Status: Close Encounters Of The Toolset Kind

Today I'd like to espouse the magical powers of backups. If you don't backup. Start. Right now. Keep several copies of your mod in various places on your hard drive and make sure you have a stable version somewhere at all times. I had two areas go corrupt on me at the same time, for no apparent reason that I could determine.

The result was very strange, as the module would load up perfectly in the toolset, and exhibit zero problems while working on it. But as soon as I attempted to enter one of these areas, the game would crash. What's more, it would cause every subsequent attempt to run to the mod to crash as well. Attempting to remain calm, I mustered what sanity I had left, copied data from a previous backup into a new directory, copied the clean updated files from my working copy to that new directory, and then proceeded to test. A couple of hours later, I was happy that everything was back to normal and I indeed had not lost the entirety of Fate of a City.

That scary encounter aside, things have been quite busy, but I've managed to work a bit more, having finished and carried out playtesting on what is probably the game's largest side quest, clocking in at over 7500 words and 19 possible journal entries, including a few alternate solutions. I performed virtually all the development before testing, and was encouraged to find that it only took a few hours of playtesting to iron out all the bugs. (Or at least all the ones I could find!) I've also worked on and finished another area and a couple of cutscene sequences, which have turned out quite well.

It also appears that custom music is a popular choice according to my poll, so despite the two people who think my music sucks (and I'll love to hear alternate musical suggestions or what you don't like about the tracks), I'll be implementing a number of custom music tracks within Fate of a City. Currently, the music consists of six tracks for a total of 14 minutes music, and hopefully I'll be able to add to that before release.

So, having taken the plunge to include a hakpak, I thought I may as well go the extra mile again, and include custom load screens to add another extra touch. After a lengthy period of producing different load screens with little success (see the unsuccessful and successful ones here), Elharc (from the #NWN2CR irc channel) finally provided me with that nice grey stone border that you can see underneath the rather lacklustre spears in this picture. After giving it a few adjustments, I managed to produce the final loading screen and the border will be the template surrounding all the load screens within Fate of a City. The picture below is for the Rich Quarter of Darthall.