It's been a while....

Well its been a couple of months since my last update.  Sometimes you need to take a break from games you love.  Anyway with Halloween approaching I managed to get back into the grove and produce a "spooky" graveyard. 

I am still playing around with some interiors for it but I will post it onto the nexus this week I hope.

 

 

Took me a lot longet than intended but I uploaded this onto the vault:

 

The Graveyard 

More Banners

Its took me a while to work through this, I am happy with what I have but I know my own lack of art skills and understanding of Gimp has held me back a little here.  You will see a lot of the banners are on plain white backgrounds simply because I found it too hard to cut them out etc.

That said I have managed to get what I wanted done!  All that remains is to redo the 2da file to work with the Cormyr PW and release the stuff to the vault with a vanilla 2da.

Nearly all of them releate to Deities worshipped in Cormyr of course plus a few others to help bring some options for other races too.

Learning New Tricks

While I have spent a lot of time with NWN2 as a player and builder I have never really explored the modding side of the game, something I regret as I have always felt my skills were not up to the task.

Lately though I have been working on Cormyr and have began to understand more to this side of things enough to finally try my hand at it!  I found a very helpful guide by Jaesun999 on the vault to help me on my way:

Custom Banners


After a couple of tries and a little bit of getting used to GIMP I have managed to start to do some custom stuff.  Alas I lack the talent to do really good ones I am happy with doing the simple versions with a single colour background.  I hope to add as many FR deities and groups as I can find symbols for:

 

 

 

Above is the three I have done so far.  the Zhents, cormyr and of course Eilistraee!

Deep Cavern

Having sent the underdark module over to Sin for him to polish up for the Cormyr server I decieded to take a little break from building, that lasted around 3 days before I got the itch to do something a little different.

I wanted to expand a little on the trick Sin showed me for making large underground areas, while I have used some in the underdark I wanted to try something different so I opted for a large cave with a pool in it that ended up being made into a mine or way stop of some sort.

Below is a picture from the toolset showing the walkable areas above the ground.  The easiest way I have found is to map out the walkable areas at ground zero then use the walkmesh cutter to take out the bits you don't want before lifting them all up above the ceiling.  This area was lifted to a height of 35 above the ground but you could go higher or lower if you wished.

Once you have got your basics sorted its pretty easy to get the rest of the area made, in the end I was pleased with the results:

 

 

 

 

I have uploaded an example of this area to dropbox, while it uses some haks (those from the FRC server) the docks etc are standard placeable so people should be able to see how this area has been made without getting the haks,

 

Example Floating Area

Winter Valley

Decieded to throw together something a little different, working on pure underdark stuff can wear you down!

This is a Winter Valley with a small cave to take shelter in, I enjoyed making something a little different from the darkness of the underdark!

The Witcher Project

 

 

 Been a while since I posted, I have been to busy playing and the building side has not really had anything worth of note going on so I guess I had nothing to post!

 

 

I have been watching the project that Tchos has been doing through his posts on the NWN2 Bioware forums.  He plans to import over 900 placeables from the Witcher game.  Thats a heck of a lot of work and my hat is off to him for taking the time to do this!  If you want to follow his work head over to the forums and take a look, he has released a demo module which will sure make you want to see more!

 

 

The Witcher Project

 

 

Ill post some screens up of this great work as I feel it deserves all the chances it can to be shown off!

 

I think you will agree, if you like to build using NWN2 that these items will take area mapping to a new level.



The Underdark

Work continues on the FRC underdark.  I have revamped quite a few areas, so far we have 15 underdark areas finished and linked up.


A shot of Sschindrlryn's City Gates

Various parts of the underdark.  There are quite a few crystals and plants that are going to give of light so the areas wont be pitch black.

Finally some screens of the Halls of the Dead...no prizes for guessing whats in here!

 

Sschindylryn

Been playing around with video capturing software this week.  So just for fun I made this run through of FRC's drow city.

Tower of Bone

Sin had mentioned he had seen a way to do larger scale interiors that actually used interiors rather than the usual way of making an exterior look like an interior.  It seems if you use one of the walkmesh helpers in the toolset and lift it above the ceiling of a normal interior you can then build above it. 

Its quite a neat idea as it allows you to get some height into these areas and do something a little different.  I tried it out tonight with a new underdark area called the Tower of Bone, the results are below:

One for Cormyr.

Sschindylryn

 

 

Well after my plug for the PW Forgotten Realms Cormyr I had a few more chats with Sin the Admin for the server and decided to throw my lot in with him.  I had been planning on taking my copy of the old server I helped build and put it onto the vault as I think it deserved better than just having all that work die off.  The excellent work by E.V with scripts and GUI's especially should be showcased a lot more.

 

Anyway with myself joining FRC I offered Sin the module to rip apart and use what he wants, mostly interiors as he has nearly all of his exteriors built for the initial launch.  Keeping each part of Cormyr with the same feel is something we need to try to do and my areas do have a different feel to his.  Hopefully Ill get some exteriors up at a later date after we go live, I really want to get back to doing some mountian areas!

 

On Gray Isles I did have a large underdark though outside of the Grimmhold I was largely unhappy with the wilderness areas so they are getting a revamp to make them a lot more interesting!  As the Underdark under Cormyr is not well known in terms of lore it does leave us a good amount of freedom in what we do.  What we do know is we have the following points of interest:

 

Sschindylryn - Drow Trade City

Blessed Seahaven - Kuo-Tuo Temple

Lake of Shadows - A lake (clue is in the name!)

 

I have started work on the Drow City of Sshindylryn (try saying it fast 3 times).  Chatting with Sin gave me a few ideas as coming up with something with a "drow" feel can be hard at times.  I am probably 90% through mapping the exterior at the moment so Ill give you a few sneak peeks!

 

 Still a lot of work to go as all the interiors have to be done but it should be a place our evil little drow want to hang out.

 



Cormyr

The Road to Cormyr

 

I found out about this place through the Bioware NWN2 boards, it has the making of being a very nice PW even if it seems hardly anyone knows about it!  Sin who is the the host, owner, scripter and builder all rolled into one has done a good job getting the place to the stage it is and if he is to be believed soon into a closed beta.

As you can see from the screenshots its going to be a good looking place to look around, which is going to be better than most bland looking PWs and that's always a plus.  What will of course make or break a place is how he sets it up, in my own opinion too many PWs are pretty much the same as each other.  Outside of a few places nothing is new or fresh, everyone seems to have the same systems and game idea.  In fact too many of them are just into a numbers game instead of trying to build something special and push the game engine.

 

With not having a PW of my own to work on at the moment I have helped Sin out with a few interiors for him to populate with nasties looking to eat you!

 

Hopefully I can feature more of his world as it gets nearer completion.

 

Vist  Cormyr and check it out.