Friday, February 5, 2010

Limbo

I finished up my last play-through and have already addressed the 120 or so notes it generated. That's a significant improvement over the ~180 from my last play-through, especially seeing as how the vast majority of the notes this time were text formatting, a couple typos, and rewording in various dialogs. I also managed to wipe out a couple nagging bugs that had defied all previous efforts to fix them, including the odd area bug I discussed last time. Thanks, Starwars, by the way, as your suggestion seems to have done the trick.

So now I'm waiting on a few things. First, I have feedback from another beta-tester that's incoming. Then there's the music. After I get all the pieces, I'll need to edit the music 2da, add the pieces to the different areas and dialogs, and finally integrate the movies. Then I'll want to test it all again.

I'll probably run through the entire thing again before the music comes anyway, but it's getting tougher and tougher to be motivated to play the same 18-hour campaign for what would be my 10th time or so, not to mention all the partial run-throughs I've done.

My thought is that I'll take a break, maybe try the recently-released Misery Stone to get my mind on something different, and then come back to TMGS.

That's the big picture. However, a somewhat serious issue arose during my last play-through regarding domain spells. Apparently, the engine has a difficult time determining if the player has any memorized. This introduces potential bugs that can't be fixed by anyone but Obsidian - and they're not exactly frothing at the mouths to work on NWN2 anymore. You see, I have numerous points where the game is supposed to determine if a player has a spell memorized, allow certain actions if so, and then decrement the number of times the spell is memorized. It works perfectly for normal cleric spells and even for wizards, druids, and other spell-casting classes, but it goes all to hell if that spell happens to be a domain spell.

After banging my head against the wall for days on end, there appears to be nothing I can do about it. The bug is just going to be in the game I guess, and it's going to piss me off to have near-continual "bug" reports that I can do nothing about. I have begun to even think about editing the domain 2da so that no domain spells at all are available. That would end the bugs, but it would overpower those domains that grant extra feats instead of extra spells. I've even thought about wiping out the domains period for the campaign, but that obviously goes against established D&D rules. There's really no good solution here I'm afraid.

So now that you know my dilemma, feel free to vote on the sidebar. I have a feeling I know which way the poll is going to go, but I'll formalize it anyway.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I voted to leave the bug, just document it well ahead of time so people can plan accordingly (I'm sure you already planned to do so).

Unknown said...

I Concord, leave the bug, it's nothing serious anyway :)

EC said...

I'd go with leave the bug, if you can't do away entirely with the mod's mechanics that lead to it.

From a player appreciation pov, it's better I think to not introduce a gameplay element at all (if possible) than to introduce it in a buggy format.

BTW, after checking out your very extensive PC creation guide, I was wondering if you will provide an optional premade legal PC (in the 2 genders). It probably would be my preference.