Neverwinter Nights 2 Forum News (Sep. 06, 05)

Remove all ads!

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.

Jason Keeney, Programmer

Pre-Generated Specficication?
In many cases, the bottom line is that we simply cannot comment in detail yet about many of our engine features. This project is still in its "top secret" phase. Evenentually, we'll be in "maximum hype" phase and we'll be able to go on and on in gritty detail about what the NWN2 engine is all about. Ironically, while we're not allowed to say what we do have, right now we're sometimes able to talk about about what we *dont* have (because, if something doesnt exist, then it cant really be a secret now can it? ). This can sometimes give the impression that we the developers are just a bunch of negative, naysaying, party-poopers who are just trying to crush the spirits of you, our fans. Please bear with us and understand that our hands are tied when in comes to discussing our feature set. I've seen a lot of comments where people have jumped to a lot of conclusions about the NWN2 engine... but believe me, the number of actual engine details that are known by the public make up just the tip of the tip of the iceburg.We certainly enjoy and appreciate the guesses ans speculation, but its way, waaaay too soon for judgement.

Dev Question - Pathfinding (extract from another thread)
Yes, it is possible to "weight" the terrain differently in different areas. This would make the pathfinding prefer to go around a mountain instead of over it, or take the bridge instead of marching through the water. There are some gameplay implications to this that are being worked out, and I'm not sure if the weighting will be directly editable or instead connected to something else (like preset values based on terrain type), but I think that in the end you'll probably see this in the game in some form.

Brian D. Lawson, Programmer

Arrays in NWN2
Bioware is not making NWN2. Obsidian is. I see you've also found some help...so this one is done.

City Tilesets

---

But may those screenshots be the screenshots that were meant to be released for e3? Or are these fresh screenshots? Thats the question

---

Fresh...

What excites you about NWN2?

---

---

My only hope it that the developers of nwn2 listens to the old nwn vets and our cryes to what we think NwN2 will need to supass NwN1. Last i heard they didnt... not good news for me thats for sure.

---

How so?

---

I second that. How so??

Frank Kowalkowski, Lead Programmer

Face generation

---

Won't there even be a face customisation like in this game: http://www.taleworlds.com ?

---

NWN2 is a completely normal-mapped game, including all of our skinned characters. This creates highly realistic lighting on the characters. Morphing between two geometric shapes is not trivial, but there are a slew of third party APIs used in games like the Sims 2 and Everquest 2 that cut down the development of such technology. The downside is that they do not provide a viable normal-mapped solution at this time. The result of using one of those technologies would be that everything is lit 'precisely' except for player's skin. While we would have millions of potential faces, the level of detail would drop in one of the most important visual areas of the game--faces. This was not an acceptable compromise as it distracts from the immersion factor of the game (ie it's CLEARLY noticeable when the player is vertex lit on their skin versus the detailed lighting of the armor).We inquired about a solution with a 3rd party Face Gen API provider but when the decision needed to be made (last year) there was no solution in place. I believe there will be a solution to using this technology in normal-mapped games (sooner rather than later) but there is simply no way to 'just do it' within our budget that would not inhibit our ability to bring significant other features into the game.NWN2 is using plenty of other groundbreaking technologies that people will enjoy. If Face Gen were viable for the game we were making, I assure you, it would be in the game.

City Tilesets
The initial batch of screenshots show off what the game is capable of generating for cities. It also doesn't even show the full level of customization available on a per-building basis.