The Sanctum

I’m posting this blog entry mainly to solicit feedback on a major dilemma that I now find myself facing, with regard to the development of Sanctum of the Archmage II. That dilemma is whether to continue with my decision to develop the first act of the sequel in Neverwinter Nights 2, or to go back to developing it in Neverwinter Nights 1.

I was initially very impressed with Neverwinter Nights 2 in January when I got my new computer and played through the OC. I was wildly enthusiastic about the possibility of scripting with parameters (those of you who don’t code, trust me: that’s a big deal), with the improved graphics and terrain modeling, and with many of the design improvements that I saw in the engine. And since it seemed to me that the future of Neverwinter Nights lay in the sequel, rather than in NWN1, I decided that making the switch early would be a good idea.

I also heard (and saw, as I started trying to learn it) a great deal about the instability of the toolset. I was horrified at the almost uniformly grotesque head models, the full-body underwear, and the elimination of 2D portraits and cinematic cutscenes. Many of the armor models had bizarre hard-coded tints that could not be changed in the toolset. And the initial palette of creatures and models did seem a bit light. But I also knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get to work in earnest on Sanctum II until May or so because of my schedule. And by then, I reasoned, most of these issues would have started to be addressed and new and custom content would start appearing for the game. In the meantime I could work on planning, and on fully fleshing out the plot for the three acts of the sequel.

Now that May is here (indeed, almost over) and that planning work is done, I’ve had to take a sober look at these expectations. And what I’ve seen hasn’t given me a sense of confidence about the prospect of being able to build the first act of Sanctum II in NWN2 – not in a way that I will be satisfied with as a builder.

The NWN2 toolset seems to be crashing less than when I first started using it, but there are still widespread bugs. For example, the item-related 2DA files have actually spawned a whole host of "Bad Strref" entries since the 1.04 patch. I haven’t lost any work due to corrupted mod files, thank goodness, but I’m still seeing posts from other builders who are reporting this. And unless I’m completely confused about where to to look, the NWN2 models sections of the vault show next to nothing in the way of new creature and placeable content. This was a huge surprise to me, since NWN1 had a robust community of modelers (such as the CEP Team) that were regularly developing such resources for the game.

After doing some digging this morning, though, I think I’m beginning to understand some of the reasons for this. Apparently, Obsidian used a proprietary 3D modeling and animation system for NWN2 called "Granny." From what I’ve been able to gather, Granny offered certain benefits in terms of performance and ease of development – but at the price of a proprietary format for which there are no available converters for commonly used modeling programs like 3DSMax. A prospective modeler could, of course, buy a copy of Granny – starting, I believe, at around $12,500 for a single machine license. Perhaps not surprisingly, that hasn’t turned out to be a particularly viable option for the cadre of amateur 3D modelers who had previously been turning out so much excellent work for the Neverwinter Nights community.

As a result, and from what I can see, there are few to no new creature and placeable models for NWN2, even now eight months after release of the game and much longer after the appearance of the pre-release toolset. There has been widespread clamor for a "granny plugin" from Obsidian that will finally make this modeling work possible, and they appear to be working hard to provide one in the relatively near future. If it works well, that will be a real breakthrough that should liberate and empower custom modelers to start creating new models for NWN2.

But that work will almost certainly come too late for me to make any use of for Sanctum II, Act I, since I have to start making progress on the sequel now. And this has put me in something of  bind with regard to some of the content that I need to make Act I work. Wasting half a day today unsuccessfully trying just to re-create the "Control Rod" from Sanctum I – a simple, unadorned black rod held in the left hand – brought me up short about the harsh realities of this. Here’s a partial list of the creatures and models that I want or need for the sequel that I currently cannot find or create in NWN2:

- The Beastmen. They return and play an important role in Sanctum II, Act I. The closest thing I can find to them in the NWN2 toolset are bugbears.

- Hand-held wands and rods. The player acquired several of these in Chapter 1. None of the wand or rod models from NWN1 seem to have made it into NWN2.

- Demons. Demons play a central role in Sanctum of the Archmage, and not surprisingly, there are a number of major battles with them in Sanctum II. NWN1 and CEP between them gave a wide selection of fiendish outsider models to choose from. NWN2, by contrast, has Balor, a Hezrou, a Succubus, and a couple of devils. I could probably make do with these, but that isn’t a whole lot of variety from which to construct an army of demons that are overrunning the kingdom.

- Pegasi. The elven pegasus warriors play an important role throughout all three acts of Sanctum II. From what I can gather, there aren’t even any horses available in NWN2, much less winged ones.

For these reasons and others, I’m now seriously considering returning to building in NWN1 until NWN2 matures more as a modding environment. There is no question that the development of Sanctum II Act I will go much faster if I do this, even if it does mean scrapping much of the preliminary work that I’ve already done in the NWN2 toolset. And I could always port Act I to NWN2 later on. I really would rather move to NWN2 now, but I can’t shake the conviction that the considerations I’ve described here are too important to set aside and just "hope for the best" by sticking with NWN2, at least for the first act. (As a former manager of mine used to put it: "Hope is not a course of action.")

This is a decision I have to make now. So the question I wanted to solicit feedback from my fellow players and builders on is: what do you think? Am I overreacting, and are the prospects for NWN2 maturing sufficiently in the couple of months or so better than my currently pessimistic mood would indicate? Or would going back to NWN1 be a sober decision based on an assessment of the current realities of modding with NWN2?

Comments (9)

Now that the spring semester is finally over, I’m ready to start turning some serious attention to the task of building Sanctum II. As I’ve written previously, I have the three acts of the sequel pretty much plotted out, and I have some very ambitious plans for the romance plot as well. I’ve been tinkering with the toolset on the initial areas to get the hang of it, and I’ve imported and fixed up most of the important items, as well as the extensive utility scripts that I used in Sanctum I. Now I’m ready to start hacking away at it in earnest!

The thing I’ve been dreading most is the task of area creation. From everything I’ve heard (and my own limited experience has been consistent with this as well), creating areas in NWN2 is a royal pain, requiring much more time and effort than it did in NWN1. However, I’ve learned an interesting tip from some other developers that has made me a bit more sanguine about this prospect: using a terrain tool (such as L3DT) to create realistic terrain, and then importing it into NWN2 using YATT. I’ve heard that using these tools can dramatically speed up the process of area creation, so downloading and familiarizing myself with them is my main building project for the next week.

Comments (1)

In response to a recent comment on the NeverwinterNights Podcast forum about single-player vs. online and DM’d modules,  I wrote the following post explaining how and why I look at NWN modding as a new form of "interactive storytelling." After I finished, I decided to blog those remarks here as well.

---

Regarding Erik’s comments: while I do think there are somewhat different perspectives between the NWN online and single-player (SP) communities, I dislike casting the two in competitive terms. To some extent that’s natural between people who prefer different aspects of the same thing, but I see it as more of a kind of "Tastes Great / Less Filling" debate than a real conflict. I’m happy to concede that NWN provides great opportunities for online gaming in a D&D environment, and to respect peoples’ interest in PWs and DM-able mods, even if I don’t have the time or inclination to play online myself. As a former DM, it’s hard not to recognize the value of what NWN has to offer in this regard, especially for DM’d campaigns. Bruce covered this brilliantly in Episode 20, and I have little to add to what he said.

But I also think it’s important to realize that NWN is more than just computer-game implementation of D&D. Thanks to the toolset, it’s a robust environment for crafting an interactive storytelling experience. So on that note, let me briefly try to present my own perspective on NWN modding, as a serious SP modder and player — a perspective for which I’ve become something of an "evangelist" over the last year. That perspective is to view FRPGs in general, and NWN mods in particular, as a new and emerging art form — as a kind of interactive fiction or cinema.

I came to NWN with the kind of "storyteller’s focus" that was natural to me as an amateur writer, and as a former DM who built his own campaign world and typically wrote his own adventures. When I started playing NWN modules, I was struck by the game’s potential specifically as a storytelling medium. Historically, most forms of storytelling that we have had (today, primarily fiction and cinema) have been passive art forms. The author crafts a story, using the tools of a particular medium (words and concepts for fiction, film and acting or animation for cinema), and the audience experiences that story in a way that does not include being an active participant in the events. By contrast, one of the innovations that D&D and other role-playing games made possible was the idea of an interactive storytelling experience. This was one in which an "author" (DM) crafted a story in which the "audience" (players) could be active rather than passive participants. This added a factor that was needed to make the storytelling experience dramatically more immersive: the ability to make choices and take actions that have an explicit effect on the course of events.

Storytelling by DM, while a very interesting and rewarding kind of experience in its own right, is also very "resource-intensive." To do it, you need to have a DM and a relatively small number of players together for an extended period of time. And most importantly, you need a DM who is not only a skilled storyteller, but is skilled specifically at thinking on his feet and ad-libbing when his players come up with things that he didn’t expect or anticipate. This is a very demanding set of conditions that makes truly good DM’d events relatively rare. And it requires a large investment of time on the part of the DM, in order to craft and run a story for relatively few people. This can be great fun (I’m not knocking it — as I said, I was a DM for many years). But it’s simply not practical for most people, and certainly not for the number of people who are interested in the kind of experience that NWN modding makes possible.

I want to stress this last point, because I think it is extremely important. If you look at the download statistics on the typical NWN SP module, you’ll find that they get thousands of downloads. My own first mod, Sanctum of the Archmage I - The Sight, currently has about 3800 — and that’s low by comparison to some of the more popular and well-known mods. The plot is not suitable for more than one player at a time, and thus doesn’t support MP — but let’s ignore that for a moment and pretend that it could be DM’d for a group of six. A standard play-through of Sanctum takes about 8 hours. So, everything else being equal, running games for those people would have taken me, as a DM, over 5000 hours. At 8 hours a day, seven days a week, that’s over 20 months, *non-stop*, of DMing *just one* NWN mod (and that’s ignoring the scheduling complications of getting players together for a game). That enormous investment of time on the part of DMs is the main reason why I think that good DM-led events, while interesting and unique, will never be a dominant phenomenon in the NWN community.

This is where the distinctive advantage of SP (or MP) modding with NWN comes in. It allows me, as a mod author, to program a computer to do most of this work for me through the features made available in the toolset. It enables me to allow players to experience my story, in an interactive form, on their own schedule and without my having to devote thousands of hours of time to running games for them as a DM. It affords me the time to think carefully, in advance, about how to craft such a story, just as I would carefully craft the plot of a good novel — so that the player has a polished and solid experience when he does play it. And since I’m effectively programming a computer instead of just writing words on a page, this can now include options for the player to interact with the events of the story instead of just experiencing them passively.

For all these reasons, I think of NWN modding as much more than just a computer-game environment for D&D. It has the potential to become a new storytelling medium, reminiscent of the historical emergence of the novel or the movie. And that’s the main reason why I’m so enthusiastic about it.

Comments (0)