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.

David Gaider, Designer

PW:

Quote: Can we get a number on how many complaints it will take beore Bioware CONSIDERS changing its focus to PW type of play?

It won't.

Quote: It took a while for Bioware to come around on the camera angles, skyboxes and robes after SOO MNAY people were screaming for it, this seems no different.

The difference is that we wanted to do skyboxes and robes but didn't have the resources before. As for camera angles, we did that not only because it was popular but because the hack kept breaking the updates, which was annoying. "Complaints" are not the only factor.

Quote: How about just acknowledging that they are more popular than you thought?

How do you know what we thought? We just weren't interested in focusing on that. NWN was spread pretty thin, design-wise, as it was... sorry, but it will never be all things to all people. At any rate, it's always going to be a tiny market that's interested in something like a PW-maker... believing otherwise is deluding yourself. We're talking about a sub-section of the multiplayer market, which is already a minority.

Further:

Quote: DG, PWs are a tiny fraction of the game as a whole, if you count single player. Granted. However, read the module descripts on Gamespy. Check out what percentage of 10+ pop servers are PWs. All of them are. You'll find you are mistaken in your assessment of the PW multiplayer market, as the overwhelming majority of online traffic is PW traffic.

And? 100% of the current NWN online traffic could be PW-related and we still wouldn't be interested in creating a PW-maker with those numbers.

More on PW: Yea, that's not even apples and oranges, that's apples and cars. Regardless, I'm going to give you an answer on it, just to put the whole topic to an eternal rest.

a) The rpg segment has a significantly lower market share than FPS / Action games

a) Halflife / Counterstrike / FPS have nothing to do with the world PW. They are multiplayer games and they are moddable, that's about anything these games have in common with NWN.

b) Counterstrike was successful because it's design struck a nerve with the player's of that genre. Yes, without Valve making it moddable this would not have happened, but given that there are also quite a lot of crappy mods with HL, it's safe to say that making a game moddable alone is not the key to unlimited sales.

c) The games you have listed provide 1% persistence and 2.5% world.

d) The tools provided with the games you list are professional level tools, many of them pretty rough and completely unuseable for the casual user. Also they are far more powerful than the NWN toolset in terms of what can be done, and the price for that is that a normal person is not able to use them.

e) All the "reasons" you list above don't apply to PWs at all. You point out that a "killer mod" can significantly increase the sales of your game - for us that could be DLA, CODI - nothing indicates that a PW toolkit would have that potentional at all.

f) 90% done - Yea, sure ... NWN is one of the games that is never done. You could endlessly add features. But just to include all the things you would need to make a true PW, you could spend years. From the "bang for the buck" point of view, fixing old bugs or adding new content is a better allocation of resources.

I know it's hard to believe that there is "no siginficant market" for PWs if everything you do is playing on PWs, but keep in mind:

- The far majority of sales on NWN are singleplayer only, people who never ever even joined one multiplayer game.

- The "most popular" server statistics is deceiving:
a) PW servers by default have a longer uptime than the standard NWN mod that is run for a session...
b) PW servers by default have the most players, of course, again the standard module where you run a session with your friends or DM's won't show up in that list

- People you meet here on the boards are more likely to be heavily involved in the online/pw community. The people activly posting here represent a small (not representative) but very visible/vocal part of the NWN community.

These things might give you a twisted view on the harsh reality that is out there: Games cost millions to make and you need to sell a certain amount of copies to stay in business. There is no justification to put any significant development resources into something with such a minor market share as the "I want to build my own PW" community. You need as many resources as possible to get the core game right. And finally there is one other little detail - Bioware tends to make good games because people here want to make exactly that kind of game and they are committed to bringing their ideas to life:

When deciding on a new game, it's a lot of "what kind of game would be cool, interesting and challenging to make", "will game X reflect the things that make a 'bioware game' special"?, "what do we want to do in game X to make it worthwile spending the next Y years of our lifes working on it", and only some "is this going to make us rich and famous and ready to take over the world", which means that if we find an idea to be boring/unchallenging/un-bioware, we won't do it, regardless if it looks commercially viable or not, because it would suck to work several years on something you don't really believe in.

Bottonline:
There's a 100% PW toolkit out there, it's called C++, please bury the idea of BioWare doing a PW toolkit within the next 10 years.

Further:

Quote: This whole thread is a crock, and this line Bioware is giving us is a crock. The fact of the matter is, the ONLY reason NWN sold half as much as it did, was because of the online DM aspect of the game.

I'm not sure what you are saying in this thread either. Who is getting the "crock"? Checking through it so far we only had the clarification that Bioware is not interested in creating a PW game. Why you are suddenly coming with the DM client and the overall online component makes no sense for me. Nobody is questioning the impact of the toolset and online components had on NWN - after all they were part of the original design. (It's far from "half the success" however, probably only around 15% of all sold NWN copies have been used at least once in an online game, and less than 5% for frequent online sessions)

Quote: Bioware's argument: NWN was really expensive to develop, and the development cycle ate up all the profits. Therefore we aren't going to do it again. Even though it sold well, we can make a lot more loot making single player games, and being done with them, rather than incurring the huge support costs we generated from creating such a huge NWN community. We only care about making money, (we are a company after all) not creating a long lived vibrant online community (cause you don;t make money doing that).

Could you point me to the place where we said that? What we said is that there is no significant market for a PW maker period and that we have interest in creating one. No reason for Dave to address these "issues" as you made them up. You are the person that didn't read through anything here.

Yes, NWNs online, toolset and DM components as well as the Live Team definitly have a measurable impact on the sales of the game, more on the sales of the expansion packs - but that's why these components have been put in the game in the first place and why we keept improving them. So - just because you only bought the game to play online on PWs, this doesn't mean this is true for the rest of the world. Good thing is that we have very accurate numbers on this stuff and can use it to make educated decisions for the future instead of making guesses.

Quote: This time, I really want to be ignored, or blasted. Not secret option #3, of neither ignoring or blasting me.

Yea, the dreaded unwanted child corner again. It's actually a good argument Dave could bring to the next meeting about our secret PC game. Maybe he can suggest to put limits into the next engine to prevent people from doing things that are not "officially supported" - would surely decimate the troll population here.... but on the other hand that would damage the 99% of the community who understand the meaning of "not officially supported but we are not hindering you either".

Performance graphs:

Still need to someone who remembers the exact color codes, but a bit I remember:

a) The really long green bar in the middle is the graphics engine - you can cut it down by using less different models, less creatures, etc, but it's always taking up the most

b) The scripting bar (red? not sure) can be identified easily when you have a heartbeat script, it will jump every 6 seconds. It's located below the graphics bar.

c) The small one above the green (blue?) is disk access time I think.

If I find someone who can look at the code and figure out what each color means, I'll update you. As for variables and their exact impact when using different storage models, etc, you need a programmer to answer that.

Scripting fixes: As for your question. Since patch 1.59+, all non campaign specific HotU scripts (read: all scripts not in the campaign modules) are included even in a standard NWN installation. So you can open, modify and save them in your module, even if you have only NWN. This is necessary to allow people using HotU functionality on your server, even if don't have HotU yourself. Not entirely on topic, but to give you a heads up:

Since patch 1.63 is going to include HELLOFALOT bugfixes, there will be changes to several include files and bioware default scripts (i.e. the nw_c2_*) scripts, which means if you override those scripts in your module, you will have to manually patch those files.

Rejoin & healing: My suspicion is (and I'm guessing here, as this happened way before I joined Bioware) that this feature (restoring spells) was supposed to go in the game at some point but it caused trouble or was perceived as unneccessary and was cut before the game shipped. I think the healing stuff is done intentionally to make the game more accessible. Since it was a concious decision not to put the code into the game, this is definitly rated "feature", not "bug", naturally lowering it's priority.

The fact that HP/SPELLS are saved in the character file alone does not make it easy to put this feature into the game however. If you join a different server or a new game, you expect your character to be fully healed and rested - everything else would be conceived not user friendly and we would not risk relying on module builders to heal players on enter. My personal opinion is that the healing stuff / spells should be tied to the difficulty system and that on HARDCORE+ difficulty you should not be healed/restored upon rejoining the (same) server with the same game in progress. So what is the chance of seeing this feature integrated:

- Almost certainly not with 1.63
- As for after 1.63, in case our Digital Distribution project gets all required approvals and takes off, the Live Team will probably continue to have a programmer permanently associated to NWN, so chances for this particular feature to be put into the games are there (and since it affects all multiplayer games, not just PWs, chances are significantly better than if it would be a PW only feature request).
- There is no guarantee this feature will ever make it into the game
- There is no definite "no, we will never do that" either.

I hope this puts the topic back on track and reopens discussion more toward proposed solutions and scripted workarounds.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Areas:

However think about tis:

An area is rarely empty and rarely consists of just tileset geometry - there are creatures, placeables, triggers, etc. Empty areas (no player there) cause significantly less CPU load on your machine - unless you put lots of AI_LEVEL_HIGH + creatures into them, but they still process their update routines every once in a while. If you have 300 areas, chances that you are asking more of NWN that it is designed to do are pretty good. It won't artifically prevent you from doing so. As I explained in other threads on this board - we have very low priority on investigating issues that arise in huge module setups "100's of Areas, 100 meg module size at all" unless the issue can be experienced in a more conventional setting (10's of areas, 10-30 Meg) module size. That's not because we hate PWs or don't believe you that there is a issue - it's because you are using the game in a way we did not intend it to be used. Try cutting down the module to 30 areas and see if the problem still persists. If it does, we probably could justify allocating time to look into a bug report.

I've seen a couple of reports where a module got corrupted and caused weird behavior in the game, you might want to try exporting all resources into a new module and see if there is a change.

Quote: I know you're not exclusively focused on PWs.

Err no, I think we've made it pretty clear that we are not focused on PWs at all. We are not going to artifically hinder PW development and we are usually at least discussing the impact of certain decisions on PW and sometimes features get added/removed (i.e. "customize character" in server vault settings) because they benefit/hurt the PW community, but that's a far way from even being called "focused".

I am impressed with the solutions (i.e. NWNX2), hacks and tweaks the community came up to make NWN work on a scope it was not designed for and I'm all for evaluating and adding features that benefit this part of the community like any other (module builders, custom content creators, total conversions), but don't expect significant changes to how the game works or it handles really big modules(tm), that's unlikely to happen. As mentioned in the "wishlist" thread, we'll investigate things like reserved DM slots for a possible future patch, as they help a lot of servers out there - but even investigating something that only happens with really big modules(tm), way outside of NWNs scope, and in addition only on Linux servers, seems not to be the best way of spending your precious life team zots. May sound harsh, but that's the way it works.

Further:

You need to be more careful. Just "DelayCommands are bad" is plain wrong. DelayCommand, as any other scripting command, is just fine when used correctly. As for placeables, our internal rule was no more than two per tile in the area (but depending on area size, on 16x16 I would not exceed 1 per tile, on 4x4 it can be 3 or 4, if you place them well). And of course keep the areasize capped at 16x16 - 16x16 is a lot and should only be used if you really can't design around it. The smaller your areas.

Eyeball:

- Freezing paralyzes the enemy for a short amount of time if he fails as Save against DC10+ (Eyeball Hit dice/3)

- The eye balls fire bolt has a chance to knock down the enemy on a critical hit if he fails a save at DC 10+ (Eyeball Hit Dice /3)

- The eye ball inflict wounds bolt has a chance of slowing down the enemy on a critical hit if he fails a save at DC 10+ (Eyeball Hit Dice /3)

In any case there is no saving throw against the normal damage of the attack, the eyeball just has to hit a ranged touch attack (after all, he just has to throw an eye on you : )

If all the spells it has are used up (and that's more than any mage would have at higher level), he will switch to weapon finesse mode and engage melee

BioWare and PW:

What I said in this thread, and if you read through it again, that should be pretty clear, was:

- If you say something is bad design because you can't use it to build a PW, you don't have a point. If you say you don't like that you have to do ugly hacks and complex scripts to overcome problems you have in your PW because of NWNs design, you don't have a point. -

The Live Team is still activly repairing, updating and adding stuff to NWN, and I would guess they are at least willing to investigate this stuff, but you need to come up with a lot better reasons than "because I don't want to use complex script to make my vision of how the game should be true in my PW", because that's nothing that will sell the idea to a producer who has to schedule time for this.

So again, if you are not prepared to take no as an answer don't post and better don't read what I write, because I'm not going to paint the world nice for you. If you interprete a "no, unlikely" as "this guy is only posting to slap us down and tell us we are not worthy", you should better ignore any thread I am posting to.

Hiding in the "BW doesn't like PW people anyway" corner and posting sarcastic statments about how the PW community is the unwanted child Bioware doesn't care about anyway is not going to help your point (and it's wrong as well). If you really think a certain feature would be beneficial to, try to find a good reason why this should be in NWN, a game that *not* a build-your-own-PW solution. We know that you PW people are out there, and we have taken this part of NWN's community into account in past discussions about changes/new features and from time to time we added stuff because it was beneficial to that part of the community, but NWNs main design focus hasn't changed in that regard, so the chances of seeing anything that involves a lot of work being added/changed just because it would help PWs are pretty slim, you need other reasons as well. And as a note (please note, this has nothing to do with "toolset", "multiplayer" or mod support, I'm talking about "PW" here):

There is NO significant market for a "build your own PW" type of game out there, at least not significant enough to hope to break even at the costs of making a Triple-A game today. It might be a nice niche for a small development company, but I wouldn't expect any of the larger game developers to come out with something like this anytime soon.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Patches: The patch files that your friend downloaded for you are the critical rebuild patches (the cadilac of NWN patches). They work just as well as the other patch files (they actually can also work if some of your game files became corrupted for some reason, which the other patch files can't do). The only drawback of the crtical rebuild patches is that they are much larger in size (which isn't a problem in your case, since you have them already burned to a CD). The critical rebuild patches, you just double click on to have them install themselves. Your friend downloaded all the critical rebuild patches for the different possible combinations of expansion packs that you may or may not have installed. Since it appears that you have both expansion packs installed, you will most likely need to run the NWNEnglish1.62HotUUpdate.exe criticall rebuild patch by double clicking on it.

Improvements: There have been some improvements made to the clearing of all actions when ever someone joins/leaves your party (although the changes probably wont address everything that all people will want). Non-hostile actions (resting, moving, etc.) will no longer be canceled when some one joins/leaves your party. Some hostile actions will no longer be canceled (although hostile actions against other players or their associates still will be). Some hostile actions against NPCs will not be canceled now, although some still may get canceled depending on the situation and timing of the attacks. The ClearAllActions that was being done on party join/leave was an intentional behavior that put in place before NWN shipped to address some other serious issues with the game. The changes that were made to address the ClearAllActions problem were intentionally very conservative changes, so that the older issues were not reintroduced. As a result, the changes probably wont address the "I stopped attacking when some one in my party lost their connection" issue for people playing on PvP/Arena servers.

Path finding:

Path finding is done on the server. Some thing that I just recently learned myself:

Tiles aren't loaded into memory on the server until they are needed. If a tile has a placeable on it then the server needs to load the tile information and hold onto it (so it knows how the place the placeable on the tile). This will cause increased RAM usage for the server and extra overhead for managing the extra objects (which in turn will put more strain on the server). The same thing essentially happens for creatures as well. If you have creatures doing random walks in all your areas, the server will have to load all the tile info for all the tiles that the creature may walk across in order to do the path finding. This is part of the reason why destroying creatures when there are no players in the area can help performance (plus the creatures don't take up time running other aspects of their AI when they don't exist).

This came up in a discussion about increasing the limit on the number of tilesets that the game can use in one module. The concern was that as you add more custom tilesets to your module (and if all of the different tiles in the areas using all those tileset have placeables/creatures in them) then the amount of RAM used by the server could grow significantly.