Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Feb. 15, 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.

Adam Brennecke, Programmer

Supported Video Cards
x800 will run the game. I am using a 9800 right now. It doesn't support shader model 3.0, in which you will see graphic and performance improvements with.

Erik Novales, Programmer

NWN 2 engine....
It's a completely new graphics engine. This is a FAQ, BTW.

So just how easily will scripts transfer

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Quote: But is the current thinking that the structure will BE the NWN scripting functions + additional scripting stuff or will there be significant changes to the functions themselves.

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The plan is to keep the old functions around unless there is a good reason not to do so. If changes are made to them, they will be either bugfixes or of the sort where additional default parameters are bolted on. And then, of course, there will be all the cool new stuff.

Brian D. Lawson, Programmer

Supported Video Cards

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On a side not, my 6800 GT is currently on the way ...

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Mmmm...6800 series. I absoluetly love the NVidia 6800 series cards. Shader model 3.0 is just dreamy.

will the nwn2 engine support as many units as the dragon age engine?
That's a cool shot and definitely instancing at work. But, I will say this. What you see in that shot is actually pretty straight forward. In fact it's easy when you have only a single directional light in the scene affecting ALL instances in the same manner. On top of that, those instances all share the same everything literally (geometry, textures, etc). We'll have more dynamic lights in our scene, as well as a lot more customization available on a per object basis...and it's for those reasons, that instancing for us is quite a challenge.

Ferret Baudoin, Lead Designer

Too many requests?
I will echo some of Jason's sentiments. I know that people on the boards get attached to one idea or another, but a RPG isn't made or broken by a single feature. Some of the things people want, they won't get. But if we do our job right (and I think we're doing very well on this so far) the collection of features combined with the SP campaign should be enough to make this a no-brainer purchase for any PC RPGer.

Tony Evans, Designer

Dragon Disciples

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I agree, it wouldn't take a whole lot of work and would add alot to the game overall. But you have to a character that is in the "large" catagory of larger to fly.

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Usually when a fan says something like "it wouldn't take a lot of work" it means "it wouldn't NOT take a lot of work." Note that the two NOTs cancel each other out, meaning in simple terms "it would take a lot of work." However, in this case I believe it translates to "it would take a lot of work AND a complete redesign of the game engine, user interface and gameplay."

I'm not the final shot-caller, but I can say with a high degree of certainty that we will not have mountable, flyable dragons in the game. Despite this dubious shortcoming we fully intend to deliver the most awesome AD&D game you've ever played. If you are still craving dragonflight after playing NWN2 in 2006 then I suggest playing games that have that feature: Drakan, Might and Magic VIII and Dragonstrike to name a few... (Note that the preceding statement is for educational purposes only. Tony Evans, Obsidian Entertainment, Bioware and Atari do not officially endorse SCEA, Surreal Software, New World Computing, 3DO or SSI.) Okay, there was my one attempt at being clever for today. I'll go back to work now...

Is NWN2 not having enough development time?
Thanks to Bioware's trailblazing with the first NWN, we don't need 5 years to complete the sequel. No one at Obsidian will deny that KotOR 2 couldn't have been even better with a little more time, but in my experience that is always the case with ANY project you put your love into. Whether you are making games, books, movies or babies, when it comes time for them to go out the door, you don't feel as if you've finished your work, so much as you have let it go with a wish in your heart. Not to toot Obsidian's horn, but consider this... We had a little over a year to finish KotOR 2, and we have nearly twice as much time for NWN2. And we learned a lot of valuable lessons from KotOR 2 that can be directly applied to making NWN2 as great as possible, and as efficiently as possible.

Rich Taylor, Programmer

GUI Customizeable?

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I love the idea of being able to not only customise my UI via xml, and the addition of customisable buttons would be awesome. I know it's still early days yet, but would it be possible to make our own windows? I mean instead of customising the inventory window, could I make my own window that I could list all of my crafting components and have some buttons that fired off a crafting script?

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As of last Wednesday, it's possible to add new windows by simply adding a new XML file to a directory and adding a line in the ui.ini file that points to that new XML file. So yeah, you can easily add your own windows as things currently stand.