Loading hints

Ronan · Post by **Ronan** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 1:52 am

Lets make these actually usefull, providing little tidbits of info people might otherwise easily forget. I've got a few ideas, but would like more.

Faerunian time, breaths, candle-lengths, highsun, highnoon etc. I'm not sure what or where the exact definitions of these things are?
Common greetings, farewells, prayers and sayings in a few common cultures and religions.
Some of ALFA's hard-and-fast rules.

Leareth · Post by **Leareth** » Sun Nov 19, 2006 2:17 am

Yes that sounds great. Of course put the don't run and permadeath comments. Errrr maybe some of the general elven names n'tel etc. Candle marks would be good also adding why the are called candle marks (it should be obvious but doesn't hurt). Also I wouldn't mind a reminder about patron deities. While we can now force the choosing getting the people to RP their patrons and their reverence of other gods is a bit tricker.

Reminder that the Fearunian calander is actually has a 10 day week. Maybe list some common festivals like Greengrass, Midwinter etc. I'm sure there is more but that's what springs to mind right now.

Leareth

Thangorn · Post by **Thangorn** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 11:48 am

some places in Faerun use bells to measure time eg. four bells past highsun.. would be roughly equivalent to 4pm..

mebbe we could have bells that ring instead of teh loading bar, though I dont know how you'd manage that..

Ronan · Post by **Ronan** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 4:53 pm

So... anyone wanna put together a bunch of hints for us?

ç i p h é r · Post by **ç i p h é r** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 5:01 pm

Great idea. The ALFA Players Handbook would be a great resource for this I think. As for volunteers, well, Lord Kilburn posted in the Talent Pool thread that he was looking to help in *some* way, so this might be something he's willing to help with. I'll post a link to this topic on that thread.

Lord Kilburn · Post by **Lord Kilburn** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 5:40 pm

Yeah, I can do that. My work slowed down on the icons, but I'll work on those some more today as well.

Blackwill · Post by **Blackwill** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 9:00 pm

I'd like to see bits of known historical and geographical lore in between the hints too.

Cassiel · Post by **Cassiel** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:05 pm

I can wholeheartedly recommend the article on Faerunian Swear Words. I wrote it. It's brilliant.

Also, the FRCS has a section on "Time and seasons". To avoid accusations of cribbing their material, I've made changes where I found what they were saying stupid (e.g. "dawn" is patently the same as "night's end", and sounds less lame) - so I'd suggest paraphrasing as follows:

"Across Faerun, people and monsters both mark time by the rising and setting sun. In southern lands such as Halruaa, there are about twelve hours of day and twelve of night the year round; further north, the days are longer in summer and shorter in winter, with the Dales seeing perhaps 8 hours of daylight in Midwinter and 16 in Midsummer."

"Clocks are both rare and expensive, so hours are not commonly used. Rather, times of day are measured from obvious points: dawn (or night's end), morning, highsun (noon), afternoon, dusk (or sunset), evening, midnight, and moondark (or night's heart). Actual names for these vary widely across the Realms. Only in large cities, where temple bells (particularly of Lathander) sometimes chime the hour, are days divided into smaller units of time; where this happens the hours are referred to by the number of bells, hence "six-bells", "eight-bells", etc., with "twelve-bells" being another term for highsun or noon."

"The Calendar of Harptos is used to mark the passage of the seasons, and is named for the dead wizard who invented it. Each year is composed of 12 months of three tendays (i.e. 30 days). One tenday (or a "ride") is ten days, with the individual days being numbered - first-day, second-day, third-day, and so on. Five special days fall between the months, marking the seasons. The names of the months and the festivals are:
(1) Hammer (January) or "Deepwinter"
-Midwinter festival (January 1st)
(2) Alturiak (February) or "The Claw of Winter"
(3) Ches (March) or "The Claw of the Sunsets"
(4) Tarsakh (April) or "The Claw of the Storms"
-Spring festival "Greengrass"
(5) Mirtul (May) or "The Melting"
(6) Kythorn (June) or "The Time of Flowers"
(7) Flamerule (July) or "Summertide"
-Midsummer festival
(8) Eleasis (August) or "Highsun"
(9) Eleint (September) or "The Fading"
(10) Marpenoth (October) or "Leaffall"
(11) Uktar (November) or "The Rotting"
-The Feast of the Moon
(12) Nightal (December) or "The Drawing Down"

[What would be best would be to have it display details of whichever month & religious festival we were in - but not worth doing special coding for.]

I'll add details of the festivals when I've time.

Leareth · Post by **Leareth** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:55 pm

I think we should mention the time of Troubles since it still relatively recent and the knowledge that something happened should be common. Also a bit of a mention about the naming of years might be nice. You might want to link this to the APM.

Leareth

Ronan · Post by **Ronan** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 3:21 am

Cassiel, were you going to compile this list? Its simple to add the text to the game engine, but I'd prefer someone other than myself actually compile the information into a sane number of loading hints for me to cut and paste.

Cassiel · Post by **Cassiel** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 8:59 am

Sure, Ronana - I won't be able to look at it until next week, though. Could you:
(a) bump this thread then in case I forget because I'm still hungover after the Christmas party
(b) specify any minimum or maximum text lengths
(c) let me know if the number I can produce are limited
(d) let me know what format you want them in (text doc, csv, excel, etc)?

Ronan · Post by **Ronan** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 12:38 pm

a) Sure
b) Umm, there isn't likely any limit. Just be reasonable looking at the amount of text already present in NWN2's loading screens.
c) I've got 200 tlk entries allocated now, though I could allocate more. There isn't any hard limit, use your judgement.
d) Preferably, go to nwvault and download TlkEdit, and put them in Tlk file format (starting at line 0, I'll cut and paste into the ALFA Tlk). If not, any other text format is fine.

Cassiel · Post by **Cassiel** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 4:37 pm

I've got going on this - hampered by the fact all my pdfs are on the hard drives I can't access (SATA seemed like such a good idea at the time), but I've got the TLKedit thing working.

Cassiel · Post by **Cassiel** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 5:43 pm

I've done a score or so of these. At the moment, it's very easy to change them if I've fooked anything up - but I can't check myself as I don't have a computer that can run NWN2 currently.

Can anyone check whether:
*The carriage returns display normally?
*The text length is okay?

Any comments on content appreciated too - I've taken a conscious decision to make the place descriptions sound like direct quotations, some lifted from Greenwood on the WotC site and some written myself.

http://www.grundy.f2s.com/downloads/ALFA_loadhints.tlk

Ronan · Post by **Ronan** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 7:35 pm

Cassiel wrote:*The carriage returns display normally?

They do.

Cassiel wrote:*The text length is okay?

Looks like some are a bit too long, I think we are limied to about 10 lines, with roughly 100 characters per line. Too long of a entry won't crash anything, it will just cut off the top portions which don't fit in the window. Given NWN2's ATing times, I think a lot are too long anyways.

Also, remember we can use <i></i>, <b></b>, and <color=Gold></color> sort of things. I'm not entirely sure what colors we are limited to, but I think Gold, Red, Orange and Purple work.