Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Feb. 25, 06)

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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

Bioware, a word in your shell-like regarding dedicated servers...
First of all, I have no idea what your subject line means.

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It states in the PotSC FAQ, that _all_ players joining a multiplayer session _must_ have purchased and installed a copy beforehand. From this I understand that the module is checking _client_ CD keys,

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Let me stop you right there. Modules do not check CD Keys. Servers don't check CD Keys. Clients pass their CD Keys onto the game server and the game server passes them onto the Master Server. The Master Server replies back with a yea or nay and then the client is allowed to connect to the server. Regardless, this has nothing to do with the module authentication.

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Quote: it can't simply be a resource issue as the PotSC resources are available for download... so the with this in mind I find it hard to accept the stated explanation that the dedicated server cannot be used because of it not using CD keys, from what I see in all this the server has no need to check CD keys as it's the clients being validated.

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Module authentication happens on the client and is based off of the CD Keys that you used to purchase the module. The server is not a client and does not have CD Keys. The server has no CD Keys in which to ask for authentication to load the module.

If there was a way to make dedicated servers work for the Premium Modules without a severe amount of re-engineering, we would have done it.

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Quote: PS. The perpetual live-connection requirement really is one of the least user-friendly ways of authenticating software, please don't do it again. Not even the accursed Steam platform from another developer needs a live connection every time you play.

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Fair enough. And as we have said many times, we had the choice between the current system leveraging the CD Key system and continued updates for NWN and no Premium Modules and no further updates to NWN. We chose the former.


PotSC CD release??
Retail releases are completely up to our publisher, Atari. We are not aware of any current plans for them to do that at this time.

Brian Chung - Technical Artist

1.67 2da editing problem (bug?)
Placeables.2da adds a new column "Static", this is to get around problem where an animated placeable with skinmesh set to static will cause the client to crash. If set to 0, the checkbox in the object properties will be grayed out so it's should never get toggled as static.

This was added for the school of fish and kelp placeables from Pirates of the Sword Coast since they were created as skinmeshed models, as segmented models they looked really bad. Plus any other skinmeshed placeables people will create.

Baseitems.2da adds the "DefaultIcon" column so if you used a custom item from another mod with say, sword parts 5 and up (default NWN models only go up to 4 types and 4 colours), it will be flagged as invalid and display a gray icon. This is to get around a bug where the item will be invisible in your inventory otherwise since there are no bitmaps for the custom icon parts, and end up as a black hole making any items placed on it disappear forever.

Not sure of any column changes of appearance.2da other than the inclusion of sahuagins and seagulls and other critters, but like shadguy said, fix the previous two first.


Armor Textures
I believe the list you see in the toolset is sorted by the AC value of the piece, as defined in the parts_chest.2da file.