Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Oct. 23, 04)

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

BioWare - 2das download for 1.64?
I will find out Monday morning what is up with this. Thanks for the reminder.

Tim Smith, Tools Programmer

AI Changes & v1.64? Did something break?

---

C has always always always used a preprocessor to include #includes. By the time the compiler gets to it, all # declarations have already been expanded. It has been that way since the first C code oozed from an edlin session... and will be that way when the only people doing C work are 80 year old retirees. Modern C++ compilers give you the option of precompiling headers... but it is often a perilous prospect. NWScript works in pretty much the exact same way. It just doesn't give you direct access to the preprocessor step like a modern Unix C compiler does. Note: I know NWScript works this way because I use it as a feature all the time. Every one of my scripts is peppered with debug() calls that print to the log. By default these are null functions (void debug() {}). If I want to turn it on for one or two files I fill in a PrintString() and recompile just the files I want logging.

---

There is little difference between old C and modern C++ compilers regarding include files. The only difference is that when all the #defines are the same and the #include files are all the same, the compiler can save a precompiled version of those include files. Old C compilers could easily be modified to support this. Both my script compiler and BioWare's script compile do the exact same thing, but on a more limited scale. They compile NWSCRIPT.NSS as part of initialization and then compile all requested scripts using this precompiled header.

Modern C++ compilers still compile source files as if the include files are all inline in the main source file. However, they use a lot of tricks (precompiled headers) to avoid doing the same work over and over again. If you change an include file, all the referencing source files must be rebuilt.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Infinite [spoilers], is it fixed?
Some changes were made to fix some issues with this quest breaking under certain circumstances and I believe that exploit was also fixed when the changes were being made. Wrong forum. Spoilers are not allowed in this forum.