A POLL on the Aurora Toolset

[Djinn Raffo]

I agree with Banzai on the lack of documentation...it's mind-boggling to me ...That book by Versus or whatever, the guidebook...its thirty bucks canadian!! What an outrage..i flipped through it today and it looked fairly solid but i wish it said all that in the games instruction manual.. I couldnt justify buying it.

This tutorial session that the Growling Builder Wolfgir mentioned is pretty good at Neverwinter Vault.

[ 08-24-2002, 02:41 AM: Message edited by: Djinn Raffo ]

[Memnoch]

Originally posted by Djinn Raffo: I agree with Banzai on the lack of documentation...it's mind-boggling to me ...That book by Versus or whatever, the guidebook...its thirty bucks canadian!! What an outrage..i flipped through it today and it looked fairly solid but i wish it said all that in the games instruction manual.. I couldnt justify buying it.[/URL]

And that Versus book, while reasonably good, will NOT teach you how to script - if you haven't got a scripting background your only choices will be:

1. take a C++ class; or
2. jump in and use trial and error

Option one will probably be quicker but more expensive. Option 2 will be more frustrating but will be cheaper. I've gone with option 2 and am SLOWLY getting the hang of it, scavenging scripts from the Bio forums and I'm slowly but painfully getting the hang of it - I probably know only 25% about scripting compared to what I want to know, but that 25% is 200% more than I knew yesterday. Like I said, it's a steep learning curve - either you sink or swim.

[Djinn Raffo]

Another option might be to just wait...

Hopefully as some time passes and people do start to learn it... Do start to record what they have learned through their trial and error efforts.. Then we will see some serious fun. Building it and playing it!

I can code in a few languages ... rudimentry in c++ .. but im good in some other ones ... so ive got a step on how the logic of the languages and coding works... but still the lack of help on it is pretty brutal. That book and even cutting and pasting scripts may not teach you how to code...but it can give you some familiarity with it. Intuiton and exposure can be powerful.

[ 08-24-2002, 04:49 AM: Message edited by: Djinn Raffo ]

[Memnoch]

The lack of documentation is very brutal actually, and it doesn't help that for each event you want to script there are probably 7 different ways of doing so, which gets confusing when you're trying to learn the fundamentals of how the functions work. But I think I'm slowly but painfully getting the hang of it - it's just little detail things that are annoying - and those little details are what really personalize your mod.

[Memnoch]

Originally posted by AndyG: I've just dabbled in it so far, I haven't done a solid building effort. Currently, it's fairly limiting that you can only use one hak pack per module.

What's even more limiting is that if you want to combine a HakPak efficiently (eg two different tilesets) you need to use a 3rd party packer like NWNPacker to pack it (unless you want to be sitting at your computer pressing enter about 1000 times). And it doesn't ALWAYS work - depending on what needs to go into the HakPak and what needs to go into the override - if you have two files (eg .itp files) with the same name then you're in trouble. Not to mention that these combined HakPaks can get MASSIVE after a while - bigger than the mod itself.

[Thrawn]

ive been programing for a year or two and i already came up with a very nice little program with subrace and ECL and fun stuff. and beside the point this is my second script ever in NWN. url below.

http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewto...30988&forum=47

clicky for my post on bioware forum bout the script but anyway.

i mainly learned by trial and error for a while untill i got the handle of nwn scripting commands, i knew how to program c++ and has been for a little while nothing execessive but i got to say the best resource ive found so far is the

HCR module because it has many many scripts in it and i mainly use it as sort of a reference if i am wondering on like how to get the pc for example i look it up in HCR 99% of the time its in there.

Also another tip of mine is pick up a how to program c++ book so you can pickup atleast on the basic, the synix at least, and the if, while loops and for loops and couple of other things, nothing advanced but the basic certainaly would help you quite a bit with scripting.

[Memnoch]

Just a bump for people who may not have seen this yet. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Memnoch]

And yet another bump - let's see if we can get more feedback now that more people are starting to play around with the toolset. [img]smile.gif[/img]