Sword Coast Stratagems' birth

[Salk]

DavidW,

 

I and probably many others would be interested in knowing how you came to become an IE modder and what gave you the idea of creating SCS in the first place (if I am not mistaken you started first posting at the PPG board some years ago).

 

If you don't find too boring to share some informations about your modding career and how this hobby of yours has produced satisfactory results and perhaps some headaches, I'd love to read what you feel to share with us.

 

Again, thank you for taking time to listen to our suggestions and feedback and for helping us understand the mechanics behind an impossible to implement feature or the logic behind each and ever decision you take within the SCS project.

[DavidW]

DavidW,

 

I and probably many others would be interested in knowing how you came to become an IE modder and what gave you the idea of creating SCS in the first place (if I am not mistaken you started first posting at the PPG board some years ago).

 

Well, in brief:

 

- We (= Hannah, my wife, and I) originally played BG and BG2 when they came out, and loved them, and got into CRPGs more generally as a result.

 

- In 2003, we'd basically run out of games we liked - if I recall, we'd played all the IE games then, and we hadn't really got into NWN. (There was a bit of a dearth of good games around then, or at least good games we'd come across.) I found out on the web that there were mods out for BG1 - I think the ones I was aware of were Dark Side of the Sword Coast, in particular, and maybe some generic adventure pack. So we tried playing BG1 again with mods. (I think TUTU wasn't out, or at least wasn't very stable, and there weren't many mods for it.)

 

- We had a kind-of-fun time at first, but it was quite disappointing. I'd had very naive expectations for the quality of mods, but found in fact that they (or at least, the ones we tried) were often quite badly coded, quite poorly written, and terribly unbalanced. For a while I tried modifying the mods (I have a kind-of-sort-of programming background) and toning down the unbalanced items, and I wrote some of my own AI for spellcasters. But BG1 is a horribly frustrating modding environment, especially for AI modding, and meanwhile fixing the mods we were using increasingly started not to be worth the candle. So I gave the whole thing up as a bad job and we switched over to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer as our default entertainment.

 

- In mid 2004 (when we'd run out of Buffy!) I came back and looked at mod sites again and discovered that TUTU was stable and BG1NPC was out. So we came back to BG and liked it a lot. This time we had a much, much more careful set of mod choices. I started playing around with the game myself again, and found that it was much much more scripting-friendly than BG1. Given that there weren't any tactical mods for BG1 (except brute-force things that doubled all the hit points) I ended up writing, piecemeal, AI code for most of the enemies. I went on to do the same for BG2, since I thought Tactics was pretty variable and could be improved on. All this was basically for Hannah and my benefit, though I think fairly early on I thought there might be a wider audience.

Mostly I was learning to code by looking at the code for Tactics.

 

- I think I vaguely worked up the BG1 stuff I'd written into a cohesive package and then basically forgot about it for most of a year. Then I remembered it and posted at PPG about it, and fairly soon got hosting here - this is late summer 2006, I think. After I published it I ended up having a very fast learning curve in more modern compatibility-friendly WEIDU scripting.

 

- I didn't originally intend to release anything for BG2, because my own stuff was incredibly scrappy and the task of doing coding for BG2 was a bit daunting - the previous mage script I had was nearly 10,000 lines long and it all had to be done by copy-paste. Then I had the idea for SSL, which was transformative. That, combined with getting the hang of WEIDU coding in a serious way, meant I could write something really quite different. So while SCS, at least in its early versions, was quite a traditionally coded mod and was written piecemeal during play, SCSII was written from scratch as a single fairly-well-defined project and was a lot more innovative. I think it's still the case that SCSII (and SCS, once I went back and recoded it) is significantly more complicated and integrated in terms of its overall under-the-hood coding than almost anything else out there. Not that that on its own is any guarantee of quality, of course!

[Shaitan]

I remember I found one of your first versions of SCS at PPG's modlist: I browsed it often to see the fifteen latest mods. I enjoyed it tremendeously. Thanks for revamping the whole game.

[Salk]

 

Thanks for this nice recap, DavidW!

 

I am a sucker for these kind of infos from guys I like so much.

[DrAzTiK]

we switched over to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer as our default entertainment

 

I love buffy too, I have all seasons in DVD ^^ My episode prefered is Once More, with Feeling (musical episode from Season6)

 

Sarah Michelle Gellar is charming

[coaster]

Interesting background David, thanks

 

You're lucky to have a wife who likes BG2...mine prefers the Sims 3!

[Salk]

Reading again through the answer, I realize there are some more questions I'd like to ask you.

 

- We (= Hannah, my wife, and I) originally played BG and BG2 when they came out, and loved them, and got into CRPGs more generally as a result.

 

Do you and Hannah play on LAN, creating each of you one character and then having four more of the NPCs join you? Or do you just play together a single player campaign?

 

Also what is it particularly that you loved about BG1 and BG2 (obviously not the AI )? Do you have a preference for the original or for the sequel?

 

Mostly I was learning to code by looking at the code for Tactics.

 

How challenging has learning in that manner been? Have you had any external support?

 

So while SCS, at least in its early versions, was quite a traditionally coded mod and was written piecemeal during play, SCSII was written from scratch as a single fairly-well-defined project and was a lot more innovative. I think it's still the case that SCSII (and SCS, once I went back and recoded it) is significantly more complicated and integrated in terms of its overall under-the-hood coding than almost anything else out there. Not that that on its own is any guarantee of quality, of course!

 

Can we conclude that you've been perhaps more satisfied with SCS II as a project than you have been with SCS because of the two different approaches?

 

Thanks for your time!

 

P.S. By the way, you might want to remove the part where it says SCS II is available as Beta from the SCS II description from the SCS II Forum... :-)

[DavidW]

Reading again through the answer, I realize there are some more questions I'd like to ask you.

 

- We (= Hannah, my wife, and I) originally played BG and BG2 when they came out, and loved them, and got into CRPGs more generally as a result.

 

Do you and Hannah play on LAN, creating each of you one character and then having four more of the NPCs join you? Or do you just play together a single player campaign?

 

The latter.

 

Also what is it particularly that you loved about BG1 and BG2 (obviously not the AI )?

I'm not 100% sure. Some amalgam of plot, characters (in BG2), the feeling of a very rich world (more BG1), and actually, the combat system. I don't think any game I've played since the IE games has given as smooth and easy-to-manage a party combat system (though partly that might be about familiarity with the AD&D rules). Believe it or not, I don't actually think the BG2 AI is half bad given the constraints under which they had to work. (Except the mage AI in BG1, come to think of it: that was always a bit laughable.)

 

Do you have a preference for the original or for the sequel?

No; I like different bits. But I've only actually played them three times each. BG2 probably has more replayability in it.

 

Mostly I was learning to code by looking at the code for Tactics.

How challenging has learning in that manner been? Have you had any external support?

Not especially, and no. But as I say, I've got some programming background, and since I think about abstract structures for a living, it's relatively easy to transfer the relevant skills.

 

 

Can we conclude that you've been perhaps more satisfied with SCS II as a project than you have been with SCS because of the two different approaches?

 

That's an interesting question. Probably not, actually, because while SCSII has more systematic cleverness, it's probably not so good at doing small cute things in the game (which in turn is probably because I'm more familiar with BG1, and also probably because low-level combat is easier to control). Also, by now SCS is pretty thoroughly SCSII-ified - in fact, the current release of SCS is more high-tech than the current release of SCSII.

 

P.S. By the way, you might want to remove the part where it says SCS II is available as Beta from the SCS II description from the SCS II Forum... :-)

 

Thanks, will do.

[Jarno Mikkola]

That's an interesting question. Probably not, actually, because while SCSII has more systematic cleverness, it's probably not so good at doing small cute things in the game (which in turn is probably because I'm more familiar with BG1, and also probably because low-level combat is easier to control). Also, by now SCS is pretty thoroughly SCSII-ified - in fact, the current release of SCS is more high-tech than the current release of SCSII.

So that's to say you'll most likelly consentrate onto the strategy aspect of SCSII in the future when thinking on SCS_vs._SCSII, as you have said before, when you have the time.

Intresting read by the way, so thanks.

[DavidW]

That's an interesting question. Probably not, actually, because while SCSII has more systematic cleverness, it's probably not so good at doing small cute things in the game (which in turn is probably because I'm more familiar with BG1, and also probably because low-level combat is easier to control). Also, by now SCS is pretty thoroughly SCSII-ified - in fact, the current release of SCS is more high-tech than the current release of SCSII.

So that's to say you'll most likelly consentrate onto the strategy aspect of SCSII in the future when thinking on SCS_vs._SCSII, as you have said before, when you have the time.

 

This assumes, optimistically, that I work on things according to some kind of grand design, rather than whatever random thing happens to interest me at any given moment.