Blog, UI, and Continuing Development...

First off, welcome to my new blog. :D It will be used by me to ramble on about the development of ViM. If you are interested in what I am current working on and what rambles I have to say. This will be the place to look.

I would also like to take a moment to say, that yes, I am still working on ViM and it is coming along nicely, if I do say so myself. Of course, being the only person working on the project, it takes a while to get an aspect completed and tested. So, as expected, development is rather slow at times and it may appear that nothing is being done. Add to that other distractions and activities and it slows even more.

Anyway, on to the latest topic of development...

As some of you may, or may not, know, Veiled in Mists has its own play style. One of the major issues that I encountered when developing ViM under NWN1 was the inability to display the custom information to the user through the UI. The only method that the PCs had to access all of the customized data was through slash commands. Although they worked quite nicely in ViM when they were coded, they were a royal pain the arse to actually code. (A Listener Object is a bad bad thing.)

Now this brings me to my current work for NWN2. At the moment, I am busily designing customizations to the NWN2 UI that allows all of the custom data used by ViM to be displayed to the user. This includes heavy changes to the character sheet and the addition of a mana bar next to the player's portrait.

As of this posting, the vast majority of the customization has been finished and I am working on wrapping it up so I can move on to other aspects of development, like the combat system. Expect an update to the Veiled in Mists home page with some screenies of the UI once it is "mostly" completed.

Now concerning the 0.1.200 patch to the server. I would no longer expect this patch to be released before the 1.06 patch from Obsidian Entertainment. Now if the current trend hold true to form, the 1.06 patch referred to by the developers will be called 1.05 in the patching application. This mean, hopefully, it is the next patch coming down the pipe. Although I am not sure when it should be expected.

The 1.06(1.05) patch allows me to do a lot more with the UI that I had ever dreamed of. So that is why I refer to it as being mostly done. Until the patch is released, the UI can't be completed. (Yeah, I know, completed is used here as a relative term.)

So once I have that patch in my grubby little hands, I will be able to wrap up what is needed for the 0.1.200 patch and push it out to the server. Hopefully some of the current bugs in the game will be correct. Mostly the follow list would be nice:

- Toolset not using custom tlk files.
- Standalone server application not using custom tlk files.
- HAK packs not being read before character create when connecting to a multiplayer game running off the standalone server application
- Standalone server application needs to have access to more than 2 gigs of physical memory (64 bit extensions or a linux version of the server)

Those 4 things would make me all warm and fuzzy. But if they fix the first three, then I would be happy.

I guess this concludes my first rambling on this page. Who knows, you may even see more in the future. /shurg