Hard days night

Just a quick wednesday update. Grimm is coming a long very good with the 14 indoor areas for the island. Great job so far !
I have set up a little area in a hurry yesterday. I want to use the steps I have been trough as a tutorial how to paint with my textures, basic area layout and color painting. On the left you can see the centerpiece, just some old farmhouse . There is also a river and a grassy part in this area.
I´m now going to write down the steps. After that I will feed the webpage with some content and setup the daycycle files ready for download. But I won´t finish this until the weekend. So, just a little delay. But after everything is setup once I will release some more stuff on weekly bases.

Going back to work now...

Teasing the teaser

Heya everyone...! I´m back in the civilized world after a fantastic weekend on a rocking festival near my hometown here in germany.

Today I have started with the finishing touches of the first prefab area I want to release. It is a small island on the coast of Eden. It is yet very detailed, but a lot of painting is left to do. There is also a need for placing some objects in the village and finishing two (outdoor) caves. Anyways... I think I´m still a little drunk, so I made a teaser image of the area for the webpage tonight instead of fighting with the toolset. This might give you small (!) impressions of what to expect. You could also download this old video to see some moving pictures :)

And when it comes to details, I could need a little help to save some time: If someone is interested to do some interior design for the village and some other houses or caves... drop me a line :) Or would it be better not to place anything and let the modders do this ? I am not sure about this right now.

Anyways... tomorrow I will finish tweaking the textures and the 2da file for them. Hopefully I have the time this week to get the webpage running. I´m planning to release the first files within the weekend or the next week (depending if there is a possibility to visit another festival).
You see, things are going along quit well and I´m really looking forward to release something after all these months fighting with my ideas / time / the toolset. And mainly I am looking forward what other people will do with my stuff.

Until then... keep on rocking in a free world !

In the making...

I have been quit productive the last week and things are coming along quit well.

I have finished working on my webpage for the prefabs stuff I plan to release. Why build a website for this ?I thought about that too. But I came to to conclusion, that it would be a good idea to show how to use the textures and light settings the best way. Wich textures match the best in a set ? How to paint them "correctly" to get the best results and so on. So, I needed a space for that. And this blog is probably not the best way to do this. I will continue to use it for progress documentation instead.

Anyways... I am currently tweaking the textures for the release. I am not sure if I should release them all at once or in themed packages. That is because I want to include a matching area where I use these textures. And these areas needs a finishing touch before I release them. I think I can give away some more infos the next week along with the first release of a texture pack. Here is a little preview of what you can expect.

I have some few days off now and I am going to a little music festival this weekend. It will be a lot of fun and hopefully I get my head clear so I can go to work more relaxed than I did the last weeks. So, stay tuned and have a nice weekend :)

Break the silence

Two month not a single word ? Yeah, I know...
I wasn´t into the toolset a lot, since I work with another editor the whole day at the company. And besides all the bugs this editor has, it´s very fast to work with when it comes to placing objects. Besides that, my company has started to work in (light) crunchtime since May. So, I had no time to go on with my module. And chances I will finish it in this century are rare. Maybe the toolset is not the best tool for me to realise what I have in mind ?
Anyways.. I want to play NWN2 modules with visuals I like, but I can´t make my own game right now. So I have decided to share all my sources and areas as presets time after time and hopefully this great NWN community can use them and make some stunning modules with my sources !

Thanks to the poeple over at Bouncy Rock for giving me food for thought !

I think I will start with the release of my custom texture and brush sets along with some weather settings in the first place. I will posts further details the next days. For now I leave you with a weather setting I am currently working on (which will also be released). After all the sunshine I have previously done, I wanted to make some bad and misty weather. I´m testing it in a dark and spooky forrest. Here are the results for sunrise (of course!) and daytime:


Hope you like them ! I´m going to finetune them now and move on with the sundown and night settings.
By the way... does anyone knows a way to change the weather in one area over time ? Load different weather settings with a script or something ?

Bewitched !

Last week I needed to take a break from the toolset. After some heavy writing and area creation sessions, I was burned out a little bit (I guess this happens to everyone working with the TS from time to time).
I decided to give "The Witcher" another chance, since it was not playable after launch on my machine. The loading times between the area transitions were straight out off hell. So I patched it and started all over from the beginning.

And what should I say... I simply love it ! Great dark and gloomy atmosphere, rememberable characters and a compelling story ! A lot has been written about this game, so I think you know what it is about. If not... go and play it !
Of course my main reason was to get a closer look at all those fantastic looking areas. From screenshots, every view looks like a painting. Perfect use of color pallets and lightning. And I think I can say I have learned a lot about the texturing and lightning techniques the developers used. I have also figured out a neat trick they do with backdrops in the background, faking some great vistas (like in this picture here, all mountains in the distance are just simple painted planes). I will try to do adept this in the TS soon.

Besides that, I have joined a german NWN2 modding group called Feline Fuelled Games (Hi guys!). I love their modules they have previously finished and I will do some areas for the their upcoming stuff. In return, I hope to finish my little project with their help.

Learning from the witcher, I have painted a whole new set of textures for my upcoming areas. I will post some shots of them within the week.

But for now I have to go back to Geralt and solve some mysteries about an old druide tower in the swamps of Wyzima :)

Deadline for the area contest: Right now !

I have received some emails lately if I´m going to submit something for the area contest. Sadly this is not the case. I was really looking forward to take part, but at this time I didn´t know march was going to be a very stressful month.

But besides that, another reason was, that I had not finished the area I wanted to sumbit. A week before the announcement of the contest, I decided to revisit mainparts of the story and because of that I had to roll up some bigger parts of the main island. And because of that little time I had working on the area, it stays a messy construction ground during the whole month. I guess thats faith :) Anyway... I wasn´t sure for the price at all. Where to get two additional monitors ? And mother nature will thank you for your joy playing games with three times more comsumption of electricity ! (I hope the winner thinks about that at least for a second.)
I´m very exited about the entries and I have tested some of them. I´m very curious who will win at the end and I keepmy fingers crossed for my favourite :)

Now it seems that I have finally finished my start island yesterday ! All locations are now content ready and the dodgy story outline is nearly finished. I just have to rewrite it and put it in a readable form :) And after that translate it into english. A light at the end of the tunnel...

I thought you might be interested to see what I mean by writing "major changes in the areas". I have found an old shot I took from the heart of the start island when there was just a cozy clearing. But it went out, that this would be the perfect place for a camp, sourrounded by some old ruins. Today I made a screenshot to show the before / after effect:

Before


After

You see what I mean ? And don´t worry, there are some clearings left. Ironically this makeover was the easiest to do, but I wasn´t aware of that when I started on reshaping some roads and placing new doors. I had a terrible (door) bug that nearly made my quit working with the toolset... But I don´t want to talk about that anymore :/

I also wanted to include a quit big cave to contest areas, because it simply connects some other finished areas. After pausing in frustration for some days I made a major rebuild on that cave too. Sadly I have no shots of the old version anymore. But on the left is a sneak peek of the new one, or at least an underpopulated part of it.

I hope Obsidian is going to start some more contests in the future. Peferably during a holiday season !

Seems I´m into a typing mood right now. I should use that chance and start to translate my scripts...

Hallöchen and welcome to my blog :)

After three month of silence I think it is now the right time to start this blog :)

I´ve been quit busy with my job the last 8 weeks, so I didn´t find the time to start a new thread in the NWN forums or update this blog. But it looks like I have a lot more freetime the next weeks. I promise to update these pages more frequently. Well, I think I promise myself. Let´s see if I can make it...

The reason for this blog is the show the progress of my toolset works (that will hopefuly turn into a module soon). I love the blogs of the other nice guys in the NWN comunity and I surf them quit often a day. I am very exited what they are all up to with their modules currently they have currently in the works.
As for my little "Project Eden"... I had a lot of thinking about the story. I wasn´t sure it was something special at all but thats what I initially wanted to achive when I started working with the toolset. Like I said, I love other builders modules but I am not really into that D&D stuff. Till this day I haven´t played NWN2 beyond Neverwinter at all ! But that´s just because I didn´t get to learn the universe of D&D. So I started my own little universe. Nothing really special by now, just a map, some screenshots but a lot of ideas !
And after thinking and reshaping the "thin red line" of the story, I think I finally came up with something that satisfied at least myself. Only some more lines to write and I think I´m ready to release a version of the island along with the storyline to the ones that were interested working for the project. I hope they will like it too.

Anyway... next to rewriting the story I have started working on a new area last sunday. I just had to paint some textures instead of typing letters :) It´s a really big tropical island. I have finished the rough landscape shaping yesterday. All possible pathes and all bays are at their place. And today I have reworked nearly every grass that was available in the toolset. It impossible to creat what I have in mind with the grass that comes with the toolset. I plan to release them as prefabs along with my textures sometime in the future. I will post a screenshot of them tomorrow when I start working on a remote tropical sandy beach... I´m really looking forward to this since the wheather here in germany is grey and rainy at the moment ! For now I leave you with a screenshot I took in my first night of the new island :)

Thanks for reading... see you in the next post :)

P.S. I still need a appropriate name for that island ! Got some ideas for a tropical, pirate style name for it ?