Neverwinter Nights The Witch's Wake Fan-Created Content Profile #2 - Lootable Corpses

Fan-Created Content Profile #2 - Lootable Corpses

Profile by Rob Bartel, Sept 18 2002

Authors: Emmanuel Lusinchi (Sentur Signe) Intended Users: Builders of many shapes and sizes (see below) Download Locations: - NWVault - Sentur Signe's NWN site

Fan-Created Content & the Witchwork Series:

The Witchwork Series is an official NWN story arc to be released as free, downloadable modules by the BioWare Live Team. Part of our goal with the series is to showcase some of the innovative enhancements and systems being developed by members of our steadily growing fan community. Each of the profiles that we release over the weeks leading up to first module’s release will focus on another fan-created component that you’ll be able to experience in our coming series.

But why wait for us? Many of these components are already being used in other modules so try playing some of them to see how they feel. If you’re working on a module of your own, consider using some of these components to make your creation a richer and deeper experience for your players. Pitch new ideas to their creators and get involved in their development.

Our second profile of fan-created content explores some big questions. Where do computer game creatures go when they shuffle off their mortal coil? Who gets their belongings? How long does a goblin’s corpse take to decompose? And what the heck is a Drudo anyway? Emmanuel Lusinchi (aka Sentur Signe) tackles these questions admirably with the Lootable Corpse system that he designed for Neverwinter Nights.

Frustrated with the immediately disappearing corpses of the Official Campaign, Lusinchi crafted a system whereby creatures’ bodies litter the battlefield after death and can be looted and bashed like any other container. Droppable flags on the items are fully respected, no heartbeat scripts are required, and the corpses fade away on a customizable timer, keeping the system optimized and running fast. Like the DM’s Helper, the Lootable Corpse system is packaged as an easily importable *.erf and even comes with its own sample module.

Author’s Description:

Lootable Corpses - Version 3.0

In NWN, two things can happen when monsters or NPCs die. Either the slain creature 'fades out' and is replaced in a matter of second by a small bag of loot, or it leaves a permanent corpse that *cannot* be looted. This 'either-or' situation is rather limiting and a variety of 'corpses' scripts have been developed to allows more flexibility in this matter. The "Lootable, Destroyable, Non-Naked corpse" package strives to offer useful corpse-related functions, to remain simple to install and use and, very importantly, to provide no known drawbacks for its usage.

In a nutshell, the package makes it easy to set-up a creature's corpse with decay times (both with or without looting) and a clean-up time for discarded loot.

If you have tried other corpse packages, you might be interested in the fact that this one truly requires very little CPU overhead (it uses no on-heartbeat functions), and respects the 'Dropeable' flag on inventory items. It does not require special naming conventions on Tag or Resref, nor is it necessary to create two instances of objects in the monster's inventory.

Intended Users:

The Purist Module Builder: If it really bugs you that, in the Official Campaign Prelude, goblins corpses are lying everywhere... yet those *you* kill just fades out... then this package is for you.

The Puritan Module Builder: You have tried some of the other "corpses" scripts out there but, somehow, you always end up with a bunch of dead naked guards in your city, and that just wont do at all... This package has a couple of nifty options for you.

The Neat Module Builder: Can't stand the mess left after your adventurers faced 60 fire-beetles? What you need is corpse decay and a smart unclaimed/discarded items clean-up.

The Not-Neat-At-All Module Builder: You like corpses. In fact, the only thing that sounds better than a lot of corpses is the ability to hack those into small chunks of flesh until nothing is left but a wet red floor. Well, okay, whatever floats your boat, friend. But let's just say that this is one of the option of the package: corpse can be set to be 'Destroyable'. Actually, you can set, for example, goblins corpses to disappear in a final geyser of yellow gunk, while the Undeads will explode into bits of bones if sufficient damage is applied to their fallen body.

The CPU-Cycle Watcher Module Builder: You like nice features, but do not like paying the steep price of too many on-heartbeat? This package uses 0 (zero, nada, none) on-heartbeat. And the clean-up after the adventurers will also save resources... What's not to like?

The Pressed-for-time Module Builder: Everything is packed in a single .erf. You 'only' need to add two lines of code in two scripts of your monsters template. The package also respects the 'Dropeable' flag you painstakingly spent so much time setting on your monster's inventory items.

Project Status:

The current version, 3.0, has been out since well... forever (August 7th '02). It is stable. A version 3.1 will be out soon to correct a recently discovered problem with monsters 'chunking' (i.e. exploding in a cloud of gore when massive damage is dealt). Chunking requires a modification of an .ini file, so this problem went unnoticed for a long while. The Witchwork series will be using the updated version.

An Interview with the Creator

BioWare: How long have you been playing D&D and what’s your background with it? When did you make the decision to become involved in the Neverwinter community?

Emmanuel Lusinchi: Well, being French, I literally taught myself English by reading the first edition of the Player Handbook, back in what must have been the early or mid '80s. Who said RPG were bad for kids? Anyway, this must have puzzled more than one English teacher, as I could at an early age name a dozen varieties of swords in Shakespeare' tongue, but would not know the translation of common items, like fork or newspaper. I first played D&D (the 'red' box which was the first official French translation of D&D), moved to the (untranslated) AD&D 1st edition when my brothers and I found out the language wasn't such a big barrier after all, and then moved again to a long forgotten role-playing game called Dragon Quest (from SSI), which I still play with a group of friends when we do get together... which happens about every 2 years if we are lucky (living in San Diego, California, while most of them are in France doesn't help) This is what is so exciting with Neverwinter Nights: the potential for a scattered group of long time friends to play together again. In fact, it even can go full circle, as I recently found quite a few people in my office who play NWN and who are willing to start a 3^rd Edition D&D pen-and-paper campaign. I would not be surprised if NWN sparks a small revival of the p&p game in this same way a bit everywhere.

As for when I got involved in NWN, I guess it happened as soon as I first visited the official forum, less than a week after the game release. I found there an already growing collection of scripts which were both a great incentive to start contributing on my own, as well as an effective pedagogical tool.

BioWare: So what are Drudos anyway? And Cleaners? And Looters? Where did you come up with the idea of using invisible creatures in this unique fashion?

Emmanuel: During the development and testing of the Lootable corpse scripts, I must have killed a bunch of creatures... over... and over... and over again, at least a thousand time. It quickly became important for me to create a particular creature I would somewhat enjoy obliterating in very large number, repetitively. A Drudo is as close to a Smurf I could get within the Aurora Engine (Now, why is it we can't freely re-scale creatures in a 3D engine? This would have made my Drudos all the more convincing). The name Drudo was actually randomly generated by Aurora, as using the Sm*f word could have gotten me in hot water.

The Cleaner and Looters were created mainly to go around various... features of Aurora. The 'feature' that gave me the most problems was the inability to read the infamous 'Dropeable' flag off an item in a creature's inventory. To keep a long story short, it finally occurred to me that one way to respect this flag was to have a first creature take all items from the corpse, kill itself for the benefit of another creature who picks up the loot from the floor and moves it into an invisible placeable located on top of the original corpse. Now, that's one long sentence and one complicated way to read a simple flag. The Lootable system was my first real scripting attempt, and I had a lot of preconceptions on how the NWN engine was supposed to work (but didn't). Now, with more than a month of daily scripting under my belt, I realize I could get away with fewer creatures, few (if any) of them invisible. Also, the development of the Lootable system was mainly incremental, fueled by suggestions and requests from the forum as well as luck in some case: for example, the Cleaner used to be invisible but I changed its appearance one day to help with debugging... The new appearance happened to be that of a Spectre and since I really liked the resulting creepy effect, I left it at that.

BioWare: Do you have a wish list for future versions of the Lootable Corpse system? Are there features you wish you could implement but have been unable to so far?

Emmanuel: Yes, I feel the present system is unnecessary complicated due to some present limitations of Aurora. A few well-chosen new functions would greatly simplify this system, and would probably be very useful to the scripting community in general. My wish list would be: a simpler method to read the 'Dropeable' flag and no unwanted sounds while looting a corpse. In decreasing order of importance, this would require the following updates to Aurora:

1. int ReadDropeableFlag(object oCreature);
   Why this? This would make for a much smaller and elegant system.
   
   
2. A new object container placeable that has absolutely no sounds associated to it.
   Why this? Looting corpse shouldn't sound like opening a chest. Destroying a corpse shouldn't sound like breaking a table. Enough said.
   
   
3. Alternatively, a merchant that accepts to sell and buy everything for 0 gold piece might work equally well: we would just use a shop instead of a container, which could be really nice indeed.

BioWare: You’re currently working on integrating a Psion class into Neverwinter. How is that coming? Do you have any other projects in the works?

Emmanuel: It's actually going better than I expected. I finished what I consider to be the hardest part, a replacement to the spell-selection GUI. But I must backtrack a little and explain the philosophy behind my implementation of the Psion. A lot of very good people have been doing a lot of great work on custom classes for NWN, and this always necessitates modification to some *.2da files, which is something the average NWN players might be unwilling to do for various reasons (I know I don't like the idea myself). With the Psion project, I am trying to show that it is possible to create a whole new character class entirely through plain vanilla scripting. The benefit of this is, when completed, the Psion class will be 100% "module-side". By this I mean players will be able to enjoy the class just by downloading a Psion-enabled module, or joining a Psion-enabled server. No *.hak to download! Another benefit of the approach is that the Psion does not replace another class: you can have side by side in your module people playing all the regular classes and people playing Psions. To a certain extent, multiclassing with Psion is supported (although no Psion-sorcerer, sorry).

The downside is that I do not have access to the spellbook GUI for the Psion, so I had to make do through dialogues, placeable and existing misc. item graphics. The resulting interface is... rather... different. But I have been using it for several weeks now, and it really isn't as bad as it first look. Another problem is that the game engine still thinks a Psion is a sorcerer, and so Psions players still have to choose new spells on level-up even though they cannot use them. They also must select a familiar, who is just as unavailable to them.

Anyway, I am now at the point where the core logic of the Psion class is working fine: power-points per day, leveling-up, discovering new powers, free talents per day, etc. I have implemented all 0 level spells, most of the 1^st level and I am making my way through the 2^nd levels at a speed of maybe 10 spells per week. Between work and my personal life, that I value immensely, I only am left with about 30 spare minutes to code... on a good day. So progress is rather slow. I am still hoping that someone will step forward and say: I'll take over from here :) (hint, hint)

As far as other projects, I have a module I work on, on and off (mostly off this past month due to Psionic overload), and this is where I take most of my scripting ideas from. It will involve first level adventurers having really good reasons to take out much higher level NPCs (so fair fight is definitely out :)

BioWare: Do you have any tips or advice for others interested in creating new content for Neverwinter?

Emmanuel: For scripting: if you are really new to NWN but know the C language, I would actually recommend buying the Official Worldbuilder Guide and a pile of PostIt notes (there is no useful index in the Guide, so be ready to stick a note on a page whenever you read about something interesting in it). I know it helped me.

I'd also recommend heartily downloading other scripts and having a peek at them. In particular, the HardCoreRule (HCR) system is so vast, you're bound to find something that helps you out when you get stuck. The official forum is great if everything else fails.

I won't give advice on module building, as I have done little of that lately, but I'll warn that it is very easy to get lost in small details, like playing with the fog color, or putting a tree *here* rather than *there*. Those things are important, but should come at the very last.

BioWare: For people who want to try out your Lootable Corpse system, what are some good examples of modules that you know have made use of it?

Emmanuel: Well, apart from my own module, which is nowhere near completion, I haven't really heard of anyone using this system. I'd like to believe it's because the Lootable Corpse system really implements a very small function, and that some module builders import the *.erf and never think twice about it again. I'm very eager to see the Witchwork modules actually using the stuff. If people like what they see, corpse-wise, there's quite a few corpse-scripts out there that should fill the needs of every possible module quite nicely: one if fully integrated with HCR, another requires no change whatsoever to creatures scripts, mine which is simple to use and low on CPU usage, etc.

BioWare: Rumor has it that you’re making a trip to Mexico in the near future and might be gone for a while. What gives?

Emmanuel: Ah, you know about that eh? Well, somehow my fiancée convinced me to go to a casting audition at the beginning of this year. One thing led into another, and I am now an Extra for an upcoming Fox movie: The Far Side of The World, shot at their Baja studio. This should keep me busy for about 7 weeks, starting at the beginning of October. My contract actually prevents me from saying more, but I can say it should be quite an adventure and a lot of fun. Good thing I have a solid reserve of time-off to take, a very understanding boss and a very flexible company.