Wonderous Items (DMG3.5)

Development of standard ALFA palettes (ABR)

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Wonderous Items (DMG3.5)

Post by AcadiusLost »

Allright, I spent a good part of the day tooling up all the DMG wonderous items, from A through P (didn't have time to finish the rest).

A few of the ones i did need scripting, which I can do later, there are a fair number I skipped because they were less than workable in NWN2. Some will doubtlessly need to be fixed/adjusted as well.

I emailed the erf to Ronan, since I'm not all up on where these go or sure if I have access to it. If someone wants to start from R, and finish them up in the next 3 weeks, they are welcome to- otherwise I'll get back to them when I return from my trip overseas.
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Post by AcadiusLost »

Got the last few workable ones of these toolsetted and uploaded last night, though there are a few things that bear some discussion:

-Many of these are high-powered items, which may never see much use in ALFA (Robes of the Archmagi, for example: SR18, +5 AC, +4 universal saves, bonus feat: spell penetration). I've included them where they've been feasible by the toolset, but what would likely be more "useful" to us here would be lower-powered versions of the same sort of things. I've done this a few times for things like the Robe of Blending (should be +10 hide, alter self at will, ours just does the +hide), potentially I could look into doing this for more of the items, depending.

-Pricing: There are some limitations using stock NWN2 with adjusting prices on items (much like NWN1, can't lower beyond potentially wonky Item Property prices), though I understand there are ways via haks and such. Should items be priced as per canon, or as per our ALFA manual pricing guide? I've used canon where possible, but sometimes, especially if we want minor or altered versions of canon items, we need to work out how they should be valued.

-Variety: The item properties listings potentially allow for many, many more unique wonderous items, even at low/accessible values: should we be making some of our own Wonderous items for the ABR pallete? It's kind of an openended question: convenience of having more available low to mid level magic loot onhand to award, versus lack of uniqueness and time invested in toolsetting it all.

Interested to hear folks' thoughts on these.
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Post by ç i p h é r »

On lower powered items: Not a bad idea. Many wondrous items have lesser and greater versions so we could do the same for those that don't.

On pricing: Get it as close to canon as possible, until we can fix these. I understand that OE will start addressing modding issues in patch 1.06.

On variety: Have you perused many source books? Virtually every book, from core to various supplementals introduce new magic items. WotC's done the thinking for us, so if you'd like to add variety, this is where I suggest we start.
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Post by AcadiusLost »

As the thread topic implies, I've just tooled these from the 3.5 DMG: haven't brought in other canon sources for items yet, to avoid duplication if others are on the task. As it appears they aren't, I may move on to Magic of Faerun or one of the others. Pricing may be a bit tricky if they aren't 3.5 books, but that's easily enough adjusted after the fact.

Other settings on the items: We've got True/False deals for the following:

-Droppable? (been setting this to Yes, but not 100% sure what it's affecting)
-Pickpocketable? (been doing "Yes" for anything of a reasonably small size)
-Identified (setting as "No", figured that was appropriate)

-Useable Only when Equipped / From inventory / both: tried to set this meaningfully for the items, though not sure if it's being referenced at all for some items (not equippable, etc)

I've also tried to select inventory icons (2D art) and tint that fit the items, but for the equippable ones, I haven't done anything with their 3D-ingame-equipped appearance (cloaks, boots, robes, gloves, amulets). The "Preview" option in their properties always just shows a blank grid. Do these just need to be put on an NPC to see and modify?
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Post by ç i p h é r »

AcadiusLost wrote:The "Preview" option in their properties always just shows a blank grid. Do these just need to be put on an NPC to see and modify?
Either that or the camera my be offset to the left or right, zoomed in too far, or zoomed out too far. Just a thought.
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Post by AcadiusLost »

Tooled up wonderous items from the "Magic of Faerun" book as well, now. Some of these were in the game resources, where possible I copied with minor adjustments.

As I can't rely on alphabet to sort these out anymore, I'll likely upload a full pack of these shortly. I'm also going back and making some minor fixes on my earlier ones as well.

Only way I've been able to "preview" the look of wearable items has been to put them in the inventory of an NPC instance, then use the "Armor set" option to check them out, then go back and adjust the blueprint accordingly. If anyone knows a better way, I'd be glad to hear it.
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Post by HEEGZ »

I am fairly certain there are some plugins on NWvault that have a built in preview for item creation. Try these perhaps:

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... tail&id=12

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... etail&id=3

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... tail&id=36
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Post by ç i p h é r »

AL, Ronan mentioned that he (or someone) made adjustments to your initial items pack (A-P). Are the blueprints you're working off the revised ones or the originals you published on the FTP?
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Post by AcadiusLost »

I've been working off my originals- as far as I'd heard, the only modification Ronan made were in pricing, and I haven't had any luck yet with the ahp1.0 hak (maybe a conflict with 1.04?), so I've been working with what I had. The updates to the older ones are in the look/tinting, description, and models for a number of them, so probably easier to repeat the repricing than vice versa.

The wearable items I've been able to edit by doing a bit of a dance back and forth between the panels of an NPC's inventory management, seems to be working allright for now- I know things like bracers don't appear on the model, but should amulets? If so, haven't been able to tweak those yet. The circlets and headbands are all looking correct (found them under banded mail helms), as are the cloaks and belts. The masks/goggles/eyes all use the same nonideal party mask model, but it's the only one I could find that seemed reasonable. I'm less than thrilled with the coloration of the Robes of the Archmagi, as the tinting/color options under Armor Set only seem to affect the trimming, and not the main color of the robes- if anyone has some wisdom in the area, I'd appreciate it.

Also tested the Ioun stones, using the item properties that came with the toolset, they seem to apply the correct effect (+2 ability, or +1 AC), but are not deactivatable, nor do they display a VFX effect- they just persist until a different one is activated, in which case the effect is replaced by the new one (can't use more than one at once). It did appear they add some lighting to the PC of the appropriate color, but no swirl/orbiting that I could see. They are also priced by the toolset at about 11x their DMG cost, for some bizzare reason.

I'll check out those plugins as well when I get the chance.
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