Neverwinter Nights - What's New

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(Originally posted by Sorcerer)

Here's the latest info, right from the developers:

Neverwinter Nights Project Update for December and January

The hallowed halls of BioWare were a happy place for the month of December. We worked up to the holidays making a lot of solid progress. As a result, we set some very ambitious goals for ourselves for January and we worked hard to meet them.

Programming
The programmers spent most of December and January tightening up the code, making sure that the end user will have not only an enjoyable gaming experience but also a stable one. We've also been making some important revisions to the combat system and the many Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) throughout the game. One of the surprises in Neverwinter's development was the sheer amount of GUIs that needed to be constructed. We've developed a good, standardized system to handle many of them but it still takes a lot of man-hours to complete such a large volume of screens with different functionality. In addition, we spent a lot of January in "crunch" mode, trying to broaden the functionality available to the Design team as they begin the most important phase of their work. Our Tools Group worked especially hard and their effort really shows in the new features now coming available in the toolset.

Art
Art-side, the project is moving forward very aggressively. New content is being completed on a daily basis. The artists are working even faster and to higher quality than we had scheduled for, so that helps us a great deal. The Tileset Modeling Group is doing a great job and the visual mesh is nearing completion for almost all of the tilesets. Once the visual mesh is created, the modelers will go back and generate a "walk mesh" for the various tiles. The walk mesh is used by the engine to determine pathfinding, collision detection, and sound effect information (footsteps on a leafy forest floor sound very different than those on the hard cobbles of the city, for instance). After the walk mesh is created, the tileset is ready to be tested and any extra variant tiles can be added at that time. In short, creating a tileset is an involved process and our modelers have put a lot of time and effort into making sure that you have a beautiful-looking game. Meanwhile, the rest of the art team has been pumping out portraits, icons, textures, and models with gusto. It's hard to fathom the sheer volume of content we have already created for Neverwinter. One of our artists has created no fewer than 1,720 different in-game weapon icons, all by himself.

Design
Armed with the increasingly functional scripting language, the designers have been experimenting and testing the limits of what can be accomplished in Neverwinter. Some advance dialog is being written for Chapter 1 and the final magic item planning for the official campaign is nearing completion. On the more technical side, NWScript has been showing signs of both the power and the flexibility that it had been originally designed for. As the old adage goes, if absolute power corrupts absolutely, then we are going to have some very demented scripters by the end of our development cycle. Some quick attempts at scripting have yielded a pack of insecure wererats who avoid players until they have enough members in the pack to assure victory. Once a critical number of wererats are present, they swarm the character from all sides, quickly overwhelming any opposition. While complete obliteration of the player characters is quite possible, it's not really going to endear us to our players, so the final scripts will have to be a little less fatal when we ship the game

Overall
2000 was a busy year for the Neverwinter team. We hit an all-time high of 41 personnel and we generated a ton of content, code and documentation. The original vision we had for Neverwinter Nights is moving closer to completion and it is an amazing sight to behold. When this game emerges from our offices it will be a truly monstrous accomplishment. It is the sheer talent of the people I get to work with on a day-to-day basis that makes a project of this scale possible and I'm very grateful to be a part of the magic here at BioWare.

Thanks,

Trent Oster
Producer
Neverwinter Nights
BioWare Corp.