wildwinter

After my rant of a few weeks ago (about the difficulty of getting into games jobs) I have news…

From Jan 2010 I will be a Senior Developer for Traveler’s Tales – the guys behind Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones. Will be living in Cheshire during the week, and at home in Cardiff for weekends.

All change.

Muppet’s Bohemian Rhapsody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY

Just a quick reminder that if you’re looking to improve a kid’s vocabulary for Christmas, you can’t do better than My Worst Words.

Just imagine the happily drunken hours around the Christmas tree, watching the grandparents’ faces as their little cherub pipes up with exactly what they see on the page.

G’wan — you know you want to.

Dragon Age is the new Baldur’s Gate.

Highly recommended…

Today I had my first film script optioned by a production company.

I’ve been playing around with the Neverwinter Nights 2 Toolset – an IDE for the Electron Engine used to build modules to play within NWN2.

It’s buggy, crashes from time to time, and has lots of rough edges – but then you’d expect it to; it must have originally been developed as an in-house tool where the priority was on getting a game built rather than heavily testing the editor.

(Annoyingly, the latest patches cause both it and NWN2 itself to crash on my machine – I’ve had to revert to a couple of patches back, which may explain some of the bugs.)

The terrain, texturing and walkmesh editing tools seem solid and well thought out; and the library of ‘placeables’ works well. Where the whole thing seems to be ropey is around the scripting and conversation side. The interfaces are a bit obtuse; it’s difficult to find your way around, and there’s a monolithic feel to the coding system itself which means that the scripting feels clunkier than it really needs to be.

Granted, I’ve only just started getting to grips with it – the documentation is sparse – so there may be easier answers to some of the things I’m trying to do. But I have started to compile a short wishlist of ‘if I were rewriting this editor…’ things to do.

Some things I’d change:

• I’d allow multiple scripts to be assigned to events, rather than just one. At the moment only one script can be called for each event (events such as, for example, “On Use” for a lever). Since you tend to have a collection of objects which all behave in nearly the same way, you either end up with lots of small stub scripts, or with scripts that are parameterised to then call other scripts.
  Switching it to accept a list of scripts – with a priority sort on the list – would make it much easier to create modular code. I suppose it’d be rather like Director’s old behaviours system.
  If this slows the actual runtime execution to a crawl, there’s nothing to stop the scripts being merged into a single script at compile time.
• The editor needs an ‘update my placed object from its blueprint’ button – for when you’ve edited something in the library and want the instance in the scene to be updated accordingly without manually copying over the changes.
• I’m really surprised by this one – it’s easy (via a library script) to add a condition to a line of dialogue so that the line is only available if – for example – a variable is set. But there’s no simple way to set a flag or variable when a line of dialogue is played without writing an entire script file to do so. Seems overkill. So I’d add a ‘when this line is played, set this variable/flag’ option.
• I’d have hierarchy of blueprints akin to class inheritance (“Sleeping Guard” derives from “Guard” derives from “Human”, for example). This would make it easy to modify generic behaviour (especially with stacked event handlers as noted above) and easy to apply changes to an entire set of objects. Again, this could be build time rather than runtime so should have little impact on speed.
• And the biggie: I’d do my best to allow a live test mode; to test the scripts and behaviours rather than the rendering. Because skipping out of the editor to load the _very_ chunky NWN2 game is slow, and must make level development and testing a complete nightmare.

That’s my list for now. It may well grow.

NWScript itself isn’t too bad – it’s sort of a subset of C.

Incidentally, trawling through library code I’ve discovered lots of comments by Naomi Novik, who wrote the quite excellent Temeraire. I’d no idea she was a coder, and no idea she’d worked for Obsidian/Bioware/Black Isle or whoever originally wrote those scripts. Interesting!

Confirmation on Sean Bean in Game of Thrones…

http://grrm.livejournal.com/95840.html

Along with Mark Addy as King Robert…

So, two weeks in the land of cheese and wine.

After struggling down the Gorge de Galamus in a wetsuit, climbing up above the clouds to revisit Peyrepertuse (and into the fog for Montsegur), trailing down into the bowels of the earth for the Grotte de Niaux and the 14000 year-old paintings, driving through thick night-time fog with no roadmarkings on the way back from Andorra, swimming in the lakes at Montbel and Puivert, relaxing in the hot springs at Ax-les-Thermes, standing goggle-eyed outside the incredible Fortress of Ultimate Evil which is Amiens Cathedral…

I’m back to find the boiler isn’t working, the roofer hasn’t arrived, it’s raining, and I’ve got a pile this long *gestures* of things to do.

Bah.

Edit:
So by 4.30 today, my day has consisted of:
- The boiler not working (and the plumber being on holiday ’til the 27th)
- The roofer not turning up
- HSBC telling my my credit card has been used fraudulently
- 6 inches of water in the floor of my car (dodgy doorseal)
- And at least three other irritating things that I can’t discuss publicly.

Double bah! Or even triple…

So, would it expand to an entire musical?

Demons are a Girl’s Best Friend