Hi gang. Been about two months since the last news post, so I figure I should at least put somethin’ out there to tide ya over for the next two :-P
Some of ya know that I’ve been away at Fort Benning, GA for military training – IMLC (Infantry Mortar Leaders Course) and then off to Airborne school, been here since Jan. 5th. I’ve already graduated IMLC, and I report to Airborne this Friday. To help pass the time and keep myself outta trouble (sorta, heh) I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with Neverwinter Nights 2… playing, helping beta test and troubleshoot various aspects of the game and other peoples scripts, and making my own content. One of the custom content items I’ve made is a ‘Hellfire Skeleton’ pack, you can see a screenshot of ’em to the left there. Just took the existing in-game skeleton model, changed the color of it, slapped on some glowing ember eyes and a flame shroud, adjusted the creature properties (I made several diferent types), and there ya have it. Ready for anyone to download and import into their own custom module or persistient world.
Another project I’ve been working on, is adding light emitters to almost all of the spell effects in-game, as well as light emitters to various other things, like elemental-type weapons (ice blade, fire axe, holy sword, etc) and certain effects that monsters exhibit (Balor anyone?). I always found it odd that the spells in NWN2, while all the particle effects looked fine, that there was an absence of light from virtually 99% of them. Even the original Neverwinter Nights suffered from this, to an extent. The second screenshot to the left there is a cleric casting ‘Sunbeam’, and just adding a simple light emitter to it makes one helluva difference visually. I just finished a significant update to my spell lighting effects pack today, and it’s seemed to get a pretty good response from the NWN2 community so far… even got some kudos from the NWN2 dev team ;-)
If you play NWN2, and you’d like to try out the content I’ve made, you can get it here in the ‘Downloads’ section on the site here, or you can get it over at the Neverwinter Vault – http://nwvault.ign.com. There’s discussions about each of them on the official NWN2 forums as well.
Alright… I know for some of you reading, that you’re wondering when Hardfought will start hosting game servers again. It’s coming, I’m just waiting for a couple titles to get done and released so we can host them. Crysis I’m definitely going to host… this game looks to be a great FPS title, both for single-player and multiplayer. It’s supposed to be out within the next 1-3 months, so here’s hoping. Team Fortress 2 is on my radar as well, but last I heard, its release has been delayed (again) until this Fall. Boomhauer still has both of my servers – the first one is still up and ready to go, and the second will be up soon (it got a small upgrade/overhaul). No worries… as soon as I know somethin’, you will too.
That’s all I got for now folks. I’ll be outta the loop for most of the month of March while I attend Airborne, but I’ll chime in when I can. Take care everybody, and we’ll see ya online.