NWN Official Forum Highlights

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(Originally posted by Z-Layrex)

Here are today's official 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.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Witch's Wake Glitch: The 'flickering' on the corpses may actually be the wind blowing the dangly mesh on their costumes. It doesn't seem to look all that good on creatures that are lying down, so I removed the wind from the opening battle scene where it made the player look a little dorky. Also, I've been hearing reports of flickering scorch marks in the opening areas. This is the unfortunate result of 'z-fighting' between the scorch placeables and the smoke placeables, it seems. I wasn't ever able to get them to play nice together but it never seemed an important enough issue to warrant taking either of them out.

Hak Pak Auto-Downloader: Because we haven't put it in yet...

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake: Phew! Wow, that was a lot of reading. Okay, well I suppose I should wade in here a bit. Everyone can lay off Aerosol a bit and tone down the flame war. The first post wasn't particularyl descriptive but it was honest and didn't strike me as a trolling attempt. Basically, you can't please everybody all of the time and that's perfectly fair. While I'm sorry Aerosol and a few others have decided WW isn't to their tastes, that's to be expected. The Witch's Wake is designed as a mystery, a psychological thriller, a cliffhanger, and an identity quest. If you despise those overarching genres, WW probably won't change your mind about them and that's okay.

As for the 'amnesia is a hackneyed plot device' argument, of course it is. (Bet you didn't think you'd hear me say that, huh? ) It's a literary archetype, as is the basis of pretty well any other story you choose to tell. There is little to nothing new under the sun but good stories seem to get written all the same. I'm not too worried about it. I'm glad so many people are enjoying the module and, for those of you that aren't, I'm sorry to hear that. Hopefully you'll find something (be it official or fan-created) that's a little closer to your preferences. For all of you, we've postponed our post-release survey until after Christmas but, when it's sent out, please take that as an opportunity to make your like or dislike of various aspects of the module known.

Witch's Wake Template: Quote: Is the module template for using the WW features available yet?

Not yet. I need to clean it up a little first, as towards the end of WW1 development, I got sloppy about porting changes back into the original template. I'm hoping to be able to make it available before I leave for Christmas, though.

Rotating Camera in Witch's Wake: Quote: I hereby declare this the "How did you do that?" thread, which (I hope) answers people's questions on the design of the module. Alrighty, first one: The rotating camera in the beginning. How did you do that? With the SetCameraFaceing script command.

Yup. The programmers just kind of blinked at me when they saw what I was doing with it. The function was originally designed to be just a single call that pointed the camera the right way after coming through an area transition. I'm actually calling it thousands of times within a tiny little incrementing DelayCommand() loop. It was one of those "You mean it actually lets you *do* that?" moments. It gives an error if you run the script on an NPC (or even if you have an NPC tell another object to Execute a script that does it). Triggers and areas both seem to work fine, though. If you need an NPC to start it somehow, you can have them fire a User-Defined event on the area and that seems to work. It's fairly hackalicious at this point but the XP2 team thought it was cool enough that they requested a bunch of special cutscene functions for their release. I'm not sure when those will be available or whether or not they'll trickle down to the Live Team, but they should make things a little less crazy than what I've been doing.

Loading/Saving: A number of people have been reporting crashes when Loading or Saving the game. In all cases that I've seen so far, the problem seems to lie with an uncompressed custom portrait. To ensure that WW1 loads and saves correctly, please avoid using uncompressed custom portraits. If you're not sure what that means, stick with one of the default portraits that came with the game and you should be fine. If this doesn't fix the problem, please post here explaining what's going wrong.

Next Witch's Wake: Ooh, you're all going to hate be for this...I'm giving myself a conservative estimate of 1 module every 3 months. If it's done sooner, it's done sooner. If I have time to make the gameplay longer or cooler, I might just do that. It's all just guesswork at this point but don't be upset or surprised if it's not out before the end of March.

Jonathan Epp, Quality Assurance

Camera Control with Scripts: Just so everyone knows, it looks like we'll have a better way to do camera panning/tilting/zooming in the next game patch. That's not an absolute promise, but chances are pretty good it'll be there.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Plot Wizard: Ultimately, the Plot Wizard was designed to help address many of the most common problems encountered by new module designers. That being said, we're happy that more experienced designers are finding the Plot Wizard useful and we are interested in supporting their module construction efforts, PW or otherwise, in future updates.