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.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

ALT+Tab: ALT-Tab isn't a officallly supported feature in NWN, so it may cause problems. However, I have found that if the mouse doesn't seem to work in game after alt-tabbing, some times pressing the ALT key after returning to gameplay will make the mouse work again.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

HotU AI: We did a fair bit of AI improvements for Hordes. In fact we also looked at the available Community AI's - Brent, our Lead Designer on Hordes, had a nifty simulator module running for several days and nights, having different AI systems fight each other in various constellations to gather data. We did find that in most cases, Jasperre's AI was winning - with some exceptions when it came to group based combat, and some of our AI got tweaked with the resulting data - however we also found that we could go only that far - as good as many community AI projects are, they are not compliant with the internal rules and goals we had for Hordes - some of them cheat (i.e. setting plot flags to prevent certain actions from being interrupted), some are too cpu intensive, breaking on minimum spec machines and some eat memory by storing a lot of tactical data (i.e. interesting foes) as local objects. I certainly can recommend the advanced module builder to use CODI or Jasperre's AI (I didn't test the DLA AI yet)if they want to have something refreshingly different for their modules - but be aware that this might cause problem on minspec machines (server or client alike).

A number of tweaks (far from complete list) in the Hordes AI over the NWN main ai (which are retroactive in most cases):
- better reaction to area effect spells, including better handling of using dispel magic.
- better friend/foe identification for OnSpellCastAt
- expanded matchtables for spell/feat selection (mainly to include the new HotU and some SoU spells)
- some improvements to the spellcasting AI
- vastly improves henchman/familiar/follower AI and lot more options to tweak it (i.e. the autostealth option)
- new henchmen radial commands
- numerous bug fixes to the AI (i.e. handling of some special feats, spell or feat selection)
- whirlwind AI

We also went a great length to enable community AI builders to influence AI decisions and even overwrite the default AI:
- introduction of variables to set behavior like offensive rating, magic use rating and compassion rating

- introduced the ability to overwrite the default ai with a custom AI without modifying scripts as seen with the custom beholder and mindflayer AI.

- introduction of x2_inc_switches.nss which includes some AI specific switches.

As for scaling back the default AI because players have a too hard time - I don't know if that happened for NWN, but I know these decisions happen, yes - IF a too powerful AI ruins gameplay. Let me give you an example: I added the "dispel enemy AoE" spells AI routine to Hordes, and, while testing, found it highly annoying - enemy spellcasters would always immediatly kill off your AoEs the moment you cast them. Now this might be realistic and intelligent of them, but it also completely ruined the day for any sorceror that was using AoE spells as main weapons - it was just not fun anymore. So I decided to put a little randomization in to make it happen a bit more infrequent. Technically this can be seen as "dumping down the AI", yes, but it is also "preserving the fun", and that is the most important thing IMO. (I think I left a variable you can set to tweak this, not sure)

So, bottomline: Yes, the community AI projects are very advanced and often better than our AI, because they don't have to worry about Bioware's internal limitations (like those pesky minspec machines or just compatibility with the two previous NWN campaigns) - plus their creators have "unlimited" time on their hands - something completely unheard of in this industry. Yes, if you are a skilled module builder and know what you are going into when replacing any Bioware specific scripts, there is no reason not to give those community AI projects a try.

Random name generator: Err, yepp ... but then again, the overall value of having the random name generator spitting out more names is very very low in my opinion, as it does not really add anything to gameplay - most people want to name their characters themselves anyway. No, there are far more interesting things on the list of "nice to have features", so I would rate this "very unlikely to ever happen".