Neverwinter Nights Forum News (May 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.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Neverwinter Nights: Infinite Dungeons
It's out the door and ready to slap some players into submission! New creatures, new tilesets, new game every time. Infinite Dungeons is so full of awesome I weep for any who don't take a look. I weep

Rob Bartel, Senior Designer Live Team

how long did Skrinkles last?
Alas, poor Skrinkles, I knew thee well...

ID Tilesets...
As with the "Pirates" art content, we encrypt the *.set, *.2da and similar files but leave the actual art assets exposed. This keeps the art release 'unofficial' as it were and allows us to make final fixes, etc, prior to the content's official release via a future patch.

Neverwinter Nights: Infinite Dungeons

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Rolled up a 10th level druid and entered the dungeon - so many monsters are being spawned in each room that they are wiping the floor with me. Where are the promised NPCs? I really need them now, at the start, yet all I've found is a vendor selling pets. I really get the feeling that this is designed for multiplayer far more than it is for singleplayer.

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Hi Orik,

When entering the dungeon, you can choose to customize the dungeon to particular class types, if you wish. Also, if you have a roleplay-focused character build, you may want to turn down the difficulty slider a little as this module is definitely balanced as a dungeon crawler.

As for hirelings, that's the trouble with randomized content - you never quite know who will show up where. You'll generally find hirelings in encampments but there are also various quest-givers hidden away in the dungeon, many of whom will accompany you if you ask. Regarding the monster seller, did you purchase any of the critters he had on offer? What about the various summoned creatures and transformations available to the druid class?

And in terms of story development, as the title suggests, Infinite Dungeons is definitely a dungeon crawl and we encourage everyone to manage their expectations accordingly. The 'official campaign' of the module is delivered primarily through Little Timmy and the End Bosses and spread across 7 multi-level dungeons. What's there is good but don't expect it to unfold on an area-by-area or level-by-level basis.

That said, thanks for the initial report and hopefully you warm up to it as the module develops.

ID info

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I am wondering where I can find information on how to use the new features in ID ie. gems, recipies, floor maps etc.

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Check your journal entries. There are a bunch of Tutorials in there covering the various new features introduced in the module.

Poor performance in Infinate Dungeons
Alright, here's an update. With a module this ambitious, there's a lot of data that's getting thrown around, stored, accessed, etc, and we made some choices about what the best places were to perform those actions. Some are performed on level load (hence the delay on entering the dungeon or transitioning between levels), others on area load (i.e. moving about within a given dungeon level), etc. We made the decision to place as much of it on the module load as possible, so as to speed up the in-game play. This is the character creation lag that some of you are experiencing - the module is in the background, pre-loading a bunch of information and cataloging it into faster lookup tables for future use.

On most machines the effect is minimal but obviously there are a significant number of you who are experiencing this and we apologize. Given the nature of the module, that processing time had to come from somewhere, unfortunately. For those of you for whom this poses a serious problem, you should be able to walk away from your computer for a little while and let it do its business. Once it's completed building those lookup tables, it should settle down and become usable again.

How can I make a char higher than level 1 for ID?
Also, Infinite Dungeons ships with a number of pre-generated characters at a variety of epic and non-epic levels. Feel free to grab one of those if you prefer.

ID nice , but some small bugs

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i started the game with my HOTU 28 level blackguard and it seems some parts of the dungeon dont scale, for example some of the hirelings are level 1 , altough some get the same level as my character.
About the monsters sellers , none of the monsters he sells you scale at all...so i buy for 26000 gold a level 1 mummy lord.
Some of the hostile npc appeared naked without equipment too , but it occured only once.

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It sounds like you're running Infinite Dungeons on a machine that's below the minimum spec (we increased the spec from HotU, FYI). If your machine can't keep up, some of the creature OnSpawn scripts won't fire, resulting in them not leveling up, equipping armor, etc.

Chris Priestly, Quality Assurance

17 May 2006 - Infinite Dungeons Premium Module May 24
For those who want some, come get some! It's available in the store now. http://store.bioware.com/products/

how long did Skrinkles last?


No, Skrinkles isn't a "plot" thing. It was a last minute addition for players that insisted on playing level 1-5 PCs. It was felt that the game was a little hard for low level PCs so Skrinkles was added as a help for the immediate start of the game.

If you're a higher level PC or if you get beyond teh first area or two, Skrinkles becomes monster chow pretty quick.

Neverwinter Nights: Infinite Dungeons

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Perhaps an NPC in the start room would have been a good idea to help at the beginning.

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Besides Skrinkles, you mean?

Infinite Dungeons and stand-alone server
You can definately play it in multi-player. Jason is investigating the idea of running it as a stand alone server. He should be back later today with whatever he finds.

Infinite Dungeons
Yes. It is a digital download module. We do not have any plans currently to make a retail version, so you're best off buying a copy from the BioStore. Here's a quick store link:
http://store.bioware.com/

ID-what am I missing?
Correct. You do not get through the blocked doors. If you check your dungeon map (the one that unfurls on the floor, you should see that there is no connection from teh blocked door into another room. If you've found a blocked door, move on and find an unblocked one.

#Even though you may want to go west, and the blocked door is in the west, you may need to go south, west and then north to get to the room.

Curse that nutty Halaster and his wacky doors!

Infinite Upgrades (Spoiler)

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You will find forges usualy near encampmeants where you can upgrade your equipment

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Sort of. You may find a forge at encampments (there is randomness in this as with all things) that you can use the gems and tiems on.

But to correctly use the gems, you need recipes. The recipes, like the gems, are found randomly (but at a lessened probability) throughout the dungeon. No recipe and you're just guessing at what gem combination works with which item.

Clearing areas quest Inf Dungeon
Also, if you check your ID floor map, you will get a highlit area indicating which one is meant.

Infinite Dungeons and stand-alone server

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Great, thanks for the swift response. Just to clarify, do all players need to purchase a copy in order to play via multiplayer? I assume that answer is yes, just want to be sure.

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Your assumption is correct. Yes, they do.

Unless you want to take turns on the same machine, but that's just weird.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

176 colors not enough? Then add more!
bump

Brian Chung, Technical Artist

Deck of Many Things
This is more of a scripting issue, but a quick search on NWVault shows: Click Here and Click Here available.

Poor performance in Infinate Dungeons
I've experienced some slowness as well when testing out the DLA module - turned out it I had my audio set to software, so it was hammering on the CPU for the sound mixing, instead of hardware. Try rechecking your game settings, and turn off things like anti-aliasing.

Peter Thomas, Designer

Poor performance in Infinate Dungeons
There will always be a slowdown when starting a new ID module. This is because it reads in information from a bunch of 2DAs and stores that info on the module. It is constructing creature and treasure tables and things. I've found it best to wait until the graphic running behind the character selection pane moves smoothly before going into the game. If you click really fast you can see the tail end of this cataloging process in-game.

You can actually find the 2DAs the module is reading from in some of the unencrypted hakpaks. This means that you can actually add new content to ID and it will be included in the game when you start a new module.

Be warned, though: All the dungeons you haven't exported are included in the ID_DATABASE database file, and this will be DELETED and RECREATED when you start a new ID game.

The following 2DAs and hakpaks can be modified to add your own content:
id1_container (treasure chests)
id1_creatures (normal creatures, used for both friendly and hostile)
id1_decor (decorative placeables)
id1_dialog (ingame random dialogue)
id1_items (specific, non-randomly generated treasure)
id1_miniboss (boss-type creatures, always hostile)
id1_plotitems (items to find for random plots)
id1_plotplc (placeables to find for random plots)
id1_puzzles (puzzles that can be found in-game)
id1_secret (secret door types)

How these are edited have very specific conventions, and I may end up having to do tutorials for some of them. I can answer specific questions on them, though. I would not recommend deleting lines from the original versions of the 2DAs, especially the creature ones... that may result in a new kind of creature being seen in the dungeon.