Neverwinter Nights Forum News

Remove all ads!

(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

Patch 1.63:

Quote: Epic Gargoyle form missing its stats.

fixed

Quote: Iron Golem form has the elemental immunities backwards.

Not sure

Quote: Flipping between items via the quickbar ends up getting an item frozen in place in the inventory.

Probably fixed

Quote: Casting a spell then going into drive mode makes the model get stuck in the casting animation.

Probably fixed

Quote: Archer NPC's keep attacking stealthed/invisible PC's.

Fixed

No word on the others, haven't been paying attention to the patch notes for a while.

CD-key privacy:
The best way of keeping your CDKey private is to follow the basic rules of computer security.

- Don't install unknown software
- Don't open your NWN directory for file sharing
- Keep your system up to date (i.e. install every available ASAP)
- Run an anti virus programm and a fire wall
- Don't share it with people, regardless how friendly they are
- and don't double click on those pesky email attachments.

If we added a method of only allowing the CDKey from a certain IP, Atari Customer Support would go down in a storm of violent complaints from people who forgot about that feature or have dynamic IP Addresses. It's your responsibility to keep your CDKey private - and it's in your best interest as well, because if someone can grab your CDKey, he will probably be able to grab a lot of other sensitive data as well.

Shifter: If your shifted form had a constitution bonus (i.e. the dire tiger), you will loose the bonus hitpoints gained from this from when you shift back. If that brings you below 0, you're dead.

Random number generator: The random number generator is just that, random, at least as random as your operating system allows it. But, as every DM knows, there's always a good amount of paranoia in players when it comes to dice as well.

Further:
The more annoying people in my old PnP party used to "test" their dice extensively before a session and "retest" them before each "important" roll. That's the best way to get them DM appreciate diceless roleplaying

Crafting 2DA: yes, there is a .2da that defines all the choises, des_crft_appear.2da or so.

It's structured this way:

X X+1 X-1

if I remember correctly, which means that X is your current appeareance, X+1 defines the index of next appearance you get in the dialog and X-1 defines the index of the appearance you get when selecting previous in the dialog. So

10 12 9

would mean that if you currently have appearance #10, selecting next would pick the appearance at row 12 in the 2da, previous would get the appearance at row 9 in the 2da. All you need to do is modify the .2da and put it in the server overide.

Ranged attacks: Please note that there is currently a bug with creatures that use ranged weapons not properly unacquiring hidden targets. It will be fixed in 1.63

Patch 1.63 fix: There was indeed a bug that left visual effects stay around forever (as some people may have experienced in combinations with "goblins" and "green dye" in the HotU OC). The circumstances where this bug would appear were:

- if you had multiple copies of the same visual looping effect (VLE) applied to you at the same time, AND
- they all came from different sources(creatures), AND
- you then had another new VLE applied, AND
- this new VLE was of a different type than the original ones, AND
-this new VLE was applied before the first multiple VLEs had had a chance to expire,
THEN the original VLE would play on the creature forever (and would never go away until you logged out).

(I am sure this bug had negative effects on Craig's sanity, hopefully only temporary). It has been fixed for 1.63.

GFF file corruption: File corruption can happen to any file format, files stored on certain file systems (like FAT/FAT32) are more likely to be affected than others. A single flipping bit can invalidate a compressed file beyond the ability to recover it. Files can get corrupted for a variety of reasons - due to a crashing computer during a hard disk write, virii or trojans, unstable or experimental drivers, programs violating the toolsets memory space, hardware defects (especially bad memory) and hardware incompatibilities/bugs. There are a couple of things you can do to make corruption less likely (i.e. using a more robust file system like NTFS5 or a journaling file system like reiserfs (if you use linux)).

Your first and foremost protection against this will always be backups, frequent backups. Secondly, if the toolset crashes, don't take it easily. You can use the recover functionality to get your module back, but there is no guarantee that this module is 100% in good shape. Also, if you run the toolset, run it alone - other programs you run in addition to the toolset can possibly interfere with it - especially the game - do not run a module in the game that you are editing in the toolset! Detecting corruption is another difficult topic, as a corrupted object might not be apparent as corrupted at all. Surely, if you have a 0 byte itp file in your module, you can pretty much tell why it is failing to load in the game, but in a lot of cases you might not even notice that something is broken.

So, to answer your question - I think it is highly unlikely that we will invest time in the features you describe. To do it right, the game would need to introduce CRC's or similar means to ensure the integrity of every single file packed into a GFF, not only adding a size to it, but also resulting in significant management overhead to both game and toolset for verifying those checksums. A repair feature would be highly complicated to impossible as destroyed data can not be magically recreated - even if you could restore the file format, the data inside the gff might will be destroyed and will possibly crash the game anyway. One more thing: The larger your module gets and the more files are stored in it - the more time will be required for file IO, increasing the chance for an accident to happen. Keep your modules small, NWN was not created with 150 MB, 200 areas, 15k items modules.

Yes, it's unforunate that modules sometimes, on rare occasions, get corrupted, but so do office documents, savegames, etc. If corruption is caused by a bug in the toolset, we will fix it - our experience (about 8 people working up to 12 hours a day for several month on HotU with the toolset, experiencing a single module corruption due to running game and toolset at the same time) pretty much says that investing significant time in the features you requested would be a bad investment. There are a couple of options you have to increase your chance of recovering from a corrupted module

- You can export any static file from your module to a secure location, probably using a third party program (like VSS or even tripwire) to make ensure integrity and give you the option of detecting changes in those "static" files.

- Save the source files out of the toolset's \nwn\temp0 directory to a save location from time to time.

- (again) do frequent backups and do not hesitate to revert to a backup instead of restoring a crashed module (you can still recover the files you worked on manually before reverting and verify they are ok).

- make sure your storage is in a good shape and run frequent file system maintenance (i.e. defrag, fschk, etc)

- lastly, our file format is open - you might find someone in the community who will write a gff validation or even repair tool for you.

I don't expect you to agree with this post, but you know the rules, only ask if you are willing to accept the answer

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake: "WW1: Remastered" will continue to be free but yes, we are hoping to convert WW2 and others into a revenue stream for the Live Team. While I agree with a lot of your thoughts regarding the underlying concept of Linux, our personal experience was that Live Team staff (myself included) kept getting poached by paying projects such as Jade Empire or the expansions. It unfortunately came down to a question of converting the WW series into a revenue stream in its own right or saying goodbye to the series (and the overall concept of a Live Team) altogether. We chose what we considered to be the lesser of two weevils, and hopefully the results of that decision will be content well worth your gaming dollar. Our intent is that the money raised will go back into helping the community through various Live Team initiatives, ranging from ongoing support of Neverwinter to the development of more community-centric features in upcoming titles.

Further:

The FAQ's a bit out of date but it should cover most of the bases. The key thing that's changed is that, after a year of being pulled away from the WW series to work on Jade Empire, SoU, and HotU, I'm diving back in and doing "Witch's Wake I: Remastered." Basically, that means I'm updating the original module with post-expansion resources and some new techniques on the back end in preparation for the remainder of the series. Also, we're hoping to make the series part of a larger Live Team initiative (run a search for DD or Digital Distribution on this forum if you want more info) that will provide for the support of NWN and future mod-oriented titles well into the future. We'll be in a position to talk about that a little more once we've sorted out the details with our publisher, Atari, and we'll update the WW FAQ at that time

The community: Well I will say this much: We definitely hope to be able to work with some of the top talent in the community, provide them with strong internal support (even to the point of adding features to the game to help them out), a robust QA environment, and so forth. My own personal belief is that we can accomplish a lot more by working together than by working apart and, in the end, that's going to benefit the community as a whole. In essence, such a move would be a more formal extension of my original attempt to use the Witch's Wake series to showcase the best the community had to offer. As with all things DD-related, however, there are a lot of questions still up in the air. We're moving ahead but it's a slow process and it's very hard to tell at this point where all of the cards will land. Once things fall into place, we'll let you know.