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

Server Problems: You forgot the part where Bioware decided to conspire against server operators to make them suffer and decided to make the game crash just out of fun....

We got a Live Team committed to fix those bugs, people working full time on a product not generating a steady flow of income anymore. That is unusual an industry where most games are publish, patch 1 to 3 times and then abandon it. Yet the Life team resources are limited and they need solid information on bugs to reproduce them in order to fix them. It has been stated more than once that these bugs have the highest priority here.

Insulting and questioning the abilities of those who are working hard on those things will certainly not help anything. To be blunt: Get them the information required to reproduce those problems instead of wasting your and their time by posting insults and conspiracy theories on this board.

Psionics: To crush any rumours: there will be no psionics implementation in Hordes of the Underdark.

Vorpal and Wounding: Wounding is bugged until 1.31. Vorpal is working. Depending on how you set up the property, there is a 5 to 75% (?) chance to behead and instantly kill an opponent with a vorpal weapon if he fails a Fortitude Savingthrow.

I confused it with another on hit property, you can set only the DC on vorpal. I think creatures immune to death magic are immune to vorpal.

VFX Not Working: Sounds unintentional but there is probably no sense in fixing that because there are some major changes to that system coming up in the future and this most likely has been made "obsolete" by them

Script Functions in HotU: You can be assured that there are tons of features (Scripting commands, Art, ...) that will boost the multiplayer part of NWN. I was a scripter in the NWN community before joining Bioware to work on HotU, and the scripting functionality we have access to for Hordes of the Underdark is far more than I ever would have expected to get for NWN. But thats a personal opinion, yours may vary.
I am already curious to see what the communtiy will create with these things.

Friendly Fire: Yes, when I was DMing PnP it was always a major fun to see if the players would cast sleep in combat, usually affecting their own party members ...

2da String Limitations: I would not use strings longer that a few hundred character's anyway as they can cause quite some lag. I'll update the Get2DAString documentation in the toolset to reflect the limit tomorrow. Maybe the Lexicon could update their documentation on this as well, this would save some people some time

Polymorph .2da: One note on this: if you enter something in line 43 in the 2da, you can use EffectPolyMorph(43) to access that form. Never ever modify NWSCRIPT.NSS to include new POLYMORPH_TYPE_ constants. This technique was uses prior to patch 1.30 and is no longer supported, in fact it is evil and bad and ... well, just don't do it

Modifying Tilesets: Its difficult to do modifications for existing tilesets in an expansion as these changes would have to be released as "live" content as well (like the turf house in the rural tileset).

Quote: I think Georg and Gaider, or maybe it was someone else stated that you could have a party up to 4 (including the PC).

I never said anything about that ... must have been Dave (or Visc is hallucinating). In fact I w/could never give you an exact number for any feature at this time, as nothing has been finalized.

Quote: I believe a few spells have been changed in NWN from their original 3E versions. For example NWN mage armor provides dodge, deflection, natural armor... Instead of just +4 armor bonus. Others didn't make it into NWN. I was wondering if anyone has done any work assembling a hakpak of spell fixes that make NWN more like PnP.

You would not need a hakpak for that. Simply putting the spells into an .erf file would do (and thus require no downloads for the players for your module). Probably you could check the HCR project, judging from their names they should have some of these spells in store...

Quote: GiveFeat(nFeat, oCreature=OBJECT_SELF)

I doubt that could happen, it could allow a module creator to make a character invalid so he would no longer be able to pass ELC checks. There is a workaround: you can add any feat to an item if you edit IPRP_FEATS.2da. You could create creature hides with the feat on it and equip it on the player

Quote: But Brent said that we'll have at least one neat spellcasting prestige class per spellcasting class so I take it to mean they found out a workaround to that problem.

Brent said "Don't worry we'll have at least one very interesting prestige class for each spellcasting class". This does not mean the classes are not neat. Sorry, I needed to post this to prevent bad things from happening later
Again, nothing is finalized and approved yet.

With the scripting means available in hordes, you would be able to script random effects happening when a spell is cast by a certain class, subrace or whatever. However there is no official Wildmage class.

Quote: Apologies in advance if this is a FAQ, but I've searched high and low for an explanation of the script naming convention BioWare and Floodgate used for their script files. So far, this is the only info I've been able to find:

*_s0_* - Spells
*_s1_* - Creature Abilities (bolt, gaze, etc)
*_s2_* - Class / Char Abilities (rage, etc)
*_s3_* - Item related spells (alcohol, belladona, etc)

Any chance we can get more details on this? I think it would really help point you in the right direction when you're looking for examples of particular NWScript code fragments.

You pretty much summed it up.

*_i0_* / *_inc_* - Include Files
*_c2_* - Creature Event scripts ()

Scripts inside the campaigns are prefixed with their quest identifier. Conversation conditional scripts:

*_d0_*
*_d1_*
*_d2_*
*_d2_hen_* - Henchman conversation related^
xp1_* - Xp1 global conversation conditions

*_ch_* henchmen / associate scripts

*_o0_* - Module Event scripts

*_o2_tf_ - Trigger Event Scripts
*_o2_* - Placeable

*_trap_* - Trap scripts

x0_dm_* - SoU DM/Cheater NPC scripts

Quote: Would script caching actually make a difference to single-player only modules? Does it actually help when there is only one player? Or was this dreamt up to answer the call to persistent worlds?

It makes a differences for both types. See it that way: Access time do data hold in memory (caching) is waaayy faster than access time to data on a harddrive. The more often a script is called (by a player, a creature, etc), the more performance gain you got. Of course, given then nature of multiplayer games, scripts are ususally called more often than in a mere singleplayer game, so the performance gain through caching is more noticeable. Just don't cache any script because then there would be not enough RAM for other purposes, which would degrade your PC's performance instead of boosting it.

David Gaider, Designer

Moustached Drow: Well, I wouldn't go supposing that drow are always going to have a moustache or that we think they all do. That's just the elf head that originally got selected for the generic drow model, that's all. One thing I can tell you about the Underdark for sure, Argyle, is that Narlen Darkwalk won't be anywhere in sight.

Quote: but a few weeks (months?) ago mr gaider confirmed we would NOT be able to have multiple henchpeople in hotu.

Things can always change again (who knows?), but I have no idea where Visceral is getting the "up to 4" quote from.

Derek French, Live Team Producer

Quote: Of course this CD-Key thing might be a BUG on GameSpy

The CD Key system has nothing to do with GameSpy. GameSpy is for server browsing and chat only.