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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Patch 1.63: Just to give you some update - the Live Team is busy killing bugs and Craig is working his way deep into the bug database, squashing some of the really ancient evil's hidden there. Whenever I reference patch 1.63 here, please understand that this always including the disclaimer "unless we encounter problems forcing us to pull this change".

Otherwise, enjoy:

1) GetDamageDealtByType() should be fixed with 1.63. We also expose "physical damage" taken in this function now.

2) EffectDispelMagicAll() and EffectDispelMagicBest() got repaired and now take caster levels into account. Wait for it in 1.63

3) GetCreatureHasTalent() has been fixed, it was linked to the wrong scripting command in the engine, producing a stack underflow when it was called. Please not that stack underflows are caused by either a game problem (like in this case) or people messing around with nwscript.nss.

4) SetSpawnInCondition( NW_FLAG_AMBIENT_ANIMATIONS ) - this is tied to the use of the creature hearbeat script to play the ambient animations which can lead to a creature's getting swamped with actions if it's stuck in other actions (i.e. complex pathfinding around too many placeables, etc). Please not that creatures spawned from encounter triggers always play ambient animations, which can accumulate to a lot of heartbeats if on servers with a lot of players on them - for these servers I would minimize the use of encounter triggers and creatures with this flag set.

5) SendForHelp(). I submitted a "proposed fix" to the Live Team a while , but I am not sure if they are going to put it in, it could trigger some ugly testing for the 3 official campaigns. If it's not in the next patch, I'd suggest using Jasperre's fix, it's fine.

6) ActionCastSpellAtObject / AtLocation() - I don't think we will change the behavior of subradial spells.

7) "There may definitely be a bug involving NPCs who have ranged weapons equipped - they seem able to see straight through EffectEthereal() on occasion, and the "bows giving players true seeing" bug has been around for quite a while." -
Fixed in 1.63 - Equipping a ranged weapon would sometimes result in a player being able to perceive objects he was not supposed to see

8) Elemental Shield (and probably Mestil's Sheath too, tho I haven't tested that one) has incorrect behaviour: it retaliates on *damage*, not on *hit*, which makes it pretty much useless apart from the 50% F/C.
- I think that behavior is intentional and unlikely to change.

9) The modification of the behavior variables in nw_i0_generic is by design - it is there to randomize behavior, we will likely never change that. The idea of those variables is not to set the behavior but instead push the creature into a certain direction regardin it's behavior. Also please not that those variables do not represent percentage values.

10) Gust of Wind - we decided to leave the spellscript alone, the spell would be completely useless if we changed it, plus, the community can easily change it for their own servers. For the official campaign, we think the current version is fine

11) nw_s0_endurce - pretty positive that this spellscript isn't fire from a player castable spell, I've been successfully making endurance potions in the OC.

As soon as I find some time, I'm to look in some of the other scripting related things here (i.e. the shout on the default spellcastat event) As for stickying this thread, there's a sticky thread about open Bugs, if Lilac or Astorax feel like it, they can cut and paste the stuff from this thread there, but we won't have an open-to-post sticky thread about this topic anymore, it will just get out of hand again with rumours and suspected bugs. Still, I find this thread here quite useful, as discussion is cut down to posting or verifying identified issues without emotion. Btw, for me, as a NWN fan, patch 1.63 surely looks like a tremendous step forward, not only from the bug fixing side, but also from the additions/changes put in to accomodate the custom content community.

Equipped items dropping: As far as I can remember, items that are equipped got never dropped (at least at some point, you needed to put a copy of them droppable in the inventory. Not sure if that has changed, it's an aweful long time since played around with that stuff in NWN.

AI:That's a low level AI change we were forced to make to make the game playable. Monster listening caused the AI to be appear intelligent, but also very very annoying. Creatures would leave their designated areas to investigate sounds, sometimes walking through the half dungeon to get to the player, setting off traps and bashing doors in the process. In the end there was no noticeable benefit on having them react on listen, as the player would seldom recognize why that horde of monsters came down on him, he would just be dead. (Compare it to Battlefield Vietnam's where bots suddenly whirl around and shoot you through trees and high grass, even if you didn't move or shoot at all.) Since it's a scripting function, there is no problem, people can just make their own version that does the right thing.

CPU Usage: I'd rather blame the general structure of mass target spells for a CPU spike. They loop over each object in a certain area, sometimes multiple times, and queue up a good number of actions (apply effects, saves, resistance checks, etc) for all off them. Note that this is nothing wrong - everything the game does will cause the CPU to be busy, and if it does it to 50 creatures instead of 1, you will start to feel a short hickup in the client (as it spawns in a lot of different visual effects, plays hit animations, etc) and the server (who has to run GetNearest and line of sight checks, which are pretty expensive, create effects, perform saving throws, and any other unholy thing a designer wanted the spell to do). If you want an example of a really bad spell, try hellball or Undeath To Death, they are the best examples of how to increase the temperature on your CPU

Romances: I think what I tried to say was more: Meeting your audiences expectations sells. If that includes sex (or a certain level of naked skin), sure. But, at least for rpgs, you can't reduce it to the formula: "put in a lot of naked skin, sell a lot of copies", as our audience includes male, females and a lot of different age groups (and I seriously doubt the blonde half naked damsel in distress on the cover would sell the game to the Ladies of Neverwinter).

Further:

Interesting discussion, and I have to say, I'm happy it has not yet degraded into the usual puritans vs. liberals bashing that would cause us to lock the thread down. Let me throw in a few random observations, but please keep in mind I'm not a writer, someone like Dave certainly has a lot more insight into "your average gamers mind":

Our games usually have romances in the main storyline, and that means that the main NPCs, usually henchmen, are romance interests. Fantasy games live from the fairy tale style princess alongside the shining hero, at least for a good part of the male audience. One could argue that the majority the male audience tends to go by visuals, so the nonstandard princess thing will cause trouble with them.

Examples:
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- A lot of (male) players didn't like (mildly put) Bastila and my impression is that this partly is because she is portrayed a dominating and strong character. While that's a nice trait for evil NPCs (Viconia), it doesn't work out for a "good guy". Why? *I* think because that part of the (male) audience wants to play the shiny (or evil) hero who is in control of his world, Bastila doesn't fit there too well (*).

- and there is Carth. He's a big hit with the girls (as is Valen) - (Shayna can certainly shed some light here), while most male gamers complain about him being "whiny", "talking to much" and "weak". Coincidence? I don't think so (as Dave wrote them as main female romance interest).

Since we are doing roleplaying games, we are in the fortunate position of being able to create characters with depth (as opposed to your usual beach volleyball game) and thus our games usually have NPCs that do not fit into the stereotypical fantasy roles as well, but,and that's my point, even we would get in trouble if we completely ignore the expectations of your audience (**), and that's why you will always see certain characters in fantasy games i.e. Minsk, the half naked and not too bright barbarian, or beautiful warrior princess Aribeth.

I'm not saying that you can't be creative and make very different and interesting characters, even as romance interests, but I think that you are going on dangerous terrain if you ignore what a large part of your audience expects from you. There's a reason why many young (male, single) adults [i.e. the people who buy a lot of video games] have posters of beautiful, even "overdone" females on the walls of their room and not posters "normal" girls, and if you want to appeal to those people, you have to play along. But thankfully our games don't rely on a half naked character on the package to be distinguished from other games of the same genre, and thankfully our games are made to appeal to many audiences, not just the average young/male/single video gamer, right Shayna? .

And please remember that we are talking about just one ingredient of many for a successful fantasy game here. It wouldn't have made any difference for you here if we had put Aribeth instead of the cool eye on the cover of the NWN box, you would most likely still be here, be it for the toolset, for the story, for the D&D logo or for the BioWare logo. But if we had limited the ability to dress your character in a stereotypical fashion in the game (i.e. sorry, you need to wear that t-shirt, regardless if you are a barbarian or not), that would have pissed a lot of people off...Personally, I don't see the big deal here. Yes, of our future games will likely have beautiful female characters, and some of those characters will be placed prominently on our webpage or advertisements, as they appeal to a large part of the male audience, but I can not see the harm here, especially since we can proudly say that our games have so much more to offer.

I know there is a lot of "but would someone please think of the children" involved when it comes to naked skin here in north america, and things certainly have become more difficult in the last years (i.e. you can not do the kind of romance conclusion we had in the BG games today , even if the definition for the T(een) rating itself hasn't changed), but all this will not change the world. Advertisements will not magically use "normal" people in TV spots and car magazines will not magically have chickens instead of chicks sitting on cars on the cover. Some things never change...