Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Apr. 06, 06)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 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.

J.E. Sawyer, NWN2 Lead Designer

Say goodbye to the radial menu [Part 2]

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Ideally, you want all functionality at the top level, but obviously in a game like NWN with so much functionality available this is impossible. Even two levels deep is never going to work.

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It will, and it does. Other than spells, which have been moved to their own quick cast menu, there's nothing that necessitates going to more than two levels if you remove the arbitrary limit of 8 per level. The logical question most people ask here is, "Why not just remove the arbitrary limit of eight per level on the radial?" Please read below.

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Quote: Dropping the radials solves nothing, and loses the clear spatial layout which makes shallow nested radials so nice to use with the mouse. The problems with nested functionality are solved with more quickslots and the quickspells UI controls, I don't see how dropping the radials improves anything at all.

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Maya uses radial menus and stacks items so they can fit a virtually infinite number of items on them. There are a few problems with this. First, you are still effectively always subdividing your interface by the number of items in it. This means that items in them will move and change position based on the number of elements. Three items in a radial are separated by 120 degrees each. Ten items in a radial are separated by 36 degrees each. If you play a character that has three elements in a list instead of ten, all of those elements change position from character to character. Since we allow (and ideally encourage) the player to control companions in NWN2, this means you will frequently see a different layout for the same type of actions.

With a vertical drop-down menu, options common to all objects of that type can appear in the same position at all times. Options specific to that particular instance can always be placed at the end. In this way, players learn that the common stuff is always a certain movement away and the special stuff is always at the bottom.

Stacking radial options removes one of the main advantages of radial menus, which is selection based on a travel vector. Stacked options require hot-spot selection, leaving radials with all of the problems of vertical drop-downs and additional problems of their own.

To extend the radial beyond the limit of eight would require either stacking options or increased subdivision of the interface circle, neither of which really help in my opinion. It only really works in Maya because (for the most part) those options don't change much. It's not the same in an RPG like NWN.