A Land Far Away

A bit beta-ish still, but here it is. The guide to creating global creatures for ALFA:
http://www.alandfaraway.org/docs/Techni ... MCreatures
We are doing creatures without special or magical items for now, until the base item resources are completed. As always, any volunteers please post what you are working on in this thread so no work is duplicated.

Yes its complicated, and yes its a lot to read (the more general guide, minus base resource specific stuff, is linked from it as well). Creature design is critical to achieving balance, consistancy, and minimizing exploitability. And there are lots of choices to be made when making a creature, so there is no getting around some complexity. It and the linked wiki represent what I've learned from toolsetting and testing creatures in ALFA1. We are holding base resources to much higher standards than would be done on a normal live server, so keep that in mind when making them.

Questions? Read the SRD, monster manuals, DMG, or ask Ronan, Spider Jones, or other kownledgable D&Ders in chat.

Submit creatures here:
ftp://alfatech:moonblade@ftp.alandfaraw ... Creatures/
(please put them in ERFs or directories with your name on them, so I can group them in some manner)
If your creatures take some sort of special scripting or something not available to you when you created them, please put them in a seperate folder or ERF with a descriptive name, and a readme explaining what is needed.

Comments, opinions?

I will be taking care of goblings, orcs, gnolls, and 50' flaming goblings.

I'll do some in the next coupla days.. not sure what yet.

I'm pretty sure I can add to that list after I rummage through the toolset resources some more.

Thangorn wrote:I'm pretty sure I can add to that list after I rummage through the toolset resources some more.

There is a bunch that I've got listed but not catigorized. I haven't even cracked MM2-4 or a lot of the regional sourcebooks yet either, heh.

I'll start work on humans once i get the full version of the game

*kicks the stupid canadian suppliers who wont have the game until tommorrow*

I'll claim other stuff once I finish an entire section

Halrin wrote:*kicks the stupid canadian suppliers who wont have the game until tommorrow*

too bad. so sad.

*rolls his eyes at another "priveledged" Northern Hemisphere dweller*

I might just wait another EIGHT DAYS while I'm at it.

hay guyz if you want to make creatures as fast as you could in NWN:

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... tail&id=35

Grand Fromage wrote:hay guyz if you want to make creatures as fast as you could in NWN:

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... tail&id=35

Thats a nice plugin, but I can actually create creatures significantly faster in NWN2 than I could in NWN1, its just less intuitive at first. Skill points are still a bitch, though. I micromanage hideously :F

Ronan wrote:

Grand Fromage wrote:hay guyz if you want to make creatures as fast as you could in NWN:

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... tail&id=35

Thats a nice plugin, but I can actually create creatures significantly faster in NWN2 than I could in NWN1, its just less intuitive at first. Skill points are still a b*tch, though. I micromanage hideously :F

That's because you're a bizarre freak who didn't use wizards. This plugin is for the other 99% of the population. >;|

Ok, what do you guys think is good in terms of corpse decay time? I've got all my "Body Bag" settings set to "body". Anything else just doesn't make much sense in terms of immersion, IMO, and NWN2 lets players select objects much nicer than NWN1 did (its much harder to click on something by mistake).

We also need an additional local variable setting, the corpse cleanup time. Corpses left unlooted need to clean themselves up after a while, and I don't want generic cleanup scripts to do this. Those always inevitably end up interfering with DMs setting something up.
So I added this:

ACR_CRE_CLEANUP_DELAY (float)
This is the time, in seconds, an unlooted corpse will remain in-game. The corpse will never decay around PCs. When it is destroyed, all the items on it are destroyed as well. If not defined or set to 0, the unlooted corpse will never decay.

I'm thinking 2 RL hours is a good setting for ABR creatures, ie 7200 seconds.

Using this system we could have corpses never decay on their own. I kinda wanted something like this so we could have PCs pick up and move corpses, and I think having them stick around helps with immersion. This could really hurt FPS of course, but thats something that would come out in beta (and DMs could change these setings if they are expecting to use a monster in hordes). OR.. we could even count the number of corpses in an area, and use that to make sure we never get so many piled up that FPS go to crap. That would depend on how things go in beta, of course...

2 RL hours, or even 1 RL hour would be fine IMO.

- HEEGZ

Halrin is doing all the humans, and is a scum for not posting here and telling everyone else

Spider is making all monsters in the "giant" catigory. And yes, he is a scumbucket as well.

Ok we finally got some creatures posted. Thanks to Sheyjin for the Herculian effort. It looks like we need to adjust a bunch of the tags and resrefs to conform to ABR conventions, but that shouldn't take long. I'm posting a screen shot of all the creatures that have been created to avoid duplicating any effort (damned if I'm going to write it all out, ).



Halrin, Ronan, Inaubryn, have you guys made any progress? I'll try and check with each of you when I see you online.

Thanks.

BTW, Souvarine has volunteered to clean up the creatures and make sure they conform to ABR standards. We should hopefully have a set of critters worthy of release soon. Thanks Souvarine.