Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Mar. 14, 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.

Erik Novales, Programmer

Ability to play module without the required haks?
Why not just have two separate versions of the hak, one with empty music files, and the other with the full versions?

Brian D. Lawson, Programmer

Wide Screen Resolution
Don't worry, they're all supported. On Friday I was just running at 1920x1200.

More:

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Sounds like you need to release some screen shots then

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Soon...

More:

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Hey, quick question. Is NWN2's widescreen achieved by cutting of the top of the standard 4:3 ratio or by adding to the sides? Some games unfortunately do the former (so you actually end up with less of a view by going widescreen), which needless to say was rather annoying.

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No, we're doing it the right way. Like Frank said, if you want to go wide, you'll want to make sure you have the hardware to support pushing those pixels...because it's a LOT of them.

Frank Kowalkowski, Lead Programmer

Enviroments
KotOR 2 featured weather effects, put in by superstar Jay Fong (currently on assignment as Lead on Obsidian's other team). Brian is working on those systems in the coming months. Some of it should be shown by E3, so I think your concerns should be addressed when you see the first screens of the game. The whole team has gone through a lot of effort to upgrade the environments and how they are generated.

Wide Screen Resolution
We want you guys to see the new engine, believe us =) The game looked pretty cool on Friday--Brian's primary monitor is widescreen. Our proof-of-concept demo a few months back was also running in 16x9. Keep in mind, that's a lot of pixels to push, so the hardware to support widescreen will be far in excess of the min spec.

Script control over Cameras
There will be improved camera placement and control. This is actually already in the engine.

Custom Content Round Table Log Posted
Interesting reading. One thing of note is that we are not supporting any models from the first game. I think it was hinted at in the discussion, but I can confirm that no old meshes/tiles/animations will run in NWN2.

Tony Evans, Designer

a few questions.........
These questions and more are answered in the FAQ. Click Here

Rich Taylor, Programmer

Script Functions that need fixing

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Read a few posts back, I have some comments on this. Again, I see no reason to use GetObjectByTag() after a CopyObject, CopyItem, or CreateObject function within the same script. Simply define the function as a object, and you have your object. i.e.

object oCopy = CopyObject( ... );

Works every time. The reason GetobjectByTag() doesn't work is because the object list isn't updated that fast.

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That's basically the problem, yeah. But like Jassper says, you can avoid the problem by using the return value from CopyObject().

Not to mention that that saves a GetObjectByTag() lookup. GetObjectByTag() is a very inefficient function. You'll want to call that function as few times as possible in your scripts. So it's good to take advantage of any place you can avoid using it.