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

Witch's Wake: WW1 is pretty is pretty short (about 3 hours) so you can probably burn through it in an evening or two. If you intend to continue with the series, I will recommend you play the Remastered version as it includes some new database functionality that allows me to track the choices you make in WW1 and apply them to what goes on in the rest of the series. The original version of WW1 doesn't have this. As I said, though, the module's pretty short and I suspect a lot of people will enjoy playing through both versions of the module. If you want an idea of what to expect from the Witch's Wake series, play through the Charwood subplot in the NWN OC or Chapter 3 of HotU, as I wrote those as well. And I definitely recommend checking out some of the top fan-created modules on the Vault as there's some really top-notch stuff there.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Animations: One thing regarding Bioware encounter triggers / spawners - All monsters created by those get the flagged with "mobile ambient animations" - this will cause them to run a some code in their heartbeat script that has been identified as "taxing" on the game performance while we were working with Hordes. While this isn't a problem in your average module, it will become a problem on huge world setups like the ones posted here. Especially if you experience frequent action queue overflow or timeouts messages in your DM client message area, you should try to avoid this kind of setup - one solution is to recompile the default AI scripts after deactivating the line that makes monsters use the ambient animation system when they get spawned.

CPU usage: There is no problem here. High CPU usage does not cause lag in the game (it may cause lag in other applications running at the same time, but that's the reason why it is recommended closing all other applications when you run a game).

Feedback: I would replace "complain" and "whine" with "ask for". Sure some people complain and whine, but usually it's those that submit well written proposals/requests that make the difference. Someone gave us a very good reason to include SetSkyBox, we found their request compelling and there it is...If we hadn't constantly improved NWN over the last couple of years, adding 200+ new scripting commands, new functionality for both game and toolset, the game wouldn't be as popular as it is right now.

I don't see us trapped in some kind of vicious circle here, allowing us to collect and integrate feedback from our community is one of the great benefits this site offers us, and one of the reasons for the continuing success of NWN. If we had stopped improving NWN after release, I don't think a lot of people would be still playing it. Sure, every once in a while someone whines, but hey, we have over 1,700,000 registered users, chances are good that someone will complain in a negative way - the positive feedback still has the upper hand. The next patch is going to change/add several other things the people from the custom content community have asked for so they can make even better modules.

Game crashes: This problem sounds like you have a problem with your machine, probably broken RAM or a hard drive problem. I have heard that there is the possiblity of the toolset corrupting a module if you run it in the game the same time it is open in the toolset and manage to crash it. But I'm not aware of anything that could corrupt the whole game, especially consistently. We worked with about 10 people on hordes, about 10 hours a day for several month, and I can only remember a single time a module got corrupted (reason above) and that's the reason why the toolset now performs auto backups on your modules.
Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Patches:

Quote: Actually, you want the second one if you have HotU installed. The first is for if you only have NWN. I think x1 is for SoU and x2 is for HoTu and what does x12 stand for ? Those who have both?

Yep x12 for those that have expansion pack 1 & 2 installed.

x1 for expansion pack 1 (SoU) only.
x2 for expansion pack 2 (HotU) only.
pc for NWN installed without any expansion packs.

The updater will try to go to the Internet to find the patch, if the patch files found in your NWN directory either don't have the right game version number, or don't have the correct prefix for the expansion packs that you have installed.

Forum languages: People are welcome to come and discuss topics on our forums in the language of their choosing. Not everyone speaks English well, and our games are frequently translated into other languages. You will notice that there are language settings that appear on the left sidebar in some of our forums.