There’s a learning curve. Just relax and take it a little at a time.
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/other/tool/nwn2-toolset-guide
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refresher for everyone (myself included)
CAMERA
rotate view
- Ctrl+RMB (or just MMB)
slide horizontal plane
- Ctrl+LMB
slide vertical plane
- Ctrl+Shift+LMB (vertical mousemove)
zoom in/out
- mousewheel
OBJECTS
rotate object
- Shift+RMB (horizontal mousemove)
elevate or depress object
- Alt+LMB (vertical mousemove)
z - HeightLock toggle
s - Stackable toggle
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The Toolset doc that comes with NWN2 is in the NWN2 application / Documentation folder (not your My Documents folder). It is titled nwn2toolsethelp.html
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So I’ve been tinkering with the toolset earlier and I’ve got a couple of questions:
1- How do I check the alignment of a creature?
2- How do I spawn or at least view creatures that haven’t spawned yet, since I’m viewing the area as it is when the player first spawns in it without triggering anything?
3- I noticed that almost no one has points into saves, despite the stats related to the saves being quite high, and those that I’ve seen that do have saves have only tiny amounts. Is that intentional or do the saves change once the encounter starts?
4- How do I check conversation scripts in modules?
5- Is it possible for me to change the amount of money merchants have in their pocket or even remove the caps they have on selling prices?
Glad to see you’re tinkering. I have to admit what everyone else was thinking, which is that your first few posts came off like those of an impetuous child who hadn’t yet learned that the people don’t just turn over the results of their hard work to the first person who comes along and demands it. All of us learned how to use the NWN toolsets through reading and a TON of trial and error. It’s impossible to imbue another with hard-won experience.
That said, I think I can answer a few of your questions.
To view creature properties, right click on the creature name (whether you find it in ‘Area Contents’ or ‘Blueprints’) and click the ‘Basics’ tab in the window that appears. Scroll down a little to find the good-evil and law-chaos sliders. You can click the ‘Preview’ tab to see the creature model. Spawning a creature is as simple as left-clicking and dragging the creature’s name directly onto the area map.
The saving throws you see in the creature properties are calculated according to 3.5 rules. I checked a few creatures to verify, and I don’t see what you’re referring to. Can you give a few specific creatures for us to check, maybe?
For conversation scripts, just look at the conversation itself, as the table shows the names of the scripts that execute for various conversation nodes. The scripts are found on a separate tab in the same docked toolbar as the conversations. This will help you with your question about merchants, which are just NPCs with an associated ‘Store’ asset. Check the conversation with the merchant creature to find the script that opens its associated store, and then look for that store name under ‘Area Contents’ or ‘Blueprints’. Play around with those settings; the ‘Behavior’ heading has what you’re specifically looking for.
I make no excuses for my behavior. Those that know me best know that I’m often rude, obnoxious, impatient, hot-headed and hot-tempered. And no, I’m nothing like Qara, because I actually think and do happen to have sympathetic and considerate sides, just that I rarely channel them. However, I’d still like to point out that the people that responded to me did not come off as much better. I don’t see much reason to not relay what you learned to me instead of telling me to read a tome that would leave me more confused than educated, for lack of a better word. A simple explanation of why viewing deleted content isn’t that easy with a few basic instructions on how to use the toolset all summarized would’ve saved us all a lot of time. Instead, everyone kept repeating that I should read the guide, mess with the toolset by myself and insult me. Yes, I have been insulted by a couple of people, one calling me entitled and saying I sound like a troll and the other offering a sarcastic remark that I looked over. Regardless, fuming over all this won’t do me any good. Best to save my energy for the present.
I already knew how to access the Basics tab, though I didn’t know I could access the Preview tab. When something’s greyed out, it’s usually inaccessible. Regardless, there are no sliders.
The best examples I’ve checked were Lorne in the arena and the Shadow Reavers in the Vale, but also some of the berserkers in the Ice Troll Lodge. Lorne had no saves at all, and one of the Shadow Reavers had two points in his saves.
I have no idea what you just said here. There’s nothing indicating conversations. You know, besides Open Conversation/Script, and I know that’s not what I’m looking for because it doesn’t show me all conversations in the game.
I don’t ask people to change their behavior and I’m certainly not offended by it, and I’d suggest you not be too insulted by anything others say, as well. I’ll put it this simply: to answer virtually any one of the dozen or so posts you’ve made in the last couple of days wouldn’t be very difficult if you had some fundamental familiarity with the game structure and how the toolset works. I’ve read other topics of yours in which people have replied, perhaps naively, with either snippets of code or references to games files, assuming that you were comfortable with following their instructions - because so many of us already are. Unfortunately, the nature of this game and its tools is such that we need you to meet us halfway. You need to have familiarity with the toolset and the game files, with the various dependencies between assets in the game, with basic scripting, etc for it not to be a waste of our time to explain things to you. Believe me, the next few posts I make in this particular thread will be probably be the most literal and informative ones you get on this forum - and when I break out screenshots I hope you understand why.
But also, don’t get discouraged by any of this. You’ve been implored by several of us now to just go experiment. The toolset looks intimidating when you first jump in, but if you’re really curious about how things work, you’ll know your around it in a short time.
To specific questions: I haven’t played the NWN2 main campaign in about ten years so I don’t actually remember exactly which creatures you’re looking at, but here are the saving throws for a Shadow Reaver Cleric(18) in “3400_Merdelain”. Looks legit to me.
Also, here are the alignment sliders in the ‘Basics’ tab of the creature properties window, so you know where to look. Incidentally, if a creature has a conversation attached, you now know where to look for that, as well.
Now see, had anyone explained all that to me, we’d’ve saved a lot of time.
Okay now see, I was looking at the far right tab, and it’s really small, so for the second time, I thought I’d reached the end of it. Now I know better. FREAKING OBSIDIAN, MAKE IT EASIER TO UNDERSTAND.
Also I forgot to say, when you said “Spawning a creature is as simple as left-clicking and dragging the creature’s name directly onto the area map”, what name were you talking about? Where do I find said name?
Also, I just took a look at a couple of NPCs with conversations and a couple of merchants, and I see something titled Conversations in the Basics tab at the bottom, but I can’t click on it, even for the merchants.
Now see, had anyone explained all that to me, we’d’ve saved a lot of time.
This is exactly what I was talking about in the wall of text first paragraph of my last post. I’m going to reply to this thread maybe two, maybe three more times, showing you things that are already right in front of you on the screen. I’m the only one who’s going to do this for you because I guarantee no one else has the patience to do it. After a couple more posts, my patience will also be exhausted, and you’ll be on your own, so I implore you to try to figure out the simple things - like, I’ll keep saying, the rest of us did - and save the questions for tougher concepts. Don’t blame Obsidian for making things difficult to understand: this toolset is an incredibly powerful platform for game design that was way ahead of its time, and for everything it offers it’s actually remarkably straightforward.
To your specific questions; I opened up the Blacklake area of the “2000_Neverwinter” module more or less at random, so open that one if you want to follow along:
To spawn in a creature, you actually you don’t even need to click and drag. Just left-click on the name of the creature in ‘Blueprints’:
Then click wherever on the map you want the creature to appear. Now we have a friendly fiend in Blacklake:
Conversation names and information have also been staring you in the face the entire time. Here I’ve selected Cain, one of the bards on the stage in Blacklake, and opened his properties window:
To actually open the conversation file in the conversation editor, it will require a series of clicks on tabs and items demonstrated here:
Take a look through those five tabs in the explorer pane on the left-side of the toolset (the one with the ‘Conversations’ tab). You’ll also find scripts in there, and hopefully I’m anticipating you in guessing that you’d be looking for those next.
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I believe we’ve already covered the fact that I wouldn’t be able to tell which is tough or easy. Regardless, I have no idea why I didn’t see the Conversations thing. Maybe I’m going blind. As for the searching thing, I didn’t see it probably because my screen is too small, so it was minimized to the point the Name, Tag and Resref things were at the literal bottom of the window. That would explain my problem with the other tabs.
There are a couple more questions I have, namely being how to read trigger scripts for spawning creatures and how to view cutscenes scripted to play, whether or not they actually do play in the game, but I’ll look into the guide myself and see what I can dig from it. I got the basics down, so I’m probably ready to read it now.
a thing to keep in mind about creatures. There are two ways to get them into the game; one is the way SavnetSinn described. The other (more complicated but for various reasons better) way, is to spawn them in by script as needed.
The reason i mention this is because you might start looking for a specific creature in a specific area at some time and not see it in the toolset area. If so, chances are that an OnEnter script (or some other script…) will run when a PC enters the area, that makes the creature spawn
so don’t pull yer hair out if/when you don’t see creatures in an area: instead they spawn “on the fly” at Waypoints typically,
/note
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That’s pretty much why I asked how to spawn creatures in the first place - I wanted to know how to spawn a creature that spawns only after the PC runs past a trigger. But I suppose I’ll figure that out as I read the guide, along with how to edit a merchant’s money.
as a hypothetical, a Trigger can have a script assigned to one of its Event slots. a script in an OnEnter event could spawn a creature when the PC enters the trigger
if you look at the Properties of any object it usually has a section called “Scripts” – those are the events that are available to that type of object. They run assigned scripts when that type of event happens (to the object)
even conversations and conversation-nodes have events …
I’ll see about that next time I use the toolset.
I think I’m late to the party but I feel I need to say a thing about the toolset. It took me about 1 year to learn and about 4 to master. My campaign is a project I have been working on for 7 years (give or take) and in the first 4 or so I created about 30% of it. The rest 70% during the next two, and been spending my time ever since on bug fixing and such.
The toolset, or any game engine, is a complicated piece of software. If it was easy, we’d be making Heroes 3 maps instead of campaigns. And I say this because I did plenty of Heroes maps back in the day. Drag and drop sprites and you’re good to go.
So in conclusion, being able to create nice modules comes with a price. But it’s worth it. Once your first quest works out, the feeling is priceless.
p.s If you think this engine is complicated, don’t even try others like the Divinity OS one.
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Kids today have been indoctrinated to want instant gratification, so naturally they act like infants when they don’t get immediate results. Tough. Let them deal with it or move on. 
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I’m still spending hours just to get a line of script working correctly… I will say I am still a noob after 2 years… thats just modding the default campaigns.
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Don’t be discouraged by that. You’re still trying and that’s what matters. When something clicks and finally works, you get that small rush of discovery and the triumph of making something happen, and that’s what’ll keep you going. Besides, the skills you learn in scripting translate well into other avenues of coding, which will probably be a requirement for literacy at some point in our future, so good on you for continuing with it.
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How very profound.
Scripting is an issue on its own. I always say the same to people who have trouble coding. You can achieve 99% of what you want with the stock scripts. Many come in the form of ga_*, which are used from conversation.
If you want to spawn critters when a party enters an area (or whatever) and can’t script it, write a convo which is talked by a “DM” placeable and say something like “As you enter the room, the skeletons come to life”. And on this line call ga_create_object(…)
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