Aurora is such a tease.

The struggles of modding this beast persist. It's been a happy Christmas and New Years, so time for an update!

I've developed a few new areas, conversations, worked on load screens, and added more characters. I have bits and pieces completed for several scenes, but not enough to string them together. I do, however, almost have the first scene completed in its entirety, other than an annoying issue where a door doesn't want to talk to me. (It's official, I'm going crazy).

My biggest setback is tackling various advanced challenges of the Aurora engine, such as cutscenes or nuisances outside the confines of the engine. For example, the door in this image is too far away to engage in the conversation because Aurora is a whore, so I had to work around the issue, trick the player, and insert an invisible object placed closer to the player using a door's portrait. In another example, an NPC wouldn't die to a fireball spell in a cutscene, so I had to simulate it by timing his death with the impact of the fireball, because I guess cutscenes give special treatment to NPC's. I had to reload the mod about nine times before the timing synced up. By the way, the two images in this post happen early in the mod, so I don't consider them spoilers.

I feel confident 90% of my mod's vision can be accomplished within the construction kit, but that other 10%  is concerning me. Sadly, that is the part I must address first. After all, if I can't finish my mod's most challenging aspects, then why waste time accomplishing the easy stuff, only to hit a brick wall? I understand I could change parts of my script to avoid brick wall moments (and to an extent, I probably will), but it's aggravating knowing there are things the engine is capable of that I simply don't have knowledge of.

Unfortunately, knowledge of NWN modding is more elusive today than it was in the past. Before I proposed this project back in April of 2014, IGN's Neverwinter Vault was alive and well. It was the ultimate resource for NWN modding. It ceased to exist of that same year around the end of June. My timing couldn't have been worse. The NWN Community Vault was released to rectify this, but the loss of forum posts littered with technical knowledge wounded me, unless their forum is archived somewhere I'm overlooking. It would be like someone creating an ambitious Skyrim or Fallout mod, then mid-way in they're told the Nexus is permanently down. If the NWN Community Vault hadn't been born, I definitely would have cancelled this mod, as I refuse to mod a game without a dedicated community site.

I feel like I need to speed this mod along, so I'm going to be more transparent regarding my setbacks, as I'm not going to get any of it done procrastinating on the issues. If any of you would like to collaborate with me on any Aurora engine questions I may have, let me know. I'd love to find one or more people I can bounce questions off of, who I will, of course, credit in my mod. Regardless of no assistance, I'll continue development, but I'm just saying the sooner I tackle my questions, the sooner you guys get your mod. (Damn, I'm turning into Malakai. I sense a shift in my alignment.)