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

Stopping skills/feats: Hide in plain sight is certainly not an exploit, it is an ability of the shadowdancer. There is no way to disable this ability by scripting. Giving monsters better spot checks/truesight spells can make them tougher to beat.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Limiting Epic Levels: There is already a setting in the advanced server options menu for setting the allowed level ranges for the server. Or am I missing something?

David Chan, Sound Effects Designer

Quote: Any chance of getting a text-to-speach engine so it wouldn't matter what you typed out - it would say it (unless you say quite a few cajun words). Microsoft's text-to-speach engine was large when I last looked at it (300 mb or more) but the quality was not bad - could make just about any voice. I doubt they are the only makers of text-to-speach software but perhaps a tool that uses this to create the voices that are then put into wav's for the game may be slick.

That's not really possible at this stage. On top of that voice synth still sounds way too synthetic to fool anyone.The sounds are named as descriptively as possible and you can filter by prefix. There is really no time to write up a description for each and the best way to see if they fit is to listen to them.

Quote: My problem is not new sounds but knowing what sounds are now available, in the Resource Window a very, very, long list appears (9293 resources to be exact).....is there a listing anywhere which gives a description of each resource. Thanks..BTW which one produces applause.

The sounds are named as descriptively as possible and you can filter by prefix. There is really no time to write up a description for each and the best way to see if they fit is to listen to them. Thanks for all the suggestions folks. I'll do my best to get in as many requests as I can.

Tim Smith, Programmer

Stack Underflow: For everyone's future reference:

Included with SOU and the 1.30 patch, the compiler was fixed and should no longer have problems with variables declared inside of "{}"s. Actually, variables declared like this would only cause a problem when used with break and continue statements. As far as this specific problem, can you describe exactly what you fixed in your code to get rid of the problem?

The problem is that if your initialization routine for the global variable tries to access another global variable which has not been initialized yet, it could result in a stack underflow. In general, you shouldn't call routines to initialize your global variables. If those routines access global variables themselves, the results would be unpredictable. Since globals are just initialized in a wrapper routine around the main or starting conditional, OBJECT_SELF should already point to an object.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Epic Levels: Yes, we are adding "epic" levels to the Hordes expansion pack. Players who buy Hordes will be able to go higher then 20th level, and they will have access to more powerful feats, spells, weapons, and skills. For the multiplayer community, this means that there will be very powerful characters running around servers playing as Gods.

Quote: Perhaps Bioware could post a list of known bugs so at least the community would know the Bioware is aware of a certain issue. Perhaps even the current priority level could be posted. I realize certain exploits and other issues may not be allowed to be posted which would be okay with me. Just perhaps acknowledge which items are really bugs would be nice so we know they are on the fix list at least.

Honestly I'd be too afraid to list all the bugs that are known. I'm afraid that people who see the total number of bugs may draw the conclusion that the game is too buggy to buy without taking into account the total size of the game. In the same way masses begin to believe the streets are crime ridden because every second news story is about a bank robbery, murder, car jacking etc.

I’m also afraid that griefers may take advantage of some of the known exploits and cause more problems while we are fixing them. That being said, we still could post a few known issues but that will take our time to deal with, instead of developing other things that may benefit the community later on.

What He Does: I work at BioWare, I was the liaison between Floodgate and BioWare during Shadows of Undrentide. On Hordes of the Underdark, my role is to make sure the game gets done on time, with high quality and within budget.

David Gaider, Designer

Quote: also to clarify my topic "complete control over henchman" what i meant was i just wanted control over their skills and feats each time they level up so i can decide what skills/feats they get instead of the computer.

No, you will not be able to select feats and skills for henchmen as they level up. You will have greater control over their actions than you did in SoU, however.

Subraces in HotU: No, you can't play a drow or any other sub-race in HotU... but I've already said that elsewhere. There will be no hard-coded sub-race functionality.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

HotU: Well... all I can say about the storyline is that you will need torches for some of it.

HotU Forum: A big brain-sucking welcome to the new Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark forum! The official web site for Hordes of the Underdark will be launching in a few months so make sure to check back regularly for the latest news. When it launches it will be updated regularly with plenty of information to answer your questions about this second expansion, and visual treats to provide an early glimpse into this dark and dangerous world of adventure. Until then, you can watch for online and print previews (such as the preview in the Sept issue of Computer Games Magazine) and chat about this creepy new expansion right here! (Forum can be seen here)