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

German Translations: Translations are usually handled by the publisher. Out of curiosity (I am from Germany) I spoke with some of the guys who translated shadows and they told me that they have to use the official dnd translation for the gameplay terms. As for the tracks, I agree, Schienen would be a much better translation.

Kobold Jumping: Its a visual effect (using the kobold model) which is triggered from a spell. Basically the kobold casts the spell which will destroy him and fire off the kobold projectile.... If we only could do dwarven throwing....

HotU: At the moment we can not give you anything else than a No for things that are 100% sure not to go into HotU. Since the other features are not 100% at the moment, we can not talk about them. Once the train starts rolling, you will certainly see lots of featurs that will make you happy, but until then.... patience. Breaking the 3 class limit would require a major overhaul of the GUI, something that is not likely to happen.

Broken Script Functions: Lilac is correct as far as I can tell...speaking of resting ... OnRest events on creatures should soon actually fire when you assign ActionRest to them (they never did since the release). Look for it in an upcoming patch.

Quote:Thanks you for responding Greg, but I think you miss our point. Selecting the option to have spells not to hurt friendly and neutral is really avoiding the problem rather than addressing it. There is a good portion of players who would rather leave the damage option on. Case and point, just check out the number of server using HCR rules. It is not really an option for the roleplayers and stratagic minded player who enjoy the fun of putting some thoughts in blowing things up with area of effect spells. And for mod builder who prefer more realistic setting like using hard core rules, it represents added work to do custom scripting to prevent NPC from going nuts when the good guys unintentionally harm them. Otherwise, their mod face the possibility of being completely broken and render unenjoyable if the said NPCs is quest/plot critical. In the end, this "solution" of turning things off is really about limiting options, doing a diservice to the customer because for those who wants the option on, they have to suffer through poor AI that could not realistically tell a friend from a foe.

Ah, I can see. Anyway, I would be annoyed if I was grilled by a fireball, even through afriend. The way Friend and Foes are determined in NWN will not change in the near future, but there are a few options at your disposal to change it more to your needs:

- Use "nonglobal" factions for your neutral/friendly NPCs.

- change their SpawnIn Flags to prevent them from calling help and/or modfiy their combat initiating scripts (i.e. OnSpellCastAt) to be more tolerant to friendly fire

- Change the central function used to determine hostility in Spellscripts to work differently. Its only one place to change, but you have to recompile and save all spellscripts in your module (or override) to make the changes work

Quote: I noticed a while back that the effect "wounding" was slated to be fixed (actually never has worked, but was noted that it would be fixed) in 1.31. This wasn't in the notes posted above, so I was wondering if anyone had any info on whether it now works or not?

It is fixed in our internal builds. I do not know if this fix will be rolled out to the public with 1.31 or a later patch

Robin Mayne, BioWare Webmaster

Mac NWN: The Mac version of Neverwinter Nights is now in stores. Game owners can register their game here, and then discuss NWN in this Mac forum. Further details in the Mac section!

Linux Forum Features: As part of future improvements to the BioWare Community sites, we may implement a more in-depth profiling system and content channeling, which would probably include 'I am a Linux Gamer' type of profile setting, but this is a ways off. This profiling isn't specific to NWN Linux, but to the whole of our online community, and would be implemented with other improvements at a later date.

Quote: the OLD version of NWN and won't play on any server that has upgraded to SOU. (Read almost all, if not all actively developed servers today.)

That is not correct. The shipping Mac version is able to connect to SOU based servers, depending on the module being hosted. You can find more details about non-SoU owners playing with SoU owners in the SoU FAQ here.

David Gaider, Designer

Spell Casting Prestige Classes: The problem with spell-casting PrC's is that there is no way, currently, for someone to gain the extra level of spell-casting ability in their original class when they level-up in the PrC. If you are a 15th level Wizard and take 1 level of Archmage, you should have spells and spell-casting ability as per a 16th level Wizard, correct? That currently can't be done... neither as an inherent PrC ability, nor as a feat. Until and unless it can be, you won't be seeing as spell-casting PrC's.

Expansion Campaigns: Not to comment overmuch, but there HAS to be a playable campaign with the expansion. How many players do you know that would pick up a content expansion that only adds things to the toolset which they do not use, on the promise that several months from now there will be a bunch of community content that requires it? Not many. There might be some persistent worlds and DM-run games which would want to use new features right away, but that'd be a fairly small percentage.

So, then, what publisher in their right mind is going to put out a product which will see most of its sales many months after release when players start realizing there's community content out there that needs it... providing the builders actually built something with the expansion, knowing that none of the players actually had it. An all-content expansion could be done, mind you... but the backing behind it would have to be commeasurate with the expected sales. Meaning a smaller print, meaning less distribution, meaning less people available to work on the project and therefore unlikely to have much more content than an expansion that included the campaign to begin with. Look on it as a necessary evil, if you must, but necessary it is.

Quote: Visceral Doom: All I want of HotU is a good single player game with slow advancement and long gameplay. No more and no less.

There cannot be long gameplay, as this is still an expansion, and there will not be slow advancement. Besides all the normal reasons, we have the epic levels to introduce just as SoU had to get to levels high enough for prestige classes to be introduced. These things do not mean that HotU will lack quality any more than SoU did. If those are make-it or break-it qualities for you, that's okay... they have been made abundantly clear, however, and will not change. My suggestion is that you either deal with it and find something positive to focus on or move on.

Derek French, Live Team Producer

Crashing Server Problems: Hi all. We still haven't been able to duplicate this behaviour, even with help from the community. Some code samples have been sent in (which didn't compile) and the packets they created don't crash the server. Some packets that looked like they might cause problems have been handled better now.

We will gladly fix any exploit that has been called to our attention - nwexploits@bioware.com - but this one is still eluding us. Unless we get some hard evidence as to how this is happening there is little that we can do. If anyone out there has some better description of this crash, please send it along to nwexploits@bioware.com

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Release Dates: You're free to predict anything you wish (time will tell). You're also free to change the basis of your original argument - just don't expect people to continue to play when you do so. Now, starting with BG we've released each subsequent D&D game within 12 months of the one before. As a matter of fact, since this is the first time we've done a second expansion pack (the cycle up until now has been a new game followed by an expansion followed by another new game (or stand-alone sequel), followed by an expansion) there's no reason to think that NWN HotU won't be out before the end of 2003.

It depends upon whether you define a year as an arbitrary 12 month period or between January and the following December. I'm choosing the former since there are optimal times, from a marketing perspective, to release games - before summer and before Christmas.

Baldur's Gate - Released December 1998
Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast - Released October 1999 (not too sure about that one)
That's 10 months.

Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn - Released September 2000
That's 11 months.

Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal - Released June 2001
That's 10 months.

Neverwinter Nights - Released June 2002
That's 12 months.

Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide - Released June 2003
That's 12 months.