Millions of years ago, on the old IGN Vault, I was interviewed about the rubbish Undead Animals I kept incessantly throwing at everyone and when asked about things I'd like to do in NWN in the future, one of the things I mentioned - the only one I can now recall - was DINOSAURS! Proper Dinosaurs. LOTS of Dinosaurs, just stacked!
Many years have passed and I have been working on Dinosaurs for NWN on and off throughout this time, usually with no particular success. I've had a dodgy Spinosaurus hanging around for six or seven years to little purpose and I keep mentioning them... Now that I'm - finally - really starting to make actual, proper, archosaurian progress, the time has come for a quick little preview...
The Spinosaurus, the most formidable of all the Dinosaurs in Demoness Tales... No complete fossil of Spinosaurus has ever been found so all restorations are conjectural to one degree or another, but this appearance, essentially an even bigger Baryonyx with a sail on its back, is the most accurate and reliable around. (The farcical 2014 restoration was based upon partial fragments of multiple specimens of different sizes, plus a great deal of assumption and highly unreliable comparatives. Not surprisingly, it looks ludicrous. Many palaeontologists assign it no credibility whatsoever and neither do I). And anyway, the Spinosaurus in Demoness Tales has always looked like this. And now my NWN version also actually looks like a proper Spinosaurus instead of a sort of weird, disc-appended lizard. Believe me, this thing looks pretty damn terrifying when it charges at you in-game with a deafening roar.
There is also a Triceratops... but the Spinosaurus killed it stone dead into tiny pieces on sight and it mushed before I got the screenshot done... "It's passed on. This Triceratops is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet it's maker. This is a late Triceratops. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the river bank, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible... This is an EX-TRICERATOPS!" Then again, maybe it's just pining for the fjords.
Of course, if I'd just checked it in the Toolset and assigned it some better stats it might have lasted more than five seconds. Maybe.
Naturally, Demoness Tales being what it is, Lucirath has the Spinosaurus as a sort of adopted "pet". They both seem to enjoy complete mayhem and killing more or less everything in sight. It's good to share a hobby.
Ceratosaurus vs Stegosaurus... Learning from the "Triceratops Fiasco", I pushed the Stegosaur's stats up enough that it could last long enough to put up a fight that I could get close enough to in-game to get a hopefully exciting screenshot. Wading through the sixty-odd shots taken in a flurry of keyboard hammering as the Ceratosaur came hurtling out of the forest and attacked, I discovered that none of them were actually anything like as exciting as it had looked whilst standing in the middle of it with all the roaring, snarling and crashing going on - not to mention the "Dinosaurs knocking the stuffing out of each other" music.
The Ceratosaurus is the other of my two old, long-term models who has been around for years (along with a singularly rubbish Kentrosaur, which is three, but the Kentrosaur was... embarrassing until recently). The Ceratosaur has also been drastically overhauled and now actually looks like a Ceratosaur, which is a huge improvement. Most of my Dinosaurs are based on meshes I converted from the Jurassic Park : Operation Genesis game, which I've been modding for years. The meshes have then been hit with enormous Mesozoic bricks to create all sorts of new species that weren't in JPOG. These pictures just show a few of them...
There is still a lot of work to be done on my NWN Dinosaur Project, but I could no longer resist showing just a few of the results so far. Sorry. Rabid enthusiasm. Especially for theropods.
Dilophosaurus, with its distinctive double crest, one of the earliest of the giant predators (though not as giant as some of its descendants), a many-horned Styracosaurus (who's doing rather better than the Triceratops) and a "small" sauropod, Cetiosaurus, in the background...
Thus far, I have the following Dinosaurs more or less complete (just needing a few texture improvements, minor geometry alterations and one or two irritating little animation glitches...
Carnivores:-
SPINOSAURUS, BARYONYX, CERATOSAURUS, ACROCANTHOSAURUS, MAPUSAURUS, DILOPHOSAURUS, DEINONYCHUS, RAJASAURUS.
Herbivores:-
STEGOSAURUS, KENTROSAURUS, WUERHOSAURUS, STYRACOSAURUS, TRICERATOPS, BRACHIOSAURUS, DIPLODOCUS, CETIOSAURUS, SCELIDOSAURUS, HYPSILOPHODON, STRUTHIOMIMUS.
Further to these, I also have the following species lying around in bits or with no textures at all, rubbish/zero animations and/or sundry other things requiring major application of bricks.
Carnivores:-
MEGALOSAURUS, COELOPHYSIS, GORGOSAURUS, CARCHARODONTOSAURUS, VELOCIRAPTOR, TYRANNOSAURUS, CARNOTAURUS, OVIRAPTOR, SYNTARSUS
Herbivores:-
TUOJIANGOSAURUS, TOROSAURUS, CHASMOSAURUS, PROTOCERATOPS, MONOCLONIUS, SALTASAURUS, SEISMOSAURUS, MAMENCHISAURUS, PLATEOSAURUS, SAICHANIA, POLACANTHUS, IGUANODON, OURANOSAURUS, PARASAUROLOPHUS, LAMBEOSAURUS, CORYTHOSAURUS, SEGNOSAURUS, PACHYCEPHALOSAURUS, STYGIMOLOCH.
Yet still further to that are some other species I'm considering adding once all these are done. I've also got a none too clever Pteranodon that needs work, so I might add some Pterosaurs and maybe even a few Mesozoic sea reptiles such as Tylosaurus and Elasmosaurus... and I really want to do a Nothosaur too...
Anyway. Don't expect Dinosaurs on the Vault tomorrow, there's still lots to be done - even if Fifi can restrain me from trying to add every known genus of Dinosaur ever discovered - and I want to get them RIGHT. But I DO have Dinosaurs. And I'm getting MORE Dinosaurs done bit by bit and eventually there WILL be a PHoD Dinosaur Hak of ludicrous size!
