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

Polymorph: There is a column in polymorph.2da which has the resref of the item the character is going to equip in his right hand after polymorphing. If you just want to change the spell, I would suggest using a correctly padded 2da file, add a new entry basically copying the line of the doom knight and make your changes. You then use the line number of your new polymorph.2da entry as parameter for effect polymorph, so if your new doomknight was in line 320, you would change nw_s0_tenstrans to read:

EffectPolymorph(320) instead of EffectPolymorph (POLYMORPH_TYPE_DOOMKNIGHT)

After those changes you need to put the modified polymorph.2da into a hakpak and associate it with your module.

Disintegrate: You know, disintegrate always has the bad bad side effect of destroying any loot on the creature as well. And, no, there is no disintegrate spell for mages, sorry, but the beholders want to retain a monopoly on that ability

Beam Effects: There are limitations on how you can use the beams, imposed by the graphics engine:

* Your character needs to be able to see origin and destination of the beam at the time the beam is created

* Leaving the current area can result in beams not being drawn correctly when you come back

The solution to get stable beams is to apply them between invisible objects and "reset" the scene when a player comes back by destroying and recreating those invisible objects.

More:
The original purpose for beams were spells, and for that purpose they are working correctly. You can use them for many other purposes, but it requires some tricks to work around the unwanted behavior of the graphics engine in their case. You can find some more information on that topic on the Scripting Board, the short answer to your above question is:

Yes, we are aware of the problems you experience when using beams in a fashion they were not designed for in the first place, and no, these limitations are not likely to change anytime soon.

Scripting: There is a reason why those commands are not in yet. Functions that change Attributes, Feats, spells or skills would collide with the ELC system, allowing a scripter to make changes to a players character that would render the character "invalid" with ELC servers or even lock him out from his own server. Some of them (SetName) are not possible to add without major code changes, and thus are unlikely to happen. Others are being considered and one has even been added in the Hordes Scripting language, but has been found less useful than it might appear on the first glance, because of xisting engine constraints. You can work around some limitations with existing means(i.e. by granting feats through creature items using the dynamic item property system added in hordes). This does not mean that the Live Team won't consider adding those functions at some point however...Hope this sheds some light into that issue...

Local Vaults: If you run a local vault server, there is a full fledged selection of scripting commands to Examine, Add and Remove item properties and On(Un)Equip event handler which can be used to script your own Item Level Restrictions. Combined with the already existing scripting commands (i.e. GetItemGoldPieceValue), you can create pretty advanced systems for controlling item properties (i.e. automatically downgrading item properties to less powerful version, adding negative properties to balance positive ones...), all that without requiring a hakpak.

Quote: Quote: However (there allways is a however right?) There could be a Localint or a simple Item script that allows players to equip things over lvl 20 with no Penaltys of the server, if scripted correctly for a RP server right?

If the server is running a server vault (like most RP servers), you are not in trouble, because you are in control which items enter and exit your world, and if you wanted you could store a "level" for each item you create on your server and use the OnEquip scripting handler to verify if a player is allowed to equip an item of that level. You can even dynamically alter a weapons bonus when it is equipped, so it is downgraded to i.e. +3 if a player below a certain level equips it.