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.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Screenshots: Yup- I use the Print Screen button. A couple of things to keep in mind for a higher quality of screenshots:

1. Unless you want take a picture of floating numbers turn off all the Feedback options.
2. Hit the key 'H' to remove the game GUI.
3. Think about sacrificing game speed for nice visuals by raising your resolution and/or ramping up the anti-aliasing.

The screens will be saved in the NWN directory.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake starting class: It depends. A combat-oriented class can still be of comfort in WW1 as the beasties are there to be dealt with even if you don't receive experience specifically for killing them. That said, I recommend picking a class you may not typically play and seeing how WW responds. Every class is viable though wizards and sorcerers might be the toughest due to the rest restrictions and limitations on familiars. But they get to cast Charm and Scare in conversation. Experiment a little and then come back and tell us which class you enjoyed most.

CEP magazine release: I believe some modules (including Witch's Wake 1) were cover mounted on CD at one point. Also, a lot of the Australian magazines have gone to cover-mounted DVDs and are always hungry for content to fill them up. If you'd like to see your favorite magazine cover mount the CEP, send them an email telling them how cool it is, provide some links, and encourage them to mount it for one of their upcoming issues.

Tilesets: I faced this exact problem while remastering my original version of Witch's Wake 1 in preparation for our proposed Digital Distribution project. I ended up taking a screenshot of the original area and repainting the equivalent terrain in the new tileset (cycling through individual tile variations where I felt it was important). I then opened the old area, ensured that all of the various object types were visible, and zoomed out far enough so I could see the entire map. I swapped over to object mode, dragged a selection box around the entire area, and used Ctrl-C to copy all of the objects it contained. I then went to the new area and used Ctrl-V and moved my cursor around until it looked like everything was in the right place. One click and I was (pretty much) done.

There are some limitations to this approach, however. All objects will snap down to ground level so if you've made a lot of z-axis changes or stacked objects on top of each other, you're going to have to redo all of that work. Also, I found that encounters lost their spawn points in the copy/paste process. I just drew a quick map on graph paper and marked down my spawn points there, then recreated them by hand. The GFF solution might be a better approach in some cases but if you have two non-equivalent tilesets (forest and HotU's icy, for instance) you'll probably run into troubles.

Witch's Wake 2:

Quote: Might we "masses" have a release month or quarter for WW: remastered and WW 2, please? I'm in the middle of my 7th run through HotU and it's wearing thin. Official Bioware modules, where art thou?

Nope, no dates available (except for Stan's). A lot of the details are out of our hands right now (Atari signing the contract, WotC approving the individual modules) so we have to wait until those are sorted out before everything starts becoming a reality. On our end, there are also a variety of technical tasks being worked on (a revamp of the website, creation of a secure storefront, piracy prevention mechanisms, etc). Meanwhile we have the development of the modules themselves, some of which are waiting on the issues discussed above (once Atari signs the contract, we'll be able to allocate additional manpower and it will free up some further initiatives as well). In short, it's a complicated process. Progress is being made on all fronts, however. Hang tight and we'll let everyone know once that day comes within sight. In the meantime, take the opportunity to play some of the great community mods out there or start a regular DM'd session over at Neverwinter Connections.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

30% Idle CPU Useage: As I explained in another thread, we do not see this as a high priority item. Since the server is empty, it doesn't matter if it has 30%. And you can not conclude that if the server takes 30% CPU when empty it would take 30%+x when full, that's not how it works. 30% CPU load does not have any meaning when it comes to performance. You can have 100% cpu load and performance is still good and you can have 10% and performance is bad, for one or another reason. If there were no artificial sleeps in the server code, it would always take 100% anyway.

Screenshots:

Quote: But why using the TGA format? Why not JPG or PNG for that matter.

Tga is good for lossless, high quality screen captures - JPG and PNG both need to be encoded and JPG always is associated with quality loss in favour of compression (through PNG can be lossless as well IIRC).

Further:

Quote: Actually, the question is why not BMP, which has been used in all IE games (and pretty much everywhere else)?

Actually very little things are done without reason today

TGA (Truevision / targa file format) has some advantages over BMP:

Up to 32 bit color depth (opposed to 24 bit in BMPs), gamma setting, integrated thumbnails and alpha channel support (not really needed for screenshots). And of course it makes sense to have the best quality for screenshots.

The only thing that speaks for BMP is that it's "the" native Windows format and even Paint can read it , but then again, NWN is available on several other platforms and any good image viewer supports TGA.

CD key: There is no way you can get the real CDKey of a person by scripting. All you get is a public version of the cdkey, a signature/hash that can not be reverse engineered into the real key. Also there can be no "key generators" for online play as there is no algorithm used to generate cdkeys - all valid keys have been random generated and are known only to us. I strongly suggest not trying out any "key generators" as all they do is to present you a list of stolen or even fake keys while scanning your hard drive for your own keys to send them back to the developer of the key generator. Also please keep in mind that your cdkey can be invalidated if used in conjunction with a stolen key.