Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Tiamat)

Trent Oster, Producer:

Feedback Mode: The game will ship only showing the to-hit rolls and the damage. If we have a little extra time we can look into adding an extra feedback mode.

Portals: Portals ping the other server. If the server is full or not accepting new players the portal is disabled.

David Gaider, Designer:

Familiars: You are correct. We are offering the ability to quickly summon in your familiar. The main difference between familiars and animal companions is probably melee combat. Many animal companions are very strong in melee, while familairs are not as a whole that tough in melee. Additionally the familiars do grant the special bonuses to the player character. To date I'm quite fond of the fire mephit and the hell hound familiars.

Detecting Weapons: You can detect through scripting whether or not someone has something in their 'hand' inventory slot. Most people in towns do this...and if you've got something there, they ask you to put it away (as it's got to be either a torch or a weapon). They also detect whether you've got anything in the 'chest' slot...if you don't, they laugh at you for running around half-naked. If you do, you could do an equivalent check on their AC. High AC doesn't solely come through armor, though, so I'm not sure if that would be the best way. It would depend on what you were trying to do.

Stilt-Houses: Ok, to specify what can be done with the 'stilt-houses'.

If you use the generic 'building' tiles, you can place them anywhere in the water and they will not generate land around them...they will appear entirely on stilts. There is, however, no way for anyone to get to these houses. Unless you're using the stilt-houses purely as decoration, you're going to have to put some land on, at the very least, one side of the house.

So you could put down one square of land, surround it on three sides with houses on stilts, and have a bridge connecting it to some other piece of land. Note, too, that bridges can act just as roads...they can turn corners, intersect and so forth, so you could have a whole city of bridges if you wanted, you would just have to be frugal about the number of little 'land islands' you had in the water to anchor the bridges and buildings together.

Like I said, though, you would ONLY be able to use the generic buildings tileset. Any of the pre-designed buildings, castle-tilesets, merchant stores, etc. all will generate land around their edges (and some, like the castle tilesets, generate land in all adjacent squares). It still should work for you, though, with some playing around.

Doors: Ok, basically there are two types of doors that I've seen. There are the 'standard' doors which you can put into place in any regular-sized doorway that's left open on the tileset. Some of these will be specific to the tileset (such as the 'barndoor' which can only be placed on the barn tile), while the rest are generic.

Keeping in mind that this is a temporary list, we currently have the following types:

Strong Wood
Weak Wood
Fancy
Portcullis
Portcullis_2
Rusted
Metal
Stone
Stone_Evil
Jeweled
Force Field

There are also the 'large' doors which are placed via the tileset. These will be used to put, say, a gateway on wall tiles or to block a corridor/bridge. Some of these are very large, but it depends on the specific tile. Either way, these doors operate the same as normal doors and can be opened/closed and assigned the same statistics.

And, yes, you can break down doors...unless the door is specifically flagged as 'plot' and therefore indestructable. Locks may be placed on doors the same as placeable objects...but may be made un-pickable if you so choose.

The thing I like best is the ultra-easy way that the area transitions are set up with the doors. Here's how you do it:

1) In your first area (let's say this is 'outside the house', place your door. You can drag over a 'standard' door, which will make it appear on the empty doorway in the tile...or create a new one. Or drag over a standard door and edit it...you choose.
2) In your second area (let's say this is 'inside the house', place the same kind of door on the interior. If you're a fan of detail, you can invert it's graphic so it's the 'other side' of the outside door.
3) Right click on the door. Click on 'Setup Area Transition'.
4) A new menu will come up. You have a pull-down menu of all the areas in your module...select which area you want the door to transition to.
5) A mini-map of that area will pop up, showing all doors, triggers and waypoints in that area...and have a pull-down menu listing all their tags. Select which you want the door to transition to. In this case, we select the door in the 'outside the house' area.
6) Select whether you want the transition to be 'two-way', 'current to target' or 'target to current'. Select 'two-way' and the transition will automatically be set-up for the door in both areas.

That is SO simple. Once you do this, you may now go into that area in-game and click to open the door. When you do so, it will automatically transition the character inside...and the character can travel either way. No hassle at all.

But enough babbling on my part...back to work for me. (hears whip crack)

David Chan, Audio Producer:

Fading music in and out: You trigger a song and it plays. If another song is triggered while the first is playing it will quickly fade out and the new song will start. The fade times will most likely be hard coded. You can't overlap 2 songs as the amount of overhead would be too high.

More on Music: 1. Music has to be written to use this kind of system (i.e. VERY modular)
2. Editing the music into phrases that can be linked together is a small nightmare.
3. Playing MP3s back to back with no gaps in the sound is very difficult and we won't be putting that in.
4. The amount of memory required to encompass all the different moods you'd want would be huge.
The music system we are implementing will be quite flexible and I think most people will be happy with it.

Stringing Music Together: No, the sound effect system is not made to work in this manner and the results would probably be nasty. As for the graph theory, it might work well in math, but making something sound good is not as much of a science as connecting nodes. It's a lot more subjective.

Don Moar, Lead Programmer, Tools:

The Toolset: The name of the toolset is the Neverwinter Toolset, or NWToolset for short.

A key which only opens a specific door/chest: Actually, no scripting is required in the case you describe. Simply give your key item a unique scripting tag and specify that tag in the Key Name property of your chest.
Voila! The chest will not open unless you have a key with that tag in your inventory.