Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Bug squashing

I did a little beta testing of my own and found a huge amount of bugs and things that didn't exactly go as I had planned in the scripts, oops. I've spent the last few days squashing these bugs, fixing conversations, adding block scripts to areas and just making sure the mod works fine overall.

Yesterday was actually the first time I tested the mod as a campaign. Good news is that it worked fine, I could transition between the two mod files. Bad news is that indeed I found a lot of bugs. But I think I solved the few major ones already. Just some stupid small mistakes that could break the whole game/experience. Especially the ga_move action in the conversations is giving me a headache... Sometimes the PC moves when I use it on the PC node, sometimes the PC just stands still. I don't see the logic.

Also I've come to the conclusion that I've tried to do too much in the mod. I mean I've got murder mystery, hack 'n' slash, side quests, three companions etc. On my next project I will try to consentrate on one area and maybe spice the things up with hints from some other elements. Still, I think the community might enjoy the mod - except the ones that don't like slow starts, as the murder mystery kinda takes a while to solve... Maybe. Depends if you want to solve it right, or just blame whoever you want. In any case, some evidence must be gathered before you can accuse anyone.

Well, I should be leaving to work now. Enjoy this screenie while I'm gone!

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Beta closing in - any willing testers?

There are times when I hate the toolset and just stop working with it. Yesterday it was quite the opposite! Somehow everything just clicked, the conversations flowed with ease, the annoying red cross error is fixed and I have custom items now, yay!

I added lots of items to areas, some you need to explore to get to them. Finished up a couple of areas and some quests. The mod is starting to feel like it's complete soon. Though I think it will be late from the deadline for a few weeks - I haven't had much time to work on it during the past two weeks. Too much work and real life stuff. But I should be able to work on it tomorrow and on Monday again.

So hope remains that this mod, which is turning out to be awesome by the way (hehe, at least I love making and playing it), will be released soon. I might need a couple of testers before I release it to the public though... I wonder where I could store something that big. Rapidshare? Possible?

Any volunteers for some beta testing in the beginning of March?
- Leave a comment and ways to contact you or send me an e-mail to mazena86@gmail.com
-If  you want to test the mod, I also expect you to comment on it, report the possible bugs you've ran into etc. Feedback on how to improve it is welcome too.
-And everything in the mod is copyrighted to MEE - except the custom content from the vault, aaand the music isn't mine either, heh. :))

Friday, February 6, 2009

Back on the saddle! (and a toolset error!)

Last weekend (and monday, tuesday and wednesday) was very unproductive considering Hearts of Endia. I had to work the whole weekend and my girlfriend is trying to take away my free time - don't worry, I'm fighting back! I've even made some progress last evening and today.

One could say that the opening part of Hearts of Endia is complete. That means only the main conversations of course. But it's a huge step, one part was taking forever to complete and now the conversations' word count has gone up to about 27 000. I'd say it's a pretty sick number as I still have the companion dialogues and some quests totally unwritten. Luckily for the players who don't like reading, most of that massive amount of dialogue is totally optional. It's up to you whether you want to talk to everyone you see or not, but most of the NPCs have a unique line or two.

I was getting worried of the limited choices in my module, so I started to use some more creativity in the quests and dialogues. The results are more fun, but take a lot longer to finish and require a lot of planning ahead. And I usually don't plan ahead much, I just sort of feel my way to the end. Hm, I hope it doesn't show, hehe.

Also I've ran into an annoying error in my toolset. Seems like I can't create some custom items anymore - the toolset gives me an error when I try to change the blueprint's Base Item. Well, some base items work well, but some don't. And damn, I want to make custom rings and amulets. I posted a thread about it to the bioware forums, take a look and help if you can! Should the problem solve, it will save so much time. Otherwise I might have to reinstall everything and I'm worried wheter everything will still work the same way after a clean install.


Now I need to go to bed, will continue with the module tomorrow evening again. Then it's time to do some serious quest implementing!

Edit: I hope you people have patience, I'm starting to think that the release at the end of February is not going to happen if I don't get these errors fixed...