Bringing the Prelude up to date?

Jidokwon

Good day! I'm *very* green with any sort of development, so bear with me, please. I've opened the toolset for the first time and am hoping to bring the Original Campaign's Prelude up to date with everything that has been made available since its creation. Longer term, I'm hoping to unify my NWN experience to be similar through any module that I might opt to play. Inventory control, updated henchmen control options, genie bottles, power stones, intelligent weapons that can all be used in any setting. I'm hoping that anyone here might point me in the right direction as to where to start. I've opened the Prelude module properties and am entirely missing where to patch it to be brought up to date. Is it a simple matter of rebuilding the module? Will I have to export and import large quantities of content? Would it be a simpler project to merge all of the Original Campaign modules into one huge module? Any suggestions and feedback are certainly appreciated.

Proleric

Well, it certainly isn't simply a matter of rebuilding the modules.

Most of those features are implemented (or, more importantly, not implemented) at a very detailed level of scripting, where they become entangled with other functionality.

So, for example, if you give the XP2 scripts to the OC henchmen, inventory control might work, but the henchman-specific plots probably wouldn't, and all sorts of things might break.

Nothing is impossible, but it would be a big project, requiring a lot of impact assessment, re-scripting and end-to-end testing.

Jidokwon

Considering that this is going to be a much larger project than I had anticipated, I thought that it might be easiest to just rebuild the module from scratch. I don't know if I'd do this for every module in the OCs, but the Prelude is pretty small. I also thought that I could get better acquainted with the toolset in this way. Is it possible, though, to have two modules open in the toolset? Or, perhaps, run two toolsets at the same time so that I can view the content that I'd have to recreate? Thank you again for the replies.

Calgacus

I've thought about the idea of a merge of the 3 main campaigns but it would be a big project.

Cut some content maybe but update much more - all outdoor areas especially need to be redone - the city of Neverwinter should be thing of beauty. The plots would have to be rethought and stitched together differently so as to be less linear but more intertwined - perhaps the different big baddies would be at odds and the player would need to play them off against each other or perhaps choose one to serve, etc.

But as for just the prelude - besides henchmen control what would need to be updated? Some extra training for what classes or feats? maybe a few crafting examples? I think just updating the prelude could be worth it even if just done as a learning exercise.

ForSerious

Of that list, genie bottles would be the easiest to add, I think.

I started adding a crafting system to the original campaign a long time ago. My biggest issues and setbacks came when I wanted to update the crafting system. It requires revisiting all the areas, scripts and objects I added and modified—in each module. I have since learned to make things less interdependent, but it would still take me quite some time to update all the modules with my latest improvements. I would need to change a lot so that a simple export then import is all that would be needed.
On another note, if any improvements or fixes have been added to the original campaigns in the Enhanced Edition, I would need to start over to make sure none of those get left out. (one of the things I added was a reward script for disarming traps or unlocking things like in NWN 2 Mask of the Betrayer. For me that meant adding those scripts to every usable placeable that is locked or trapped.)