After your adventures in the Calim Desert, you have returned to Calimport, ready to assume your new duties as one of a noble's personal guards. Your new employer has assured you that he expects more from you than routine guard duty, and will be assigning tasks appropriate for someone with your varied talents and experience. What's more, there is no knowing what may happen if you find yourself even peripherally involved in all the courtly intrigues of Calimshan. There is little doubt that your time in Calimport will be full of adventure.
Swordflight Chapter Two is an epic adventure in which you will explore the city of Calimport and a few nearby regions in non-linear fashion. It features challenging tactical combat, old school dungeon crawling, interaction with many colorful NPCS, extensive class-specific sidequests, numerous role-playing opportunities, and more.
The following four hakpaks are required to play this module:
ctp_common.hak and ctp_loadscreens.hak (found on the CTP Release(s) page linked to below)
ctp_babylon.hak (found on the CTP Babylon page linked to below)
SwordflightA.hak (found on this page)
Version History (see readme for more complete details on changes made):
7/2/12: Version 1.02 released. Some bugfixes and tweaks to combat balance.
7/31/12: Version 1.03 released. Fixes to a couple of minor bugs.
9/25/12: Version 1.04 released. Some adjustments to systems for resting and henchman management, and fixes to a few minor issues.
Unfortunately the size of this module made it difficult for me to playtest it as much as I would have liked, and it looks like you found a few more small bugs (you are a pretty good QA tester, it seems). I will look into correcting those and doing some additional testing as time permits. I am not really sure what is causing the various henchman issues you report or what, aside from an impractically massive reworking of the whole henchman AI, can be done about them, but I will particularly try to do some testing with henchmen in combat (again, time permitting) to see if I cannot get a better idea as to what the problem is. As I said before I did occasionally notice odd henchman behavior in my testing, but it seemed a rather sporadic thing, and I put it down to the usual quirks in Bioware's AI. From what you report though it does seem like something about this module is causing these issues to crop up more frequently than they should. It took me several years to make this module, as one can see by comparing its release date to that of Chapter One, albeit I was not always working as efficiently as I could have. I wasted the better part of a year after the release of Chapter One experimenting with the NWN2 toolset before eventually concluding it would not serve my purposes. Additional chapters are definitely planned (they should be shorter and thus hopefully will not take as long to make) and I have already done a small amount of work on Chapter Three. Whether anyone will be around to play the later chapters if and when I complete them is anyone's guess. You are no doubt correct that I need to do more work promoting the module, but I have never been very good at that sort of thing. Although at this stage in NWN's life-cycle I fear there are just not that many players around for any module, however well-promoted. A lot of people have moved on to other things and have no idea how much amazing stuff is still being made for this game. It would be nice if some of them could be enlightened in this regard, but, again, I am probably not the best person to ask as to how to go about doing so. In any case, thanks for your kind words regarding the module. I enjoy desinging and building modules and it always additionally gratifying to know that there are people who enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Posted by Kamiryn at on08/02/12
There're a few other minor things I've found... - haunted house: journal talks about north west while the house is in the north east corner actually, - putting the tiger to sleep: I didn't get any gold for this (I did get XP however), - Zarala does not fight when (improved) invisble. Very similar to the problem I had with Kelem. Unfortunately unlike Kelem you can't force her to become visible again. All you can do ist waiting for the duration to run out. I've finished part II a few days ago and I can only repeat that your module is one of the best modules I've played so far (and I've played quite a few). Really great! I wonder how many month (or should I say years?) did it take to write part II? Since the ending is somewhat open I dare to ask if a third part is (or was) planned? You should definitely make more advertising for your work. I'm very sure that a lot of people would like to play the modules but just don't know about them.
Posted by Kamiryn at on08/02/12
So the swamp beetles are using the bioware stink beetle OnDeath effect now. I have a save from just before meeting the first swamp beetle and I think I will replace 'my' swamp beetles with the v3 versions (by taking the uti file from v3 mod file and putting it into the hak file, that should overwrite the original swamp beetle file - at least I hope so).
Posted by rogueknight333 at 2012-08-0723:19:47
Thanks for the continuing QA feedback. I was already aware of the bug with the swamp beetle's Cloudkill-on-death effect, and it should be corrected as of version 1.02. Players who have already started a game using the originally released version of the module can eliminate the semi-permanent and*bleep*ulative slowing the bug causes with Freedom potions (or Freedom Spells if you have a PC able to cast them). The slowing effect can also be removed by resting, though trying to rest in the swamps is dangerous.
Posted by Kamiryn at on08/02/12
Further tests seem to show that a) there's no problem if they cast cloudkill as a spell. b) it seems that the OnExit script 'nw_s0_cloudkillb' does not get executed if the cloudkill effect gets created by the OnDeath script.
Posted by Kamiryn at on08/02/12
No idea why but it seems there's a problem with the swamp beetles and their OnDeath script. The movement speed decrease does not go away when leaving the area of effect. So with every killed beetle my party became slower and slower.
Posted by Kamiryn at on08/02/12
> are you using TonyK's AI or anything similar? No - afaik, have to double-check that once I'm at home again, but sure aren't any. My override folder just contains NWNCQ, my own CCOH and the five(?) official bioware files. Not sure about NWNCQ but the rest shouldn't cause any conflicts. I know the usual NWN henchman AI problems but this seems to be different somehow. As if Kelem's AI script isn't running at all sometimes or as if sometimes he does not realise when a combat starts (at first I thought he got blinded in a previous fight but that wasn't true). > I don't know if your character has HIPS? No HIPS.
Posted by rogueknight333 at 2012-08-0204:30:06
Thanks for the vote, Kamiryn. On your henchman issues: I occasionally noticed quirky behavior on the part of the henchmen during testing but it was not a regular thing. I have sometimes seen similar issues in other modules so I believe they are problems with Bioware's AI, rather than anything I did, though perhaps the greater difficulty of my modules makes the weakness of the Henchman AI more glaring. Just to confirm: are you using TonyK's AI or anything similar? I do not know how well that would work with some of my own script modifications. If an incompatible override could not be to blame, then I know of at least a couple of things that could be going wrong. One problem that I find sometimes occurs (and this could particularly be a problem with Kelem) is that a stealthed henchman will not always go out of stealth and attack just because you do. In such situations you can hit your stealth button, to cause the whole party to abandon stealth (even if your own character is already out of stealth due to attacking): you will note that each time you use the stealth hotkey it can cause the henchmen to toggle in or out of stealth mode, and this can happen even if you cannot enter stealth yourself on account of being in combat (I don't know if your character has HIPS? That could complicate things too). I have also sometimes seen henchmen who are invisible (if that is a factor) behave oddly, perhaps for similar reasons. Another thing that sometimes happens with spellcasting henchmen is that they will stand still apparently doing nothing in combat, but if one waits for a few seconds or so without disturbing them they will recover and start casting a spell. Possibly after casting one spell they have to wait for the start of a new round (or something like that) before they can cast another. I hope the above helps you figure out what is going on. Perhaps someday I will include a completely reworked custom AI for the henchman in a module, but that was just too much extra work to take on for this one on top of everything else it required, so I had to retain a lot of the issues with Bioware's problematic AI. Note that with the XP scaling system I did manage to implement, a henchman will still boost your experience just by being in the party even if he never does anything (and it can be nice to have Talu around just so you can ask him to cast Mass Haste on everyone, even if he never does anything else - though maybe he is not yet at a high enough level to have access to that spell).
Posted by Kamiryn at on08/02/12
Haven't found any other bugs so far. But I'm still playing and will do for many hours more I guess :D. One problem however has occured and it's a really annoying one - not quite sure if it's a bug or a problem on my side but it seems that both Talu and especially Kelem are actually spies (:D) working for the goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears or whoever, because when fighting the humanoids in the Forest of Mir very often they (especially Kelem) actually refuse to participate, regardless what commands I give them (attack nearest enemy, defend me) and repeating them during the fight doesn't help at all. Perhaps they think three level ~10 adventurers figting a whole armee is a stupid idea but I would say that just one level 10 adventurer fighting that same whole armee is even more stupid :D. After returning to calimport and when exploring the city gates sewers they are somewhat back to normal. Haven't tried any other henchmen outside of calimport (will try the dwarf and the lich soon), so I don't know if it's a general problem or specific to Kelem. Still and without any doubt this is a great module and while I'm not finished yet I have seen enough to vote.
Posted by rogueknight333 at 2012-07-3105:18:30
An updated version of the module correcting the bugs pointed out by Kamiryn is now available.
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