Level development is progressing apace, and I feel I should provide the reader with a small update as to the design philosophy at work in Lost Sosaria, and the amount of progress I have made thus far.
Regarding the scale of the map, I’ve got the Lands of the Dark Unknown drawn out onto a piece of relatively standard graph paper (I may scan it in for you to see at some point). Each square of the graph paper, I have decided, will correspond to one Neverwinter Nights area measuring, ideally, 24 by 24 world units (for the distance-minded, that’s 240 m by 240 m, according to BioWare’s standard definition of a world unit).
(In the previous iteration of Lost Sosaria, I had appointed a size of 32 by 32 world units to a square on the graph paper, and then subdivided these into four 16 by 16 areas in turn. The kicker, so to speak, is that developing a 16 by 16 area doesn’t take much less time than developing a 24 by 24 area, which means that I actually trim my invested development time — per area — by a factor of approximately three. So I’m moving faster overall — three times faster, roughly — and overall the scale of the world I’m using is about 56.25% of the previous iteration. Also, it’s easier to be succinct and fit everything important into one area when you’re building to the larger specification.)
Some areas take longer than others. When I’m building an interior level in the castle or for some of the houses in a city, that can take a while. Building some mountain terrain, on the other hand, moves along quickly. I might spend three hours working on an interior area (though usually not THAT long), but I might only spend an hour to make a mountainous exterior area. And building with the awesome new tilesets that give the area in and around Castle Black Dragon and Black Dragon City that distinctive and awesome look takes longer than building with the Rocky Mountains tileset that I’ll shortly be posting some screenshots from.
Indeed, building with the awesome tilesets takes a bit longer than an expansive interior to make, simply because there is so much room to finesse things.
The problem I keep encountering with a lot of the hak paks, because they add many nice features that I am always only too tempted to try and use, is the issue of memory faults. There are certain elements within all the tilesets, it seems, that are only too willing to cause a memory allocation fault when placed, and then cause a non-recoverable sequence of such faults when the attempt to undo what was just done is made.
And if by some chance I do manage to recover from the cascade of errors, the area I’m working on will almost always crash the Aurora Toolset when I try to save it and move on to another area for editing.
I’m becoming slightly paranoid, and so have adopted a defensive policy to combat the chance that I might irreversibly corrupt the module after an excessive session of editing. As I add each new area to the module without generating a memory fault, I save the module and then copy it to the Mac. This gives me the opportunity to have a current snapshot for testing at all times (since I do all my play-testing and in-game screen captures on the Mac anyhow), and also takes care of my desire to keep a current backup of the module on a seperate drive from the main version.
At any rate, that’s where the project is at for now. I’m going to sit down with the map and further segment it into small “provinces” that I will focus on building one at a time. And I’ll be laying out a “milestone” plan for myself so that I can start getting demos out for the public to have a look at.
This is not a demo announcement, though — if there’s going to be any releases, they won’t happen yet for a few months. And the first one or two will probably only be map releases, rather than actually incorporating any characters or other plot aspects.
Tags: Aurora Toolset, Black Dragon City, Castle Black Dragon, hak pak, Lands of the Dark Unknown, Lost Sosaria, Mac, screenshot
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