Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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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

1.64 beta available

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It seems that this beta patch only works if you have the entire nwn collection: hotu and sou.

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This is not true, but if you are having a problem getting it installed then you probably shouldn't be messing with it.

Rob Bartel - Senior Designer Live Team -

What's the latest word on the WW series?
Never say never, I guess, but at present, SoU and HotU are the only traditional retail expansions planned for NWN. The Live Team continues to update the game with new content and functionality and the Digital Distribution project will definitely help us kick that process into overdrive. There's plenty of cool stuff still to come, in other words, but future traditional retail expansions are unlikely. Clear as mud?

Robin Mayne, Webmaster

28 Jul 2004 - BioWare Community Celebrates 2 Million Members With Giveaway

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and include jobs in these give aways

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Ha ha, I would have to talk to HR about that possibility...

Georg Zoeller, Designer

HotU Visual Effects
There is a console commmand that can play them, I think dm_visualeffect. Check the DM forum, it's explained there somewhere.

ping 1.63 ... respone timedout

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Guys, I think its been firmly established that we waiting this 6 months because of no real other reason then Bioware was waiting to get NWN Platinum out. This of course infuriated me to no end.

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Silvarti, it's generally not smart to get infuriated about something that is not true. Whoever "firmly established" this was probably talking to Santa and the Easter bunny. Things like the Platinum Edition are decided by the publisher, not the developer. There are multiple reasons why 1.64 took this long, among them

- First and foremost: The amount and level of changes in this patch. Even if not everything is "flashy" or new content, especially stuff like implementing and testing low level changes to the game engine are time consuming. It IS the largest non expansion pack patch (change/fix) wise we have done so far.

- Reduced Priority/Manpower for patches for a 2 year old game with no expansion packs in the works for things like internal and external (i.e. QA, approval, localization). It's not Live Team + people from the NWN/expansion pack team anymore (for making fixes, changes), it's just Live Team at this point, and if a change requires support from someone not on the project, it might need some time before that person has some space on their schedule to do this.

- GDC/E3 Demo Season delaying internal and external processes (Talk to someone in the industry and ask them how much non E3 related stuff gets done in that time period and how much priority stuff about a 2 year old game would get from anyone during that time)

- Digital Distribution approval process and integration.

- Various other undisclosed reasons.

What's not on the list is
- "Platinum Edition"

Seriously, if we wanted to wait for platinum edition, it would ship with 1.64, not a modified version of 1.62.

The reason why we can't do 4 minor patches are numerous, but you can ask Derek how long it takes to build, package and test all the ~30 different versions of a patch

NWN Client English, German, French, Spanish, Italian,
NWN+SoU Client English, German, French, Spanish, Italian,
NWN+HotU Client English, German, French, Spanish, Italian,
NWN+SoU+HotU Client English, German, French, Spanish, Italian
NWN Gold English, German, French, Spanish, Italian
>Multiplied by<
Mac, Windows, Linux
Plus
NWN Dedicated server
>Multiplied by<
Mac, Windows, Linux

plus probably support for various other languages not directly supported by BioWare. Feel free to check our patch matrix http://nwn.bioware.com/support/patch.html;

not to forget beta, uninstall options for the beta, QA and approval for those 4 patches.

Maybe we could have done two patches, but then again, the overhead from this would probably still have been quite expensive and would have delayed the DD changes by quite some time, so in the end, I think we are pretty happy that we are in 1.64 Beta already.

At some point the DD project will (hopefully) lift off and you will be able to see some of the at the moment, less visible changes in 1.64, and maybe understand

Frankly, I find it somewhat silly that someone would complain about 1.64, after all we are still patching this game. The far majority of game companies out there would have terminated patch support the moment HotU was out of the door. We keep a dedicated Live Team to maintain, update and add content to NWN, but they are not a 100 man full product or 25 man expansion pack team, so their capacity is limited and patches won't flow as fast as anymore at this point. Yea, I know, "be happy you get a patch at all" sounds somewhat arrogant, but that's not the point - the message is "get used to a slower release cycle for patches, it's inevitable when a program ages". That said, we plan to continue support of NWN and some great things are planned for this community, but as all good things, it takes time.

Finally, I can understand when people get angry because changes/fixes to the game cause problems with their own scripted subsystems and you can be sure that cases where this happens intentionally (such as the lootable corpse change) are discussed and weighted very carefully before they get put into the game.

With a game like NWN, with all it's features and different ways to enjoy it, we will never be at the point where everyone is happy, that's impossible. Someones favourite pet peeve or bug will still be "unfixed" after patch 9999, some people will be unhappy because we patch at all (forcing them to update their servers/hakpaks), others will complain we patch not often enough. In the end we have to do what we think is best for the game and our community as a whole, not just for a couple of individuals who want to save work on their server or really would like a certain feature for their module.

More:

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Just to clarify:

1.62
Droppable - moved to lootbag ondeath
Nondroppable - stays on corpse

1.64 BETA
Droppable - moved to lootbag on lootbag open
Nondroppable - destroyed on lootbag open

I can understand the change with droppable items, but why the change with non-drop? They never had a problem in 1.62. Hardwired destruction of objects is always a Bad Idea, you should know that Georg

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I'll check with Craig to see if that second part of the change was necessary, could be an unwanted side effect (after all, the "nondroppable" flag originally meant - "this is disposed when the creature dies").

1.64 beta available

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I've done quite a bit of testing and have yet to see a crash. However, I am using the old animations...Perhaps some of those crashing should try installing them and see what the results are. Click Here

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What kind of SoundCard are you using? EAX enabled?

itempropdef-- UseLimitationHaveFeat
You could use OnEquip or OnActivate to check if the feat you want it to have is there.

HotU Visual Effects

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It should be noted that there are some REALLY cool effects in the spells.2da file that you can use. In lots of cases, they don't do anything but a visual effect. A good example of this is the grappling hand effect. Why these are spells instead of visual effects is an utter mystery to me.

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They are special effects that are tied to certain animations and might be missing certain states that are required for them to function correctly with the EffectVisualEffect function.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

1.64 beta available
Are the 1.64 beta crashes that people have been getting client side crashes or server side crashes (if you connect to a dedicated server, will the server crash or just your client). I'm suspecting that the crashes may be sound related (which might explain their some what random nature). If people that are experiencing crashes could try playing with sound disabled (by setting DisableSound=1 in your nwn.ini file), it would help me in determining whether or not the issue is indeed sound related.