Been quite busy these intervening weeks, finally finished off Act I and am hip deep into II. Act I was long and like any good three act tale, the second act seems to be the lull before the storm. That is not to say that Act II isn’t good, it starts slow and the pacing picks up as you progress deeper in to the Act. I spent a lot of time early on buying and selling equipment looted during the arduously long first Act, doling out the good stuff to my companions where possible. It seems the OC dialog is particularly Diplomacy driven, though there are occasionally options for Intimidate and even Taunt. I would like the variant Intimidate rule to be optional on a character by character basis. While I find the Charisma based Intimidate a reasonable mechanic, for some characters Strength is just better suited. The Diehard Bruce Willis would likely employ Charisma, Schwarzenegger’s Conan, I think, would use Strength to get his way. In any case there’s a lot of XP reliant on Diplomacy skill, so my future characters will add points to that skill as much as possible. Gaining Influence over your companions is another important task and using your own personal diplomacy is nearly as important as using Charisma-based skills in dialogs. There is a lot of interaction where one answer gains influence on one character and loses with another. Early on, when you have few companions you just have to take your lumps, but later on, you can arrange your party so that you can keep rivals apart when necessary.
But my involvement with the game doesn’t with playing. I have been keeping a weather eye on the Neverwinter Vault for UI enhancements, clothing options, snowy terrain tile sets and other features that will increase my enjoyment of the game. Found a couple of nice ones that should make anyone’s list of must haves. I have mixed and matched XiDragon’s xUI and Charlie Vales CharlieUI – both mods will greatly reduce mouse clicks over time – and Gaoneng’s United Colors character creation mod is apparently a player favorite. If a complaint could be lodged versus United Colors, it would be that the manually changing the palette schemes for 16 races @ 6 parts per with 256 colors (24,576 color codes), not to mention dealing with the hex encoding of the colors in the files. Herein I found a way to put my skills to use and make some lives a bit easier. After a brief bit of study to see what was going on under the hood, I decided to write a C# application that read in the United Colors data files and allowed the colors to be edited using the standard Windows color changer dialog. My app would make editing those 24 thousand elements quite a bit easier. It also provides the option of editing the original 18 color palettes already provided in-game. One good idea begat another and I began adding various types of color gradient automation to make finding the right shade (or range) of color more quickly accessible.
NwN2 Mod Configurator (Name of the next version, since its scope has expanded)
