Mod creation.

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I am in the beginning stages of creating a mod, based on a new NPC, a female half-dragon. Since I am inexperienced in scripting (But not in area/item/creature creation), I am asking for help. Anyone who can use WeiDu, NI, ISE, or such is welcome to PM me with the heading "Scripting." If you are interested in doing some voice dialog, PM me with the heading "Voice." Also, our very own 8people/Octara has agreed to do the voice dialog for the NPC. And yes, there is a romance. I will do some scripting, but I'll mostly be concentrating on layout and creation. Most likely, the mod will be over 75MB when finished. Some teasers are below. Let me know if you are interested.

Features:


Lots of dialog and player interactions. (A lot of dialog voiced by our very own Octara.)

7 Minor Quests.
5 Major Quests.
1 MEGA Quest

10+ New Dungeons
1 New City

Many new items and spells.

Many new monsters.

Many new stores, creatures, and bosses.

More to come as I add to this list.

 

Ah That will not be easy but good luck.

 

Thanks. Any chance of you helping?

 

I have had 1 day off work in the last 3 weeks and lot's of other stuff to do and besides that I know nothing about code and things like that

 

That is going to be a huge project. It will be not easy because it covers a very wide area of modding (e.g. area editing - at least 3 file types) IESDP can help you a lot. Check TeamBG for tools and you may find tutorials there too. Many links for tools can be found in SP too. Study already existing scripts, you might learn a lot from that too.
As I said, this will take a very large amount of time and energy. Good luck, Va!

 

Wouldn't you be better off starting with a smaller mod? I remember downloading some modding tools once and figuring I'd write a mod that would add several dozens area, items, quests, etc, etc, to the game. But I got so disheartened by how long it would all take that I lost interest and just gave up.

If I'd started a more modest project - one new area maybe, with a couple of extra items and a quest or two - I might have got it finished.

 

I'll be halping with the actual NPC, but other than that I might not be as helpful.

I think perhaps splitting it into Two mods may be better - not many people would appreciate downloading a 75MB mod

And if it gets big I won't be able to help because I still have dial up.

 

Good idea. You can do the following too: create the mod in lesser parts, "portions" which can be played alone, so you can test it (e.g. you place your first creatures and test your scripts on an already existing area, so you do not have to create a new area yet). If you work on it for months, and then try to test it, it may be so buggy and/or its parts will be inconsistent that you will have to spend a lot of time to fix these problems.

The suggestion of Octara is very good. Although you do not have to split the mod in developer stage: while creating the compressed file, you could use the split option (split to volumes) of your archiver (WinRAR is the best in my opinion, it can certainly make .zip). This will create files of a size specified by you. Disadvantage: to install and play with the mod, the user has to download all volumes.
Download managers are good for big files, by the way, with their effective resume options.

[ February 11, 2004, 22:08: Message edited by: Baronius ]

 

I am breaking it down into sections already. However, I do realize the complexity of this mod. That's why I need scripters!

Any help is appreciated.

 

I'm a scripter, and i might help.

I still say you're taking a impossible task. (Me then, translating all BG2 to finnish... )

[ February 12, 2004, 17:18: Message edited by: Taza ]

 

How are you planning on doing that? Are you taking original monsters and re naming them/giving them new stats. Or creating new avatars? As far as I know making a new avatar for a monster is neigh on impossible.

 

^^ Making the avatars is quite difficult, but it's finding an open animation slot for them that's near impossible. There are a hardcoded number of slots, and each one is predefined to some degree. I had a very hard time getting my silver werewolf animation into the game.

 

You can create quasi-new good-looking creatures by using the already existing avatars, as someone told in one of the posts above. Beside the renaming, you can also change their colors, I suppose you have already known this. Although color changes won't apply in case of certain creatures, where the .bam file already defines the colors (example: Fire Giant), thus Major, Minor, Hair etc. Color changes cannot be seen.

 

How many free slots for character animation are there left? It's not something I've looked into but if I was going to get a mod done (about 0.001% chance of this actually happening) it'd be handy knowing how many extra animations I could add.

 

Wooohooo. What a task... It's extremely difficutl task Va and I wish ya good luck. From the impression I get, you're planning to make some sort of unofficial expansion of the Throne... Tough task and I wish you good luck to achieve it.

From the impression I get, that Black Isle put in the character of Sherinkal in Icewind Dale 2, your hald-dragon should be proud, near arrogant creature. A sibling of the mating of human and dragon, which is one of the most powerful races in Faerun. Although she should be tormented by her half-heritage and not-belonging in neither the two races. Recommend alignment I propose - Neutral Evil with a chance of alignment change like Viconia, but to go further. That's what I think... A arrogant, haughty and superior creature, whom would be shown the real meaning of life by our protagonist (if good) or continuing the hatred toward humanity of everything to Lawful Evil (if evil)...