I need a swig o’ some strong Dwarven Ale!

Hello, again! This week, I bring you more Candlekeep…in fact, I bring quite a bit more Candlekeep! I’ve been hard at work in and around the Candlekeep area after putting some of the Nashkel territory on hold. The productivity and work has been absolutely awesome, and I was able to develop a large majority of the interior grounds.

Some of the NPCs and the backbone for the starting quests have been created, but they need to be fleshed out more. Their speech is irregular, they have incorrect AI packages, etc. Since part of that work is Quest Development, you can expect the next post will have most of those starter quests implemented. As well, I was able to completely rebuild the interior area, and I’ve worked on linking up a lot of the Candlekeep building interiors to the rest of the world. Here’s a short exploration video of the grounds showing some of that off.

Don’t piss off the guards, they’re a pain to deal with.

As you can see, I’ve even put in the voices for a lot of the NPCs. I ended up making a few more creatures and encounters. Xvarts have been fully implemented, and so have Ogres!

Oooh, so tough! Actually, they’re ridiculously tough….

I’m hoping that by the end of September I can have Candlekeep completed, and the main quest line all the way to Jaheria and Khalid completed. That’s an ambitious schedule, but I’m an ambitious person, so it will work out!

There is still a lot of fine tuning to do with Candlekeep, but the finer points are actually developed later on. The way Skyrim handles encapsulated cities is by making multiple outdoor worlds by duplicating the main world. Each duplicated worldspace is stripped of all exterior “stuff”, and you are left with a shell of the world space expect for the interior of the city which is then brought to extremely high detail. The Navmeshes are perfected, there are tons of NPCs and idle points, lots of voices — basically anything you want to be huge and memory complex you save for a city since anything not within the city is loaded into a buffer and then is only checked every once in a while, freeing up tons of processing power for the city itself. Therefore, before you copy the overwall worldspace into a cityspace, you develop not only the city itself, but also the area around the city, so that in the case the walls are accessible, the player can look out over the world without a break in immersion.

Anyways, enough with the tutorial lecturing. This week has been extremely successful for our development, and what was once just a bland plateu of a starting point has been turned into a small city. It’s pretty awesome to see that change rapidly! With that, I bid you adieu until next update. Here are some more videos of Candlekeep to keep you all entertained!

More Ogre Fights!

A stupid-long exploration of Candlekeep.