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.

The Big Surprise That Wasn't

Well, I'm flying through my latest testing of TMGS, and I’m reasonably pleased with the number of notes I'm taking of things to correct. There's virtually nothing left that would constitute a real bug, and I'm still well below 100 comments while being a ways into Act III. Nearly every note I've taken can be handled quickly.

My two beta testers, however, both came up with a rather nasty bug. Specifically, two small interior maps in Act III cause the game to crash in some instances. After examining the error logs, it appears that the problem isn't with the module or even with NWN2, but rather with the NWN2 call to the MicrosoftVisual Studio 2005 runtime DLL, probably during a screen draw. I'll need to hunt down exactly what the issue is, as the fact that both of my beta testers ran into the same problem is probably a sign that I'm in for a lot of grief when it's released to the general public. Funny enough, neither I nor Alazander had this issue, so it’s not universal, but there’s definitely some hardware or software configuration that doesn’t like those two maps.

Note that if anyone out there is a wiz at external API invocations and thinks they can help me track down the exact issue, I'd appreciate it. I've got both error logs.

Once I track that down, I should have a very polished version. However, I'll have plenty of time to continue testing because in what was the worst-kept big surprise of all time, I recently agreed to collaborate with StrangeCat Productions on custom music for TMGS. The process was initiated early last week, but I'm already excited about the results. I've posted a small snippet of Verona's theme (the love interest for male PCs) below.

Also, I managed to find enough pictures of a similar style on the net to make start and ending movies viable. I’ll be sure to post the start movie as soon as the music for it is ready.

So these two developments mean that the final production will have the far more professional feel I was originally hoping for. Things are looking up!

Alaska is Cold in January!

The title may seem obvious, but first-hand experience is an eye-opener regardless. I have just returned from my (hopefully) last business trip to Alaska for a while, but this one just had to come in January. I will say that -35 degrees F (-37 degrees C) with no wind feels a LOT warmer than even -5 degrees F (-20 degrees C) with a 5 mph wind!

Then there was this poor bastard. It wasn't the worst I saw, but it was the worst I saw when I had a camera handy. I can't believe people actually agree to live like this full time, but I guess the world needs all kinds. On Saturday, I woke up to -25 degrees F in Fairbanks, AK, and ended up in 75 degrees F in Melbourne, FL. That means I actually made up 100 degrees in a day. Crazy.

Maimed God's Saga
One of the benefits of my week in Alaska was that I returned with renewed fire to wrap up TMGS. I just received the detailed feedback from my first beta tester, and there are several small issues to handle. However, his wrap-up comment was as follows:

Can I also note I think is is a much stronger piece of work than the SG series despite the character restriction. By the end I was thoroughly enjoying playing the priest character!

I'm currently waiting for the feedback from my second tester, but he seems to be near the end.

In other TMGS news, I have an exciting announcement coming up, but I want to get a little further in before I reveal exactly what. If it all works out, it's going to be cool.

Preliminary Maimed God Business

The World of TMGS
Juan's question in my last post leads me to remind people what the map of the Maimed God's Saga Campaign looks like. As he remembered, the world map was indeed made using the Civilization III toolset, as I revealed in this post. The overall map has not changed since then.

The campaign starts in the center of the map at the village of Riverford, then moves to Navatranaasu, and then moves to the area around Waterdeep. To be clear, the map has a colorized insert of the area around Navatranaasu.

Character Creation Guide
The starting level for TMGS is 6. Enough XP will be given at the beginning of the module to bring the character to the player's choice of between levels 5 (for those who like a challenge) and 7 (for those who like it easy). However, I know there are some who like to take a character all the way from the beginning, which means you'll need to find a suitable adventure for levels 1-5. For those who are ready to start getting their character ready now, I've uploaded the character creation guide here.

Happy 2010!

Happy New Years, everyone. May 2010 be as good as 2009 if this year was good for you or better if it wasn't.

I also get to mark another year gone without TMGS seeing the light of day. The good news is that it's now close and getting closer all the time. The major bugs are all out and I don't imagine I'll need to add any more content. I like the way it plays, my alpha feedback was generally good, and I've already finished the adjustments to account for the few significant suggestions for improvement I received. I'm now to the point where I can say it will be released as soon as I am confident in its level of polish.

That's where the beta-testing comes in. Yesterday, I got the campaign to my lone beta-tester. Yup, that's all I've got for now, so most of the beta will be me, and I've simply got to take a short break before I play through it all again.

In the interim, I've been playing through SoZ again... oh, and watching football and eating, etc. And then I've received my copy of Tudors Season 3. Gotta get through that!

Schadenfreude

Well, all my changes from Alazander's comments are incorporated and I'm well into my next play-through. In fact, I just started Act III, which means I should be finished in a day or two. Right now I am at 124 comments, and that will almost certainly reach 160 or so by the end. Granted, most of these are very minor things like dialog formatting and very few at this point are genuine bugs.

However, it's disheartening that not a play-through goes by in which I don't find 100+ items to fix. I don't want to release a non-polished module, and I don't think I can feel really comfortable with a final release until a play-through only finds about 10 to 15 items, all of them minor.

Nevertheless, I'm not going to let this stop my beta phase from proceeding. Once I correct the comments from this round of testing, it's on to the beta. I still have room for other beta-testers, by the way, if anyone is interested. (And it would still be appreciated.)

So switching gears, what does the title of this post refer to? Another question will yield the answer, and that question is why is this man-boy crying?


Well, it probably has something to do with that top line and the fact that 13 < 32. Actually, in mathematical terms, 13 << 32. Any sports fan in the US who has not been in a cave these last couple weeks knows one thing: that Tiger Woods has ruined his image. But if they know two things, then it’s that the so-called best college football team in the country got DEE-STROYED a couple weekends ago, leading to the copious quantities of tears that emanated from the face of the tough guy above.

And I have to admit, I soak it up. Why? I hate that team, and I'm not fond of the goofball who leads them. That would be Tim Tebow, who the media obsesses over almost as much as they do/did Tiger. I blogged about Time Tebow before, for those with a good memory. If I'd been there, I'd have licked the tears off his face because to me that's the nectar of the gods.

Thankfully, the Alabama Crimson Tide saved my favorite sport for me. I was really starting to hate football...

I'm Back

So updates have been scarce recently. Lot's of reasons for that, but my time-table for testing TMGS is still on track. I'm working through a couple remaining issues from one of Luke's comments that required some reorganizing of a few dialogs, but progress is steady, if slow. I do think the end result will be better.

Caribbean Cruise
So my wife and I went on our first ocean-going cruise this past week. There was some good and some bad to it. Overall, I wasn't real thrilled with the lack of flexibility and the comparatively small amount of time in the countries we visited, but having the hotel essentially move with you is nice. We spent a couple days in Mexico, one in Belize, and one in Guatemala - very different from our other trips. We got to see a few Mayan ruins and zipline through some rain forests. Pictures included.

Our next trip is shaping up, and we're pretty much 100% set on spending a week on our own driving through Ireland. Should be fun with that whole left-side-of-the-road thing. Be scared, ye Irishmen and women.

So as we're going to be free-form and the itinerary is currently wide open, I'll put it out for the faithful readers who are either Irish nationals or familiar with the country. Is there anything that is considered a "must-see" in the country? This could be either a city or a specific site. Hopefully, we'll find some really great things that aren't necessarily in the guide books. We'll obviously fly in and out of Dublin, but anything else is open.

Cleopatra and Antony
One of my big reads during the cruise was Cleopatra and Antony by Diana Preston. I won't review the book here, but it was one of my selections following my viewing of the second season of Rome. It did a great job of filling in the gaps in the very fast-paced narrative of the final episodes and made several of the scenes make more sense. It also confirmed the number of small details that the TV series included that were absolutely true. (For example, Antony really did challenge Octavian to individual combat after his defeat at Actium.) I'm still going to read a few other books before I settle on my opinion of the depiction of the Egyptian court.

Overall, it was a very easy read for anyone interested in the period. In other words, it was written for the general enthusiast as opposed to a scholar.