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Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Dec. 25, 04)

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Dec 27, 2004.

  1. chevalier

    chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran

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    Remove all ads!
    Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. 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.

    Derek French, Live Team Producer

    1.65 and SoU Chapter 2 issue
    I have a question about your fix: since you mention needing to back up the executables: nwmain.exe and nwserver.exe prior to installion, does this mean that we should revert to these backups after we're done with SoU Chapter 2 to prevent any other problems?
    No, but you will need to revert back before you install the future 1.66 update, only because the update process will fail if you do not.

    More:
    Would it be possible to get discription of what issue this fix addresses in SoU chapter 2.
    There is a custom AoE spell script in SoU Chapter 2 that is firing, and due to a fix in the 1.65 patch (the bug was that AoE spells would return the wrong DC check value in certain circumstances) this custom script was failing and causing a lot of processing to deal with the failed checks and thus slowing the game down to unplayable speeds.

    Georg Zoeller, Designer

    Business Prospectives on the Premium Mods
    I've said before that Bio could easily measure the alienation. Release one mod without the copy protection. See what happens. Georg? After all, this is a big experiment, so why not experiment more?
    We know what happens - experimenting is one thing, throwing money out of the window another.

    Oh well, it was only 8 bucks
    If a store sells me a defective product, for example shoes, I can always take them back and have them replaced. With video games, there is an unwritten trust that if a developer/publisher sells a faulty ware, then they would, with haste and for no additional charge, do whatever is required to fix it since the fault is with them. At least this is my belief.
    Your believes are not relevant. There are laws that define when a product is "defective" and what a "fault" is . Read . Understand. Post.

    NWN is already an aging game and I still see loads of bugs that have not yet been fixed. This to me is NOT good work.
    NWN is a two and a half year old game that still gets patches for free. It's one out of approx. 3-5 AAA titles released in 2002 that gets patches to add new features and remove reported bugs. There are several hundred other titles released in 2002 that don't get any patches and left with bugs.

    To me, that means that BioWare has industry leading support for their products and I am proud to be a part of a company that doesn't treat their products with a fire & forget mentality.

    I would like to know why my PC would STILL sometimes stops fighting in the thick of a battle and just stand there flatfooted while taking hits. This bug has been around since the beginning and the biggest of my NWN pet peeves since this is how my PC usually dies.
    As far as I can see, you haven't submitted a bug report yet. Feel free to submit a bug report and tell us how to reproduce the problem and we'll fix it for you - for free - 2.5 years after release.

    I see this bug just about every time I play NWN and I doubt that Bioware is so blind that they have not seen it. So why haven't they fixed it? Is it because they are too busy with money making schemes like premium modules to suck their customers dry?
    That's must exactly be the reason. We are sucking people dry by giving them modules TO BUY. I mean - we are practically forcing everyone to buy so many premium modules that their wallets are dry? I don't know, I have the feeling that there must be something else that is sucking here, because it's not really efficient to suck people dry with 4.99$ module.

    And, oh gosh, a business with a money making "scheme". How could we insult someone's intelligence more than to actually ask for money for the goods we create? Everyone knows game companies are charities and give away all their future work for free once you shelled out 50$ for one of their past products! How dare we to insult the customers by devising a "money making scheme"!

    And ... oh, the worst insult ... they actually take the revenue from this "money making scheme" and finance new NWN content and free patches from it.

    Evil BioWare! Evil I say!

    I am not happy with Bioware's attitudes, and it seems that they have stopped listening a long time a go.
    Could it be that you belong to the faction that means "do what I want" or "listen to ME" when you say "listen"?

    Frankly, you are partially right. Most of us just stopped caring about people with a "I'm the center of the universe and BioWare should drop all their work and rush to fix my pet peeves with NWN" attitude a long time ago.

    But let's see about your "stopped listen" complaint from the recent patches...

    - Community wanted switch to turn off "automatic failure on 1 on saving throw rules" ... we added it in patch 1.64

    - Patch 1.64 added functions to manipulate the fog color. The community wanted functions to read these values. We added them in patch 1.65

    - The custom content community wanted to create more custom phenotypes. We raised the limit for custom phenotypes in 1.65.

    - The community wanted to be able to heal doors and placeables. We added this functionality in 1.65

    We have not stopped listening to our community, we just put a filter on the noise from people that make unreasonable and aggressive demands.

    But unlike other developers who would just ignore you when you complain, Bioware would take it one step further and insult your intelligence.
    And how would we do this? By creating conspiratory premium modules to suck you dry?

    Or by taking posts containing inflammatory and false claims (like "BioWare said repeatedly they only listen to statistics", "BioWare doesn't listen") and factual errors and ripping them apart?

    Ah yes, internet forums can be quite rough from time to time, but taking your time to get the facts right can usually prevent your post from getting put on the butcher's block... you should try it from time to time.

    While this is refreshing to those with intelligence deserving of insults, it is not appreciated by the rest of the customers.
    I'm sure these customers can speak for themselves.

    Bioware has said repeatedly that they would only pay attention to statistics,
    Could it be that you are making that up? Ah, no I don't think so, because an intelligent person wouldn't do that.
    So please, out of pure curiosity, list references, since we apparently said that repeatedly, it shouldn't be too hard for you to find a couple of posts where we said that, right?.

    so lets all stop wasting time trying to get Bioware to listen
    One tip that might save you some time trying ... we are listening, but usually on the "community" channel, not the "BioWare do my bidding" channel.

    More:
    Perhaps a one-time CD-Key-like activation through the NWN client which permanently flags the software as being able to play that given module? Just suggesting.
    During the past month we have heard lots of arguments about this topic, and we are aware that it is a topic that a lot of people have strong feelings about.

    Believe me, we have been looking into this for quite a while, and we will explore things like this in the future - however, for the time being, we have decided for the online activation protection because the functionality for this was already part of NWN's multiplayer code.

    The code for this has been tested and proven working under live conditions for 2 years now - this means it is the most cost effective solution available to us at the moment (everything else requires expensive licenses or very expensive technology research) and allows us to sell the premium modules at a price point which we believe is competitive.

    Any other protection method (and releasing without copy protection is not an option for various reasons, including contracts) - would have raised the cost for the premium modules in a way that would lead to drastically lower sales.

    There have been long discussion about this topic, and it was ultimately decided that the market for the premium modules, at launch time, would be the people who have an internet connection and don't mind the multiplayer authentification and that targeting this market segment would have better risk vs cost rating than releasing the modules with a higher cost and a different copy protection. And so far the experiment seems to work out quite nicely.

    We are aware that we are shutting out people who don't fall into this market segment and who would like to try the premium modules as well, and the Live Team has said they will investigate different options in the future if this whole digital distribution thing proves worth the time invested.

    All in all there is a lot of emotion in this debate - some people have the fear that if this protection works out and is accepted, all future software will be protected with it. Others fear that we could move exclusively to the online market.

    While I can understand these fears, I do not share them - the mission statement for this project, is NOT to about copy protection - it is to test the waters for "digital distribution of episodic content to an 'online' audience".

    BioWare has always been sensitive regarding our customers fears and wishes.

    - We revised the original NWN EULA based on community feedback, something I can not remember any other company doing.

    - Shortly after NWN was released and one patch included an updated copy protection software (which we were required to do use) to a version that caused a lot of problems with peoples computers, we removed the copy protection completely until the copy protection developer addressed the issue.

    We are taking feedback on the online requirement and copy protection issue seriously, but we are not interested in emotional debates based on a "if we allow this to happen, it will happen in the future" basis and we are not interested in suggestions that are not in touch with reality ("i.e. just release it without protection").

    I believe that being open and honest to our community about the reasons behind certain decisions is the best way to deal with controversial things like this. A few people seem to be offended by this openeness (i.e. by statements that we would have stopped NWN support after 1.63 if not for the premium modules), but in the end I believe it's worth to alienate a few to maintain the current relationship of trust we have with our community.

    And, <random swear word here> yes, we are of course interested in making money and being profitable - we are not a charity operation, we are a business.

    More: Just as a follow up - it's a basic decision between two options of communication blunt and honest facts or PR speech.

    A) "Sorry, but as it stands, we target a different audience. Yes, we had meetings about this issue and decided for online authentification because of [cost vs. risk considerations]. We are so far happy with it but interested in investigating further options in the future"

    B) "Oh, that online authentification thing. Err, yes, we didn't really talk about it, it just slipped kinda into the code and we are not happy about it and we never wanted to do it but some evil forced us into doing it and we will surely remove it ... in the future ... sometimes ..."

    Some people prefer A, some people apparently prefer B and feel insulted if say A ("What do you mean, I am not part of the target audience!").

    I believe the vast majority of our community wants A and I'm not willing to go the B route and coat every post into PR honey just to make sure nobody gets upset. I rather violate the "the customer is always right" lie^H^H^Hrule (with joy) than to TELL people "Ah sure you are right" and then DO the exact contrary.

    Ah, and Joana Filipa, sorry for hijacking your thread with my rants, I went a bit offtopic :)

    More:
    I felt like correcting him on the George or Georg mistake, ...
    That mistake is usually a good indication whether someone has actually READ posts or just blankly stared at them while trying to find a smart sounding answer. Thankfully there's noise suppression these day to filter the egomanical channel without muting the community.

    Anyway, the amusement from this thread alone is worth the 8 bucks for kingmaker :lol: , a night at the movies doesn't even come close in entertainment value. Ahhh ... the lost art of trollfarming.

    Damn, offtopic again ... Please excuse me while I ban myself from the boards for this offense and go to punish myself with excess intake of Lebkuchen and Gluehwein for the next few days.

    Merry Xmas, Frohe Weihnachten, Feliz Navidad to the BioWare community :)

    James Henley, Technical Designer

    simple noob question
    Any undeclared integer variables will automatically carry a value of 0.

    More:
    thanks :)

    still need an answer on:
    also the upgrade is done during a conversation, how do I pass a value back to the conversation so the NPC will tell the PC it succeeded or failed?
    You'd have to use a conditional statement on the conversation node to check for whether or not it was successful (likely that you'd just use another, temporary variable to cover that which is always reset before the actual upgrade check is made).

    & is it possible to reference something with a partial tag?
    kinda like windows search can be done with ME.* for any file of anytype with the name ME
    Tags must be fully referenced when using functions such as GetObjectByTag().

    2DA
    A 2DA file is a 2-Dimensional Array containing information about various aspects of the Neverwinter game. These files are referenced by the engine when certain information is required.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Dec 27, 2004
    #1
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