BioWare Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

Here are today's BioWare forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Toolset Heating: I was running the toolset for quite a while on my laptop in university, and I can attest that it's the best way of getting your batteries drained fast and your CPU decreasing speed to prevent overheating. The reason for this is that the toolset is a very expensive application - it is running the graphics engine in the area window. On a Desktop PC you will not notice it usually, but notebooks are far more prone to heat issues due to heavy CPU activity than Desktops.

A few things you can do:
- set the graphic options in the toolset as low as possible
- disable sound and music playback in the toolset

Toolset Heating (2): Multiple bags of holding add a significant number of inventory slots to a player, which will cause functions that loop over all inventory items to be slower than normal. In NWN, each inventory operation needs to be requested and confirmed by the server (thats why you sometimes have ghosted items, the client waits for approval from the server). Scripting operations that do nested loops/recursions through a players inventory are most likely to cause lag when multiple bag of holdings are involved. I would suggest to make bag of holdings rare items in your world.

Patch 1.63:

Quote: Thank you for the update. Do we know when the 1.63 patch is scheduled to come out?

When it is done. Sorry, we can't give you a fixed date or even estimate right now, that patch is going to be a huge thing, probably the largest non expansion pack releated patch we've done so far in term of code changes / bug fixes.

Spell Effects: Personally, after experiencing the incredible hellball VFX firsthand (don't ask), I'd like to rip out the part of the hellball VFX where the ground opens and attach it to the earthquake spell. Now that's not going to happen officially, but community groups like the spellman project could do it. The problem with earthquake is that a lot of its effects (i.e. topple/damage buildings) can not be applied in the NWN engine with its static tilesets, ground splitting open (see above), which makes the spell significantly less powerful than it's PnP version.

Granted, a module could have a nice special situation where this spell would become handy (collaps the temple, kill all the evil priests and zombies inside), but these things are quite unlikely to make people choose this spell, so we originally intended to beef it up with a bit of damage, maybe special damage against constructs, etc, but this was too different from the PnP version, so we weren't allowed to. That is one of the problems you are facing when working with a license, it's hard to make changes to things that are established, even if these changes would make perfectly sense in a different environment like computer games.

On the other hand it makes a lot of sense for the license holder to protect the licensed property from being altered beyond recognition, it would damage the value of the license and, as seen more than once, will upset fans loyal to the license/game system (- don't ask me how BGA fits into this picture however, I don't know). This doesn't mean that using a license is a bad thing, working with things like D&D and StarWars has appeal and benefits, but you need to be aware of the limitations that come with those.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Earthquake: We initially had a different implementation of earthquake that made it far more useful/powerful/balanced for the level of spell that it is. However, the original implementation wasn't approved by WotC. Changes had to be made to the earthquake spell and the final approved version of the spell is the one that is now in the game.

More:

Quote: Were you privy to what exactly WotC objected to, what the spell was like before, and that sort of thing, or is just a 'I overheard some guys talking about it at the water cooler' sorta thing?

The earthquake spell (as per its PnP description) doesn't translate well to the PC and as such probably wasn't a good choice of spell to try and include in the game by us. For example the NWN engine doesn't allow crumbling of buildings or crevices opening up in the ground and swallowing creatures. We attempted to make the spell more powerful in other ways for play balance, but that made the spell deviate more from the PnP description. From what I remember, it was the deviation from the official rules that caused the changes to be required.

This is a perfectly normal part of game development when you use some one else's license in your game. The license owner wants to protect their license. Thus, the license holder will typically do some sort of approval process on game content. Sometimes things don't get approved and you have to change them. I don't think anyone likes to make changes to things that don't get approved (since you always have your own vision of how you would like things to be). However, if there was no approval process, then we probably wouldn't be able to use the license in the first place and the D&D license brings a LOT of good things to NWN. That's why we used it. The great thing about NWN is that if you don't like the current spell implementation, NWN gives you the power to change the script to make it do what ever you want.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

NWN Progress: BioWare's first Neverwinter Nights announcement and the corresponding concept demo coincided with the unveiling of D&D 3rd Ed. at GenCon '99 (August). The first demo using "real" code was at E3 2000 (May).

Toolset Code: There's no Delphi in NWN. But remember, the toolset was written using C++ Builder and C++ Builder is a C++ wrapper around Delphi's Object Pascal wrapper around MS' Windows C/C++ API, so it's a close approximation.