Load Screen Sunday Once More

As Liso so kindly reminded me, I've not done a load screen Sunday in a while, so I'll catch up in a big way today. The following three load screens are for the first and second floors of the VanGhaunt mansion and the Navatranaasu cathedral. All three are essentially screen shots I've already given months ago, but I promise that next Sunday will be something heretofore not seen. Once again, the mansion maps can be found in this post. The first floor screen is of the Gallery of the VanGhaunts and the second floor screen is the sitting room of the PC's suite.

As I said in the comment section of my last post, the bad thing about working on Act III was that I couldn't post any screen shots. A big twist occurs at the end of Act II and so anything I post from Act III is by definition a spoiler. Now that I'm back on Act II, more screen shots will be forthcoming, especially once I get most of the scripting done and I enter testing.

As for progress, this weekend I knocked out the scripting for almost 10,000 words of dialog, including Jellica's 6800+ word behemoth. That accounts for a little over 12% of Act II's total. With lots of holiday days in the very near future, I expect that I'll move fast over the next couple weeks.

And now the load screens:

Something New

What the heck. We all need to try something new every once in a while, so I'll try a new template for my blog. I'm not sure about the look, but we'll stick with it for a while and see how it goes.

Briefly, since the last update, I cleaned up a couple more issues in Act III, handled some outstanding problems from Act I, updated the 2das to be compatible with SoZ, and then spent a small amount of time updating all maps to include some appropriate new placeables from SoZ. Mostly, this included some of the new spider webs in the VanGhaunt mansion, which hopefully lends most of the rooms an unlived-in look. Finally, I perused the available haks to see if anything interesting had popped up since my last look. Sadly, nothing caught my eye.

So there was no further excuse to delay things. On to Act II...

Ode to an Idiot

Sorry, I just had to. I know football isn't the prime motivator for coming to this blog, but this might interest even non-football fans. About a year ago, I posted a diatribe against my favorite team's most hated rival, the Florida Gators. Occasionally, I look over past posts to remind myself of some things or to link to previous musings. Well...

Yesterday, I took another look at my Gator post to see that another wonderful comment had been posted. A few weeks ago, I removed an inflamatory comment from a poster and I was about to do the same to this one, but then I thought, "Tiberius, what better way to illustrate the idiocy of the average Gator fan than to leave it here." Folks, I may be a fantasy writer (of mods), but even I can't make this stuff up.

Now you may be thinking that I'm being a bit unfair to a whole fan base. I'd love to say that this poster is an aberration, but I can't. Sadly, most Gator fans I know are of a very similar level of intellect. The anomalies are those that are actually decent - and there are a few - but there's a reason that the Gators are hated by pretty much everybody (FSU, Miami, Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee, LSU, etc...)

So I'm linking again to the post so that others can read the wonderful comment. For those who want to get right to the good stuff, just highlight below to read. I've not edited a word; apparently, Gators do not understand how punctuation works. Warning, if you're easily offended, don't highlight!

FUCK YOU BITCH FSU SUCKS DICK TEBOW CAN BEAT THEM BY HIS SELF HE IS A STRONG CHRISTIAN THAT IS WHY YOU HATE HIM YOU FUCKIN ATHIEST, OH U NO UR BAD SPORTS WHEN YALL CHEER WHEN HARVIN GOT HURT

It's sad to see how low the educational standards at the University (sic) of Florida are.

I'm Done...

... with Act III's scripting! That's right, after 4 months - 2.5 months not including a 1.5 month break to do little things like a Halloween project - I'm officially done with the "scripting" portion of Act III. I'll still have to tinker with scripts as I continue to test, tweak, and polish, but the heavy-lifting is finally done.

I've also managed to complete quite a bit of play-testing. I've already done three run-throughs of the first half, though there are several more left to do. In addition, unlike my normal methodology, I play-tested each part of the second half as I went, so I actually think that's all polished and done. So I'd conservatively place my testing and polish phase at 50% done, and it's probably closer to 75%.

The bad part is that it doesn't look like I'll be getting to that play-testing for a bit because of a rather nasty bug that cropped up in patch 1.21. In short, the OnEnter trigger for areas no longer seems to be firing conversation commands. In other words, people no longer initiate conversations upon entering an area. I can certainly confirm some head-scratching behavior that left me puzzled for a couple hours before I found that thread, and it seems that the same bug may have butchered MotB and several other user-made modules.

The funny thing was that my pre-release version of SoZ only took me to patch 1.20, and the programming I did during that time worked like a charm, but as soon as I went to the legitimate post-release version and patch 1.21, it got all goobered up. It's baffling how this can happen, but I'm not a programming guru, so I won't rip Obsidian too much until I know more. In the referenced thread, Obsidian has claimed that they will release a patch to fix this in "December or January," so other than a couple more tweaks I can test as is, I'm done with Act III until the next patch, at which point I'll return to finish it off.

So I'm almost on to Act II...