[Released, work in progress] NWN2 Mod - Ruins of the Sun God

[Freelance Henchman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXlpTk3_3LA
The expanded food system with 4 grades of food, and a demo of traveling overland which now requires food as well.

 

[Excidium]

Cool.

Also, weird related videos.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Sigh, still on it, last I did was get the death system to work like in the original campaign (for now). The default in an empty module is just a free respawn where the character died with full HP, which is obviously not sensible other than for debugging. I frankly didn't like the SoZ bleeding to death system, but in this module everyone who falls in battle will get saddled with an injury so hopefully it's not too banalshitboring even if I just use the simple standard death system.

Next up on the list of things to fix/create is the random loot system, which is partially done already. Loot chests contain some number of random items from selectable loot chests, so for example a "polearm rack" will contain a certain number of random spears, scythes and halberds etc. I will have to set the contents of the loot chests of course. These also contain a bunch of mundane weapons and other "trash" items of the appropriate type so the good stuff doesn't get spawned too often.

I was considering having the loot algorithm use a "random seed" which is set depending on when you first start the game. Players would not be able to use a "reload until you get something nice" strategy to get something particularly powerful then, but on a positive note (for the player) a great item that pops up in a container always does in fact pop up there even if they decide to reload after a survived battle went particularly badly. For that to work I would have to assign a particular number to every container to munge together with the global random seed, but I think it could be done simply by getting the location coordinates of that container in the map.

 

[Stasgard]

God dam it, this sounds good enough that it'll end up convincing me to buy NWN2 if it gets finished. Keep up the BROtastic work.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Thanks. :D

Worked on that "random seeded" loot system today and it seems to work alright in principle, though I haven't put in the system for making the loot choices depend on the loot chest's location yet. Once that's done this means that all loot chests will contain the exact same random loot no matter when you get there or reload or whatever. Not gamebreakingly important I guess but I hope it helps with the believability of the world a little bit.

So far none of the enemies drop random loot. My single non-animal (skeletons) encounter uses weapons that are predefined. I'm not sure yet if I even want to have enemies drop random items because it seems like it might introduce too much randomness in a way. The plan is more to have fewer, smaller but more varied, hand-built encounters rather than mass spawns of trash mobs. But not sure yet, let's see once I have some humanoid intelligent enemy encounters built.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Judging from this poll http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1253774 BROs don't like XP for killing, so I think I'll go with that as well. As a pleasant side effect this also saves me the headache of setting the "CR" of monsters so they give an appropriate amount of XP on death, and I could never figure out how to do that correctly.

 

[Zed]

Exp from monsters work if it's all encounter-based. Keep it up bro, will definitely try it once there's something to play.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

I'm working on a short beginner's quest (without combat) which is a take on the "rats in cellar" quest, but you won't need to actually battle them (are rats in real life ever that belligerent?). The warehouse master at the quest hub town needs someone to get rid of the rat's nests and will pay the PC for every one found. This is the small "warehouse" area (modified from a premade I found on nwvault):

This requires some differing amount of Search ranks, plus non-elf characters will need go into Detect mode to actually find them (elves have the Keen Sense racial ability). The warehouse master will reward the PC with some small amount of coins and XP on delivery.

The quest NPC also tells you to leave your thieving fingers off the stored stuff, but I'm planning to put in some nice items that fell behind crates or whatever. Good PCs will be able to actually give those back to the master and ask for a different reward.

You BROs got ideas for interesting stuff I could put into this small quest?

 

[Freelance Henchman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgBJyONtDA0
Here's a video of a new forest area where you can go hunting animals for food. Animals are fast and always run away, so technically this shouldn't be feasible without ranged weapons (or traps). The standard ways of making enemies always run away didn't quite seem to work so I took the opportunity to fool around with AI scripting some more. It doesn't always work quite as expected, hence the guy in full plate in the video eventually brings down that stag with his warhammer. Also, NWN2 has no "fatigue" mechanic for running, which becomes a bit obvious (and somewhat irritating to me) in this little sequence.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

NWN2 has no "fatigue" mechanic for running, which becomes a bit obvious (and somewhat irritating to me)

hrrm bro could you monitor the total time spent in combat to death of targeted animal in that area and give slowing/exhaustion penalties based on mix of constitution score and survival skill after combat resolves, so maybe a buff dual wielding ranger could massacre half the place but a greatsword brobarian gets winded after a couple of successful takedowns

 

[Freelance Henchman]

I don't know if any of that is even possible, but it would be good if it was. Proabably no can do though.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6bH0znF9Es
Needed to fix that fleeing script somewhat so it wouldn't ignore that characters may be in stealth or that there may be more than one enemy. Somewhat amusing to see the boar companion running after the rabbits and deer.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO2W8sXQDlY
A simple "environment feature": this allows jumping over obstacles by succeeding at a Tumble check (there is no Jump skill in NWN2). On fail the character is knocked down instead.

I'm hoping I can use this to make areas a bit more lively and offer some extra options in battle or even just for navigating around. Outside combat it might be auto-success provided the DC is exceeded, so a rogue scout who is good at Tumble could explore some part of an area where his tank and mage companion can't follow.

 

[Excidium]

NWN2 confirmed for popamole.

Pretty cool stuff. I can see some interesting uses for those obstacles.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

A simple "environment feature": this allows jumping over obstacles by succeeding at a Tumble check (there is no Jump skill in NWN2). On fail the character is knocked down instead.

emailing mass effect 3 team now to make sure there are skill checks for vaulting over crates with spacebar

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

A simple "environment feature": this allows jumping over obstacles by succeeding at a Tumble check (there is no Jump skill in NWN2). On fail the character is knocked down instead.

emailing mass effect 3 team now to make sure there are skill checks for vaulting over crates with spacebar

With a failed skill check Shepard bashes his face when diving for cover, stunning him and giving his opponents a chance to rush.


All of a sudden people aren't so eager to act like they're playing Gears of War anymore.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Just hypothetically speaking, what kind of check should be required for executing a successful collar grab? minousquestion:

 

[sgc_meltdown]

successful touch attack and then intimidate roll bro which activates hold person effect on success

there are deep and complex stat checks like this all the time in mass effect games but they are hidden away from players and shepard starts with maximum attributes

 

[Freelance Henchman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l06xcz3_Nko

Here's a battle with a bear in a cave making use of those vault points. If a character has good Tumble then the bear who is impossible to take on in melee combat for a level 1 becomes pretty easy to defeat, provided you have a ranged weapon. Well, I got stupid in the video and shot too early and was killed for my troubles, but the principle is fine.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Made a new release today: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Nw ... ail&id=103

I sort of had a problem making the "scarce food" thing work logically when your "base" is basically a huge castle full of people. There didn't seem to be a good reason why you can't just buy loads of food there, so I felt I needed to scale this back a lot. The new starting area and "base" is now a merchant's small wagon caravan that got wrecked.

You can not buy any food at all now, instead you need to hunt animals in the "forest" area which respawn over time and randomly (and apart from harmless rabbits you got a random chance for wolves and such that will attack). While this may sound grind-y I hope it isn't. Ideally it provides an in-character way of gathering a scarce resource.

For navigating the world, I'm interconnecting the regions with "travel markers" that provide a dialog and the amount of food that will be required to reach the target, so "Travel north (1 day's food required)" and such.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

I had an idea for an area with a lot of climbing and such:

Basically the objective is to assassinate some boss in that big tent on the tall hill. One way is directly up the hill with a lot of climb checks (which also may require a climber's kit item I would need to make). Failing climb checks means damage of course, and injuries once I have an actual working system.

The other way is through that green swamp area where diseases are likely, and there's a bunch of enemy encampments on the way as well (which you may be able to bypass with a stealth check of some sort, not sure how yet but maybe similar to my "vaulting" points except with move silently checks rather than tumble checks.

 

[Surf Solar]

Your food system is also fucking good. I implemented a "rest" system as long as you are fortified in a building etc in my mod too. Anyway. Is there anything one could help you? Your mod looks good, I'd want to "waste" my ressources on it.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

Hey there, good to hear you like that food system idea, I guess I'm on the right track.

What this mod needs most desperately is simply more content, ranging from "overland areas" with wandering creatures and smaller self contained mini quests to entire side quest lines and of course more of the titular "ruins of the sun god". Preferably of course these would take my systems (food, more powerful alchemy, environmental hazards etc.) into account, or even better bring up ideas how to expand and improve them.

If you want to make any of that, feel free to post your ideas in this thread so that I and the other BROs can rip into them first.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzZyAYt1rAY

Here's a video of a first attempt for a climbing mechanic. It's basically a strength check, currently modified for amount of load carried (+1 DC per 10 pounds of weight). This should take into account armor penalty as well but I didn't get around to that yet.

As you can see, the character "dies" a few times from receiving falling damage and gets right up again since that's how the OC death system works. Since I don't have an injury system yet and it frankly is a big damn undertaking to get one up and running (and I really don't feel like working on that right now), I've decided to put that on hiatus and will use something much quicker and easier to implement for now.

I'm thinking of just giving a XP penalty every time a character gets knocked out like that, which should hurt enough really. Otherwise it's just a matter of for example clicking until you reach the top of that hill with 1 HP, then use healing items and you're as good as new. With the XP loss there is at least a real long term cost that can not be remedied easily and may prove fatal later on when you're not a high enough level to deal with "endgame content".

Maybe a "100 XP per current level" penalty would be appropriate (100 XP loss for "dying" at level 1, 200 XP at level 2, 300 at 3 etc.)? This could either hit every character in the party just as they are "interconnected" for XP gain as well, or it could just drain whoever "died".

 

[Zed]

That's pretty cool. Might want to have character face forward after climbing up. Facing the "click rock" when climbing down kind of makes sense though.