Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Apr. 19, 06)

Remove all ads!

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.

Adam Brennecke, Programmer

ATTN: PW people RE: module sizes: Part III

---

For reference, so we don't keep asking the same questions, here are the major ones from the last two threads that are unanswered.

"Is a NWN2 tile the same size as a NWN1 tile,"
"what do you mean by active area?,"

Can we have list of the size in megabytes of the average sizes of an area?

i.e, how big on average is a

---

exterior 4*4, interior 4*4
exterior 8*8, interior 8*8
exterior 16*16, interior 16*16
exterior 32*32, interior 32*32?

---

---

Here are a few technical answers:

NWN2 tiles are roughly the same size as NWN1 tiles in terms of meters. Indoor tiles in NWN2 are a bit larger in terms of memory footprint, but outdoor areas are much larger. However, having a ton of placeables in areas, which we do, will greatly increase area git size, as well as the memory footprint of the area when it's loaded.

The NWN2 server will load all areas in the module into memory when the module is loaded. An area that is 'Active' means that it has at least one PC in it. Inactive areas will change AI priorities to a lower level, and being inactive will not free any memory. Active vs Inactive is how we control AI priorities and not memory usage. So a PW server with 90% area inactivity will run better than the same server with only 10% inactivity.

And finally, client machines only load one area at a time.

More:

---

Brennecke, are we correct in assuming that small exterior tilesets will have a much smaller size than large exterior tilesets? (the .are files, if not the .git files)

Doing the math,
a 4*4 tileset would be 16 tiles
an 8*8 tileset would be 64 tiles
a 16*16 tileset would 256 tiles
and a 32*32 tilset would be 1024 tiles

It would make sense that we could have a large number of 4*4s instead of one or two 32*32 areas.

---

Yes.

More:

---

1 am one builder with 2 scripters on my team, we have 170 people registered on our website...so id say its quite an important topic.

id like to know if we can easily edit the world map.

---

Although this is slightly off topic - yes you can edit the world map.

Erik Novales, Programmer

Outdoor maps!
When you export areas, the terrain is exported as well. Basically, it works like it did in NWN1.

Text to Speech Engine
We use it internally for temp voice -- it's a good way to test code and estimate the overall impact on the game of running with voice, but it's nowhere near an acceptable quality level for shipping a game. Maybe in another 10 years or so.

J.E. Sawyer - NWN2 Lead Designer, Obsidian Entertainment

ATTN: PW people RE: module sizes: Part III
I have asked some programmers to help out with these questions, but they have been very busy. I stopped answering questions because some were beyond my technical knowledge and others were certain to raise questions I couldn't answer.

The rarely discussed Tree-Hugging PC: The Druid
I like druids.