News Flash: No Work Done on "Faithless"

I haven't been able to do any work on "Faithless" over the past week. Instead, I enhanced my "Battle of the Builds" module by adding three new power builds for player characters to fight. I had considerable difficulty creating the custom AI of one of the NPCs, the Blood Scholar, mostly because I had to work around the limitations of the NWN2 engine regarding NPC wizards casting spells with metamagic.

When I finally released version 1.18 of "Battle of the Builds," I discovered a flaw in the rangers' AI. To make matters worse, I realized that a long-standing bug in the NWN2 engine was confusing players because clones of their characters were sometimes more powerful than the PCs on which they were based. I immediately set myself to ironing out these flaws. Three days later, I released version 1.19 of the module.

Changing and debugging my scripts was unexpectedly difficult. It's a good thing I had invented a trace debugging technique for NWN scripting. Otherwise, I would never have finished my enhancements for "Battle of the Builds."

I can't help but be reminded of the Biblical admonition against serving two masters, that you'd hate one and love the other. Well, it seems to be also true for developing two modules. I love both "Battle of the Builds" and "Faithless," actually, but I'm loving the new module more. Besides, "BoB" is a high-maintenance beast that is taking away much-needed time from "Faithless."

It has been a crazy week, made even more hectic by the preparations my wife and I made to celebrate our son's birthday last Sunday. Actually, he turned three today, but we celebrated his birthday in advance. I had to take a bit of time off from modding to prepare for his little party. That was perfectly fine with me. I know where my priorities lie.

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