My Life as a Moder...ator

Maimed God Update
Not much I'm afraid... Honestly, the thought of writing more conversations this weekend didn't really sing to me, and so I did next to nothing the entire weekend. I did manage to get a few dialogs done during the week, but I've only increased my tally to 26,500 words, or 57.5%. A paltry week's work I admit. Hopefully, I'll get the bug again this coming week.

So what did I do instead? Well, I have more work than I can shake a stick at, but during my computer time I decided on a little world domination, and that meant Civilization III. Yes, I have Civ IV, and while it's technically superior to Civ III in almost every way, it just doesn't have the "magic" for me that the earlier version does. And so I played as the Egyptians... and yes, the world will soon be mine... all mine! Hahahaha!

Witness the fall of the soon-to-be-extinct Sumerians! Uh, that would be the teal to the left of the screen. Yes, I know the orange are the Dutch. They'll get what's coming to them soon enough!

Moderating
Some time ago, Alan Miranda, CEO and guru extraordinaire of Ossian proposed that I should be the Ossian moderator on the BioBoards. I guess this was because he didn't have the time, and I had this distressing tendency to actually read what went on there and even occasionally report to him when interesting things popped up. I was rewarded for this with... more work.

Stupid me, I agreed. It took about two months for all the approvals to fall into place, but as of about three weeks ago, I am an official moderator on the MoW board... and I'm already ready to gag. I may be about to come off as incredibly rude, arrogant, condescending, but you see, I have no idea how developers keep from absolutely telling off the ignorant masses, given some of the outright stupid things I have read. When I was just plain-old me, I had freedom to say what I mostly type and delete now that the Ossian tag is by my name.

Recently, Keehwan Her announced that MoW would be delayed yet again until July. I won't even start with the reasons for that, but the announcement seemed to provide certain people with all the justification they needed to be outright over-the-top rude. One poster typed three words in their response: "You are pathetic." That, of course, violates the board rules against directly attacking other posters, so I edited the hell out of the post. If you haven't already, it might be interested to scroll through the thread to enjoy the commotion, including said poster's response to me that he had only said Atari was "worthy of pity." You have no idea the amount of vitriol I typed and was ready to post... only to then hit delete.

You know, I'm thrilled to be working with Ossian, but things I say will (wrongly) have the veneer of coming officially from the company even though it doesn't. Oh, to be able to go back to just posting as me when the worst thing that would happen as a result of one of my posts would be for me to get banned...

Load Screen Sunday
If you all recall, part of Act I can take place on the River Delimbyre. Unfortunately, none of the included load screens were suitably aqueous. And so I made one myself. Enjoy.

Load Screen Sunday

Progress Report
No need to post an updated progress matrix; the only number that will change is the Act III dialog box. I have managed to add several thousand words of dialog since last update, and the total word count for Act III now stands at 24,682, or 54.5% of what I project I'll need. Still a long way to go, but I've filled in a couple of the major plot dialogs. I count 29 more dialogs I need to write covering everything from a couple line "commoner" bit to major campaign-changing monstrosities.

First Load Screen
I've decided I'll present the load screens in roughly story order with the ones you'll see first coming before those that come later. There is, of course, some variability in the play of the campaign, so some of you may see a slightly different order (not that you'll remember by then).

The first load screen is a bit of a general one I made for the opening area, though it will also be reused later on at a point I can't talk about. I'll present it without further commentary.

Memorial Day Weekend Update III

Not the greatest day of writing if I'm being honest. I only got about another 3600 words done, but that spans nine different dialogs. I also managed to make several item blueprints that I'll need for those dialogs, and I added the dialogs into their proper places in the module with the limited scripting needed for them to fire. Honestly, I had hopes of doing more, but it's not an entirely bad effort all things considered.

The updated progress matrix is included below. My immediate task is to finish the Act III and Campaign dialogs. Then I'll start on the journals.

Also, beginning this coming Sunday, I'm going to start showcasing one of my new loadscreens per week. There are 18 total. I will take about a two to three week vacation in late July into August, so that will get me about 20 weeks of goodies. And I'll try for other screenshots as I post other stuff during the week.

Memorial Day Weekend Update II

It really blows. I ended up wasting most of Saturday on chores. It's amazing how "To Do" lists grow when you own a house and a business. I only managed one roughly 800 word dialog yesterday (hence the lack of update).

Today, I finished off a bunch of yard work in the morning and ran some more errands in the early afternoon, but I managed to swing about four hours late in the day for the toolset, and so I cranked out another 5700 words of dialog (and one additional creature blueprint I had missed). I'm currently sitting on 15,300 words total for Act III, which is about 34.5% of what I'll need.

The good news for tomorrow is that I have literally the whole day set aside for toolset time. One small bit of bad news is that I discovered a slight change in some of my loadscreens will be necessary, so that will shoot about 30 minutes to an hour. Fun, fun...

Memorial Day Weekend Update I

Well, I didn't quite make my goal for the start of the weekend, but I managed to complete the final integration of all my loadscreens and the inclusion of the Tyrran shield as I indicated last time. In addition, I systematically went through and verified / fixed / added all door transitions between maps and world map triggers. Finally, I either imported from Word or else wrote from scratch about 3800 words spanning 2.5 dialogs. Overall, not a bad day's work, and I'm at last into full-blown dialog-writing mode with three off-days left to go.

Blueprints... Check!

Since my last update, I've been a bit slowed by losing two days to the trip to L.A. and then having to put in extra time at work to make up for it... not to mention other annoying real-life crap that... uh, won't be mentioned.

However, I've managed to finish off the 109 creature blueprints I'll need for Act III including all associated custom armor and weapons. In addition, I systematically assigned loadscreens to my maps and determined I would need 19 new ones to fill in the gaps. I have already taken all 19 screen shots. Now I need to convert them to .tga format, modify the .2das, update the campaign hak, and assign the new screens to the right maps, and that will be done. While I'm updating the .2das, I'll go ahead and modify the items one so I can include a spiffy Tyrran-based shield out of this nifty community hak (3rd picture down, top row, 2nd from left).

Tonight (Monday) and tomorrow (Tuesday) will probably be out in terms of working on anything NWN2-related, but hopefully, I can knock all that out Wednesday and Thursday. The real goal is the weekend. I have Friday off work, Saturday and Sunday are always off, of course, and next Monday is a holiday here in the U.S., so that will give me four straight days to work. There will be chores to take care of during that time and other minor annoyances, but I plan on putting a serious dent in all the needed Act III conversations during that four-day stretch. If I'm as productive as I think I'll be, that'll put me pretty close (75% to 80% of the way) to being done with all Act III dialogs. Here's hoping...

Mysteries of Westgate Press Event

This past Wednesday and Thursday (May 7th and 8th), I attended the Mysteries of Westgate press event in Beverly Hills, and I must say it was a blast. California... well, it's California; it's got a culture all its own. All I could think of was, "we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto..." but it was a good time, great food, interesting hotel...

Of course, it was my first time meeting Alan face-to-face, and he turned out to be as cool as I thought he would be, and all the reviewers, some of whom I'd exchanged e-mails with, were all fabulous as well. Finally, it was great meeting the representatives from Atari (publisher) and fortyseven (public relations), and it was fascinating getting a brief glimpse of how at least this small part of the background to publishing games works.

Lastly, I've heard universally positive feedback about the event and, more importantly, the game. But rather than have me blabber on further about it, go and see what others who attended had to say:

Thieves' Guild

Warcry

NWN Podcast

Just RPG

Neverwinter Vault

IGN

I'm still waiting on another article to be published and will update this post when I see it.

A quick note. This Friday, Ossian will release our final Spotlight covering not the lore of Westgate, but the Ossian perspective of the event. Until then...