Neverwinter Nights Board Update

Remove all ads!

(Originally posted by Darien)

Here are some developers' comments from the official Neverwinter Nights message boards.

Rob Bartel, Co-Lead Designer:

The storyline: We finished creating extensive outlines (approx. 30 pages per outline) for each of our modules last September or so. In February, we were writing prototype conversation for some of the modules in the first chapter. It's important to note that these were done in a word processor, using hypertext links, not in the actual toolset.

We're currently transfering the prototype conversations into the actual conversation editor, using that as a means to quickly hunt down bugs (I thought I finished the conversation for one of my modules today, for instance, only to find that a bug had corrupted a bunch of my files).

So, yes, you could say that we've been 'creating the storyline' for many months, now, but it's really an iterative, piecemeal process that will still be continuing well into the future. This is a normal process for a new engine game and nothing to get alarmed about.
Script crashing: The scripting language is powerful and gives broad access to the game and engine. This will allow bad scripts to make a mess, but the scripting language will have a few safety features to stop endless loops and other problems. I would recommend solid testing before you release scripts though. Good testing is the only way to be sure.

Trent Oster, Producer:

Module Size: To date the largest module I've seen so far is under 300k. With this said, we haven't attempted anything close to a final module in size. I'd guess between 1-5 mb for a larger module.

Screen artwork: The interface in NWN is very "minimalist". We deliberately went for a very lean Gui. Our goal is to leave as much screen real estate open for gameplay as possible while presenting all the required data

The game will feature a number of hand drawn stills for module starts and endings and a huge variety of hand painted user portraits. All the Inventory items are also hand painted with matching 3D models in-game.

Mac OS X: The game was working on the Mac until we found out about OS X. The Carbonizing effort hasn't been massive, but it has had a fair number of headaches. For the longest time we couldn't get mouse input. In short, the OS X port pushed the Mac port further behind, but through hard work our local expert has almost caught back up.

Good show Howard.

On the internationalization area, we are doing most of the multi-language support in NWN, so it should be one app, many languages.

Publishing the Scripting Language: We will start opening up more about the scripting language as we get closer to ship. We have a habit of ripping things apart and reworking them so we're waiting until we're sure the language won't change too much before we release a ton of information.