Moonshadows has hit a pretty significant milestone: 15,000 downloads! I'm very pumped. :)
In other news, the winners of the Obsidian Area design contest were announced over on Neverwinter Nights Podcast, so definitely check that out and congrats to the winners. Additionally, there was recently a Mysteries of Westgate press event at the Avalon hotel in Beverly Hills, CA, which both Alan Miranda and Russ Davis (Tiberius) attended. The game seems to have been very well-received, so that's good news! I personally hope that there's another one over on the East coast; then maybe Leonard (Challseus) and I could show up! :)
I spent the last couple of days tinkering with the VFX editor, though I've ultimately been unable to create what it is I wanted. Normal VFX-stuff I can do; but once I started tinkering with models and textures and actual .dds files, things just go out of my reach. I'm no 3D-artist. :(
Anyhow, today I'll go back to working on Moonshadows itself. I plan on creating a few NPC's and writing their conversations, as well as possibly writing some core path stuff. My first final exame is also on Monday, so I'll be setting aside a substantial amount of time for that -- also, luckily, it's raining outside, so I probably won't be distracted by the outdoors and all of its temptations (sunlight, frisbee, running, etc.). Off to be a productive little boy!
I did some interior decoration today; the area I'm currently working on is coming along quite nicely, so I may have some screenshots of it up soon. I didn't spend too much time working, though, as it's absolutely gorgeous outside and the frisbee gods were calling to me. ;)
Well, in addition to a bit of miscellaneous testing/scripting/item-blueprint-ing, I fully-implemented companions today! They're functional and cool and all is well.
Well, after last post's re-vamp of the Moonshadows screenshot gallery, I decided to go ahead and do what I've been meaning to do for awhile: give HugieGames a big facelift. The homepage, NWN1 content and NWN2 content pages have all been (re-)created from scratch, so they're worth a look...as is this additional screenshot!
Some area design + screenshot-taking session 5/9/08
I was able to finish a large portion of an interior area today, one which I started from scratch this morning. Then, after doing a whole bunch of non-building stuff, I created a test character for myself (a spirit shaman -- those dudes are almost as sweet as favored souls! ;) ) and, my companions by my side, battled through one of my completed areas. I came away with twelve nice screenshots in total from the escapade, so, if I pace myself in a disciplined manner, that should last me quite awhile (1 screenshots/post, anyone?).
I did some area design tweaking yesterday -- mostly lighting/fog adjustments, with some placed-effect work as well. Additionally, I designed a new custom creature that I think came out pretty neat, and which should spice things up combat-wise. Perhaps I'll post some screenshots soon -- stay tuned!
In a hurry to make it to an intramural frisbee match (which we won!), I accidentally parked in a handicapped spot. Hurrah for $100 fines. I was having such a good day, too...
On a related-but-not-really note, I'm going to open a paypal donation link thingy. If any of you happen to be unfortunate enough to have more money than you know what to do with, feel free to contribute to the HugieFund. ;)
EDIT: It turns out receiving funds via PayPal costs money. Screw that! :D If you want to give me free money, send me an email and I'll give you my address! ;)
The Academy of Modding Excellence hosted an IRC chat earlier this morning that I was invited to attend. It was a lot of fun -- we had between 20 and 25 people there for the most part, and there was some really interesting discussion going on. I also was able to chat privately with a few folks that I think may be able to help me out with personal projects. On that note, off to send out a few emails -- then, to the toolset!
The Academy of Modding Excellence has released their second batch of nominations for the 2007 NWN2 Golden Dragon Awards, and Moonshadows has been nominated for Best Action Module! I'm thrilled and really excited to see how the final voting turns out. My competition is 'Tragedy in Tragidor' by Phoenixus and 'Corruption of Kiahoro' by human_male, so not really sure how the dice will fall...
The commenting feature on the blog was working, but I noticed after posting one that it was spitting out the comments for a given post in a random order instead of in the order the comments were submitted! I whipped together a fix in the php code this morning, and all seems to be good in blogsville once again. :)
I've got a few more screenshots from the area I built yesterday; I went back and used the terrain "color" tool to get some sweet shadowing effects on the cliffs and edges of the area. Enjoy!
As you can see, I've added commenting functionality to the blog. All seems to be in working order, so feel free to leave me one so I can enjoy the fruits of my labor! :) Also, I'm currently working on making editing function correctly...we'll see if I can figure it out.
I spent some time today creating a new area. It's still pretty "bare-bones" -- no music or sounds and minimal work with terrain and texturing -- but the mood is already there in part, and I actually think it looks pretty neat. You be the judge!
Academy of Modding Excellence announces 2007 NWN2 nominations! 4/24/08
The Academy of Modding Excellence (AME) has at long last announced the first round of nominations for the 2007 NWN2 Golden Dragon awards! Accompanying the announcement was a slick video highlighting the various nominations:
Apparently, module-category awards will be released soon. Keep an eye out on the site...and cross your fingers! ;)
Well, that was quick -- I'm up to 300 votes! Also, I've been tinkering with the blogging code all morning to ensure that when I manually delete a post from the database, it doesn't mess up my display algorithms. It's all working now after about an hour and a half of work (or, at least, it worked if you can see this post! ;) ), so that's pretty cool!
Moonshadows hit 14,000 downloads yesterday! I know it's not a particularly big occasion, but I like to keep a tab on downloads so I don't miss the big 20k when that comes around. I'm also at 299 votes right now, so 300 shouldn't be too far away...
Also, good news! My old laptop was under warranty after all, so it appears I'll be getting the motherboard replaced for free! Also, assuming it's only the motherboard that was screwed up, I shouldn't have lost anything on the hard drive. Sweet!
So, my new baby is a 17" Dell Inspiron 1720. It has 2.5 GHz processor, 3582MB of RAM, and a freaking boatload of hard drive space (250GB's). It runs like a dream both in-game and out; Vista just seems to operate WAY smoother than XP ever did, so that's awesome too.
My videocard is an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 1 GB of memory on it. Needless to say, running NWN2 poses no problems. ;) I'm curious to see how The Witcher performs -- hopefully post patch 1.3 and with this new laptop, it'll run faster and smoother than before. On that note, I've downloaded the D'jinni adventure editor and I intend to take a look at that (along with some tutorials) sometime soon-ish. I have enough projects on my plate right now that I won't be diving in to anything too substantial, but you never know...
Also, an important note for you readers: for some reason, Firefox refuses to recognize certain valid html commands/functions which work perfectly on Internet Explorer (which I use and love). If you're a loser who for some reason uses Firefox, what you see is potentially not what you would be seeing were you surfing with IE. So use IE -- it's the only browser I'm currently supporting with this blog. Thank you. ;)
Welcome to my new blog! As you may have read on my last post over at blogger.com, my old computer's motherboard bit the dust the Friday before last. This was a major pain in the butt for me for several reasons, not least among them that modding and working on getting this new blog going were both brought to an abrupt halt. Luckily, my new machine has arrived, and I was able to salvage a bunch of stuff thanks to backups. What I haven't been able to recover yet should be mine once again soon, after I do the whole hard-drive recovery thing over the course of the next week.
So, modding should start again now that I have my machine and this blogging software up and running! I'm going to be adding a comment feature soon -- for now, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the new look/feel. Send me an email at alex AT hugon DOT com and let me know what you think!
Anyhow, off to class -- I'll update you with my recent activity soon, as well as tell you all about my new baby (computer). ;)
