Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Feb. 07, 05)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault from Obsidian Forums. 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.

Brian D. Lawson, Programmer

Better Graphics and ...
I think the big thing to understand is that the single player campaing will come almost entirely from the design department. While Erik works the toolset, Jason works the path finding, collision, and physics, and I work the graphics...those things/areas all amount to tools with which the designers will draw from in creating the single player campaign. Keep in mind that they are ALL areas that need to be addressed and improved upon for the game to have a chance at success while being held to the standards in 2006. With that being said, you'd be amazed at what a small, tight knit team can do when firing on all cylinders. I can't wait until we can finally post some screen shots.

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Show us a crate already.

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If it was up to me...I would have shown you all a lot more than a crate by now!!

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You would have showed us a shovel too! You are just to good to us. I see where you are coming from Mr. Lawson, but Biwoare said similar things about NWN 1 and we all know how bad that game's OC was. I am just trying to be cautious.

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Let's be clear here. I'm not making any promises at all about the OC. All I'm saying, is that anybody and everybody on the programming team is doing their part in terms of providing the design team with all the necessary tools they need to create a good OC. The burden of actually creating that OC unfortunately is out of my hands and fully in the hands of the design department. That's the only point I'm trying to make. Ultimately, whether the game is a success or not depends on everybody's contributions behind the scenes.

will the nwn2 engine support as many units as the dragon age engine?

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I'd just settle for being able to throw out a couple dozen NPCs in something other than a barren wasteland and expect that the framerate would stay reasonable. I seriously doubt we'll see Rome: Total War style interactions, but hopefully something a bit more interesting than NWN.

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I think those are realistic expectations.

More: At this moment, we're currently writing everything according to the DirectX 9.0c specifications. Unfortunately, when you start making exceptions for this card and that card, you're essentially defeating the whole point of an API like DX9, which is to unify a core set of features across a variety of video cards that "truly" do support DirectX 9.0. Needless to say, exceptions like that can quickly cause a code base to explode into a mess of card specific code. With that being said, I can't really say one way or the other as to whether we'll support those features of the Radeon class cards. It should also be noted that you can code a similar type of instancing mechanism on 2.0 cards, which is what I'll be doing. However, when a 3.0 card is detected the engine's instancing system will take full advantage of it.

So in either case, the benefits of instancing will still be had.