If you’re like me – not so great at writing your own entertaining stories – then here’s an alternative proposal you could consider. The following list shows several highly rated modules that could potentially be converted to NWN2 as English-language titles. Have a look and see if any of them strikes your fancy.
It’d definitely be interesting to have a think about the NWN1 modules that would be most improved by an NWN2 rehaul, in terms of gameplay possibilities as well as art (for instance, I’m sure a lot of people would play a NWN2 Dance with Rogues…but it’s a single-character adventure that spends most of its time in the dialogue box. Updated graphics aside, there probably isn’t that much to add to it, no?)
I can think of at least five people that would install or re-install NWN2 just for an ADWR conversion.
If it was Valine you heard from, I hope they are alright. Of those friends and acquaintances I have online that have abruptly vanished, I have later learned that a dishearteningly large number did so due to awful things happening in their lives or awful things halting said lives.
Light sources affecting stealth was something I could not make bulletproof for Crimmor. It worked (I had to manually draw triggers for the light spheres, and use a heartbeat for day/night), you could manually activate/deactivate lights and stuff (even turn torches on/off via fire/cold damage), and guards would react to lights being off when they shouldn’t be (including turning them back on and looking for the player), but the light sphere triggers would sometimes fail, which would cause the stealth skill points to go wonky.
As for handling moving lights, never figured out how to do that, probably would have to override torches with an aoe effect.
Porting from NWN would be a lot easier if there were a way to directly convert Conversations.
For lights, could an Ipoint within a trigger region be used to run a heartbeat script that applies an EffectSkillDecrease effect to your Hide skill, depending on your distance? That way you’d see the effect on your character icon.
A lot of people who partake in certain lewd aspects of this game - prefer to keep very private about it especially. (I fall firmly in this camp as well)
I figured out the light sourcing issue. You have to make sure you chain the stealth modifiers / effects to a SPELL_ID. It makes things much more reliable for the OnEnter / OnExit. (I recall mentioning this to you years ago in IRC)
Moving Lights = Heartbeat / Perception script (Or a Recursive check) that checks Line of Sight / Range between player and said source of light. In fact most of my stealth system works off that logic. I should really demo / show it off. It was pretty cool beans.
ADWR does this for guards when you walk around in the nude / pick a lock of a door / whatever. It will compare the distance between you and the nearest set of guards that can see you. Then decide if they were close enough. This is also how they stop chasing you when you flee from them.
Simple - but works great.
I would make my area’s with all the lighting I needed… Then I would paint triggers over the areas where light was. Each Trigger would automatically assign itself to the nearest light source. It had to know the state of lamps / lights to check if they were on or off.
(Yes, I allow players to turn lights off / use water arrows to turn them off - smart guards will notice and turn them back on… I think I got a little crazy with it)
I didn’t use an icon… but actually would play a small visual effect making the player sort of glow… However that was purely a test vfx… The best way to handle it would be a custom UI window that shows how visible you are. (IMO)
Spells such as web can generate a standard trigger region via data from 2da files. There’s probably a way to take advantage of that and simplify laying down the light triggers.
Well my point was they could be useful for saving build time: you won’t need to lay down a trigger region around every light. Instead, just plunk down an Ipoint object that generates the permanent AOE. Performance-wise, they may need to be turned on and off by the area enter/exit scripts. But you only need to script it once.