Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Apr. 24, 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.

Frank Kowalkowski, Lead Programmer

ATTN: PW people RE: module sizes: Part V
Hey guys,

I've read over quite a few of these posts and the question on everyone's mind seems to be--how big can a PW module be. I'll address that in just a second.

To reiterate on what Josh has said, the campaign structure we've set up will allow multiple modules to be linked together. Most party-based adventure campaigns will never need to worry about the size of walkmeshes. You could theoretically have 300 modules linked together, but the caveat is that 'you must gather your party before venturing forth' when performing a module transition. The OC that ships with NWN2 will be broken into dozens of modules (for a variety of non-walkmesh reasons such as workflow as well) but the players will generally not notice it at all. We've been running in this mode for months.

So how many areas could a module such as a PW theoretically support? That is a function of several things--mostly walkmesh information. The server loads every area in the module including its walkmesh info. It needs to do this so that area transitions, etc can be performed smoothly and that AI can path in non-player areas. An exterior, maximum sized area generates about a 20MB walkmesh. Extra area information can run about 5MB (since trees, etc are now their own object type). All of this information needs to be resident on the server.

In a dedicated server situation, you could wind up with 40 maximum sized areas in a 1GB memory area (give or take). Again, that is with maximum sized exterior areas.

The walkmeshes on the exteriors are much finer in detail than the original game because of the heightmapping. In order to get the organic look, we need to have smaller walkmesh faces. This problem goes away on interiors where we know what each tile is going to look like and can customize the walkmesh for lower overhead. Hence, the interiors are several orders of magnitude smaller than the exteriors in walkmesh size. The largest interior walkmesh size I can recall off the top of my head was about 1MB. That was a maximum sized dungeon. Depending on the tile makeup, you could probably go larger, but it's doubtful it would be anything significantly in excess of 1MB.

We are working on some optimizations that will reduce the size of the walkmeshes--but they probably won't be drastically smaller than they are now. However, because we aren't tile restricted on exteriors, it's entirely feasable you can have the village at the base of a mountain and the snow capped mountain paths all in the same area. Previously, if you wanted to change the 'look' of a region, you needed to swap tilesets which required an area transition. Now you can have a village hub with swamps, ruins, etc all on the same map.

I think the best answer is 'wait and see' if you are unsure about how to design your PW for NWN2. The toolset is a similar, but different beast, and you may find that you can do more with fewer areas in NWN2. Being able to sculpt the terrain to your whim gives an incredible amount of power that isn't possible with tiles alone.

Thanks all, I'll try to get back to you guys if I have any additional information.

J.E. Sawyer, NWN2 Lead Designer

Multiplay in OC?
Yep, you'll be able to play through the OC in multiplayer, though it really works best as a single-player game (much like the BG games).

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Ah, excellent.

I was under the impression that companions worked more like KotOR's... how will that work out in multi-play? Shared control? Companions divided between players? Companions omitted?

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I believe they are all under the control of the "main" PC.

Since you have 3 more months, can we get cleric domains?

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Well, getting rid of knockdown/discipline would be a good start if there's anything that needs to be cut. People around here utterly despise it...and i guess you could say i'm one of them.

Oh yes, and the Parry skill could also benefit from a trip to the garbage can.

And lets not forget Taunt...now there's skill that collects more dust than the Swiffer Sweeper.

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Fantastic. Fighters are now left with three class skills.

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Yeah, because we all know that despite all the feats they're getting, deep down inside they're still a skill-oriented class.

What a bummer.

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I think it's more than a little strange that you can sarcastically deflect the fact that fighters would lose a number of combat options, whether they come from skills or not.

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I'd say it's about as strange as you "promoting" and defending skills that are basically useless...why? So it can look like we have a plenthora of skills to choose from?

It's the quality that's important, not the quantity.

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You're suggesting we take out things that are known to function in the game engine. How does that save us time for things to be implemented elsewhere?

And as others have pointed out, dismissal of those skills is not universal. Cutting skills that already work as designed might make some people happy, but it would probably annoy other people and it certainly wouldn't give us any extra time.

Want us to fix them? Okay, well what else that's on the list of things to do gets cut?

More: Implementing domains and deities properly costs a lot more time than putting in a single prestige class (especially relatively simple ones like Arcane Trickster).

I'm also not sure how implementing something that forces a player to select a deity and specific domains is going to make them role-play properly. When I played clerics in NWN, I knew what deity they served, I picked appropriate domains, and I role-played accordingly.

I guess in PWs it's annoying when someone comes in as a Cleric of LOL with Evil and Healing as their domains, but that seems to be a minority case. On PWs like ALFA, someone like that wouldn't even get in to begin with.

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Builing a proper well-founded house takes alot more time than erecting a string of shoddy poorly constructed shacks.

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Yeah, I know. As I wrote, I'd love to fix a lot of basic things about how NWN works (bonus naming and stacking would be nice), but doing that hasn't been a priority. We're left with a few months to go and not a whole lot of flexibility for moving things around.

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So what 'Thing Men Was Not Meant To Know' is it that makes the dirty remain ?

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Changing these things was never looked into at all. It's not in any of the design documentation (not even the way it works in NWN1), it wasn't technically reviewed by programming, and it certainly wasn't scheduled.

That isn't to say that those things couldn't be done now. But now we're back to fixing things, not cutting things to make time for something else.

At the beginning of the thread, people were asking for changes to deities/domains. Now were looking at changes to deities/domains and changes to fighter skills.

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I really don't see how Fighters only having 3 class skills is a problem... Normally Fighters don't get above 12-14 Intelligence in a Point-Buy system so it's not like they have a lot of excess skill points to spend.

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I'm the odd-man out, always making fighters with high Int and absorbing the cross-class skill penalties!


Nathaniel Chapman, NWN2 Q&A

Skin Colors
When creating your character in-game, you are restricted to a set of racially appropriate skin tones (for instance, Drow have several choices, all of which are either dark or very dark). However, in the toolset, you can tint creatures and characters any way you like, as long as the creature is tintmapped.