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. 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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Action Queue: The problem is that the action queue of your creature gets overflowed:

If you add actions faster to the action queue than they are performed, you will eventually reach the limit of 75 actions in an objects queue. Examples where this can happen. Putting creatures to sleep and still having a heartbeat that adds actions. Having creatures perform long actions like ActionMoveTo or ActionFollow while a heartbeat adds more actions. Having a heartbeat that does something like ActionRandomWalk or ActionForceFollowObject, etc. The old action may not be cleared when the heartbeat runs the next time and this may cause the commands to add up in the action queue

How to prevent:

use GetCurrentAction to see if the action queue is still filled and do not add other actions if so use ClearAllActions to remove all actions before adding new ones

Spell Scripts: shadows of undrentide spells start with x0_

Spellscripts are listed that way:

*_s0_* - Spells

*_s1_* - Creature Abilities (bolt, gaze, etc)

*_s2_* - Class / Char Abilities (rage, etc)

*_s3_* - Item related spells (alcohol, belladona, etc)

Al Schilling, Product Manager

Mac Release: There is always more APPROVAL CRAP. Please understand that everything we do that relates to NWN has to be approved by a number of parties. We feel confident enough in the quality of the final candidate CDs that we've scheduled the production of finished goods based on getting the approvals in a timely manner. Would you really prefer that we wait for the final sign-off and then schedule production? That would mean another 2 week delay. I promised those of you in this forum that, the day we announced the ship date, I'd post it here. I did just that. Yes, there's still a chance that it could get screwed up. There's a chance that our manufacturing facility could burn to the ground. There's a chance that the truck delivering the printed materials could crash and burn. I'm just giving you the best information I have. If you think you're tired of APPROVAL CRAP, try sitting on my side of the desk. Now, I'm not looking for any sympathy or anything but I've got to tell you-it sure is frustrating that the day I can post some really good news, you still can't see any bright side.

Dinosaur-the contents of the Mac version of NWN are well documented in these forums. It includes the NWN client as well as the DM client. It does not include the toolset. Users can play against other players on Macs, PC, or Linux. The PC version initially retailed at $60. Given that we can't offer the toolset, the initial price for the Mac version is $49.99.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake: WW1 received about half a million downloads, which blew away everyone's expectations, including mine. Internally at BioWare, the project is held in quite high regard as a result, and we recognize that it was very well received by the community. Regardless, expansions and other income-generating projects have to take priority and, as we currently have a shortage of writers, I've been asked to fill in some personnel gaps in a variety of other projects.

Ultimately, that's a key issue that the Live Team faces - while it's clear that the team is adding value to the company, it's very hard to quantify that value in terms of additional units sold or money made or future purchases committed to. Until the Live Team can establish a more concrete revenue model for itself and prove its self-sufficiency, traditional projects with tangible rewards will always take priority. While I've been the most visible casualty of this process, I'm definitely not the only one.

That said, we are looking for ways to address the issue and I've set some things in motion that will hopefully lead to that degree of self-sufficiency somewhere down the road. This will be a good thing for all of you who play BioWare games as it should translate into improved service from a more robust Live Team, with a more consistent stream of new patch content (like the rats, kobolds & gnolls for instance), updates to the toolset, and more playable content along the lines of the WW series, among other things.