Verdant Prince

[*Strawberry Jam]

Well maybe someone else likes them enough lol

Experience says it's always better to work on what you actually like =)

[*Ceremorph]

And I'm more than happy to do so. It's why Xndar and Alersia did the dragons; they had ideas and were willing to put in the work to make a MUCH more expansive system than I would have.

[*Strawberry Jam]

Hehe well I dunno about making prestige classes but how many college assignments worth of work would one be?

My tech experience is pretty limited to experiments tho, logic/semantics parsing, stats & psychology processing. They make almost everyone do some kind of techy thing at my school unless you're in theater studies :blink:

I know some matlab, R, prolog, html, ocaml, bbcode too.

[*edmaster44]

I know COBOL, VB, C++, if you know C that should be more than enough, it's very much like that just with a little different Syntax.

[*Whitefly]

Nwscript is a very simplified version of C, built up with high level functions and very little access to low level stuff, as you'd expect from a scripting language. It's pretty basic to use and there are some great guides online, plus there's the nwnlexicon if you just want to look up the workings of a particular function. Most of what's avilable in the toolset is well explained anyway.

It's maybe a bit tough to learn how to develop a whole class without any prior experience with nwn's toolset, since scripts are only one part of it, and with classes they're probably the smallest part of it. I think it's more important to understand how the game uses 2da files, particularly the subrace and feat 2das. Quite a few of the races probably have no scripts at all, it's only special abilities and properties (like vampire slam and vampire properties, for example) that require scripts. If your special abilities are all spells, you can probably replicate the code of the spell you want to use and just change how it gets caster level, if it's necessary.

I heartily recommend downloading tanita's 2da unpacker and having a nose through the server files if you're eager to learn how custom classes work :3

[*Mick64]

Code: Select all

plus there's the nwnlexicon if you just want to look up the workings of a particular function.

Just have to remember that nwnlexicon is for NWN1. Some functions either don't exist in NWN1 or have been changed in NWN2.

[*Ceremorph]

I'd personally say the hardest part is actually the pre-work where you figure out what the race will have to start with, what the racial PrCs will give, and how the special abilities are going to work. Once you're past that, it's mostly updating a bunch of 2das (racial subtype, class, cls_*, race_feat, feat, and spells, along with the custom TLK). Then you only need to script new abilities.

For an example, I managed to do Ogres, Trolls, Half-Ogres, and Oni, as well as the Savage Marauder and Ogre Mage PrCs, over a two-day period (one of which was a work day), mainly because there were very few scripts involved; meanwhile the Golem Master class took me and Ariella working together and almost a month worth of work before it was ready... but it involved dozens of scripts, as well as item and creature blueprints set up in toolset, and extensive testing of brand-new systems. So it really does come down to how complex what you're working on is.

All I can say is, if you're interested in learning, you're definitely in the right place since we've got a large and helpful builder team, as well as quite a few players who have experience doing some of these things. Although I will admit that fey might not be the best place to get started because of its complexity: usually taking on something smaller and simpler first to get your feet wet and get you the good feeling of seeing other people making use of your creation before you throw yourself at something that's going to take longer to finish than most modern games do.

[*edmaster44]

Reference and ask a hellalot of questions, that's how i learned my way around NWN1 Toolset.

[*Mick64]

Yeah, I don't recommend starting with a big project like a class. What I usually recommend to people who want to try is...

1. Bugs! It might sound silly, but starting off with fixing a few bugs is a great way to learn how things work, because it's mostly digging around and trying to understand. If you really don't want to, you can skip. But it's how I started and I thought it helped a lot.

2. Make single spells / feats. These are the smallest "unit" you can really make, and since classes are just a collection of feats (Mostly, unless you get fancy), you can get practice for...

3. Make a full class.

[*Ceremorph]

Actually a race is a good place to start too. Because that generally requires editing at most four 2da files (and you'll want to be conversant on those before you take on a class!), and if you choose a more simple race you'll only need to make one or two custom abilities.