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.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

BioWare Future: First of all you have to recognize that, at 175 employees and 3-5 separate projects, BioWare doesn't abide by a single unified vision for where and what we want our games to be in the future. Some teams are working on console titles, some are on PC titles, some are taking approach x, some are taking approach y, some are focused on this aspect of the larger problem while others have focused on other aspects. In other words, don't read too much into Darcy's statements in that interview or Georg's comments in this thread, or mine either, for that matter. We're all approaching the notion of game development from different angles and it will all come together by the time our games make it into the hands and hard drives of our fan community.

What I can promise you is that the Live Team is focused on all issues surrounding you, the community. During the three years that I led the design on Neverwinter, the concept of a community such as this was always foremost in my mind. Tile-based area development is just one result of that having been a priority. Overall, I feel Neverwinter has done a stellar job of building and sustaining BioWare's present community, even to the point of blowing away our own high expectations. What can I say, you guys are phenomenal and that's why I made the choice to join the Live Team and continue pushing the envelope with Witch's Wake and our (hopefully) upcoming DD project.

But Neverwinter can't be the be-all and end-all of this community. We have every intention of growing, adapting, and changing over the coming years and ultimately that will mean helping this community migrate over to future BioWare titles. Games like KotOR have been great games and highly successful but, from the Live Team's perspective, they haven't contributed in any direct way to the BioWare community and the BioWare community hasn't been given any substantial means of contributing to it. The same will likely be true of Jade Empire, though there may be a little more potential there given the fact that it's based on our own intellectual property.

Ultimately, the Live Team is setting its sights on BioWare's upcoming secret PC project as 'the next big thing' for this community and we're going to be working alongside the core development team to make that happen (after all, our jobs and the continued existence of the Live Team kinda depend on it! ). We've learned a lot from NWN's development and will be putting that experience and insight to use over the coming years.

So what does this have to do with tiles? Well, as Darcy has said, the art and design teams for KotOR and our upcoming titles are considering a return to the BG tradition of heavily customized, art-driven landscapes. There's a lot to be said for that approach and the Live Team fully supports them in that decision. As rtrifts has suggested, however, relying solely on that framework is not going to be in the best interests of this community and of the Live Team. And rtrifts should know, as he's leading the very impressive DLA mod team with which I'm sure most of you are already familiar. Ultimately, my personal hope is that the Live Team will be in a position to put our proverbial money where our mouth is and hire the necessary personnel to develop community-oriented tools and resources capable of plugging directly into the tools being used internally by BioWare's core development teams.

This may or may not involve tiles. Imagine a push-me-pull-you (PiMPY) sort of terrain editor, for instance, that's capable of rapidly generating very organic, non-tiled landscapes. What if you are then able to import arbitrary chunks of 3D geometry (whether from a library that ships with the game or downloaded from an equivalent of the Vault) into that landscape. Then consider the option of being able to spray-paint waving grass or budding flowers or entire forests of trees onto that landscape with ease. Tiles aren't the only means of achieving ease-of-use so don't lock yourself into that mindset.

Now maybe none of the above will prove feasible or maybe the Digital Distribution project won't generate sufficient revenue to enable it or maybe other complications will arise along the way. Regardless, the Live Team is here to ponder and address these sorts of questions so that the core development teams can focus on developing fun games and getting them out the door in one piece with the minimal amount of grief, loss of life, and spontaneous combustion. They have their jobs to do and we have ours. Personally, I think it should work out pretty darn well for everyone, yourselves included.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Famous characters: BioWare has no plans to release 'official' versions of some famous characters for folks to check out...I would suspect that there are some fans who could do a faaaaar better job of recreating famous characters than we could. I have read several of the books for example but I am certainly not any kind of expert. There is also the angle of out of repect to our publishing partners we do not release anything that has not been approved by all the D&D stakeholders.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

CEP: Sorry, I don't see your point. So far, for me, CEP is the easiest to use, best documentend and most comprehensive hakpak I have seen. Yes, surely it still has some "low quality" stuff in it, but then again, everyone is free to use whatever he/she wants in a module. Futhermore, I really don't understand why the hell people get mad when a project gets well deserved attention. I've already noticed that whenever DLA and sometimes content is featured on the Vault, there are always people trying to find reasons why they shouldn't get this kind of attention.

- Yes, there have been high quality hakpaks before, obviously some of them went unnoticed
- Yes, CEP was dormant for quite a while (through I would blame that on partially on us as well, it has been only since the release of HotU that many things in custom content can now be done that were not possible before).
- Yes, they have some a few pieces of lower quality content in there (not hard, given the total number of pieces they have).

So what? Does that take anything away from the value CEP will have for the community?

No. Because the CEP hakpak is the first one to combine excellent documentation, excellent file structure, an approach that is not modifying or effecting the original game, a huge amount of content matching some kind of quality filter with promised constant support. That's what makes it special in my eyes. Their idea may not have been revolutionary, but they were the first to do it "right" and they deserve an recognition for this huge task. Not everyone can download content from the vault and repackage it, and more important, not everyone wants to do that. CEP is a partial solution to this problem (which is, at least partially , a problem with NWN's hakpak framework). People won't have to browse through 30 hakpaks to update them later on to the next version of the game that breaks 2da compatibility, they just download the CEP update and that's it.

Further:

Hey, I think you have trouble understanding the concept of CEP. To be blunt, almost any hakpak will conflict with CEP. Of course - CEP includes many .2da files with it's files. In a nutshell, if you want to make a hakpak work with CEP, you need to extract the .2da files that are altered in the new hakpak from the CEP 2da hakpak, merge them together, and put them into a CEP_PLUS_ROBES_2DA hakpak on top of the hakpak hierachy. If CEP decides to put the robes into an official update, you will just need to remove the new hakpak you added and that's it.

Installer: CEP is not a Bioware product, our updater will never support community releases, due to already discussed legal implications, sorry.

Further:
The auto installer this link is talking about is the tool that we added in one of our later patches that allows builders to create executeable installers for custom content (check your local nwn\utils folder.)

Updater:

Quote: I plan on using it in Gemstone as soon as it's supported through the updater

As I explained in the other thread, this will not happen. CEP is not a Bioware product and thus can never be supported through the official updater. CEP is a community created content expansion - Bioware has no involvement with it (except for giving them some exposure through BW Wednesday to help spreading the word).