Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

I was all set to create a battlefield area for "Faithless" when I realized that I had no idea how large my area was supposed to be. I need to make several battlefields for my module, but I did not know what the minimum dimensions are and how many NPC soldiers the NWN2 engine can handle without slowing down too much. To give me some inkling of these figures, I decided that making an initial set of AI scripts for relatively large scale battles was in order. Instead of writing my scripts in the NWN2 Electron Toolset, I chose to create them in the NWN1 Aurora Toolset first. Scripting and testing in NWN1 is much faster than in NWN2. I figured that porting my NWN1 scripts to NWN2 later would be a simple matter. After two days, I got an initial set of scripts working. To test the scripts, I pitted an army of 38 dwarves against a total of 41 enemies -- 28 orcs, 11 half-orcs, and 2 hill giants. All of the foot soldiers on both sides were level 3, and most of their commanders were leve...

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 script...

Introduction Welcome to my very first blog. This is an online Designer's Diary that records my efforts to create an ambitious Neverwinter Nights 2 module called "Faithless." This blog may be of interest primarily to other module makers who use NWN2's Electron Toolset. Players who would like to know how my module is progressing without having to peek behind the scenes may prefer to access my post at the NWN2 Modules forum. Faithless: In the Beginning Life is hard in the cold wastelands that border Vaasa and Damara. A major war had been waged there nearly thirty years ago, but many treasure seekers had since picked the area clean of all spoils. Still, with a bounty on the goblinoids that infest the place, an adventurer could do worse than hunt down goblins for five gold pieces per head. Far more sinister things than goblins have started to threaten life at the border, however, so much so that the goblinoids have offered to ally with the Damarans against this new foe....