Shabby Hyena Lunatic emerges suddenly and unexpectedly from a dense shrubbery...
Never really expected to return to either this thread or the Project, but was poked with a sharp stick just recently, not so much with regards Doctor Who specifically, so much as salvaging something out of all the work that went into the Project. The initial idea was to take the Modules and rewrite them, change some dialogue and characters, shove some Placeables about, etc and turn them into entries for my "Kyru" series, or "Demoness Tales" in the case of the less "futuristic" ones...
Anyway, since SO much had been done SO quickly on these last year, my mind had gone somewhat blank over some of them. Therefore I decided to take everything out of the Big Box it had been thrown in last year and play through all twenty Modules as the simplest, quickest way of determining how best they could be turned into something else. Two things quickly became apparent.
1. TOO much had been done TOO quickly last year.
2. Nevertheless, there was a lot about them that I liked as they were, eg: as Doctor Who.
I therefore spent a few days idly wondering whether or not I would resurrect the PHoD NWN Doctor Who Project, regardless of whether anyone else ever saw it...
Eventually, becoming fed up with the muffled growling noises of Hyenaesque cogitation, Fifi helpfully made my mind up for me, like she does most of the time. Her considered, thoughtful, erudite suggestion was "Just bloody do it."
So, I'm just bloody doing it.
Resurrecting this project is not an easy task, since I am now reminded that I originally started this with a view to releasing it to the Community and therefore began compiling Haks specifically for it. Big Haks. VERY BIG Haks. I mean, not just big, I mean GARGANTUAN. Rather impractically gargantuan, all things considered.
But then, it's not a very "practical" project in terms of public release. Twenty adventures (separate Module for each), each one set in one (or more) completely different points in Space and Time. Being the dribbling obsessive that I am, I want every one of those places to have a really distinctive look and feel that sets it apart from the others. In most cases this meant reskinned or even completely NEW Tilesets, literally thousands of new Placeables, most of which I'd already done for Demoness Tales etc and then all sorts of specific Doctor Who CC as well. And that's before you add the hundreds of tracks of new music, the hundreds of additional sound effects, etc, etc...
Those Haks evolved over time, were not intelligently or logically created and were a dark blight upon the cosmos, hideously debased things that should never have been allowed to walk freely upon the earth without being extirpated from existence and destroyed by purifying fire.
So I've destroyed them.
Instead, I'm now using my usual Demoness Tales Haks which I use (with certain specific additions) for every NWN thing I do. Thus, I know what's what. These Haks are every bit as Gargantuan, but, if and when the Doctor Who Modules DO ever see a release, I can simply remove all the content in the Haks that I haven't used and release only what's necessary since I've got a pretty good grasp of what's in the Haks and where. However, without turning the whole series into a bland run round a load of Tilesets everyone's seen before a million times and losing the individuality and strangeness of the various worlds the TARDIS visits, these Modules are still going to require a VERY LARGE amount of CC. No two ways around it, even with my current thoughts on creating a little top Hak for each individual Module which holds textures that reskin certain Tilesets and Placeables so that they have a different look in certain Modules.
I am at present working on this more or less as I would on any other personal project and not worrying over every little detail regarding how it will work as a Community release. This makes it a damn sight easier to do.
There are a lot of things I'm not happy with, which got done far too hastily last year in an effort to finish a ridiculously ambitious thing in an improbably short amount of time. I'm announcing no release dates or anything now, at least not until such time as I'm happy that things are more or less done and done right.
However, I don't see why they can't be released, for the benefit of anyone prepared to download the farcically large amount of CC which is unavoidable to make the Modules look and sound as I want them to.
My disgusted loathing of the so-called New Series, my rabid irritation at the assorted garbage that "sabotaged" this project last year and the entirely pathetic little hate campaign carried out against me and this project by Valthrendir for whatever sad, spiteful little reasons motivated him are all things far too rubbish and ephemeral for me to bother with them any more.
Therefore, I can hopefully overcome the purely practical elements of this project to the point a realistic release is possible. For instance, aside from just trying to cull the numbers of Tilesets and Placeables and stuff as far as possible without lessening the wild visual impact which is one of the best things about these Modules, there are still questions such as... the music.
Music is vitally important to supporting the atmospheres of the various worlds, really adds to the tooth and claw clashes between Velpa - the PC companion character - and assorted hideous monsters, and, in essence, more or less every event that occurs.
As with Demoness Tales and everything else I do, my NWN music folder is replete to the point of bursting with over a thousand tracks, some of my own composition, but many taken from piles of different film scores from Alien to Raiders of the Lost Ark, from Predator to Ran, Willow to The Relic, Xena, Doctor Who itself, assorted other computer games and so on and so forth. Apparently, it has never before occurred to me, edited and altered by me - sometimes considerably - as most of this music is, to consider that it's all copyrighted and that throwing it about the landscape could be considered a tad bit iffy...
To keep even a shadow of the ambience that the music adds, I'm going to have to wade through vast masses of open source files most of which won't be remotely suitable and/or nail myself to my overburdened synthesizer and compose a hell of a lot of new music and hit things with Audacity-shaped bricks a lot. Naturally, this sort of thing is time consuming and adds to the reasons I'm not going to announce even a vague thought of a release date as yet.
So, to just sum up what could probably have been said in three lines:-
The PHoD Doctor Who Project has crawled back out from under a rock. It is currently being worked on, overhauled and hit with a range of colossal bricks.
I've reworked Velpa in gmax so that she's a custom model, a bit more bestial and formidable than just using a standard phenotype. I've thrown away some of my earlier efforts at old Doctor Who monsters and redone them. There are already much better Terileptils, Zygons, Sontarans, Cybermen and Wirrn with more planned. Finished the Emperor Dalek. Done a proper Davros model. Redid the Time Lord collar/headdress things with a larger, heavier brick; wondering about doing some proper Gallifreyan robes too. Also reworking some of my NEW monsters. Messed with the TARDIS a bit more too.
Still using all my usual custom music, but considering assorted options for surrogates for a public release. Not much I can do when it comes to alternatives for sound effects such as the TARDIS demat sounds, that Dalek "heartbeat" sound that's always audible in their bases and spacecraft. I think there are about fifty sound effects I've taken from the original Radiophonic Workshop files and put into NWN. Technically they must all be copyrighted too but they're kind've necessary for Doctor Who. The Dalek voice soundset I did myself, so that's probably OK. I may have to ask a few quiet questions in the right places with regards the sound effects...
I've thrown three of the stories away completely because I now identify them as being finest quality rubbish and thus they must be impaled with pure iron spikes and dissolved in acid. Three much better replacements are being hit with acid-proof bricks. Some of the other stories are undergoing fairly major alterations and, shockingly, one or two are quite good and thus being more or less left alone.
The Project is alive. It is being hit with bricks. It will be finished.
That much, assuming one of my own creatures doesn't fall upon me and kill me any time soon, is certain.
As to what mutations it will undergo to reach the Community and precisely when it will reach you... er... only Time will tell...
(Apologies that this post rivals Tolstoy's War and Peace in length.
