Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Sep. 01, 05)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 2 forum highlights, collected by NWVault. 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.

Adam Brennecke, Programmer

Grouping Placeables
MakeStatic is a no go. Static placeables are actually handled in engine pretty differently than normal placeables. There isn't really a reason to make a static placeable non-static and visa-versa, unless I am missing something.

A Toolset with "On the Fly Testing"
We are well aware of the awesomeness of the Sandbox feature in the Farycry toolset. A feature like that needs to be designed from the ground up. The Aurora engine wasn't, so it would be almost impossible to get something like that working without a major overhaul of the codebase. On a somewhat related note: We designed the new toolset/graphics engine to use a unified renderer, which means what you see in the toolset is exactly what you will see in game. This helps quite a bit when designing areas, especially the lighting. I hope that answers your question.

Script language

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There is *always* in-house documenation for all API calls, and Bioware should have made that documentation available with the release. That's what tech-writers do, they clean up the technical documenation and make it clear enough for the end-users to use.

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No, there isn't *always* in-house documentation for everything. Unfortunately, that's the reality of development of any kind. Our main goal is to ship a high quality fun game out the door - documentation will always take a second seat to a new feature or a bug fix so we can ship a good game on time. We try to document as much as we can, and docs will be invaluable down the road (for expansions/sequels/community development) as much is it is today. However, I would say there are very few game developers with a full time tech-writer on board. If developers documented everything as thorough as everyone would like, our development time would be doubled. Also writing docs for other developers is much different than writing docs for the end-users. If I am writing a doc for Jason and Brian, some certain assumptions can be made that can't be made when writing for the end-user. That being said, we want to provide as much help and documentation to the community as possible. We have some new help features in the toolset to help out, and we are documenting our default/global scripts.

More:

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But there's always something unless you've got a bunch of cowboys writing the code.

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Yeeeehaw! Seriously though, there is very little documentation, and even less that would be remotely interesting/usable to the end-users. Bioware did a pretty good job with releasing documentation of file-formats, etc, and we will follow suit.

Brian D. Lawson, Programmer

Animation on placeable and creatures

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Possibly Blender - this is a free - even GPL! - 3D modeling program that appears like it should be rivaling Max (possibly even rivaling Maya, which from the little I've heard is even better than Max. Of course Maya is $2000 too, so I think most gamers would still prefer Blender if it works ...) though I am not entirely sure about the file formats it supports ...

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Sorry, but Blender is nowhere near rivaling Max, much less Maya. It hardly even has what I would call "decent" plug-in capabilities and support. If you want to see a great up and comming GPL'ed modeling/animation package check out K-3D. Those guys have adopted the Maya approach to their internal data management (directed acyclic graph) which lends itself perfectly to great plug-in support etc. However, this is all unrelated to the original question.Somebody asked which packages we are using. I'm not sure if I can say or not, so I won't. However, when it comes to animations, I will say that it's more than just our own custom exporter...hence the problem. Releasing our own exprter is not a problem. Like I said before that will likely happen to allow for at the very least, export of custom rigid/placeable models.

Dev Questions: No Walk Areas

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In another thread a developer made a comment that certain areas could be tagged 'unwalkable' and that would effectively let you wade in water. Couple questions about that:1) Can a no walk area be turned On/Off in the scripting language. IE. If I want an area full of fog that requrires a +3 gas mask of anachronism can I have a trigger that makes that switch?2) If I don't stop a player from going into the water, can it get deep enough to go over their heads? Since we don't have swim skills, wouldn't they just be able to walk across the lake?

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I didn't write the walk/nowalk code, which is really a part of the new pathing system that Jason has implemented. I'll answer what I can and if I'm wrong, I'm sure he'll correct me. No, you won't be able to turn on/off walkable areas through script since these areas directly affect the pathing system. If you don't want somebody to be able to walk all the way across the lake fully submerged, just flag a portion of the lake bed as non-walkable up to some point just below the waterline at the shoreline or maybe a little further out so they can walk into it say up to their waste or neck. It's that easy...really.

A Toolset with "On the Fly Testing"
You are correct.

Animation on placeable and creatures

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Hmm, from what I have seen, it appears 3DS Max is very commonly used in the games industry, certainly more than Maya. If Maya is better than Max, why is Max the preferred tool generally, and at Obsidian? If you're allowed to say, of course .

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Indeed that "used" to be the case. In fact, I'm sure Max is still more commonly used. But, there are now a large number of companies out there that use Maya as it has become significantly cheaper compared to when it was first released 5+ years or so ago. For developing plug-ins Maya's plug-in API is far superior to Max's. That was why I mentioned K-3D as a good up and coming open source 3D package as they've adopted the Maya approach to plug-in development and extensibility. For this project we use Max. However, that doesn't mean future projects won't use Maya, Max, or both.

Anthony Davis, Programmer

Any chance having this feat in NWN2?
I'm going to go ahead and say that this probably will not happen. We discussed animals and animal companions for other classes and in the end we decided that it took too much away from the druid and the ranger.