Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by Veldrin)

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

David Gaider, Designer

Helmets: The problem is that the helmet slot is currently hard-coded to want to replace the current PC head model with another head model when something is put in it. There's no way currently to select amongst a group of head models to put there... it can only be one. If no model is specified, you're literally headless. I suppose you could change the current helmet slot so that placing an item in it changed the color of the normally-invisible headband you mention... but what, then, about actual helmets? It'd be more likely to get a completely seperate "headgear" slot (or whatever) that does what you want. At that point, however, we're talking about GUI alteration and more coding. Not impossible, but not incosiderable, either. I'm not sure what you could tie the appearance of such a headband to currently, other than the rest of the armor... which probably isn't the effect you're looking for.

Quote: The tricky part is when you pick up the circlet item, have a script that:

a) checks the pc's head model

This is the part that cannot be accomplished. There is no scripting hook into which head model is being used.

Body Parts: The thing I like is you've obviously found the ability to mix body parts that don't change (the tiefling's legs, for instance) with body parts that do (the rest of the tiefling body, which I assume can be armored as need be). I wonder if that means you could have, say, a fighter with an actual tunic for a chest piece (which never changed) but the rest of his body parts changed normally when armored? Very cool, regardless.

Resting: Mmm. As I said, if the marking of certain areas as unrestable seems too cumbersome, it probably won't stay in. Even as is, we may try playing with it a little... perhaps marking certain well-defensible areas in a dungeon as restable and/or turning an entire level as restable once it's been "cleared". Hard to say. It might not be worth the trouble (just like the "5 minute" resting restriction mentioned above... at that point, why bother?) Any kind of spawning system that disturbs resting is the kind of thing I'm talking about that will need to wait until XP2. Any regular roaming guards and similar already restrict resting normally, so nothing new is needed there.

As far as the OC in SoU goes, it is simply not an option to offer any sort of toggle as far as what rules will be used. That simply will not happen... we cannot afford to test and balance the campaign for each individual case. And again, as I have already said, we will not put in any kind of restriction that is too cumbersome. Ease of gameplay is still the prime factor, here... not simulating restrictions just for their own sake. As I already said, the ability to freely teleport out of combat or to a safe zone was the major piece of cheese that needed to be cut out... everything else can be designed around.

Quote: The simplest and easiest to implement moderate resting restriction is a simple script that tracks how long it has been since the player last rested and interrupts them after a proportional length of time. In other words - if you allow the player to rest fully every 6 minutes and they last rested 3 minutes ago you let them rest for half of their resting duration and then interrupt their rest.

Sorry, but as I already said I will not implement this. Forcing a player to stand around in real time because of some arbitrary time limit is not good gameplay, in my estimation. Even in PnP campaigns, the group often rests more often than once a day if they are severely depleted in a dungeon, for instance... and even if I decreed as the DM that they couldn't rest until later, if they are desperate enough they will simply say "We'll wait until we can sleep, then." As DM I could either call up an encounter or I could say "Ok, poof! Time has passed." Can't do that in NWN. Even in the BG series we didn't prevent people from resting as much as they needed to. What if you were playing BG2 and your entire party was in the middle of a module spell-less and at 1 HP? You press rest and it says "You cannot rest yet!". So you stare at the screen and wonder "Well, what am I supposed to do NOW?!" Now, I suppose it's conceivable that some could look on that as a challenge and say they'd want that. I simply suggest that it goes too far and I see no justification for putting something like that in the OC.

Quote: Just to make sure you didn't miss my point. You NEVER have to stand around in real time waiting to rest. You can ALWAYS rest. You just can't always rest for FULL DURATION. Minor point, but I like to clear.

No, I didn't miss that point, Carl, though I suppose I didn't respond to it directly. Two things about partial resting, as you suggest it:

1) Such a beast does not exist, currently. You either rest or you don't.

2) Even if a partial rest could be scripted, somehow (and it probably could), it still doesn't address the situation I mentioned. There is still an arbitrary length of real-time that is limiting the player from recovering. If they're resting, it's probably because they need to... and if they don't get back more than a few HP's and some low-level spells, what are they apt to do? Press it again. Of course, they just rested... so they'd probably get back very little if anything at this point. What do they do then?
Well, no, they don't press it again... at least I wouldn't. But they would be back to my square one sitting around in real-time until they could rest fully.

Now I'm not saying that some kind of resting restriction isn't a good thing. That just isn't it. Inconveniencing a player for the sake of realism is rarely as fun in practice as it is in theory... at least to anyone less than a hardcore sado-masochist (hey... I just spent the last two weeks trying to convince myself I was enjoying MOO3... I know whereof I speak). What I think is ideal is the same kind of resting restriction that I would use in PnP:
Let's say my party of players are a mere two rooms into a dungeon when they decide they want to rest. This with the entire dungeon aware that they're there. Prop up a chair against the door and post a guard, they say... they'll be fine. Ideally I would throw a random encounter at them. I can't do that in XP1, however, so I really have two choices.

1) Don't allow them to rest in the dungeon until it is cleared enough to be relatively safe.

2) Allow them to rest and adjust the encounters in the dungeon, since I know they'll be fully rested for each one of them. Maybe not ideal but at least this time they won't be teleporting away in the middle of a combat to return to full strength.

In either case, whenever a PC is eligible to rest, they should be able to rest fully and as often as they need to. Anything else just doesn't make sense, play-wise. That's how I see it currently, anyhow. Feel free to convince me of otherwise, if you wish.

Quote: If this were the case, you'd think they would choose to showcase three brand new tiles, not one.

While I'm not 100% down with what the art department is up to, I don't think the ruins tileset is quite complete, yet. They may not have had a choice in the matter.

Quote: Unless Arcane Archer has the race restriction removed, they've already got one racially restricted prestige class...

The restriction hasn't been removed. Arcane Archers are, indeed, restricted to elves and half-elves

Legal Things: Thank you for your assurances, Luna, and while I don't mean to impugn your professionality in any way they're rather beside the point. Legal matters and common sense don't necessarily go hand in hand. Bioware is looking at some of the methods used by other companies which have released community-made material. I don't know what the status of that is... but I do know Bioware will only proceed forward with this sort of thing when an arrangement has been made to accomodate it which we are completely comfortable with. After all... it's not as if the community at large doesn't have access to your wonderful drider models, Luna (and I do think they're great). They do. Being able to release it to a larger audience would simply be a more ideal situation... but we'll only do that when we can be certain it's a win/win situation for both sides and not have the chance to turn into some embarassing mess that we'll regret not preparing enough to prevent. I don't think we can be faulted for wanting that, do you?

Tom Ohle, Communications Associate

Bigby Spells: Interposing Hand is an open-palm hand that circles around the affected creature. Not sure about crushing, though... I'll have to check that out in a bit.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Quote: 2. not be avaliable only to people who subscribed to the website, it's sucky enough of you guys telling everyone it will be shipped with the the game itself.

Aside from patches, all downloads from our Community Site require you to have a free, BioWare Community Account. At a later date, we will allow you to flag your self as a Linux user. I am pretty sure that the Linux community will want to uniquely identify themselves so we can judge how many Linux users we have. You want us to know about you, don't you?

Quote: 1. We bought a copy of the Windows version for my wife quite awhile ago, and I've been playing my character on her box occasionally... will I be able to move my character over? My plan based on some of the comments from Jay and Andrew was to copy the installed image from her wintendo across the ehternet, which would include the save games. Hopefully I'll be able to just load the game as I last saved it on her box and quest on....

We have done some basic testing on this, and yes, you can move everything over and it will just work.

Quote: 2. Will (at least the alpha/beta/demo/whatever) be able to share a CD key? I've been holding off pre-ordering a second copy from TuxGames waiting for at least some form of binary to come out as a preview. (once it does, my order will go in within 48 hours.) In the interim while I wait for my own CD key, will we be able to play together in a lan game? (once the play disc is read at the begining of the game, it doesn't appear to be used again, so I think I can take it out of here drive before I start my client... if not, well, this is Linux, I hack the kernel on a regular basis... I can make the game think it sees that disc in the drive no matter what.)

No, there is no CD Key "sharing" in any version of NWN.

Quote: 3. Will there be a form of bug reporting/tracking aside from the fora for the alpha/beta? (something like bugzilla or whatever) As a software engineer myself I would want to be able to file detailed bugs against the beta if it has "issues"... the fora, while a nice bit of comunity, really don't lend to that activity well.

There will be an e-mail address to report bugs to, just like there currently is for game bugs and exploits. We will announce it when the Beta Client is available for download.

Quote: 4. What should we expect for hardware requirements? My current system shouldn't have any problems with the game, with the possible exception of my graphics card. But since I run an SMP workstation, I've often found that my box was "just slightly outside" the bounds of what most programs were tested on; it tends to expose race conditions and such that are simply never seen on uni-processors, which also leads into why I'm asking about #3.

My workstation stacks up as such:
2x Athlon MP 1800+
SB Live!
Geforce 2 Ultra (glxgears averages 1700 fps)
1G ram
SCSI 3 LVD raid array for operating system and important data (bloody fast)
IDE raid for bulk storage (cheap, huge, relatively slow, but still faster than most windows machines)

Actually, we want to hear back from you as to your experience, as we don't have a wide enough variety of machines to make a good guess on this.

Quote: 5. Assuming all goes well with the beta (we can dream can't we... besides, I'm sure Andrew and team are using this extra time to test the client.) How long untill we have a shipping client from a technical perspective? i.e. how long do you plan to let us pound the snot out of it before you release to mfg?

No idea at this time. We will see how the Beta goes.

X-Packs & Linux: The executable for NWN, for both original NWN and the expansion is the same executeable. And since the resources of NWN are cross-platform, the development effort for XP1 for Linux pretty much takes care of itself.

Quote: As a last request, I would ask that a method be made available for a pure Linux user to be able to actually use this client you spent 8 months porting.

As we have said, several times, that the requirement for a Windows 1.29 install of NWN is only for the Linux Client Beta and not for the final version. While we don't have the method locked down 100% right now, it will not require any dealings with Windows whatsoever. You will still need to purchase a Windows copy of the game, but that is ONLY so you can get the CD Key from inside the manual. I would also like to point out that the info above was presented back at the Jan 17th 2003 update for the Linux Client, so this is not new news at all.