3Ravens:- Yes; it's one of the new Maldrapur Skyboxes - Trying to get as seamless a blend between actual Area jungle geometry and the jungle on the Skyboxes... I've blurred the waterfalls on that one somewhat and, unless you just stand and stare fixedly at them, you don't really notice that they're not actually "falling".
Ssythilac:- Never heard of Corben and his Den before CaveGnome mentioned him and I looked it up, so I can't really comment on any similarities... One of the things mentioned by characters in Demoness Tales regarding the Citadel of Doom is that it's immeasurably ancient, apparently dead - yet seems eerily well preserved and not totally ruined (for which there are strange reasons). Which is why none of the buildings are actually in shattered disarray... but I am also working on a totally ruined city at the moment, but ruins are slow. You can build a wall in two seconds. But the wall lying around in heaps of, um, bricks, takes two hours.
As to Indian buildings, I'm expanding upon what I did for the first Kali Hak considerably and am throwing elements of Vesara, Dravida and Nagara styles of architecture into a sort of Maldrapuri hybrid form (somewhat as I did with the Jaiutmeer temple back on page 4). Trouble is the damn poly counts. I've already got two really nice temples that look amazing but bring the game to an utter standstill. Frustrating...
And now presenting the biggest, baddest, nastiest Spleen Monster in Hindu mythology...
The Timingila, a name literally translating as "whale-swallower", is an immense, horrifying Sea Creature, generally lurking in the depths but sometimes rising to the surface in order to obliterate everything in sight into a million pieces and crush everyone to pastes. As such things do.
The Timingila should be absolutely colossal - something like a thousand feet long from nose to tail. However, a Creature model that size is simply not practical in NWN. It just instantly jams on some squitty bit of walkmesh somewhere and sits there like a lump. Therefore I had to scale the horrendous beast down somewhat to a size where it could realistically interact with other characters in NWN but still look big enough to rampage in the fashion of a colossal gargantua. Even though Kali is ten feet tall, it still towers over her hideously...
So I just start to get somewhere on building the city of Rajatnur and next thing this honking behemoth comes along and starts knocking it to pieces...
Even when you're the Supreme Goddess of All Things, there are times, just infrequently, when you have to ask yourself the question "Can this really be a sensible thing to do?" Going one on one against the Timingila is one of those times, even for Kali...
Naturally the Module begins slowly enough, as villages along Maldrapur's north coast are found completely destroyed with no survivors to tell of what happened... then the Makara are driven from the sea, attacking various places (yes, there will be Makara too in the second pile of Maldrapur stuff) and as if this wasn't bad enough, the question arises of what is so terrible it has driven even the fearsome Makara ahead of it... And this thing is the answer.
Actual descriptions of the Timingila in Hindu texts are less than precise (though there are some mentions of the beast that infer vaguely Shark-like characteristics), leaving its specific appearance rather nebulous. It's massive, it lives in the ocean and it's jaws are enormous... so it's fairly open to interpretation. Mine combines elements of the jaw structure of assorted deep sea fish, notably Malacosteus and Grammatostomias, with ichthyic fins as well as paddles more akin to a Pliosaur, a few big spikes for good measure and some freakish crustacean elements, just to make it really weird and the exact, precise, identical shape of a Spleen.
The crustacean bits were also vaguely necessary to explain its ability to come crawling out of the ocean and demolish half of Rajatnur before Kali manages to find a cunning means of repulsing the foul-tempered thing back into the depths where, hopefully, it will stay.
I was moderately surprised during these tests of Kali vs Timigila fights that it was possible to actually get attack distances sorted out (eventually) that were more or less realistic despite the vast size of the Timingila.
The practice on that score I'm having with all my Dinosaurs was probably a help.
Testing Kali vs Timingila was also fun, hence getting stupidly carried away with screenshots...
