A mace by any other name

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war - Jimmy Carter

When is a mace not a mace? When you add spikes to it and it becomes a morningstar.

You see, I made a mace. Only I made it with spikes. And the more I thought about it the more I decided that it was more like a morningstar. I posed the question to some NWN2 mates and the consensus was: Mace + Spikes = Morningstar. No big deal. I reused the mesh and the texture and replaced the spikes with knobs to make a mace as well. The mace was then scaled into a warmace, making three weapons for the price of one.

The mace/morningstar were a part of the v1.30 update for the BTH Weapon Pack which added 16 weapons to the pack. The update also includes the weapons I made for the Shattered Dreams project. I haven't heard anything from the project leaders for a number of months and I assume the project has been abandoned. In any case, it's better to release the models to the community than have them sitting around idle on my hard drive.

And so the BTH Model Clearance Sale continues. Next on the agenda is a final update to my Shield Pack.

A mixed bag

I used to be indecisive, now I’m not so sure. - W.C. Fields

So the last five weeks have produced a bit of a mixed bag in terms of my NWN2 work. I've been a little scattered with my efforts as I jumped from one idea to another and from one project to another.

BouncyRock's Shattered Dreams module is coming along nicely and you can read more about that on the BouncyRock forums here: BR Shattered Dreams and you can read about the interesting work Elysius is doing on his blog. Now that the module has been announced I'll post some screenshots of the work I've done for Shattered Dreams in the coming weeks.

Aussie NWN - Dark Ages PW (the other project I'm working on) has an alpha module ready and is in the early stages of testing. It's been a long time coming but I'm looking forward to this PW coming to life. They are are waiting on the long promised fixes that are set for release with the 1.23 patch.

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to try my hand at character skinning and with that in mind I set about making some Roman-like armour to compliment the other work I'd done for Dark Ages. I basically made up a Frankenstein model from bits and pieces using the OC naked model for the arms and legs and one of the chain shirt models for the torso.

Bolting all the pieces together was the easy part and once I started to work with the skin modifier, I soon realised how much work it was going to be. It took a lot of experimentation to get the legs working so they didn't break out of the armour during the character animations. I used a combat animation widget I'd scripted to help me test the new armour and it proved to be a valuable tool. In any case, I managed to tweak the lower part of the model to achieve a very good result. It wasn't until I ran the OC chain shirt model through the same animations that I realised I'd actually improved my model over the OC model in terms of reducing the amount clipping.

Having finished the legs I moved to the arms. I completed about 90% of the skinning on this armour before I was distracted by something else but I intend to get back to it soon and complete the model. Here's the model so far.


The combat animation widget that I'd used to test the Roman armour was included as part of an update to my Module Testing Toolkit. Along with a module reload widget and some redesigned GUI functionality, the "Ring of the Dancing Warrior" formed part of the MTT v2.01h update and brings up more than six years of work on this toolkit.

I could not count the number of hours the MTT has saved me in testing time over the years. This little tool started life as a set of NWN1 scripts that morphed into the DM and player widget used on the Aeon NWN1 PW and in 2007 I re-wrote the core scripts for NWN2, adding a GUI menu to replace the conversation driven menu. If you have any interest in building NWN2 modules you should check out what the MTT can do and how it can help.

I have also released an update to the BTH Weapon Pack to include four new axe models. Three of which are shown below.


And lastly (and quickly, because my weekly NWN2 multi-player campaign is about to start) I did a re-skin of the arrow quiver model for the Dark Ages PW.


So there you have it, a mixed bag of NWN2 goodies.

Talking Heads

After completing the second update for the BTH Shield Pack I wasn't sure in which direction to take my modelling and so I volunteered to contribute some custom content work for a Middle Earth themed NWN2 Persistent World - Heroes of the Third Age (HotTA). I like the world that Tolkien put together and I'm a big fan of the LOTR books and the movies. One of the Heavy Shields in my shield pack uses the White Tree of Gondor as a design. I figured making LOTR based models would be fun. And it was for a while.

A couple of months into the project I found I had lost my custom content mojo. Instead of an interesting pass time it all became a bit of a chore. I stopped modelling during the week and only managed to drag myself to the workbench on weekends where I half-heartedly went through the motions of creating the architecture models for Rivendell. I'm sure this is a phase that most creative people go through at some time.

I continued to push through it when my attention was captured by a post on the HotTA forum where a player had requested trophy models like orc ears and human scalps as an aid to role play. Well, it brought to mind an idea I'd had about trophy heads and had never really followed through with. So I raced home from work with ideas pumping through my head and I set to making a proof of concept model that I could use to demonstrate the idea.

This was just the panacea my flagging model making mojo needed. I've always enjoyed working with the darker side of custom content. The BTH Swamp with its dank pools and the BTH Forest with its gritty ruins were my favourite NWN1 works. I recall writing at the time I was making ruined houses for the NWN1 PW I was involved with, that it was an interesting reflection on my personality that most of my best work had consisted of things that were broken and ruined. And so I relished the work I was doing with the severed trophy heads. I even made a nice little dripping blood visual effect to compliment the model.

It was a little unfortunate that the lead developers from HotTA didn't share the enthusiasm that the severed heads had generated on the forums. They felt that the modelling efforts should be spent doing more appropriate things. But it was already too late from my point of view, my mojo was back and I would not throttle it back down.

My leaving the HoTA project was probably overdue. I should have read the signs of my flagging interest and spoken up earlier. Instead I had become one of those volunteers that every project loathes; the guy that promises and then doesn't follow through. There was more to it than that, of course (there always is). Ultimately, I told the HotTA team I would finalise one last model for them and then step down as a contributor. From the moment I announced my departure I became persona non grata as far as the lead developer was concerned. Another indicator that the decision to leave was the right one.

Anyway, I hope the HotTA project gets some use out of the new Watchtower models. Although they were not part of the HotTA scope of work, the new models and the textures were made with the idea that they could be used for the construction of the walls and defences for a rustic/rural setting like Edoras.

And what became of the severed heads? I added a couple more head models and released them onto NWVault. I have since experimented with blood splattered NPCs and bloody weapons. I think this guy would make an excellent NPC Butcher, or maybe a surgeon.


At some time in the future I will expand on the severed heads by adding the NPCs and a few other gruesome oddities.

BTH Severed Heads can be found on NWVault here : http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=362

It's no simple thing to climb a ladder

Twelve months ago I sent a note to Slimer of the Aussie NWN team asking if they needed a part-time developer for their custom content. The Aussie NWN team had plans for a NWN2 persistent world set in Britain around 300AD and it sounded like an interesting project to contribute to. Plus I had played on one of their NWN PWs a couple of years ago and so I knew the guys involved. I had only been modelling for a few months when I contacted Slimer, but I was confident enough to be able to make placeables and other non-animated models for them.

I started with some rustic houses. Many of the original Obsidian models in NWN2 are way too clean and the rural house models are a perfect example. The thatched roofs look like piles of hay and every wall and corner is perfectly square. It was a good opportunity to grunge things up a little and knock a few walls and door frames off square.

While I was playing Bob the dodgy Builder, I noticed that the rural watchtower model (that looked great) was mostly a useless pile of timber that you couldn't climb. Duh! Not much use to a module builder. NWN2 seemed to be devoid of towers and platforms that could be climbed and used to defend a rural town. I took up the challenge of making watchtowers and archers platforms that the players could climb.

And so started my love/hate relationship with the NWN2 walkmesh, for it's no simple thing to climb a ladder in NWN2.

The walkmesh is used to stitch the geometry of a model into the terrain of the surrounding area and it defines where players can and cannot walk. For most placeable models this is easy enough; you have a wall and you don't want players to be able to walk through it. If you add a walkable gradient to a model (such as stairs) the points where the model intersects the terrain usually stitch adequately, but only as long as the terrain and the stairs terminate at the same level. If the stairs are sunk into the terrain the walkmesh creates a dip that makes the ground in front of the stairs unwalkable.

I settled on a walkmesh that worked well with the base of the stairs level with the ground and so in October 2007 I released my very first placeable hak with watchtowers and rural fort wall models on the NWVault site. I have been a little surprised at its lack of popularity and in ten months it has only tallied 280 downloads. In any case, I recently found myself in between projects and I decided to take the opportunity to revisit my watchtower hak.

I never liked the texture that Obsidian used for the fort walls. For a start, the models cannot be tinted. The texture also makes the upright posts in the fort walls look like mutant asparagus cross-bred with giant bamboo. It was time for the BTH texture treatment to add a more weathered look for the timber and an opportunity to include a tint map. The new texture is on the left, original texture on the right.


I also wanted to build an archers platform that was integrated with the style of the fort walls. I am quite pleased with this one, it turned out nicely.

The walkmesh for this model also has the same ground level restrictions as my previous towers. I can't claim to have mastered the NWN2 walkmesh just yet. Nonetheless, it was pleasing to look back on some of my early work and reflect on how much I have improved my workflow over the last 12 months and become more efficient.

I did have an idea on how I can improve the walkmesh for these watchtowers with a walkmesh helper model, but I was having difficulty getting it to work and so it was cut from the v1.10 release of the BTH Watchtowers. I have since read a tip from Sporaxis about converting placeables to environment objects and adding a walkmesh helper over the top. With this in mind, I have created walkmesh helpers specifically for the watchtowers. This has worked really well and I'm currently working on the v1.20 update to the Watchtowers to include the walkmesh helpers, an additional archer's platform and a gate with double doors.

My Watchtower hak for NWN2 can be found here: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=12022&id=226

It's a dangerous business stepping out your door

It's a dangerous business stepping out your door, if you don't keep your feet there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. - Bilbo Baggins

One of the things I have spent a lot of time on in recent years is the game Neverwinter Nights, based on the pen and paper role playing game of Dungeons & Dragons. While I was initially attracted to Neverwinter Nights as a fantasy RPG with strong ties to D&D, it would be the game's world building toolset and the community of other NWN players that would sweep me along on an unexpected journey and capture my attention for a long time.

I have no doubt that the NWN player community has been largely responsible for the longevity of the game. Six years after the release of NWN, the game continues to have a strong following. I first bought the game in 2003 and was lured to the toolset before I had come close to completing the single player game.

My early experimentation with the toolset had me writing some simple "go fetch" quests. One of the quests was to recover an item from the village thief. Every actor in an adventure needs a name, even a petty criminal. So, inspired by such names as Jimmy the Hand (Raymond E Feist) and Mack the Knife, I created Barry the Hatchet. The name made me laugh and I eventually adopted it as my online identity for all things Neverwinter.

I soon learned that writing exciting adventures was not one of my talents. But I did have an affinity for the scripting language that drives the NWN game. I also spent a lot of time playing on persistent worlds. Mystara- Black Horizons was an early favourite. The server is still active today. I also played on Chronicles of Torn (made by the Aussie NWN team). I had some great times on these servers and met some people I still hang out with online today.

So it's almost two years since the release of Neverwinter Nights 2 and at the moment I'm getting my kicks by making 3D custom models for NWN2. It's been a long journey from where I started in 2003 with the creation of Barry the Hatchet (petty thief and scoundrel) to building 3D models for NWN2. The fun part is that there is always more to learn.