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Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Jan. 07, 06)

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Jan 8, 2006.

  1. chevalier

    chevalier Knight of Everfull Chalice ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran

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    Remove all ads!
    Here are today's Neverwinter Nights 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.

    Georg Zoeller, Designer

    Money For XP Legal?
    1. Bioware/Atari doesn't want to have to compete commercially with other proffessionally designed modules, and...

    2. Bioware/Atari doesn't want to have to compete commercially with any proffessional designed PWs in case they themselves choose to one day licence or run a pay-for-play PW of their own, and...

    3. A general paranoia concerning protection of copyrights in the legal department, that pushes pretty much every company to be overly restrictive out of fear that if they give consumers an inch, they'll find a loop-hole that lets them take a foot.
    Required Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. If you have a legal problem and want advice, please hire an attorney.

    a) If competition was a problem, the non commercial competition (such as Adam Miller's exceptional modules) would be an issue for us too, as they compete with commercial modules as well ("why should I buy something if I get something like Module X for free").

    What the clause is about is to prevent someone from taking our (and our contractors and publishers) work and benefits commercially from it without licensing it the proper way.

    If you want to benefit commercially from our work, you license the engine, which has a different cost tham buying NWN Diamond for 29.99.

    Think this is just based off some weird EULA clause that can be ignored at will? What business module do you think Epic uses for their Unreal Engine? Hint: It's not: Buy Unreal Tournament, make money off it.

    Let me be very clear here:

    You can't make a D&D based game or game service without the D&D license and make money off it. Only Atari has the license for D&D video games. Even if you licensed our engine, you still would have to talk to Atari to get the permission to use D&D.

    The D&D license BioWare used for NWN is non transferable, we can not grant it to you. - Every Premium module we create and publish goes through the Atari and WotC approval process.

    b) NWN can not have an official PW and that's something we knew from the start, so no, competition is not a concern.

    Atari and BioWare are not the only parties involved here:

    - Wizards of the Coast, and their parent company Hasbro own the D&D license Atari uses for NWN and they are active partners on the table in the use of this license

    - NWN contains server browser technology and service by GameSpy that BioWare licensed for NWN and that BioWare pays for, continually, to keep the service accessible through NWN.

    - NWN may contain certain elements (i.e. Art, music, voice work, technology) licensed by BioWare from third parties for use in NWN. These licenses may cover non commercial use by our customers for their modules, but they certainly would not cover use in any other commercial venture by third parties, such permission could only be granted from the ocntent owners, not BioWare.

    Required Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. If you have a legal problem and want advice, please hire an attorney. The above is my personal opinion and may may or may not reflect the opinion of BioWare Corp, Atari or their team of hungry lawyers.

    More:
    Good for you Lord Vallis - but that does not mean that everyone can afford to run theire own server themselves. If a group of friends club together to raise the money to hire the use of a server if this wrong?
    Again, IANAL, personal opinion and the legal people may think differently about this (so do not construct this as legal advice), but...

    If you look at which cases lawyers have become involved with during the history of NWN, they were not of the "My band of friends and I raise some money to run our server" kind. There might be, as another poster mentioned, tax implications with this kind of setup, depending on where you live, but otherwise that does not seem to create a lot of problems.

    The cases that have caused things to become heated all involved some kind of exchange like donation vs. service or donation vs. in game benefit. So chances (IANAL) are that if you run a server and you have a donate button on your webpage without giving people who donate special benefits in game or promising any kind of service based on the game, you are not affected by this issue.

    More: BS. There is no special agreement with Neversummer or any other server that allows them to offer services based on NWN for monetary compensation/donations.

    Any plans for a 1.67?
    Honestly, I'm a little disappointed that SetDescription isn't in.
    I was going to make a newspaper in my module with articles about quests the player has completed. I suppose there may still be a way to achieve it, although in a more limited fashion.
    You can use journal entries for that, they support the use of custom variables.

    Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

    Any plans for a 1.67?
    There is no new SetBaseStat() scripting command, but it is now at least easier to get the base stat with the new ...
    On a related note, any chances that the +12 limit to base stats will be removed or at least increased?
    The limit will not be removed or increased.
    During our testing we found that increasing this limit to high caused the combat system to start breaking down, so it will remain where it is.

    Any plans for a 1.67?
    One thing to be aware of is that because a number of new fields have been
    added to some of the in-game objects in the 1.67 update, I believe it is
    highly likely that some community made tools such as NWNX2 will mostly likely
    no longer work with the 1.67 update (at least until the people that
    maintain those tools have a chance to update them to be compatible with the
    1.67 update). So once the 1.67 beta becomes available I would strongly
    recommend any server admins to download the beta and do some testing
    with their servers in order to iron out any issues they have before
    the final 1.67 update goes live.

    Craig,

    The last couple patches have had only very limited availability of linux server binaries during the beta period. We went to the trouble of setting our selves up to participate in the betas [164, 165, 166] on dedicated test infrastructure mimicing our live setup and were not, in the beta, able to participate in a meaningful way, despite our efforts.

    Do you anticipate that the growth and success of the Live Team will enable you to release linux server binaries for a significant part of the beta period? Or will your resources still be mostly focussed on the PC edition?

    Any feedback on this point will help us determine how best to spend our test time. Thanks for any insight you can offer!
    Owen has been working hard on the 1.67 beta Linux and Mac versions. While I can't guarantee that they'll be out at the same time, they "shouldn't" be more than a couple of days behind the Windows version.

    Although Owen's has a fair bit of work piled on his plate at the moment, so we'll have to wait an see how things pan out.

    Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

    Problem with entering cd-key
    Please note that the font for the CD key is not the best, and certain letters or numbers may look like other letters or numbers. Try a few combinations (write them down first if you have to), and if it still doesn't work, email accounts as Talrias has suggested. Good luck! :)

    Forum Locking Suggestion
    Good suggestion, and here are the kinds of responses I supplied in the other thread:

    1. We normally lock threads when they reach 10 pages. We find that it keeps the discussions fresher and better-paced.

    2. It would be difficult to give a time frame for locking because we Moderators aren't online all the time. Giving a time frame of, for example, two hours until lock may not be feasible and the thread would drag on for an indeterminate amount of time until the Mod can come back. It's easier on us Mods to just lock threads when they reach 10 pages or more, as they find them.

    3. the alternative would be giving short time frames for a lock, which wouldn't solve your suggested problem of giving people enough time to react to an impending lock.

    4. We cannot be responsible for who is posting what and when. Chances are that even if we were to implement this kind of policy we would be interrupting some responses with a locked thread. Would it happen less often? Who knows, but I do know that it's rare that we interrupt a very long, involved response with a lock. Regardless, we'll pass this along. Thanks for the suggestion! :)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Jan 8, 2006
    #1
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