Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News

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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.

FrankK, Programmer

Animation Editor
If you are asking whether we will release any tools that allow you to edit the animations, the answer is probably not. We'll be starting from scratch on the animations, using new rigs, a new file format and new in-engine playback routines.

Heads and Helmets
We are certainly looking at solutions to allow for open-faced helms.

Normal Mapping
<p class="quote">"Hello new guy making his first post. So After reading an interview by Feargus this morning here, I wanted to discus Normal Mapping for the Neverwinter Nights 2 and for the mod community. Personally, I work in the game industry as an artist on a title using Normal Mapping for Characters and environments . This has allowed me to be able to see that Normal Mapping might be a trend best left optional . Currently I am working on characters and at best the High Poly Normal Source is taking between 4-6 weeks to create . Environment are taking slightly less time based on the complexity of the object being modeled but still incredibly time consuming . I think not who has 4-6 weeks of spare time for one model ! I look at games like Soul Caliber 2 or Dead or Alive 3 amd they have amazing graphics and no normal mapping so despite the Doom 3 hype it's possible to make superior graphics without normal maps .

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When you have a fighting game, you pretty much have the luxury of not having tons of level geometry or characters on screen at once. You can blow your poly budget on the fighters (heck you can make the environments look good too when you have levels that small). Normal mapping will be the 'de facto' solution for lighting, but a model with no normal map (or if the user has normal mapping turned off) will get vertex lighting.

The Witcher
The Witcher uses MAX as their level editor and generates lightmaps (which puts a damper on dynamic lighting solutions). In that respect, their engine is much more like KotOR's engine than NWN's engine. For the type of game they are making, it's a wise decision. We will be moving the Aurora Engine in and entirely different direction. Brian, Jason and Erik have done some amazing things with the engine already that makes me a happy fan of the series.