Sticky Situations | 11.30.14

A 16k Question?!? So the summer flew by, more so than the last few, and I'm not sure if I'd even call it a full summer with how cool the weather was during the warm months of June, July and August. As mentioned in the previous entry, I did some traveling in July with the family to warm water and sandy beaches, and upon my return soon realized how inefficient Fate of the Auren had become. Conversation scripts had started to take its toll on the module, with every single option available to the player having a script associated with it, so the option would be removed once the dialog was read. Venturing downwards from The Stonelands. . . With a number of NPCs already in the module, and still many more to write dialog for, Fate of the Auren reached this 16k resource limit, that once over, really messes up any module. Instances of this can be found on the Bioware forum of Dungeon Masters unable to log-in to the PW, to items being in the palette but not able to spawn in-game even if the tag was correct. So one day I'm writing more conversations and enter the module to run a test on the dialog and the available options, when I realized none of the wandering filler NPCs that walk the city streets were there. The same started to happen with filler NPCs that fill common rooms of taverns and inns! Even areas I had marked as completed and fully fleshed out experienced these problems. A serious foggy bug in the weather system! I was shocked that Fate of the Auren had become larger than Almraiven and Shadewood combined. Getting some pointers from the Bioware forum on the situation, and deleting all .nss files from the /temp0 directory while the module was open in the toolset cleared that limit away, and things returned to normal. Then I stepped away from Fate of the Auren completely. From late August to the end of November, I avoided working on the module. That time I would have used working on Fate of the Auren was instead spent helping with neverwintervault.org, relaxing to play Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, as well as creating areas for a PW when an area was requested. The break was a welcomed one as I organized notes and created better direction in my own workflow for when I felt it was time to resume the module. Venturing through the Farrow Flatts. . . During development of Almraiven and Shadewood, I took breaks all the time, but never because the module reached its 16k resource limit. That's why I've taken a realistic look at Fate of the Auren and its scope. It's huge. As a player, you can venture off the beaten path and explore the many wilderness projections in the Land of the Dead, go one way and arrive at some little village that has no bearing on the main plot, or follow the recommended direction of those events tossed your way. A player can stumble upon a city before ever learning of its location -break into homes, shops and inn rooms as well- and that scope is something I really felt confident in creating when Fate of the Auren started to become a reality. I still do, but ... Wovenweb Wood - a fitting name indeed. . . ... I can't. It's no longer realistic to continue creating so much for a player to do, when there's a high possibility they'd never experience it. In Almraiven, you couldn't go to a locked door and weave an Acid Splash or Knock spell to unlock the tumblers and go inside. Doing so is fun, but then there is the designing of those rooms, or that house, and the people who are inside, and their reactions, and your conversation dialog reactions. Each idea builds on the last, and it's exhausting to test, to tweak and keep track of for a one person team. That's the true reality of the module and its current situation -pure distraction of these little systems I've made available- that I'll have to start cutting back on as development continues. Although one can break into any home or locked shop in a town, it will have to be toned down to two houses on a city street rather than all houses. There are about three new wilderness areas I'd like to create for a player to explore outside of the main story arc, but development now is completing incomplete areas (item creation, filler NPC conversations, and continued plot development of major NPCs and plot regions) required to tell the story. A high trail leading into the Farrow Flatts. . . Everything you've just seen as an in-game screen, has no bearing on the plot arc at all. These areas do tell their own tale of the events that have transpired in the Land of the Dead in relation to the main arc of the story, but it's not essential to the arc of the story to visit. In darkness. . . As much of the time spent creating these areas, I'm glad I did because even I enjoy roaming and trying out different routes to get to locations mentioned in the journal to move the story forward. No more though. I've finally had to draw a line, otherwise I'll end up losing focus on the real reason of Fate of the Auren - it's story! . . .let there be light! So, the second half of the story arc will be very linear in nature. Areas already designed for a particular region won't be expanded to include four other areas you can wander through and explore, and it will also drive the focus of the story to a smoother conclusion. Before signing off, let me add that it's on purpose with all the test character entries of the past, the majority of in-game screens are of wilderness regions to avoid major spoilers. It's why there have been no in-game screens of Shayla Shay, Annex or Falis Goodmane, their dialog or their specific regions. Night descending. . .