Bug Testing

Despite the long time between posts, The Shattered War is drawing nearer to release. I'm currently going through what I hope will be my final phase of playtesting and tweaking now that voice work integration is essentially complete.

I'm about two hours into my current playthrough, and while there are some minor cosmetic issues, everything is mostly looking pretty good by now. A complete run of the game will probably add up to at least 10 hours (though likely more), and the wide variety of choices means that it is absolutely impossible to experience all the content of the game in a single run.

No one wants to see this released more than me, and I feel more than a little disappointed and frankly a bit sheepish that it's taken me so long to get the mod to a releasable state. The scope and scale of this project were possibly a little too bold, and the sheer time and dedication required to get full voice acting means it has been a massive undertaking for one person. While my efforts have probably been a bit lax for a while, I'm keen to get The Shattered War completed and in the hands of anyone who still wants to revisit the world of Dragon Age in its Origins incarnation.

I'm hoping there are still people out there who want so explore the world of Thedas and a new adventure and story within its bounds.

All the little bugs...

The bug squashing process for The Shattered War continues slowly but surely.  I feel I'm coming very close to having all the "show stopping bugs" ironed out by now. I thought I had them all ironed out of of my playthrough last night, only to come across a new one I hadn't encountered before. It does feel like getting the remaining voice acting is quickly becoming the last major hurdle I will have to overcome before release.

In order to expedite the testing process, I actually created an entirely new "debug area" that allows me to quickly set a whole bunch of choices in main and side quests so that I can jump ahead to different parts in the story rather than having to repeatedly play through the parts of the mod that as far as I can tell are bug free. While it felt weird to be putting in a bunch of effort to create content that would only be used for testing, it has definitely saved me time already, and will only make it easier to test out all the different ending possibilities and ensure that they are tested as much as I can feasibly test on my own.

In my playtesting I have noticed a few common threads in the types of "bugs" that I've been noticing lately. People not appearing in the correct places in a dialogue/cutscene, cameras being too close, plot markers on people or quests journals not updating appropriately. These are all small things that aren't necessarily show-stoppers that make the game unfinishable, but they are definitely quality issues that I don't want to see in the final product that I make available for players.

The only major headache for me at the moment that is really frustrating is that one of the party companions is for some reason not picked up correctly by the game's levelling logic. Specifically, this character does not show any skills in their skills page, meaning that the player is unable to assign skill points (i.e. tactics, herbalism, traps, etc) and thus it always appears as though he needs to be levelled up. This is definitely the most frustrating and disheartening ongoing bug that I've currently been unable to fix - all the other companions I have work perfectly, and I can see no significant differences in their configuration to his. 

Test, Find, Fix, Repeat

Doing playtesting for The Shattered War has been the order of business for the last couple of weeks. This has been a series of playtests starting the game from scratch and experimenting with different decisions and choices within the game. Across a few characters I've tried a number of approaches, in one case I finished every quest and looted everything I could find, and in another I blitzed through doing the bare minimum of what I needed to progress, not to mention some options in between.

I still haven't gone through a full playthrough from start to finish and have hit on issues of all shapes and sizes...

• Typos or grammar errors in dialogue, item descriptions or codex. 
• While the voiced dialogue is basically problem free, there are a number of unvoiced characters that I noted some errors in.
• There are still unvoiced NPCs - female voice actors have been particularly hard to find. I will have to make a dedicated push to finding the remaining voice actors in the near future.
• Minor scripting errors, glitches in characters not moving where they're supposed to within an area, a player's reward not being correct, an enemy not spawning when they are supposed to.
• Major scripting errors - anything that stops progress of a quest. Say, items not becoming interactive when they're supposed to, or enemy deaths not triggering quest success.
• Camera angles for conversation looking weird.
• Missing or incorrect markers on the mini-map.

Of course, while the laundry list of bugs has been a decent size, I've been able to wipe them off the list fairly rapidly as well. Smashing through these issues has been a refreshing change of pace from spending time almost exclusively in the toolset with very little playtesting. Those darkspawn never knew what hit them...

Sometimes, you just need to resort to the trusty "sword to the face" option

The good news is that the mod really does feel like it's made big strides since my last round of playtesting. A bunch of long-standing niggles and annoyances have been struck off my list, and everything is definitely coming together to make a cohesive gaming and Dragon Age experience. I've been recording some of the conversations in an effort to put together a small video of the voice actors and acting present in the mod - I'm hoping to put that together and have it available on YouTube in the near future. This won't be another trailer cut with combat - just some (spoiler free) teasers of dialogue that should whet people's appetite for some of the characters and intrigue in The Shattered War.

Bugs squashing continues...

Yes, it's been more than a couple of weeks since my last update, so my apologies for the silence. Again, I'm aiming to have regular updates, but I'm trying to make sure that I don't just put content like "found 5 bugs, fixed spelling mistakes" or the like.

As for details of the progress I've been making, there are a few fairly significant things that I've managed.

I've finished processing all the voice cuts for one of the party companions. I've previously described that this can be a fairly time consuming process, and this represents a considerable chunk of time, as that's over 300 lines of dialogue for this character. To give you an impression of how much dialogue that actually is, here's a list of the number of lines of personal dialogue for characters in Mass Effect 2.

Now, the numbers there don't actually represent ALL the possible lines of dialogue for ME2 characters, but given that The Shattered War is a one-man development effort, you can see that there's a LOT of content for players to experience.

Taraz is a dwarf with plenty to say.

Secondly, I've worked on creating several sets of items that the player can find - customised sets with their own backstory and codex entries, and the items offer significant bonuses to the player should they explore enough and solve the puzzles required to find them.  There is a major set each for the warrior, rogue and mage, so no matter your character or party composition, they will be useful.

This has also meant that I've finished up a couple of the puzzles I mentioned in a previous post that will allow the player to get their hands on some of these items, and done a bunch of bugtesting to make they work without a hitch. That took a little finesse, as they were initially unsolvable due to some errors I'd made.

Aside from those two major things, I've been doing quite a bit of playtesting on the major plot quests of the game, which are all looking fairly solid at this point. This also included a number of cosmetic changes just to add more flavour to the experience - added ambient NPCs and behaviours that are shown in response to the player's actions so that they can see some of the effects that their choices are having. For example, if a player rescues a group of people, these people will then return to the town they are from, going about their business and other people in that town may comment on their rescue. 

Small things like this aren't critical to the plot, but they do reinforce the work I've put into place to make sure that the game will react to the decisions that players make. Seeing effects and consequences is one of the major goals of my design for The Shattered War, so I'm confident that touches like this will make it a memorable experience.

Testing Progress: Fixing companions and falling off the edge of the world.

After my recent reinstall, testing has resulted in a bunch of scripting and random undocumented engine issues. Nevertheless there has been some solid, albeit slow and frustrating progress on some more difficult problems.

Showstopper issues tackled this time included:

• The player appearing off the edge of the map after traveling to a location via the world map. This came as a result of implementing an area list - which allows the player to easily switch between interior and exterior areas without a major load screen.  Unfortunately some identically named destination waypoints (which are used to set the player's location when entering an area), resulted in the game not knowing where to place the player.
• Continuity issues in plots resulting in the player being unable to progress the story if they took certain actions.
• Made companion dialogue work correctly in the toolset again - a reinstall had deleted a custom file that enables it to detect and make use of custom companions. Without this fix, companion interjections in dialogue are impossible... and I've got quite a number of them.
• A major breakthrough with the player's party members - making sure that they have appropriate skills and specialisations when they join the party.  Since the game starts the player at a higher level, the party members need to have skills that suit their background. There were a bunch of different problems: not receiving correct skills/talent points, not receiving a specialisation or having skills assigned incorrectly (or not being able to assign them at all).  Party members that have half or a third of the hitpoints they should have aren't useful to the player!

This fight was nothing compared to the battle I had solving that last problem...

A few other select issues included:

• Fixing some level design to improve the flow of play and improve overall appearance.
• Changing / cutting some recorded dialogue to make the flow of conversation seem more natural.
• Noted a bunch of areas that felt "empty" for future reference to fill with little bonuses for the exploring player. 
• Solved an issue where ambient animations for a group of sleeping/injured people would kick in a few seconds after a player entered an area. This resulted in them standing up briefly after the player entered... then suddenly all falling over.  While this was quite amusing, it wasn't really the desired effect. 

So some big and small wins this time around. Hopefully this will continue for the coming week!

Mistakes, bugs and crashes

So in my ongoing playtesting, I've encountered another swag of mistakes and shortcomings, and solved a few issues that have been bugging me for a VERY long time to boot.

To give the highlights:

• Finally integrated a core sub-plot of the main story into the game properly. Previously I'd been able to go through it separately, but I hadn't done the work to integrate it into game seamlessly.
• Fixed a bunch of area transitions that weren't working exactly as desired.
• Repaired dialogue chain issues that could accidentally cause the story to jump forward by quite a bit.
• Completed and polished some scripting that allowed the player to properly complete some main quests, rather than just having them trigger automatically once enemies were dead. 
• Fixed up some issues relating to enemies not appearing, not going hostile or not fighting with other NPCs.
• Characters correctly repositioned after a cutscene; previously they simply didn't go where I wanted them to... because I wasn't calling the correct script.

There was also a bunch of smaller cosmetic stuff that I fixed as well. While I'm not focusing on those kind of issues quite so much at the moment, when I'm noticing them every time I do a playthrough and they're irritating me, it's very difficult NOT to address those problems, particularly when I know what they are. Making things prettier by increased the mesh density of terrain is one such problem. Getting rid of synth voice (when I actually possess line recordings) is another.

When I have time, I also like to make things sparkly

However, one of the BIG things I've been battling with recently is my computer.  I upgraded a few months ago, with a new motherboard, cpu and ram, but didn't do a full OS reinstall. That meant I had to be a bit dodgy in the way I upgraded my drivers to actually get Windows to boot; manually loading drivers via the command prompt works - but doesn't leave your PC in an optimal state.

I subsequently had one of the RAM sticks die, so I was dealing with borrowed RAM to keep my modding going. However, 4Gb of RAM given the horrible state my OS was in with the driver installation job meant that my computer simply wasn't happy and crashed a lot. (I now have 2 "abandons" in DOTA2 due to PC crashes, my guilty pleasure when I'm not modding)

I got sick of this and bought myself an SSD, and have spent many hours today trying to get my computer back and set up just the way I like it.  Hopefully the SSD should provide some speed improvements for my modding efforts (DAO received the privilege of being installed on the SSD), as should the general improved reliability of my computer.

As I type this, I just finished up installing the toolset and restored my database, so I should be good to go. The only disappointing news is that my Awakening disc is apparently quite scratched (I have no idea what from, it mostly just sits in my dvd drive...) and I can't actually install it due to the damage.  This shouldn't actually impact my modding, because I don't recall any Awakening resources appearing in the toolset anyway. Still, it's disappointing should I ever want to play Awakening again, because I can't. :(

Playtesting: Old and New

One of the big things from doing a bunch of playtesting is that you quickly realise where things don't quite work. This is blatantly obvious when it comes to show-stoppers, of course.  If you can't progress a quest because of some logic error, an area being inaccessible (either in or out) or not receiving an object you need to complete the quest, this is immediately recognisable.

With the title of this post, what I'm talking about is where things don't "fit" quite so well as they should.  While I've been focusing primarily on the big show stoppers, I also hit upon the continuity, realism or general flow of the game issues that mean things just don't come together nicely.  One such issue was relating to a major quest, where part of it occured on the same area as a main town map area.  This was originally to make sure the player got to see the whole town map area, but as I played the game, I realised that it simply didn't fit in terms of the content of the quest.

This means new area time!  Now, in this particular case, I didn't actually want to spent hours and hours on making a new area. This is basically a one-shot area that isn't really designed for much more than a single encounter. I've created almost all my areas from scratch in The Shattered War, but there are a couple where I have used existing work as a base for an area. In this case, I grabbed one of the default areas from DAO... but modified it to suit my own purposes.  Doing this, I've managed to create an entirely new area with basically only a few hours of effort. 

The really good thing about this is that with some clever editing, it's quite easy to change the area such that it's not easily recognisable as one of the original areas even for someone who has played the game a lot.  By removing a bunch of items, changing texturing and vegetation, and doing a few key modifications to the existing terrain, it is possible to make it look dramatically different. Here's a shot of my modified level below - if you've played DAO, see if you can spot where it came from!

You never know what's around the corner...

If you're interested, here's a link to a comparison shot of the original level compared to my modified version.  I'd still like to do a bit more work to the decoration of the level, but given my current focus is getting the mod "content complete", that will have to wait.

Playtesting and Bug Squashing

My modding efforts for the past week have all been working towards my stated goal of getting the game in a more playable state. This was to try to get through as much of the game as I could in its current state. There are still a handful of things that need to be fixed before I can run through from start to finish, but that glue that links all the individual finished components shouldn't be far off.

So the weekend saw me spend a fair amount of time doing a playthrough from the very beginning and exploring as much as I could, noting down any issues along the way.  I'm focusing primarily on the gamebreaking issues, but noting the cosmetic ones as well for future attention. Then, sometimes you just pause for some reason and manage to catch a party member leaping at an Ogre and looking a little bit odd...

Flying goose strike!

The good news is that I managed to get through quite a lot of the mod before I had to stop.  There were, of course, things that I missed, but that's inevitable when you've got an adventure like The Shattered War. Some choices cut off some content, meaning you can't see everything in one playthrough. It also means there will have to be lots of testing before I can finally call it finished.

There were a bunch of little things that tripped me up along the way:

• I was missing stages for couple of conversations - which unceremoniously dumps the player (and the person they're talking to) outside of the walkable area of the level.
• I'd moved/renamed some resources/levels, which means they were inaccessible when referenced by name by some scripts/variable names.
• The ability for supposedly mutually exclusive quest lines to be run simultaneously due to some bad logic.
• I'd failed to set attach some scripts to plots - so when the player completed particular actions, the necessary consequences didn't occur. While this really puts a dampener on a playthrough, I've done this a few times now, so it's one of the first things I check (and subsequently solve a number of issues in one hit).

Smaller issues were things like:

• Areas having very quiet ambient sound. To be honest, I'm not actually sure how I can fix some of this, because there's simply no way within the toolset to increase their volume. This is actually one of the most annoying issues, because the ambient sound really makes a huge difference to the overall atmosphere of the area. If anyone with DAO modding knowledge has any idea about this, I'd really love to hear from you.
• Tweaks to companion approval scripts causing the approval for one of the companions to not work.  
• Some recorded lines of dialogue were uncharacteristically louder or softer than they should have been. There was a nice conversation and then suddenly ONE OF THE CHARACTERS IS TALKING REALLY LOUDLY.
• A large battle scene where one side simply refused to fight and simply stood there, oblivious to any combat around them.

On the whole, I've made some great progress, and should be able to make even more over the coming week.