Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Sep. 15, 04)

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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.

Marc Taro, Lead Artist

Open Face Helmets
In this case I can say.....'your welcome'. As in: “yes, of course, there will be open faced helmets....” – you can quote me on that one, which people who read my posts know I *never* say…. We had to go with the single part head back in NWN days - there just weren’t enough parts to go around it the character to have separate hair as well – (if you guys wanted to start mail-bombing publishers demanding raised min-specs, we wouldn’t have to live with some of these limitations *wink, wink*) NWN2 will not have such ancient limitations – it’s about 100 dog years later in graphics tech since we built the first engine…so look forward to open faced helms, caged grills, visors, circlets, anything we can imagine…

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Is Marc BIo or Atari? He talks like he actually worked on NWN....

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HI Volourn - lol - reasonable confusion - I *used* to work for Bioware - where I was lead artist on NWN. I'm at Obsidan now, making a return appearance as lead artist for NWN2....thus the short answer is 'both' I suppose Actually - funny story (super geeky too!) - see that avatar over there on the left - I didn't paint it - that was Mike Sass, the masterfull illustrator behind all the BG2 portraits - but it *is* me...I posed for Edwin...my biggest contribution to BG2!! lol

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That's the Edwin portrait from BG1...

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Well yes that's true - so call me vain - I happen to prefer the thinner version of Edwin - we're talking a few years back here dude, let a guy preserve his illusions....

Fade Geometry

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Making things disappear when you get far away makes sense, to cut down on processor power or whatever, but making things close to you fade away is lame.

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Did you know you can turn off fading geometry? Just go into the options file and choose always on, or always off... then you never have to see your character again smile.gif oops, I mean, you never have to see the ugly fading again....lol we're, of course, thinking on how to do this better in the new game...(it works, but it was never as elegant as the old 2D games - too bad it can't work the same way as the old BG's - but 2D does some things 3D doesn't....)

Motion Capture (Mo-Cap)
I just wanted to throw in my .02c about motion capture - which is that is not inherently 'faster' or 'more agressive' than hand keys - in actual practice a lot of mocap is kind of slow and floaty...depending on how well it's processed...It's also not in the least bit helpful for an umber hulk...so we will use it as another tool in the kit, but it won't be the magic bullet...

Long Hair
me to…..Believe me, you don’t know how much I would love to have long hair. We're going to try again - like we try every game - but you have to understand it’s a very difficult problem. Very hard to animate the hair to work with all the extreme motion a D&D character goes thru – and to work with all the helmets, shoulder armor, cloaks etc....Physics sim is a potential solution, but not real-time – you want to save juice for the rest of gameplay – and it’s also a matter of limiting number of bones…a dozen pc’s with flowing locks might add up to one less creature in the melee. We’ll try, but of course, (‘cuz I’m a sucker for those blowing strands of anime hair), but I can’t promise anything till we have a tech solution….

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I'm wondering, is there a way to pre-simulate the hair?

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Yes - *if* we do it, we will do it that way...pre-calculate the cloth sim, and just play it back runtime - not dynamic, but baked into every other anim...the issue there is that we *still* have to have mulitple bone chains in the hair. Otherwise it's going to cut thru your face. If we can afford the bones then great - but that's not something we know for sure, without some testing anyway....

Portraits
I haven’t had time to read all the responses, but there is one common misconception that I thought I'd address - which is that you would not have any *independent ability to customize* a theoretical 3D portrait - instead it would be exactly faithful to your in-game appearance and ideally to your damage state (dying, poisoned, diseased), and possibly the type of action you were performing (fighting, resting or stealth)….hope that helps clarify the question…

Chop Tops
The 'chopping' people are discussing was entirely a method to make sure you character did not get obscured when objects came between you and the camera. It wasn’t very granular on NWN, mostly because the tiles were pretty low poly - so one way or another it will be more attractive in NWN2...

Trolls
Gothmog is correct = the troll and the ettercap share skeletons and animaitons....there had to be *some* kind of clever strategy to deliver all the creatures we shipped! I think we can do the troll more justice this time...if we do one that is...we're still planning everything - including the final cut of which creatures are in and which are out...lol - (that comment ought to provoke some discussion right there...)

Bikini or Full armor
wow - huge response here...there is no way I can read all this in my 'daily forum slice of time' - I'll go so far as to say there will be *both realistic and fantastic choices* in the armor sets. It's a game fellas(and fellinas (is that a word?) - so there will be some fun, and some realism. I rarely design something I think is overly sexualized - I mean yuan-ti leather bondage stuff aside... but total realism is a bit dull isn’t it? Gotta run

Brian Lawson, Graphics Programming

Fade Geometry

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Thats the irony of it!!! Things that arent blocking our view just dissapear.

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It's called a bug in the code. The fact that it didn't/doesn't work correctly is obvious. As to whether or not the feature goes or stays...I have no idea. All I know, is I don't like the idea either and I voted to ditch it.

Jason Keeney, Programmer

Motion Capture (Mo-Cap)
Add one more to the "mo-cap aint all its cracked up to be camp." Its often makes more work than it saves and the results are often not as good as what you'd hope for. Also... when a project mentions that it uses mo-cap for animations, thats something I'll often take with a very big grain of salt. I've personally worked on at least one project that had a series of very public motion capture sessions involving lots of media (both print and TV)... and we didnt use one byte of data we got from those sessions. Every antimation in the game was done by hand... even though the back of the box still bragged about mo-cap.

[ September 16, 2004, 20:14: Message edited by: chevalier ]