GUI tools
One of the nicer features of NWN2 is the ability to make custom GUI screens. Unfortunately, the original game uses a lot of 'hard-coded' functions that we cannot reuse for our own purposes. We have to make do with a very limited set of generic functions.
This means that there are a lot of things we would like to do that are either impossible, or require a lot of complicated scripting for something that should be really simple.
To make matters worse, designing a GUI screen is quite painful too. It requires editing an XML file and tweaking the size and location of all the buttons, check boxes, edit boxes, until everything fits and looks nice. Had they included a visual GUI designer in the toolset, we could just draw it on the screen the way we want it.
Instead we have to start up the module to see if the GUI looks good. Then tweak the values some more and restart, only to find out that the GUI doesn't show up at all because there is a problem in the XML file, like a space in the wrong place, or a single quote that should be a double quote.
Text Macro tool
My project for today was to check out the Text Macro tool that was suggested. It is also GUI based, but fortunately someone else did the hard work of designing it. The person did a great job too, it is really clean and well designed. I have to say it is a bit complex to use at first, but well worth figuring out.
That is not to say it is just a matter of downloading it and importing it into the module. As usual it did not work out of the box. Some molding, tweaking and tearing hair out was necessary to make it work in our module. The usual stuff, really.
At the end of the day it seems to be working well. So next update we should have a nifty new addition! And probably some new bugs as a bonus.
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