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.

Ferret, Developer

Haste
Thanks for the feedback. For PnP, I think the 3.5 change was a very good move. Having played a high level caster with Haste, there was some crazy stuff you could pull off. But in a CRPG, I think the issues are trickier. Mages have a tougher life because unlike a round-based game, it's harder to set up a defensive line and keep your artillery protected in the rear. So the poor d4 hit point Wizards and Sorcerers have the hulking main-line fighters on them a lot.

Tab Highlighting

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This would be one of those cases where you can assign more significance to skills, which is a good thing in itself in a typically hack n' slash laded cRPG. As many have suggested in this thread and others; how about tying the search and spot skills to what is revealed when using TAB?

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The problem with that is effectively players will have to pixel hunt. If you take a character with a low Spot and Search, you're reliving the "good" ol' days, and doing the traditional wailing and gnashing of teeth bit. And even if you have a good Spot and Search skill, in the back of your mind you may be thinking, "Is it good enough?" And thus with the wailing and gnashing for even those folks. Commenting on another thread, it may be possible to have a script command to deactivate blue glowies on an object-by-object basis. That would help with sneaking in enemies. That's some functionality that could be handy if used properly. No promised, though, we're pretty early in the game.

Writing
I'm afraid no l33t speak. You D00DZ will just have to live. Seriously though, our goal is to write appropriately for the Realms and avoid modernisms and such. The game should be sprinkled with humor, but not "breaking the fourth wall" kind of humor. More situational and contextual comedy that is appropriate for the story.

FrankK, Programmer

XML

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Lets see, the advantages of GFF to XML are not exclusive to, but do include:-

1. The GFF files are already parsed, and guaranteed (as a result) to be legal. XML on the other hand is not machine usable until it has been processed internally into something that will be remarkably like GFF. Also XML files, being hand editable, and having a relativly complex structure, are far more likley to contain syntax errors and the parser has to be much more careful to check for errors. This means that using GFF files speeds up the load time of the game. I know that I prefer to play, not stare at splash screens.

2. The GFF file allows commonly used values to be indexed by string ID rather than name. This makes for much faster searches of values at runtime. i.e. less laggy scripts.

3. GFF files can efficinelty store binary data in machine native form. In XML it would require a text based encoding. GFF files will thus simply take up less space on disk. And less space in memory - meaning less swap file, less paging, and more speed.

XML files might make sense during module development, but I would expect that a "compiled" module would include all data in GFF or a GFF like structure.

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You're assuming that XML would be the only format supported. It is simple to create a converter to binary data that would resolve these concerns. BTW, you wouldn't want to hand edit XML in any event. The whole point of using XML as a format would be to allow for easier creation of tools to process it. This is all sort of moot discussion anyway, as no decisions have been made regarding whether or not we'll be changing stuff like this.

GUI
The GUI is being rewritten and enhanced...'nuff said for now.

[ August 31, 2004, 18:33: Message edited by: chevalier ]