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

DM radial: Healing and Damaging of hitpoints through a DM radial definitely seems possible and is something that I've wanted to add (along with a few other things) for quite some time. If this does get added, it most likely wont be in time for the 1.63 update since I already have a lot of other things on my plate at the moment. Hopefully I'll get some time in the future to add more functionality such as this.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Next patch: I think the next patch adds the ability to change the skybox through scripting....

Further:

The next patch automatically invalidates characters that try to join a server with any special character's in their name that would cause problems

Skyboxes:

How to add a skybox to your area

* The first and most important step: You need to enable skyboxes in the game:
You need to check that new checkbox in the Video Settings section in the game's options menu. If you do not enable this checkbox, you will not be able to see any skyboxes.

* To add a skybox to your areas in the toolset, you need to got to the area properties of the area, then open the Visuals page just like you do when you set options like wind, weather and lighting. There is a new dropdown box at the bottom of this page where you can select different skies.

At the moment (HotU is just released), all these skies only link to the "Grass Clear" selection because we did run out of space on the HotU disk and adding a new disk for just a few skyboxes that are not used by the campaign was not an option. The other skies will eventually get delivered to the community through an upcoming patch.

Making the skybox look good with your area will require you to play around with the fog and fog distance settings on the area visual properties as well, depending on your area you need to do some fine tuning to make them play nice with the fog.

That's it. Save your area, jump into the game and pan your camera up ... and watch the show!

Bug fixes:

Quote: Then perhaps it's about time you do take notice of the constant complaints and make clear what your priorities are because this very particular issue has been brought up on previous occasions and you have never given any satisfactory answers. Any company who does not take heed of serious costumer complaints are just plain idiots. So are you saying that you do not take any notice of complaints because that is certainly what you implied with

Spare your sarcasm. We prioritize our bugs using several factors, including the number of people affected, severity, our ability to reproduce it or fix it without breaking other things. We do NOT base our bug fixing priorities about how loud people complain on the boards. As for satisfactory answers, sorry, but satisfactory is a very objective word - it's quite satisfactory for me to inform you that getting an answer is usually directly tied to the way a question is aske.

Quote: How could we possibly know what priority you place on them ? If the community had a place to see an open bug report with YOUR priorities on them then for starters you wont have hundreds of new threads all asking about the same old bugs - I guess that's a convenient way for the forums to just fill up with crud and for all the useful posts and posts with serious issues to just drop off the top page and into oblivion.

We have been discussion this quite often, feel free to do a search. Short version: No, there will be no public bug tracker. We do not run public hearings over our decisions as well - if you want that, you will switch to an open source game engine.

Quote: I shall refrain from posting my full break down of what 1.62 actually achieved but I have to mention how it broke more than it claimed to fix. We can only judge from the clear display of the lack of any testing whatsoever with your so called fixes. Inventory visually disappearing - Still occurs.

Yea, close and open it and it's fine again, hardly the Class A bugs you are talking about

Quote: Merchant Bugs - well the original posts already highlights the Server Crashing Bugs and Infinite Gold exploit.

Defensive Stance - still broken.

Right, there were other issues with that, not reproducable with the bug reports that were initially filed. Patch 1.63 will take care of that

Oh, let me help you to add the rest of the stuff you have forgotten to poset

Fixed Red Dragon Disicple not being able to join multiplayer games - Check

Fixed Custom talktables not working in multiplayer - Check

Fixed Crash in the official campaign, affecting several ten thousand customers - Check

Fixed security related things - Check

Quote: But of course in 1.62 we had some really high priority bugs fixed that made us dance with joy:

- Added a slight delay to the "inventory is full" sound effect. This fixes a problem, where the sound wouldn't play if you dropped an item while switching weapons.

- Added more emotes to the emotes menu (Read, Drink potion, Meditate, Worship, Sit on ground, Fall down forwards, Fall down backwards).

- Made a fix to the Server/Module details. They were showing up under the wrong headings in the server details page.

Yeah I was over the moon at seeing those Class A show stoppers finally ironed out. I really could not live with those bugs at all. Not having the 'inventory is full' sound effect really made me lose sleep at night. Yea, we will take your suggestion and don't fix things that can be fixed in a few minutes by a GUI programmer because there might be a couple of things that haven't been fixed that a network programmer needs to do. Sounds like a reasonable suggestion to me.

"Hey Jon, stop fixing those pesky spellscripts, we can't sell the community we fixed them because there is still this one programming bug that hasn't been taken care off and some people would think that fixing those spellscripts took away from those programmers. I know, I know, it's stupid, but hey, better not annoy ThePreacherMan!

Quote: Oh the Sea Hag works just fine... was such a great addition that we had people queueing up for days to join our servers just to see her in action!

Again your knowledge of our development process is flattering, I will personally make sure that no Designer includes any creatures into the next patch until all Programming bugs have been fixed. You have clearly shown that you are not interested in discussion but more in childish hostilities. That's only entertaining for a few minutes. I'm not afraid of arguing over controversial decisions or even our priorities or give explaination why something has not been fixed yet, but not with/for a troll. You had the chance asking questions or discussion my opinion over the concerns you have voiced in this thread, but unfortunately you decided not to take it and instead try get some fast laughter by playing the bully. Too bad.

Further:

Quote: You failed to respond to
defensive stance- still broken
and
whirlwind attack- still broken

these are very interesting abilities..theoretically, and i am just wondering if they are fixable at all?

The bug with defensive stance was that when you leave an online game and come back while it was switched on, you got rooted, and this was fixed in 1.62. However, if someone manages to do a savegame inbetween, the flag would not be cleared correctly, something that didn't come up until after we shipped 1.62 and found out that there have actually been two seperate issues, but we fixed only one - these things unfortunately happen. Patch 1.63 is going to clear the DefensiveStance Flag from the savegame. As for whirlwind, I don't know for sure, but I think I remember Craig mentioning something about a change with it a few days back but I haven't seen anything in the build notes so far, so no promises.

Further:

Quote: This is what I did to drop my 30% cpu idle:

I moved all my placeables off grid lines after reading about it on these forums and it did the trick. It might now help on your server but its worth a try.

Interesting. As far as I know placing a placeable object on the seam between two tiles (inner tile grid lines should be fine) should be avoided as it will significantly increase the pathfinding time required by creatures. I don't think this is the reason for a constant 30% CPU load, but I can see it becoming a problem if there are a lot of people walking around or, even worse, a lot of creatures performing movement actions. - in this case, the solution would be to make sure that placeable object placement is done in a way that it does not cause additional load on the pathfinding system:
- avoid tile seams
- try to stay around max 2 placeables per tile, less if there are pathfinding creatures, more if it's a relativly unfrequented tile
- try not to block narrow passages or patrol routes
- don't use placeables larger than one tile, they will wreck the pathsfinding system (that's why there are no official placeables of that size)
- if you are using patrol routes, try to prevent creatures from bumping into each other

Variables: In fact, we have design rules internally when it comes to the use of variables, because we are well aware that out-of-the-roof use of variables will deteriorate the game performance. However, as said, it is not likely that we are going to overhaul the way variables are stored at this stage of the project to fix problems introduced by using NWN in a different way it is intended to be used. If someone experiences lag because there are too many variables, the it's just that, too many variables. If you think you it is absolutely necessary to have all those variables and don't see any other way to achieve your design goals, then you either need to rethink your design goals, ask yourself if NWN is the proper platform for the game you want to run or try to get around that limitation by using an unsupported thirdparty software like NWNX2. This may sound harsh, but please take my word that I am not trying to offend you, I'm just reflecting the situation as we see it here.

There is nothing wrong with asking us however if we would consider revising that part of the code because it would be helpful for you. Feel free to post a feature request into this board and I'm sure the Live Team will consider it, especially if it's not written in hostile language. Patch 1.63 has a good amount of new features requested by the the custom content community (i.e. the ability to change the phenotype of a creature by scripting or to align VFX with the player) and scripting community (i.e. the ability to change the skybox, and patch 1.64 might as well add some goodies for the server admin community if the Live Team finds that a particular change to accomodate your needs can be made with the given manpower. (Please do take this paragraph out of context or apply it to "bugs" - read my previous statements on how changing/adding certain things does not necessarily take away time from bugfixing).

Again, I am willing to answer your questions and discuss your requests here, but you need to be able to take a "no" or "won't happen" as an answer. If you are asking a question, make sure that you are willing to take a "no" as an answer without feeling offended - if you can't please don't ask. I can provide the reasons we have to not do a certain change, and you can surely tell me why you think we are wrong on a certain decision, but understand that this will not necessarily sway a decision. We are willing to reevaluate certain decisions when we see the opportunity for that, we have done so in the past (i.e. robes) and we will do so in the future, but for this to work, a discussion based on facts rather than accusations or emotions would be very helpful - An approach like "deliberate adult hostilites to offend into responding" aka childish flamebaits is a pretty good way of making sure that people won't have interest to read a post and will finally result in the poster being unable to convey his/her opinions at all. In response to the person above asking for simple deletion of flames - I am not going to tolerate any flamebaits in this threads, they will be deleted and the poster will be banned for violating our forum rules. I want to keep this discussion open and won't allow people who think "it isn't worth it anyway" to interfere with other people's ability to take part in this discussion.

Further:

Quote: Your developers are just as guilty. The problem is that when you guys add them via the engine, it's next to impossible to figure out where they came from and no way to provide an alternate implementation. Perhaps you're not aware that every user added map pin sets at least two local variables (ISTR 3 or 4) on that PC. Just 10 map pins can put you in the danger zone depending on what else is set. 50 pins certainly will. With HotU, the toolset and AI behavior variables actively encourge heavy Local Var use. Regardless of intention, the current environment makes it hard *not* to use LV's. Since you're fond of analogies: It's like putting a high end Home Theatre on a 10A circuit. You can run your widescreen or your surround-sound but not both.

If we would limit the number of variables used, people would complain about it as well (evil bioware hardcoding). It's something we discussed and decided against limiting it to allow the greatest possible freedom to the end user and designers. Yes, this allows for people to use variables in an unresponsible way that degrades their performance - Especially on projects that are beyond the intended scope of nwn (PWs), but limiting it would hurt the majority of the module creators that make the tradition 3-10 hours module you can download on the Vault. There's a reason why the offical campaigns are split into chapter modules - NWN performance degrades significantly if your module gets past a certain size and spliting our campaign into chapter modules is our solution to this. So, yes, we are guilty that we allow creating so many variables that game performance can be affected, but we did it with the best intentions and think the benefits are greater than the drawbacks. Maybe we should put a red warning label on the variable features and function descriptions in the toolset, but I have the feeling this wouldn't really change anything. Unrelated but maybe helpful - the liveteam is looking at the resource management in NWN and might have found a way to speed up overall game performance visibly in one of the next patches. Not sure if this is going to affect any of your problems though.