Randomly decided to check in after years and see talk of Doordie and Amel. Lots of fun memories! Arguably my first long time character, Narwyn, ended up closely aligned with Amel as his protege.
Doordie was one of the best RP's I ever played with. His stories, with his character Amel, were amazing. Rich, deep, complex. I hope Doordie is doing well! You have a really great Uncle!
Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
Welcome Thainites to another developer diary - following a particularly challenging and involved build cycle, there’s a lot to talk about here that’s both finished and unfinished. It’s a great pleasure to get to run the Moonlit Circus again. Community holidays like these bring out the best in our build team and we never count the cost, as they tend to get high returns on effort and player engagement. We love seeing you go out and stretch your legs in unique challenges as you explore these Game-Jam-esque builds that are here only for a couple months before they’re gone forever.
These types of events also tend to afford us a great opportunity to do some experimentation, developing tech as we think we’ll need it and trying things we’ve never done before in ways that we think might be great in future builds. It’s often an opportunity to cut loose and do an overhaul of a class, or to add and update features we haven’t touched in a while like the armor and weapon appearance systems.
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[Continued HUD-ification]
This marks our fourth HUD update addition since we launched the original appearance HUD over a year ago, and I think immodestly that every single one of these is a unique treasure. I have the opportunity to see a ton of servers in various development discords and forums and one thing I never see people going to the lengths Kira does is in making the HUD feel like a unique and beautiful part of the game.
The Thain HUD now allows for you to control accessories, emotes, dice, monitor unique achievements, monitor and update a currency, purchase placeables, purchase feats, purchase epic levels, manage placeables, read books, and now it also allows you to change your weapon, armor, and robe appearances. These aren’t small projects - I know Kira has better coding chops than almost any builder in Neverwinter and it took her weeks of constant slogging to get this particular build taken care of. It’s worth it, too - because we want to continue to add unique weapon and robe appearances to Thain as we can, but the existing systems were extremely burdensome to add to.
Anyone who played with crafting a Circus weapon in the past knows how suddenly the whole weapon could bug. The default Bioware tech that had existed since 2002 simply wasn’t cutting it for our needs. We know that as we move forward we wanted more - just more. More crafting components for those who have taken a look at the crafting system we’ve got in the works; more unique robe colors and unlocks; more weapon skins. These are fun ways to customize and add to your character and adding them to the broader world as unlocks requires a more complex system that can keep up with them. As you unlock robes and their respective colors across your account, we now have an easy access system to continue to add even more options to.
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[Robe Technology]
Much like our HUD technology, there also aren’t a lot of servers making new robes today - this is because making robes is an incredibly time consuming and difficult process. Every robe requires us to skin weight not one or two models but twelve - six racial bodies and two genders. This is a time consuming process even if you know how it’s done, and I’ve tried for over a year to find a process in which we could streamline conversion to make robes not over the course of a week or two, but over just a few hours per robe.
It took a lot of work to get there - collaboration with a much larger modding community was a big part of what allowed this breakthrough to happen. On average a robe can be done in an eight hour workday now - and we’re hoping to further streamline the process, as we have another eighteen robes in the pipeline for building.
Something else that is complicated about adding new robes is the way that Neverwinter Nights handles color channels in armor - it creates a layered texture file in which the objects of an item must be broken into individual material layers like “Metal 1” or “Cloth 1”. This is also time consuming, but it’s also just very challenging to do with a lot of modern textures. Modern games, from which we draw a lot of our assets, don’t tend to pack textures in a way that easily divides them the way NWN does - and NWN’s limited flat of ~176 color channels often results in otherwise beautiful armors losing a great amount of their detail.
For this reason we’ve embarked on our own robe customization system, using a base color changer of seven ROYGBPW colors and experimenting down the road with shader systems that allow us to tint those objects and the sub-objects in an armor in different ways. While right now our colors probably seem somewhat limited in these new robes, I do think we’ll get to a higher standard of detail beauty soon, and if we can dig into the game’s shader system more, those seven color options can suddenly become thousands down the road, broken out across dozens of individual body pieces.
If you like our new robes, rest assured - there are more on the way!
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[Divine Champion to Sacred Crusader Development Insights]
Every year we take stock of a couple of classes that we think could be expanded on or whose themes could use help. We like to spend a little development time dwelling on this not just because some classes get more use than others but because we want each class to ultimately occupy an interesting narrative and mechanical space in Thain - and many of the older and less involved classes struggle to do this.
This year I took a shortlist of players who I knew would have different perspectives who had helped design mechanics in the past and asked them from a list of classes I had rough ideas to work on what they would like to see next - and a healthy majority asked for Divine Champion to be reworked. The class occupied a very similar place as Fighter mechanically, and a very similar place as Paladin narratively - and people couldn’t seem to find a use for it that was better than either of those. As a prestige class, it should feel exciting to take: not just offer more of the same (Saves, Feats, attack bonus) that you could draw on from other (base class) resources. As a result, it often felt very samey as presented: feeling like “Paladin with Bonus Feats” or “Fighter with Paladin saves”.
Among the feedback I got a suggestion I really liked around a Smite Attack playstyle. I have to give props here to Dogbert for seeing a real opportunity with this suggestion! Immediately I knew I wanted to work on Divine Champion as a damage dealer as soon as I heard this idea - and most importantly I was immediately getting narrative visions for the class on Thain. I was seeing Cassia Aurelia, outmatched crusader striding into a flock of MPCs to smite, seeing the Flames of Andarus, seeing Hellknights of the Iron City rushing into battle, seeing modern day Bloodguard PCs using the class, and more.
Because Thain’s pantheon is broad, “Divine Champion” suddenly seemed a strange narrative fit for the class. There are very few handpicked and true champions of deities on Thain - most of Thain’s are silent or absent - but Thain is filled with semi-divine crusades: sacred causes like the Bloodguard, the Iron City’s expansionist mission, the Flames of Andarus and the bygone Celestial Crusades. These organizations being keepers of lost knowledge are also constantly present in Thain’s narrative structure - from the ruins of Vongottstein, Castra Aurelia, the Celestial Temple, and Karistad; so making the Crusader learn and channel rites to empower their smiting attack felt like it helped solidify the class’ place in the world. Now I could see a character being one! It was time to get into the mechanics.
I try when I can these days to fit classes into 4E D&D’s subtypes of “Striker” (Damage Dealer), “Tank” (Hard to kill, hardy, holds enemies on them), “Controller” (Puts down large zones of CC or debuffs, buffs, deals small amounts of AoE Damage, etc.) and “Leader” (Supports, heals, empowers). It’s a loose rule, but I think a well designed base class tends to do a couple of these things (but not all of them!) well, while a well designed prestige class does one of them exceptionally well even if it has elements of others sprinkled in. As a High HP, High BAB, High saves class, Divine Champion struggled a lot with its identity. Building its playstyle out of a single ability narrowed this into something unique within our Divine Character quartet of Cleric / Paladin / FS / Crusader: It was narrowing its identity into a “Striker”, like the recent Assassin rework.
Strikers typically have less defensive power than a lot of other classes - so the first thing I set about doing was cutting the bonus saves and remanding them to an active choice - and the same was done for Divine Shield, which is often the boon of Paladin / Cleric multiclasses. In spite of these things, our Crusader still has a much higher BAB pool and Base HP pool than an assassin - this means that functionally their power is going to be less frequent than death mark procs, since they will likely do more damage on their own each round with their weapons and worry less about their own survival with more HP.
It’s no secret to people who have played with a lot of our classes that Kira and I draw heavily on inspiration from other mechanical games - especially MOBAs. Most MOBAs have a genre something like “Fighter”, “Juggernaut”, “Bruiser”, etc. This role is somewhat different from an assassin who puts out up-front burst damage, it’s someone who gradually deals damage and finishes off enemies while playing with a bigger health pool and more defenses.
From an ability design perspective, the class went through a few iterations - but I always knew I wanted a big single hit class that the player had control over when they dished out, but was best used to execute enemies. This execution playstyle is thematic, and it allows us to somewhat tie-down the class’ gained power in a way that wouldn’t have them zipping around the battlefield doing constant ability damage like Assassins do, but playing more feet-planted and horde-fighting, like this guy:
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It was also important to me that we not limit the new Sacred Crusader in ways that would be hard to get around for characters who wanted to primarily keep their old playstyle: For this reason you can certainly take a Ritual that gives you back the standard Bioware CoT saving throws (while Sacred Mission is active), or activate one that allows you to put up your Divine Shields at the cost of much of your gained damage - overall the result either way is paying one of your bonus feats, but gaining the smite - a fair trade, as I think most people would take a 10d6 or even 5d6 Divine Damage active with execute damage on a 30s cooldown for a bonus feat if it were offered, which is what the update amounts to if you preferred the old style.
Overall I’m excited to continue our rework paths next year with some of the candidates who didn’t get the thumbs-up on the closed ballot. I hope you all enjoy Sacred Crusader as much as I enjoyed getting to design and build it - and that you’ll quickly shore up the ranks of Thain’s many overmatched and beleaguered zealous causes in short order.
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[The Moonlit Circus and the Future]
I love working on the moonlit circus. When Kira told me we were going to make one this year, I admit I was skeptical. We were well underway on our next (two!) big projects, and fall had crept up on us fast. We always discuss around autumn whether or not we’ll run a circus that year - last year, bedraggled and exhausted, we’d crossed the finishline of the MLC just months after the Watch and Feywood and sworn that this year we’d take a year off - but inspiration waits for no one.
Kira had an idea for a train, and from that idea an entire circus was born. Something I love about Thain is that it’s sort of the soft-realization of a childhood dream of mine. As a young child, I wanted badly to be an Imagineer, one of the rare engineers who makes Disney World and its sister parks possible. I’m a lifetime student of Walt Disney, a man who made entertainment and magic synonymous - if you do your work well, people will believe they’re seeing magic.
Walt had a philosophy that even the most jaded parkgoer should come into his parks and not understand how all the magic was done. He made enormous efforts to push the technology of his time - inventing as necessary to create things no one had anywhere in the world. He wanted a world where every person coming to his park had the unforgettable experience of witnessing the impossible. Neverwinter is a strange beast to design in. It’s ancient and most people playing it have played it for a long time. Even if they’re not developers or builders they have an intuitive grasp of what is and isn’t “possible”. They know a character can’t cross over its own Z-axis going upward, ala spiral stairs - even if they’ve never noticed before that you can’t ever seem to cross under any place you can normally walk under. They know you can’t make tiles you’re standing on move or rotate.
Walt understood this about his world too - he knew the limits of the world he was building in - but he never accepted them as the final word. What he couldn’t change, he tricked. Equal parts magic show and real technology, the Disney park line is to this day a testament to fooling guests with things as small as sightlines to things as big as moving a guest when they don’t know they’re being moved.
The Circus is my imagineer dream made manifest. Once a year I have to sit down with Kira and figure out how we’re going to build an entirely new Thain-Disney World. We have to design rides and attractions no one has ever seen, and we have to develop technology no one has ever realized. Sometimes these goals are tangential with our broader goals for the year: Maybe we design a slew of minibosses knowing we’ll get to reuse them, or we develop walkmesh cheating tech that we know we’ll use elsewhere. Often though, we’re just building a seasonal theme park: Here today, gone in December. It’s exhilarating. We love it. Everyone on the Thain team, from our builders to our event DMs, loves the circus for what it represents: an opportunity every year to have a true “holiday” on Thain, one that draws back in old and new player alike to see what spectacles and impossibilities we’ve made today. Knowing how much our community loves it makes it truly special to us.
A lot of these impossibilities will see some use coming up in the not-too-distant future. There are updates coming to Thain’s South Coast, an area that has been narratively silent for almost two full years now, that will utterly change it. We’ll need much of the technology we developed on this cycle and more as we revamp almost a third of the module in a single update. Normally I would encourage people to Role Play their vision of a place we’re working on next - but in this case the scope of the project is so large that I can’t promise much, though we'll always be watching. I can definitely promise that as we get closer to that fateful change date, you’ll have opportunities and DM events to participate in and to be a part of the change.
We’ll have a long talk when that day comes about why and how we tackled the coast the way we’ve chosen to- but I should probably take this opportunity at least to tell our eagerly anticipating Craftsmen that you will be waiting until that project is done, but not long after - the system is mostly done, but it simply can’t go in yet. The overall goal of writing the world’s forests and stones simply can’t be finished until Hammersong and Greenvale are resettled. Watch for events by our event DM team down the road if being involved in these changes as they arrive is something you want for your characters!
As always, I have to thank you for continuing to play with us. The Circus, our annual holiday, is a very special time - and we’re glad to get to share it with you.
[ The Island of Thain ]
Developer Diary: Fall 2024