It has been three years since RPGDot's first appearance on the web. In order to celebrate this we asked our visitors to write something for us. Something related to RPG's. Not because it is time to do something back for us, but because we want to put our visitors in the spotlight as they made us into what we are now. If they didn't keep on visiting us and encouraged us to keep on going, we might not have lasted these 3 years. We can't ask all our visitors to write something of course, so we asked a few out of the large number of visitors we have. And if any of you feel left out, RPGDot has always been open to reader submissions ;-)

This fourth day we have a story from Northchild a frequent visitor on our forums, who gives us his opinion on toolsets in general and specifically the Aurora toolset.

"As a result of rapid growth in DV camcorder sales together with increased interest in home video editing, the US retail market for digital video editing solutions grew 387 percent in 2000 over that of 1999."

- Film and Video Magazine, February 2001

One may not immediately associate the sales of DV camcorders with a program that allows you to build and populate your own game worlds. Yet, these programs and DV camcorders share a similar purpose - they allow the lay person to share ideas with millions of people quickly and with style.

Of course, experience with these programs, sometimes called "construction sets" or "toolsets", never hurts. Even Mr. Spielburg didn't just pick up a camera and film E.T. on his first day.

Whether you're an armchair Dungeon Master or just a player looking to extend the life on a purchase in what can be a very expensive hobby, you're likely to encounter amateur creations, or "mods", somewhere in your gaming lifetime. Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot recently wrote an article about wanting to see more and better-quality toolsets on both console and PC games. He states that, "The problem with what I'm demanding is that a very small percentage of the game-playing public--even smaller on console systems--is seriously equipped and interested enough to get their hands dirty and actually learn how to use some of these arcane tools. But you wouldn't have to be a rocket scientist to benefit from the work of people who do have the devotion and skills required to create levels, models, and missions. As with any game out there currently allowing user modification, it's just a download away."

How do toolsets relate to your experience of a game? If you're just interested in playing games, you've probably already purchased some of the summers biggest hits that have included toolsets. Three of these include Warcraft 3, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, and Neverwinter Nights. Links to web sites featuring mods can be found here at RPGDot. Often, the companies that develop or publish games will feature recommended mods from users on their sites. When in doubt, use a search engine to search for relevant sites. A search on Google this morning turned up 20 pages of genuinely useful links to Morrowind mod sites - some sites were quite well-developed and looked like they were going to be around for a long time.

The next step
If you're interested in learning more about creating mods with these toolsets, you may have a longer road ahead of you. While it's true that some toolsets are easier-to-learn than others, most will require time, patience, and quality teaching resources. The four or five games that I've purchased this year have included very little, (if any), in-box documentation about how to make the most of their related toolsets. To be fair, some elements of the toolsets require an intermediate knowledge of computer programming. Asking the developers to include a massive guide and several full-featured tutorials may be unfair given that a well-supported C++ compiler with a good book on programming can cost over $100 USD.

Sound intimidating? Never fear. Even without a degree in software engineering, there's a lot that you can do with these toolsets. There's also a surprising amount of mod-creation support available for popular games. Bioware, the developer of Neverwinter Nights, offers a free tutorial on getting started with their Aurora toolset. Versus Books publishes a guide that may be confusing at times, but can still help you to get started with world-building. Forums are indispensable.

Aurora
I opened and started experimenting with Neverwinter's Aurora toolset a couple of weeks ago. The toolset is easily accessible from the Neverwinter launcher. By selecting "Create a New Module", you'll have started a wizard that will allow you to dive right into setting up an environment. After prompting you to name your module, you're taken to the Area Wizard and given a choice of the sort of environment that you want to create. The choices include Castle Interior, Forest, and Crypt locales, and will be instantly familiar to those who've played the campaign included with Neverwinter nights.

From here, the player is given a few more words of advice from the Module Creation Wizard before being left alone. Given an hour of exploring the well-designed toolset interface, a user who is familiar with Windows applications could design an attractive environment populated with monsters, buildings, trees, and other props.

Although Aurora does a decent job of easing the user into module creation, some reading and extra time will be required to make non-player characters that talk, offer quests, and so forth. Virtually no documentation is provided in the Neverwinter box, but the 35-page tutorial available from Bioware's web site does a good job of introducing some of the intermediate functions.

Scripting
If you have no experience with scripting, be prepared for at least another one to two weeks of part-time study in order to familiarize yourself with the syntax of C and how to apply the hundreds of constants and functions found in Neverwinter to the modules that you build with Aurora. As of mid-July, Bioware hasn't offered complete scripting documentation, so you will be relying on forums and user contributions. Invaluable resources is the Neverwinter Lexicon, an online reference for Neverwinter scripting. Fortunately, Bioware has made chapters of the included campaign available to view, which equals a head-start for enterprising builders. A common script might look like:

void main()
{
   if(GetIsPC(GetEnteringObject()))
   {
      SetPlotFlag(GetEnteringObject(), TRUE);
   }
}

This script would check to see if the object entering an area was a PC. If it was, it would make the PC invulnerable by setting something called a plot flag. Script wizards, with settings similar to those in Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, are available to assist you in setting up some of the basics, but the scripts may still need to be altered to achieve the desired effects.

Finale
On a final note, I was amazed and pleased when I read a FAQ at Bioware's web site starting that they were going to make all the chapters editable in the toolset. This effectively opens up everything that these programmers did for the campaign included with Neverwinter Nights for inspection:

"Not only will you be able to see exactly how we made them, you will also be able to make your own alterations and even export different components for use in your own modules. With Neverwinter Nights, we want to open up our process and make it as transparent as possible to our end users."

I'm not sure if this if this will be the start of a new chapter in game development; one where the lines between the storytellers and the listeners will become more blurred than they had been, but it is clear that if players are patient and resourceful, toolsets offer both a creative outlet and a wonderful alternative to everyday gaming.