Jump on my sword while you can, evil! I won’t be as gentle!

One day I hope to give this blog the respect it deserves — a weekly update — but until that time, I hope that youtube updates in conjunction with blogposts is good enough. It just so happens that I have that for you all today!

After a few solid weeks of working in the Creation Kit on some of the most tedious work there is yet — voices and dialogue — I’ve got some fun stuff to show. Ok, so NavMesh is probably the most tedious, but voices and dialogue are somewhat high up on that list.

For Minsc, there is nearly 300 lines of dialogue which needed modification and import. For every line of dialogue, this required a dialogue entry, conditions to trigger the dialogue and reset times defined, extraction of the original dialogue from the Baldur’s Gate game(s) (you know, BG1, 2, and Throne of Bhaal), sound editing of those files, conversion to Xwm, creation of the lip files, emotional settings for the dialogue, any animations that the dialogue needed, and also addition of scripts to each dialogue.

There are still a few bugs, but here’s what it looks like. In this first video, I speak with Minsc. Some of the dialogue lines are spoken by me since they require voice acting, but otherwise the individual dialogue is present. Some of his dialogue has a few present bugs, but it’s a lot of fun to see him speak lines in response to other actions.

Beautiful face he has, doesn’t he? Not sure why the grey-face bug seems to only affect him, but I suspect it has to do with custom skin tones. I may have to actually make a special skin just for him!

In the next video, I actually reload and end up killing Minsc to test some of his combat dialogue. Quite a bit of fun! He actually gets stuck against the rocks from the water — while the animation is going in the NW-ish direction, the force is directly south by an impossibly high current force.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed some of the updates! Next post, I should have some dialogue from Edwin to pull him into the party alongside Minsc, and perhaps I’ll have even have some Xvarts at the Xvart village to slaughter! As well, I’d like to have some of the other Nashkel companions available — Branwen, Xan, and maybe even Shar-Teel.