Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Apr. 28, 06)

chevalier · Jan 3, 2018

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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

dialog boxes
We have "NWN1" and "NWN2" style dialogues. NWN1 dialogues are, well, pretty much just like the ones in the first game. NWN2 style dialogues are more like cinematic cutscenes.

Patrick K Mills, NWN2 Production Tester

The Grumpy Strumpet Monster Check List
Until Obsidian actually says something is definately in, you shouldn't assume it will be. Blurry screenshots and confused reporters are really not the best of resources.

Forum Feels Useless
Talking out of turn, that is, without clearing things through the publisher and license holder, is not just bad from a contractual point of view. If we talk about feature X, which we really love and have implemented to 98%, but then have to cut it, people remember us talking about feature X to the exclusion of all other features that did make it in the game.

This is what I call "talking out the Molyneux Hole." He talks about some feature, like trees growing in Fable, it's not in the game. Now even people like myself that have never even played Fable can tell you that he said the trees would grow and they didn't. So we could talk about a feature you want and care about, then you go off and make your plans, then it gets cut... now you are more screwed than when you were ignorant.

Speaking as someone who's done a lot of modding and hobby design, let me give you some general modding advice. Don't make your plans around features that you aren't 100% sure about, and even if you are 100% that they will be there, don't assume that the feature will be exactly as you imagined it. It's best when making plans on a modification of an as-yet-unreleased game to be as generic as possible, if you've got a real desire to implement something based on feature X, write it up, but don't make it integral to your design. The design on a mod should be scalable, you can bring it up and toss features in like crazy if you have the time and technical ability, but at the most bare you should have a design that is totally bare-bones and *could* be done on current tech.

As I said, this is just general advice.

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While its true that Molyneux hypes his games (especially Black and White)... they're generally very good. and dont bash Fable if you havent played it because its one of the best RPG's to date.
I wasn't bashing it, merely pointing out that I never played it and had barely heard anything about it prior to release. But the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanied its release, mostly complaints about features hyped but not included, was loud enough to reach me in my ivory tower.

gamebanshee art and clean medieval cities
Neverwinter is not a medieval city, it's a fantasy city. Some fantasy cities are dirty, some are clean. It's all up to the GM because ultimately it's a game, not a simulation.

To bring verisimilitude into the whole thing, Neverwinter is the "City of Skilled Hands" and it has already been established in the previous game that it has a functioning (and lavish) sanitation network. If it's got a sewer system far in advance of anything in existence today, why should we expect mounds of human waste to be piled up i the town square?

More: Since the city presented in the screenshots (any city in NWN2 for that matter) is not based on a tileset, but on a terrain map with placeables, you can make it look as clean or dirty as you want. You need to remember that with NWN2 you'll have far greater control over how your stuff looks than you did in the previous game.

NWN2 teaser trailer
The trailer was made for the press event in Lyons and had sort of a "halloween" theme. I don't think it was ever meant to be released publicly.

Iron Golem

I'd expect it to look like... uhm... the Iron Golem ? The one depicted on the Monster Manual ?

But hey, after seeing the artwork of their view of an "attractive upper female body" on a Marilith I guess I should expect anything.
Well, pg 135 of the MM has a picture of an Iron Golem that looks, unsuprisingly, a lot like ours.

I've already submitted most of the bad links and stat-block errors, but if you guys see something that you think I might have missed, go ahead and post it here. The official announcement on the site wasn't supposed to go out until we had a chance to make sure everything worked (most of the guys in the office still don't know it's up) but what's done is done.

Characters from other Bioware/Black Isle D&D games?
The big problem here with using Planescape and Planescape characters is multifold. For one, it's a retired campaign setting- WotC doesn't use it anymore and probably wouldn't be keen on approving things from it. For this reason alone it would be unlikely to see the Nameless One, on top of all the other things wrong with the idea.

Furthermore, the Forgotten Realms from 2.5 was part of the Great Wheel cosmology, which was essentially the same thing as Planescape (see the Manual of the Planes & Planar Handbook 3.0/3.5 for more information on the Great Wheel.) However, that's been all retconned out, and the FR in 3.5 has its own cosmology, distinct from the Great Wheel of Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Planescape, etc. In fact, the cosmology of the FR is entirely inconsistent and incompatable with the Great Wheel. There is footnote, here worth noting, that the plane of Shadow (which was upgraded from a demiplane to a full fledged plane in the transition from 2nd to 3.0) can connect different cosmologies together. Still, that's a serious stretch for any official WotC product to make.

Of course, every GM I know continues to use the Great Wheel and old Planescape materials when running any kind of planar-themed FR game because they don't *like* the FR cosmology. That's not an option for someone making an official WotC product, though.

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I always looked at the FR cosmology rules as just the way people in the realms percieve the heavens. I never took it to mean that there couldn't be any intermingling of the diferent prime planes. But then again, I never felt that WoTC every declared it either way....did they??
I can't cite anything, but yes, I do believe they have made that clear.

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Anyone up on the current FR cosmology? I don't have any 3.5 materials handy. How bad does it suck?
The primary complaints I have about it is that it's just not very interesting. Everything is some specialized heaven or hell. Want to go to dwarf heaven? elf heaven? How about spider hell? It really seems more concerned with the Faerunian afterlife than with exciting places to visit.

Faerun IS the material plane, no more planeswalking so you can visit a place entirely invented by the GM. One of the nice things about the Great Wheel is that the GM can play in an established setting and use all the benefits that brings, but also has a ready excuse to throw in a setting of his or her design. You can't do that with the FR cosmology. Toril is here, there is no where else, end of story. To me, that feels artificially limiting and kind of unfair.

They've left a back door in the rules so that a GM can still get to places he wants to get to without having to deal with a realms historian. That is, the elemental plane of shadow and astral storms can both toss people into other cosmologies, as the plane of shadow and the astral plane both intersect all possible cosmologies. Still, it would be impossible for a canon product, be it book or computer game, to get that by WotC, I think.

The above are all my opinions and not those of my company, and I intend no disrespect towards WotC or anyone else. But in my games, I use a combination of the Great Wheel as presented in the 3.0/3.5 Manual of the Planes and in the Planescape sourcebooks.

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Unless (unnecessarily) changed recently, Shadow isn't an element, so there is no "Elemental" Plane of Shadow.

It's a Demi-Plane.
My mistake, it's not an elemental plane, but in the transition from 2nd to 3rd it was upgraded from a demi-plane to a full fledged transitive plane on par with the ethereal and astral. Manual of the Planes P59, FRCS P256

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I never bothered reading that book
Out of curiosity, was it some kind of "in-game" change with factual backing ("The Great This-Or-That expanded the demi-plane") or was it just strict imposing ?
I don't know. It seems to serve as a decent counter-point to the somewhat confusing and difficult to visualize etheral plane (which I don't like) while still providing a lot of the same functionality (travel anywhere in the Material Plane quickly.)

Nothing new under the NWN2 sky
I don't normally respond to stuff like this, I actually have a rule about replying to stuff lke this. However, something caught my eye:

Quote: The problem here is that your don't realize what you're doing and you follow a classical game devellopment strategy (Time=Money) while you're not doing a "classical" game.
When time does not equal money, please notify me. You'll be able to find me chilling out on the frozen beaches of the lake of fire.

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I agree that this thread is nothing new, and that it's silly to offer marketing/business advice on a forum like this and expect to be taken seriously. But is it fair to accuse the OP of being a troll? I didn't notice any malicious intent.
What is the purpose of this thread other then trolling?
I agree that this thread is nothing new, and that it's silly to offer marketing/business advice on a forum like this and expect to be taken seriously. But is it fair to accuse the OP of being a troll? I didn't notice any malicious intent.
He did sort of suggest that we should be working pro bono, as though our landlords could be paid off with screenshots and our children could consume code for breakfast, ("No more Javascript until you finish your Perl!")

Also the comment about how the folks here at Obsidian have no chance of measuring up to people with years of experience dungeon mastering. Do I really need to comment on how silly that statement is?

Whats the point of nice skies when we can't even look up?
Don't some of our screenshots show sky? What makes you think we use the same camera interface as NWN1?

List of creature and terrain types to start planning Mods?
Yeah, the guy above me has it right. The way we handle exteriors means that if you have a good image editing program for doing terrain textures, you can pretty much do anything you want, te only limit might be that we don't have enough placables of a certain type to do exactly what you want. Still, it's not impossible to work around with a little imagination.

Even without making your own textures, we have a ton of them already, since you can blend textures and paint colors onto them, you have a collosal range of possibilities.

As for the creatures, watch the website. If it's on the site you can be reasonably certain it will be in the game. Other sources I'd be wary of.

More: You guys make fun, but I know for certain that the "confirmed creature list" I've seen floating around has a lot of errors on it. I'm too low on the food chain to actually get away with correcting it, as all creature announcement stuff has to go through WotC.

And need I remind you that at one time horses were confirmed as in? All I'm saying is, if it's one of the featured creatures you can be pretty sure it will be in. If it's in other official stuff like screenshots or mentioned in a dev post, you can be *reasonably* certain it will be in.

If it's mentioned in a preview, well, no disrespect to the fine gaming journalists of the world, but 60% of those guys don't even take notes.

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Well, there's the rub, eh? None of the screenshots on the NWN2.com site have any creatures in it, and the only critter on the site right now is the iron golem. If we assume that any info that is "old" might have a chance of not making it, and then Devs telling us that most of the images featured in magazines are old ... well, you get the idea.

I think that's why the OP asked the question, so he could start planning. If it's too early to plan, that's cool, just tell us it's too early to plan. We'll deal. Or tell us not to worry ... that even though there are errors in the critter list, most folks will likely be OK because the critters are obscure and likely not to be used much.

J
As a modder myself, one thing I've learned is to never tie any of my designs too tightly to any specific feature, or in this case, monster, that I don't have in my hands right now. Don't plan on the speculative, plan on the actual.

If we released a creature list now there could very likely be changes even in the final hours before release.

More: And just so everyone understands what I mean, it's never too early to start planning. You already know that you can start scripting and writing dialogue, drawing maps, setting things up in your head. But if your idea absolutely REQUIRES an elaborate staged fight between a displacer beast and a swarm of myconids and a killer bunny rabbit, you might want to hold off on getting too attached to that scene.

I hate to dodge the question and not just give you a creature list. I'd like nothing more, but I can't do that, honestly I don't think anyone on the team can at this juncture. Not only is there the WotC issue, but cuts are always happening.

It's frustrating, as a modder, to be limited in what you can and can't do by the original content provider. It's horrible and frustrating- and sadly, the nature of the beast.

Celebrate the Githyanki!

"There are all different kinds. We tried to make them interesting. There's a dwarf. There's a Tiefling. There's a Githyanki."
Know that primes often confuse the children of Gith with the followers of Zerthimon, and mispeak on the subject. Know also that journalists hailing from the material plane know even less about the subject.

Yugoloths
Wasn't there a Yugoloth of some sort in IWD?

I like Yugoloths, I can't find any mention of them in any of the FRCS stuff, though. They may have been retconned out of FR.

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True, there is not Hades or Gehenna in FR (the yugoloths are in the Manual of The Planes). But no one actually uses that FR cosmology do they?

This begs another question. Will NWN2 use the great wheel cosmology (substituting in FR deities)? I say this because I know this is what most DMs I know do. Indeed, a lot of FR CRPGs I have played have done so as well, or at least, have made reference to planes that definately aren't in the FR cosmology.
The manual of the planes itself is very loose when talking about cosmologies. is the FR cosmology only a recommendation? WoTC has obviously let it slide before.

I mean, I don't see any reason to limit yourself uneccessarrily to the FRCS cosmology.
When you are making an official WOTC product you have to use official WOTC rules. And WOTC says FR has its own cosmology. Sorry.

Doesn't mean modders can't use the great wheel. In fact, I encourage them to do so, because I think the FR cosmology is snore-town.

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(there's even a permanent cannon sigil portal, IIRC)
Is that 2nd edition or 3.0/3.5? Cause there is no Sigil in 3.0/3.5 FR.

Many of the mentions of various planar interactions in previous games and books need to remember that almost all of those were based on 2nd edition.

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Patrick, I don't have the book here on work, but IIRC this information comes from Planar Handbook. I may be wrong, of course.

I'll try to check at wotc forums.
Problem with this is that the Planar Handbook only strictly applies to Greyhawk, and not the FR. The Great Tree and the Great Wheel are not the same places, nor are they (as they used to be) different interpretations of the same thing.

Good catch on the Abbey of the Sword.

As I've said before in another thread, the shadow plane connection is really more of a loophole for GMs to use, and I very seriously doubt that an official WotC product will be going back to Sigil anytime soon. Even if the places were part of the same cosmology, which they are not, I think the guys at WotC are (wisely) concentrating their dollars on their biggest moneymakers, which for now are FR and Eberron, Sigil is a part of neither.

For now.

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I see, but nothing preventes a game such as NWN2 to use Yugoloths (even if only an arcanoloth in disguise lost somewhere) or Sigil (very unlikely) if it's official.

Even Lady of Pain and the factions are present in the Planar Handbook.

This planow of shadow loophole will eventually lead us to anauroch?
Again, the Planar Handbook does not describe FR.

The shadow plane loophole is just that, a loophole. I do not think it would fly with WotC.

The portal to Sigil in F&P is great and canon, but not only is it described as being one-way, WotC approval is by fiat, not by established standards & practices.

If WotC wants Yugoloths, you can have Yugoloths. If they don't, you don't get them in the official package, rules and source materials be damned. If they want Sigil, you get Sigil. Otherwise you make it yourself with our awesome toolset. We can ask for Yugoloths and the Cage, but they can say no and that's the final word. Period.

As for if Yugoloths exist in the FR, I don't know. Things that were around in 2nd were retconned in 3rd and I don't see anything in the FRCS that describes Yugoloths or where they might come from. I don't doubt that they are around, since anything that's in a MM or the Fiend Folio is usually fair game for any setting you want to use it in. The FR cosmology is vauge enough that you can imagine creatures coming from all sorts of different places.

In the end, though, the only thing that keeps the community from doing this sort of stuff is technical limitations and the will to finish projects.

PS. Someone please make Sigil to NWN2, I have Planescape campaigns I want to adapt.

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As for Sigil.. lol.. man, I so learned my lesson. You guys give me a toolset capable of handling it without a complete retrofit and I may put on my "I'm a masochist" shirt again.
OK, done.

Seriously, you could make a really convincing Sigil with our toolset, not to mention the crazy things you can do with shaders and our VFX editor to make planeswalking both convincing and utterly cool.

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Does this mean we will be able to "destroy" placeable object's collision detection to make an Ethereal Plane? (In NWN you can remove a creature/player collision detection but not a placeables.)

I've been trying various techniques to make an Ethereal Plane in NWN but without being able to give each "ethereal" player the ability to pass through objects/doors/walls while preventing the non-ethereal players from doing so makes it pretty much impossible not to mention pointless. It would help to have VFX that can only be seen by specific players too.

-420
Well, what would be best is if you could toggle the ethereal on and off, allowing players to use the ethereal plane to travel through walls and doors and such. Something approximating this might be possible through clever scripting, but it would be impossible to turn the collision on placeables but not on walls. That's a maybe, I don't know for sure and a lot of it depends on how we wind up handling that sort of thing.

Doing a full ethereal where you can walk through everything, including walls, would require a lot of work outside of the toolset, but it would be possible, though you'd still not be able to toggle it.

Planar Exploration
Making planes the same way they are described in the books, particularly the movement rules, is going to be difficult to make perfectly accurate. For that you are better off using... actually there really isn't any engine out there that can do Limbo, is there? You are better off using the imagination engine.

That said, you can make some really cool looking areas, and with scripting and the VFX editor you should be able to make some very awesome areas that are good enough for anyone but super nerds. I say "good enough" because you have to comprimse when going from a setting that relies only on your imagination and communication ability to build words to a computer game where everything is very very strict and mathy. (Computers, for those not "in the know," are full of numbers. Like, hundreds of them.) And honestly, if it is cool and looks nice, who really cares that the game can't procedurally handle the morphic properties of the plane of Limbo?

More: No.

More: Right, certain rules are going to be hard as hell to implement no matter what. Morphic reality is an extreme example, but even something as seemingly easy as determining how many planes you are from your patron deity is really a nightmare when you get into it.

On the other hand, some of the things you get with this toolset will make getting the "look" right for planes easy- not only easy, but fun.

More: It would be really cool to have individual modmakers dedicated to certain planes and such, like the Tamriel Rebuilt Project for Morrowind.

But honestly, in all my years of modmaking (going on a decade now) I've never seen a project like that work out.

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Patrick was saying that the shipping toolset may be able to do something ala Sigil. I'm very anxious to see how/why. There'a a thread about Yugoloths around here somewhere where we talked about it.
I should clarify, the existing toolset won't "do" Sigil for free or anything. You'll still have 3dsmax work to do in order to make the placeables, etc. Thing is, and it's very possible that I'm wrong, but I think it will be a lot easier to put Sigil type buildings into our game than it was to build Sigil tilesets and add them to NWN1.

As for creatures, yeah, it's just what we ship with, though it's not impossible that someone will release a Granny exporter at some point.

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So, if we want new creatures, we'll have to wait for patches or maybe a "downloadable creatures pack of the month" that an obsidian live team would produce.
I won't touch this since I'm not qualified to answer it and it's been covered elsewhere in more detail than I could hope to provide.

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But it would however be possible to make an exterior map where the height map itself was designed to be a "tube" shape (ie the ends higher than the middle) to try and simulate sigil would it not?
If you mean like a U shape, then yes, that's easy. If you mean a full torus, then no, that's impossible.

A quick question for the devs involving dragons, and an elephant standing on a ball
I'm looking at the animations right now and I think the dragon walk is sufficiently draconic. You'll just have to take my word for it until we can get some movies out.

Creatures of Nwn2
Our creatures look, in almost all circumstances, exactly like the ones in the Monster Manual.

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Our creatures look, in almost all circumstances, exactly like the ones in the Monster Manual.
No offense though, some of the art in the MM and MM2-3 sucks.
I won't take offense, I didn't draw it. Neither did anyone who works here.

Pit Fiend vs Balor.. 3.5e

What I find strange is that both stand 12 feet tall, yet the Pit Fiend is only 800 pounds, while the Balor is 4500...

Contrary to what I would think from that, Pit Fiend is stronger and has the grappling abilities.
Welcome to D&D, where pure darkness has mass (a lot of it, check the nightwalker) and dragon disciples are born only once every 30,000 years (dragon disciple description in DMG.)

</blockquoteAdam Brennecke, Programmer

Screenshots on Gamespot

I approve of this dire wolf; fur looks great.
Those cows are weirding me out, though. Speed tree uses projection maps for shadows, right? Are they going to correctly interact with character and object shadows? Also, the hair on that vampire is very win. If the granny issue never gets fixed, I'm going to cry. I mean that.
We aren't using SpeedTree's solution for shadows. Trees use our unified shadow system, so yes, trees will interact properly with characters and objects.

Jason Keeney, Programmer

another height map question..
It might require a little tricky-ness (in other words, the solution wont be very generic)... but if I understand you correctly, I think you should be able to do what you're asking for. And yes.... making the top of some overhanging boulder walkable would make whatever is underneath it non-walkable.

Shane K. DeFreest, NWN2 Community Manager

NWN2 Release date!
Im going to state this once, and only once. These forums are for NWN2 discussion. I'm not going to comment on these forums about the choices other publishers have made with previously released products I have been associated with.

I will say this all publishers choose to release information for a various reasons at various times. As with any job, some of those choices I have agreed with and some I have not.

I will reiterate again, these forums are for nwn2 discussion only. Other questions, comments, or opinions can be sent to me personally via PM or by way of email to nwn2@maverickpr.net

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Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Apr. 28, 06)

chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran