Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

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

Shifters: Unfortunately the engine was not able to handle ranged weapons with dynamic item properties correctly and since I added the property merging pretty close to the content lockdown date (after someone brought up the idea here on the boards), there was no way we could make it work. Another problem was the limited damage scaling ranged weapons offer in NWN, which would have made those forms obsolete at higher level. Thus the following changes were made:

- The lizard crossbow man was changed to be the whip master
- The stone golem got the hurl rocks attack
- The rakshasa got the ice storm attack
- The manticore spikes got set to unlimited uses.
- The mindflayer mind blast got a damage component added

All in all I feel this is even better than the former ability to shoot with ranged weapons on the lizard man and the medusa, because damage is scaling much better on these abilities than on a normal crossbow and you don't have to worry about ammunition and merging item properties.

Further:
I personally never had trouble hitting anything in the hordes campaign, epecially both undead form have a pretty nice AB.

How to get a better AB:
- Casting buffs or using potions before shapeshifting
- Casting debuffs on enemies before shapeshifting or by using special form abilties (i.e. mind blast or the green dragon form's poison breath)
- Magic items

You need to understand that the shifter is not there to compete with a fighter when it comes to damage. You have incredible versatility to react to any opponent, and thus you pay a price when it comes to raw combat abilities - mainly AB, your damage should be pretty good. Just a note: I didn't copy properties to creature weapons on purpose, most of the forms with natural attacks have very powerful special qualities on their creature hide or claws, so giving them the power to merge item properties will be very very unbalancing.

Quote: How does the shifters scale up ? I heard somebody saying the forms would stop improving at lvl 17 (shifter lvl) ? Is this true ?

save DC and damage on special abilities scale up indefinitly. At level 17, humanoid shape receives the last "big" update with new weapons and appearances (new sneak attack for kobold commando, etc), that's probably what people are talking about.

Only some forms get the "big" updates (appearance and such): If I remember correctly:

Greater Wildshape II - level 13
Greater Wildshape III - level 15
Humanoid Shape - level 17

Z-offset: The z-offset always depends on the tileset. These ground tile constants are actually references to new VFX in visual effects.2da ... which aren't too new. In fact these are just tileset feature models copied into visualeffects.2da

Constant Invulnerability Bug: Yes, the patch should fix that. Save and reload if you notice this happening is the best workaround for this until the patch is out.

HotU Properties: It's the same as using the SetLocal* commands in the scripting language. You can now set these local variables right from the start in the toolset if you want.

Could you give a concrete example as to why this is an advantage? As in a quest example or something like that?

Example: You can set SpawnCondition variables on a creature instance in the toolset. This way you don't need to create new custom OnSpawn scripts to set them, saving you millions of new scripts on the long run

2nd Example: You write one generic OnUsed script for all your ambient placeables in your module. Instead of testing against their tag (what would limit your flexibility), you test against a new variable you save on the creature.

Hidden colours: You need to go to the last row of the toolset color palette for an armor. Now click on a color in that row and hold the button pressed. Drag the mouse cursor just right below that last row, you should see the green selection move down. Release ... and you got one of the hidden colors

Fear: In case you didn't notice, most enemies don't run away when frightened, they are frozen to their spot, so there is nothing to chase down.

New Found Persistency: yes we added this feature to make everything consistent with the ability to initialize variables on objects in the Toolset. AFAIK there are no strings attached, except for the rather large memory footprint/increased loadtime (as pappilon_ pointed out) you will generate when going too crazy on this. Please keep in mind that using functions like CopyObject on these items will NOT copy the variables unless you specify the bCopyVars parameter as TRUE.

Sword properties: A sword can only have 8 item properties. If you add more, the smith will not upgrade it.

Finished HotU Review: Thanks for taking the time to write this review, we really appreciate it, and are happy that you liked the campaign. It's good to get this kind of feedback from time to time. As for more game experiences like this ... start looking forward to our next RPG (or you might want to consider playing KotOR, many people who worked on HotU also worked on KotOR). Also the Live Team is certainly cooking up some interesting stuff for the community

HotU Cutscenes: You won't have much luck with taking these cutscenes outside of the HotU module, they are by far the most complicated stuff you can find in NWscript and rely on dozens of different things to work correctly. If you want to see how they are done, I would suggest having a look at the gelatinous cube cutscene in the underdark, it's a good way to start

Effect stacking:

Quote: Neither Diamond Soul nor Epic Spell Resistance stack together. They both their EFFECTSSTACK set to zero in the feat.2da so they can't stack with other feats including each other. So a level 40 monk would end up with 50SR even after taking all of the Epic Spell Resistance feats.

EffectsStack does not determine this. EffectsStack determines if feats that are in a Successor - chain stack.

David Gaider, Designer

HotU feedback: I'm interested in what everyone thought of the audio? How did you like the VO and new voicesets? Were the new creature sounds good? How about the new spell effects? Did you think the music fit the atmosphere? Also, if you are a builder, did you like the new sounds we provided? Be honest and brutal (well not too brutal )

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

NWN MMORPG: Let's not forget that Turbine Entertainment Software is already in the process of making D&D Online. So on top of all the other fantasy MMORPGs out there to compete with (AC, AC2, DAoC, EQ, EQ2, MEO, UO, UO2, WOW, etc.), a NWN MMORPG would have to compete with another product in the exact same market space (i.e. one that uses the D&D ruleset). This is not including all the _other_, non-fantasy MMORPGs (AO, Matrix, SWG, etc.) that are, or will be, gobbling up market share. Therefore, it doesn't seem like the right time to get into MMORPGs.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Comments about fan concerns: BioWare spends a great deal of time and resources and maintaining close contact with the fans because it does make our games better in the long run as these are the people who are buying our products. It does however get a bit...tough at times to come to these boards as sometimes folks who are having trouble or did not get the special feature they were looking for get upset. We do realize that those who are not having problems and enjoying the game are playing it and not here to speak their mind.

We know that these forums are a bit like a retail store where you need to be able to deal with a variety of people some good, some good-challenged. We love constructive criticism from people who play our games- that is the honest truth. If people don't like our games we stop making them and go do other jobs. We don't want that.

We don't like personal attacks on people here. The people that work here are some of the most talented and creative people anywhere and I don't take kindly to them being maligned by individuals who have no idea what they are talking about. That doesn't help us make better games. We do appreciate the support that is shown for BioWare on these forums and every once in a while I get to send out a post to everyone in the company from here that serves to pick everybody up and demonstrate that our community is with us which, in turn, encourages more BioWare people to come here and communicate with you.

You know NWN is addicting when... I played until a sharp, stabbing pain in my shoulder hit me following by an ominous voice saying "Jay..you need to stop this madness." It was my friend Danielle with a letter opener.