TimG wrote...
I tried WCOC but couldn't get past the "horse for helmet bug"
Sorry, I couldn't quite fix that bug. I did get it fixed on most systems. We really pushed the engine in NWN further than it was supposed to be.
What you called "horse for helmet bug" I would curse at and call "Horse Hat" while trying to fix it.
It is heavily tied to the mounting animation. In fact when we were working on that module the animator that made that told me I should just scrap it and make you appear on the horse. I told him the animation looked too good and I wanted to make certain other people saw it. WOW and other things you just go from standing to being mounted instantly. I thought the mounting animation was classy and I fought to keep it in the module.
What it boils down to is the following in the engine:
If you set a tail, a phenotype, and possibly an appearance all placed close together in time (though delays can make it worse) the engine will display something like horse hat. If you debug it and make a wand or something to check and see if the phenotype, tail (how horses are implented), and appearance are correct they will be set correctly in code but, not show properly on screen.
I spent probably 100+ hours working on this issue for Wyvern Crown of Cormyr. I had all kinds of delays in place because, that logically is how you would think it would be fixed. I'd get it looking great on my machine and then our testers would jump in, or Bioware's, or Atari's and suddenly they'd have horse hat. Sometimes people would be on a machine of lower specs than mine sometimes much greater specs.
A number of us started doing tests together and we found out that the most likely way to avoid this was to immediately apply all those changes in sequence with absolutely no delays.
This did work in most (not all) cases and I am sorry you experienced horse hat.
A year or so after that Bioware asked me to make the official scripts for the public so others could implement horses. That is what is in the 1.69 patch.
There are quite a few switches you can enable that will disable mounting/dismounting animations, tweak timings, etc. So, you can with those scripts go the WOW (instant mount) route. Again it was not perfect as we were doing things with the engine that it was not designed to handle.
I would have liked to have revisited Wyvern Crown and put my 1.69 patch scripts into place. I think that potentially could have helped. That was not an opportunity that ever came up since 1.69 was the last officially sanctioned project for NWN1.
I still consider it my all time favorite game. I built so many things with it. I got a computer out of it. My wife and I were flown to Bioware in Edmonton for a few days thanks to it.
Good times... Now, I may need to buy more copies at GOG.COM since I had my cd keys on nwn.bioware.com and can't get to the 4 or 5 different keys I had. I have my own. I don't have my wife's, and my two sons'.
Anyway, I felt like chiming in about the old Horse Hat problem.
-- Deva Winblood, Scripter - Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, Scripter - NWN 1.69 Patch, Creator - NPC Activities, Co-Creator - RTS - Harvest of Souls
EDIT: I will say I've learned a lot more about that bug since those days. If you make any modules where you make NPCs that are the same NPC but spawn with different heads, phenotypes, clothes, etc to simulate crowds you'll sometimes see a headless person. If you save and reload it is usually fixed as the head was right in the system but, the display side did not update. Sometimes leaving and coming back to an area will fix this as well. This may have had some impact on Horse Hat as well so, I throw that out there for any of you that run into in Wyvern Crown of Cormyr.
Modifié par DevaWinblood, 14 octobre 2011 - 08:12 .
