Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Z-Layrex)

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Content Installer:

Quote: As far as I understand, it is zip auto decompressing archive, with added functionality of automatically finding NWN directory ?

Correct.

Quote: Will we be able to at least rename it to zip and uncompress it ourselves with zip utility (as it is possible with most exezips) ?

Yes.

More:

Quote: Ok, so people will be distributed .exe files that install the custom content to the right directories? This makes me extremely nervous. What's to stop some anti-social person uploading a trojan horse exe and claiming it's something cool, getting people to download it and then having all sorts of nasty stuff installed in their system...I think having the community distributing exe files is an extremely bad idea from a security point of view. Would it be possible to package the custom content in a bioware propriety storage (BPS) format, and then have a custom content installer program that the client runs and points an the BPS file? Then the bioware made custom content installer program will extract the custom content from the BPS and place it in the appropriate place. As nice and neat as self extracting exe's sound, to me it sounds incredibly dangerous. Unless of course I've totally misunderstood something...

This is no different than any other .exe you would download from the internet right now. End-user security is up to the end-user. No one should be running a computer these days without running a full time virus scanner. Or for that matter some sort of firewall. Do you trust the site that you are downloading from? BioWare? NWVault? Bob's House of Mods? If you don't trust one of those, then don't download from there, or download and open the file manually. And scan for viruses.

And More:
I guess the point that I am not understanding is what is the difference between someone posting a malicious .exe on some Neverwinter fan web site today, and someone posting the same malicious .exe after our content installer has been released? What has changed? In this day and age, noone can afford to blind trust anyone on the internet. If you don't trust the file, don't download it and don't run it.

Guess:

Quote: Just make a version of the hakpak unpacker that unpacks neverwinter custom content paks into the appropriate sub directories.

Maybe this is the source of the confusion. This sentance above describes exactly what the Custom Content Installer does. I would like to hear back from you on this.

Here We Go:
The problem with the suggestion is that it doesn't solve the problem, it just moves the point of theat to another location. We need the content to be extractable by all 3 platforms, and this current method does that. Moving to the suggested method would restrict use to Windows only systems which is not acceptable. We are very sensitive to security issues here at BioWare, but this one is no more dangerous than anything else out there. You can use WinZip right now to make the exact same type of package that we are creating with the Content Installer.

Whistles Innocently:
Many people want to download one file, perform an action (run it, unzip it) and start playing. This program addresses this issue. Many other don't know what to do with a .hak file or an .erf file, or for that matter a .bmu. This program puts them in their proper place. Everyone can use zip files? Trust me, from both the nwbugs e-mail address, the Tech Support forum, and the support e-mail address, I can tell you that we have overwhelming evidence that .zip is too complicated for many people. Its a .zip file with a self-installing header for Windows included. To get these files for Mac or Linux, you just rename the file to a .zip and extract normally. You can even do this rename/extract with WinZip, Windows Commander, or any other utility that handles .zip 2.0 files.