Now, I've used the Aurora Toolset before. This was back in 2006 or something, when I was editing cutscenes for some Neverwinter Nights module. And I thought that was unwieldy, but at least the modules made sense somewhat and there were no unwieldy coding. Not that much anyway. I liked the Aurora Toolset. It didn't have a steep learning curve.
Enter Neverwinter Nights II. The new toolset was harder to use. But at least, apart from the swirling memory vortex which threatened to suck out all my ram, digest it, then tell me it wanted more, I could do what I wanted it to do. Creating meshes is a different game entirely, pun intended, but editing dialogue and setting flags wasn't that big of a deal, unless you wanted to create subroutines that led to subroutines that led to subroutines that led to... well, you get the point. Adding voiceover, if I wanted to, was no torture either.
Then there is this piece of junk.
First off, I knew something was wrong when I encountered the problem of not being able to convert the facial contour map (.mor files) to... anything else, really. So whatever Warden you managed to perfect in the character creator, well, woe be to you because you can't edit much else apart from eye colour and hair style. To create a preset you need to open the toolset, which eats up my memory like it hasn't been fed in days, make a new head morph from scratch, export it to a different file format. Argh. Which you now can't edit outside the character generator. But what if I wanted to make my handsome Cousland Warden's chin a little wider? Huh? HUH?!
Okay, fine. I gave up trying to perfect my Warden. She looked fine. But then I bumped into the problem of....
Not being able to find the source files for the expansion, Dragon Age: Awakening. Oh, I can find the erfs, but where the heck is the module? Or the area, to speak of? I need to make a placeable in the Throne Room in Vigil's Keep but I can't open Vigil's Keep, so there goes that.
Looking for tutorials has yielded scant results. I now have to edit code, which I hate doing because I usually have no idea what I'm doing, write Blondie's letter (dunno what he'd write... can he write? I'm assuming he's at least literate), implement it into the game, then create a dazip so I can distribute it.
Too much work? I'd say so. But apparently nobody wants a codex from the kennelmaster to the Commander of the Grey in Amaranthine to report how the dog is doing, oh no. It appears everyone who's either gay or female and has played that game wants some sickly letter from the blond creampuff about how he misses [insert name here] and how he wants to be by [third person gender appropriate possessive pronoun] side and whatnot. I'm sending him off to Weisshaupt, because that's what the slides showed at the end of the previous campaign.
Ugh. I guess I'll write the entry first, since I'll get to agonise over whether "trespass" would even be in Blondie's vocabulary, then figure out the implementation later.
