Shadowrun Shadowrun modules

[ERYFKRAD]

I just need to finish the campaign and I'll play around in the editor some more.
The main idea I'm planning is a noir thriller, the one problem being that the shipped campaign starts off as one too. But I want to focus more on mystery and open investigation where the player has to piece together the clues.

I wonder if I can turn the mission item system into a journal.

Planning a similar thing, maybe I should make McClusky the hero.

 

[Ulminati]

If you want to do Cyberpotato, try to dig up a PDF of Shadows of Europe for SR 3rd ed. (It can be acuired in both legal and illegal ways online). It has blurbs on what happened to most European nations during the awakening and a ton of region-specific plot hooks.

 

[Zetor]

I'm currently working on a module covering an epic boat ride from Seattle to HK, as per my gaming group's SR4 campaign a few years back. Modelling a cargo ship with the current assets is going to be a challenge, but... :honourblade:

Also, Shadow-Hungary was pretty amusing... the semi-official supplement, anyway. A 10million country with a Great Dragon (Kalamona), some of the worst toxic shamans on the planet, and an uberpowerful magical entity (Lúdvérc) that can murderize immortal elves without breaking a sweat? Sure, no problem!

 

[sea]

Has anyone figured out how to make lights not look like shit? The lighting intensity and radius values in the editor don't seem to correspond at all with what shows up in the game itself. All I want is something to look dark and moody, with a few point lights highlighting details, is that too much to ask for?

Also, the conversation editor is okay, but it has a lot of weaknesses. For some reason you can't create dialogue node links for player responses or continues, so it leads to a lot of awkward redundancy in the dialogue trees. No hotkeys too, you have to click icons for every single line. Compared to say, NWN's it's really quite poor actually, but at least you can have basically any conditions you want attached to a dialogue line, which is nice.

 

[Zetor]

Has anyone figured out how to make lights not look like shit? The lighting intensity and radius values in the editor don't seem to correspond at all with what shows up in the game itself. All I want is something to look dark and moody, with a few point lights highlighting details, is that too much to ask for?

Also, the conversation editor is okay, but it has a lot of weaknesses. For some reason you can't create dialogue node links for player responses or continues, so it leads to a lot of awkward redundancy in the dialogue trees. No hotkeys too, you have to click icons for every single line. Compared to say, NWN's it's really quite poor actually, but at least you can have basically any conditions you want attached to a dialogue line, which is nice.

Lighting is kind of annoying, even the wiki basically just says "mess around with it until it works". See these two pages:
http://shadowrun-returns.wikispaces.com/Lighting
http://shadowrun-returns.wikispaces.com/Making+Maps+pt3


As for the dialogue editor, what do you mean by node links for player responses? Do you mean something like looping back to a previous node? You can do that by copying the NPC (blue) node you want to jump back to and use 'paste as link' on a player (red) node.

 

[grotsnik]

Layering the lights seems to help to bring out the highlights of the scenery a bit. I tried below with a dark purple regional directional light, a light blue low-intense point light with a high area-spanning radius, and then high-intensity low-radius point lights for all the obvious stuff. It seems to have fucked up two of the lamp-posts for some reason, but with some fiddling I think it could look OK. It's never going to be really sexy, though (has anyone figured out rain?)

The editor's strops are a bit more annoying for me so far. A couple of times now it's refused to paste-as-link dialogue nodes or let me search the asset directory for no reason at all that I can tell.

...and the texture limitations per area are pretty tedious, too.

 

[sea]

As for the dialogue editor, what do you mean by node links for player responses? Do you mean something like looping back to a previous node? You can do that by copying the NPC (blue) node you want to jump back to and use 'paste as link' on a player (red) node.

In NWN's editor, you can link both player and NPC lines of any kind at any point. In Shadowrun it seems like you can only link NPC lines, and only directly after a player line. So if you have an "interrogation" kind of node where the player can ask many questions, you can't just set up the player lines as links - instead you have to copy-paste them a whole bunch of extra times. The same goes if you want to have, say, 3 possible NPC lines to all lead to the same new line via a continue - it's impossible to link here as well, so you have to add a player line to do the link off of.

At least lighting is starting to look better:

 

[LizardKing]

Is it possible to do any c&c stuff with that editor?

 

[sea]

Is it possible to do any c&c stuff with that editor?

Of course. Why wouldn't it be? C&C is just if/else statements, basically. Lack of C&C in any game is a design/resources issue, not a technical limitation.

 

[made]

Might help to open the OC in the editor and just get a general idea of how stuff works

Yeah, back when I made Morrowind mods I learned everything from dissecting the official campaign.

That said I spent an hour with the editor earlier and it's pretty straightforward. The wiki pages out there already tell you almost everything you need to know to match the official campaign. If you want to do some funky additions like a world map or new spells then you'll have to figure that out, however. The game doesn't even have a local map, it's definitely made to be mission based and not massively open.

The world map could just be one big background texture with a bunch of clickable exit icons (as seen in the campaign). Then it's just a matter of hiding or scaling down the player sprite et voila.

 

[Elthosian]

Agreed. I think the best mods will follow the OC in format, for the most part. More wiggle room is certainly possible and welcome but trying to turn this system in Baldur's Gate will result in disappointment. This is already apparent with Life on a Limb or whatever, the big open mod campaign. It just doesn't work with the base game's playstyle and engine.

Agreed too, the mod feels pretty cool but the lack of a save system makes lots of stuff to require extra coding so every area doesn't reset to it's base state once you come back, then there is the super small inventory which makes looting a hassle and of course the lack of companion skill development... I really hope the Berlin DLC comes with a new save system and a somewhat reworked inventory.

 

[Nael]

I said this in another thread but once I figure out how to remove the Tolkien races from character creation when creating a mod I intend on making a campaign based on Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash and Diamond Age novels. They will take place in that world but have little to nothing to do with the original source material.

 

[evdk]

Can you have a permanent party?

 

[Excidium]

 

[evdk]

Tolkien races

This indeed seems out of place.

Yeah, the butthurt seems out of place.

 

[sea]

Can you have a permanent party?

Permanent vs. non-permanent is easy - the engine can handle area transitions with multiple party members (it doesn't forget them or anything) so it's definitely just a script that's being used to add/remove party members at set points. That party status data is saved globally.

But as for customizing/leveling more than one follower, it depends - the game save files might only be structured with one "main character" in mind for example, while any followers are treated differently (such as having stats defined statically in game data tables instead of kept in save files, or karma only affecting the main character). I'm gonna assume it's possible though, I doubt the devs would have left out such a key feature.

Really, making content is super fast in this editor. I like. Basically any standard gameplay function (new quest, triggers, variables) can be handled using the GUI without any need for real scripting. Want an interactive object? Bam, just set the object interactive in its properties, choose "popup text" or "conversation" or whatever, and type away. I doubt you'd even need to write a single line of script/code to do even more complex stuff, provided you're sticking with the core game rules. As far as mod tools go this one is very good and has definitely been designed with accessibility and speed of content creation in mind.

Aside from the cumbersome dialogue editor. Given that I would be making a dialogue-heavy mod, that's something that's kinda weak. But I guess I can get used to it, and it's better than having buggy tools.

 

[Machine]

Have a few ideas that I plan working on, but since I'm really not too familiar with the setting (only other shadowrun game I played was genesis one) could somebody direct me to some decent fluff resources? Would rather not construct some story thats completely out of place in the setting, I'm looking mostly for more info on technology available and more info on spirits/shamans, to see all I can "get away with".

On a related note, did somebody experiment with C&C in editor yet? Mostly interested if non-linear story structure is possible, for example different dialogue options taking you to different maps, or having some sort of global variables that would be shared throughout campaign (tracking who you killed and didnt, objectives complete etc)?

 

[DalekFlay]

Have a few ideas that I plan working on, but since I'm really not too familiar with the setting (only other shadowrun game I played was genesis one) could somebody direct me to some decent fluff resources? Would rather not construct some story thats completely out of place in the setting, I'm looking mostly for more info on technology available and more info on spirits/shamans, to see all I can "get away with".

The official site has a huge PDF on it with everything you need to know. Can't link right now, on a phone.

 

[Excidium]

Have a few ideas that I plan working on, but since I'm really not too familiar with the setting (only other shadowrun game I played was genesis one) could somebody direct me to some decent fluff resources? Would rather not construct some story thats completely out of place in the setting, I'm looking mostly for more info on technology available and more info on spirits/shamans, to see all I can "get away with".

The official site has a huge PDF on it with everything you need to know. Can't link right now, on a phone.

Here: http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/primer/

 

[Machine]

Have a few ideas that I plan working on, but since I'm really not too familiar with the setting (only other shadowrun game I played was genesis one) could somebody direct me to some decent fluff resources? Would rather not construct some story thats completely out of place in the setting, I'm looking mostly for more info on technology available and more info on spirits/shamans, to see all I can "get away with".

The official site has a huge PDF on it with everything you need to know. Can't link right now, on a phone.

Here: http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/primer/

Thanks, exactly what I was looking for.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I said this in another thread but once I figure out how to remove the Tolkien races from character creation when creating a mod I intend on making a campaign based on Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash and Diamond Age novels. They will take place in that world but have little to nothing to do with the original source material.

Life on a limb had an unused 'Default Character' option. If all else fails you might want to look into that.

 

[Mortmal]

Lets have a look at that 100 hours campaign :
http://www.shadowrunidentity.org/

I dare you to find more impressive vapourware!

 

[Zetor]

On a related note, did somebody experiment with C&C in editor yet? Mostly interested if non-linear story structure is possible, for example different dialogue options taking you to different maps, or having some sort of global variables that would be shared throughout campaign (tracking who you killed and didnt, objectives complete etc)?

Definitely possible. There are global [story] variables that carry over, and you can manipulate them from dialogues, triggers, etc. You can then change the way the campaign plays out depending on their values.

OTOH the main problem with creating a nonlinear campaign is that - aside from gear/stats/etc - ONLY these global variables persist between maps (this is also due to the checkpoint save system, so we can hope this'll get changed if HBS is under enough pressure to add a real save system to the game). So you either need to have several hundred variables to store the state of the world and have a lot of 'on-map-load' triggers on each map to restore its state (which is kinda slow, too)... or you need to adhere to the mission-based structure used in the OC.

 

[Psquit]

Wow they have a dragon for president... thats awesome.

 

[Regvard]

Isn't there a nexus or some such for this game? I don't want to infect my pc with Steam for mods.