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Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Oct. 15, 04)

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by chevalier, Oct 17, 2004.

  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.

    Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

    13 Oct 2004 - NWN Player Profile: Skullport Game Guides
    It appears the piece had at least one big effect here at BioWare. I have heard of one BioWare staff member picking up ye olde Pool of Radiance to take another crack at it. Very, very cool. Nice work. :)

    Changes for 1.65
    Hopefully the 1.64 patch resolved a huge number of outstanding issues for the time being. Yes, we will be comgin out with another patch- not sure when as we are all hunkering down to finish off a few things quick before it gets too late in the year. I have to agree with Lord Niah- creatures, tilesets and so on may be a resource intensive for the Live Team but do not despair we are committed to supporting NWN because we are freaked out by this group's drive and we don't want you all showing up on our doorstep pushing people around and setting our cars on fire. :)

    Dual-Wield Whips?
    No go on the duel whips...unless your that guy from the movie Underworld who go this buttocks handed to him. :)

    Rob Bartel, Senior Designer Live Team

    Did 1.64 Make some changes to the lootable corpses?
    There were a few changes made. Corpses were still counting as active encounter spawns, for instance, so we made some changes to that. Also, looting a corpse would automatically cause them to turn naked in some instances, even though the clothing was set to undroppable. There might have been a few other tweaks as well but those are the two that I remember coming up.

    Archiving the Witch's Wake Message Board
    Hi everyone! As part of a broader consolidation of the NWN website, we've decided to close down and archive the Witch's Wake forums and start taking down the Witch's Wake subsection of the site. But don't worry, this is a very positive sign for the Witch's Wake series, not a negative one. We'll be replacing these message boards with new ones in the near future and we'll be putting up a new subsection of the website to showcase what the heck we've been up to these past few months. Until then, feel free to carry over any Witch's Wake-related discussion to the general NWN boards.

    Robin Mayne, Webmaster

    Why?
    Why is this Bioware site still redirecting to the Interplay site? I been repeatily redirected to the VERY DEAD interplay site, this is not heplful to someone tring to find out weather, they brought a set of coasters or or having a machine problem. Tech support for BG2 Soa on this site seems a little slow, as I posted my problem 2 days ago, and have yet to recieve so much word of reply. Even a simple "I don't know." would at least show some help. If the "Bioware Technical Support Forum" is not the place to request help for Bioware games being sold, where is? No good pointing the finger at interplay, that dead and buried.
    Your best course of action would be to e-mail support@bioware.com As the publisher of the BG series, Interplay is the primary source of support. It is unfortunate that their site is currently not available.

    What happened to the Witch's Wake forum?
    The Witch's Wake forum has been archived (you can find it here ). Rob Bartel has posted a message regarding the archiving:
    Click Here

    Georg Zoeller, Designer

    v1.64 & Module 2DAs now static?
    The benefits of this change are HUGE, they outweight the cons by far. Before, using custom 2da's in a loop was nearly impossible once they got to more than 10 lines, and people were forced to cache them in local variables to get speed, which unfortunately caused the module to grow in memory and lose performance on the long run. In the end you can now use 2da's as data storage structure for huge amounts of data. The database offers a solution for data storage that can be modified at run time, so any systems that need this can be changed to use the database (or NWNX if you use it) instead. If you didn't notice lag from looping over a 2da before, you probably didn't try this on a server with multiple people, the game would hit the file on disk with every cell in the 2da you addressed, for a larger 2da such as spells.2da, this would cause a considerable amount of disk activity and noticeable lag in the game. As for wasting server resources by caching, wise 2da's are not even a blip on the servers radar - even a placeable texture is usually larger. And since you have now full control over your game's cache size this is not an issue anyway. Of course it would be cool to have some Reload2DA() command :)

    More:
    That's just Great, those that mean i can start using Get2DAString() instead of my hardcoded struct's without a enormous performance hit? or should i still not loop Get2DAString() commands? i have avoided that function when i wanted to create lists on the fly. Are every .2da cashed or just the common ones? or iare they cashed on first use?
    Yes you can. I think it's caching them on the first use.

    1.64 FAQ
    1/8-1/6 of system RAM is probably a good rule of thumb, dedicated servers, especially PW servers with a lot of players and a huge number of areas, can probably achieve significant performance increases by dedicated something like 1/4th+ of system RAM to cache. It's dependent on a number of different factors, so your results may vary and allocating too much cache will definitly cause a performance decrease (as other processes running on the same machine might find themselves forced to swap to disk because NWN is choking them).

    Server stability issues with 1.64?
    I'm new to running a server, so try not to pile on me. :) I tried to download the spells.2da file and put it in the override directory. When users logged in they couldn't slot any of their spells. I removed it and all was fine again. I'm on fedora, so I stripped all the ^M's out of the file, so I dont think that was the problem. Could anyone provide some insight? I'm still crashing alot and my players, while extremely patient, are getting frustrated.
    I would try to extract the spells.2da from the resources on your machine and use your favourite *nix editor (i.e. VI) to change all lines that have "Innate" set to 10 to 9 and save the 2da. I'm not sure why the windows 2da is breaking on linux machines, if someone manages to create a working version of the fix for linux, maybe .tar the file and send it to me (georg at bioware dot com) and I'll post it as hotfix.

    More:
    Yeah, that's a nasty bug. If someone has a server crashing character, you just need to track it down to delete it. (If you're local vault, you're going to need to involve the player -- not easy.)
    Rather then deleting it, please send it to nwexploits@bioware.com so Craig can analyze it.

    GetHasSpell crash hotfix
    The problem I was having with the new spells.2da was because I didn't follow *all* of the instructions. I initially put it in as spells.2DA. This removed all spells from the server. Renaming it spells.2da fixed that problem. Running pretty stable now.
    Ok, that explains the issue. FAT/NTFS isn't case sensitive, most linux filesystems are.... I uploaded the file as spells.2DA on my website. Make sure you rename it to spells.2da before putting it into your servers override and you are fine.

    Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

    Bulette and Troglodyte resources
    I'm also having the same problems with the 1.64 patch, but with the demo mod that was downloaded after patching to 1.64. None of the new creatures or skyboxes appear. I tried going back to version 1.62 and then reinstalling the patch, but to no avail. The creatures are listed in the menues of the toolset but when you open the properties panel no creature appears in the appearance window, there is info from the dialogue.tlk file about the creatures and other stats and scripts. When you close the properties window, a message appears saying invalid appearance. Are there any fixes for this ? Thanks for any help.
    If you have any files in your override folder (especially 2da files) then that is most likely the cause of your problem. Remove the files from your override folder and the problem should go away.

    Devastating Criticial with Bows
    Is there a chance that the strength requirement to get Dev Crit with a bow will ever be changed to a dex requirement? That would make much more sense since the primary stat for bows is Dexterity.
    No.

    Did 1.64 fix "Circle against alignment-bug"?
    We did not make any specific fixes to the AOE spells that can move with a creature (such as Circle against alignment). We did make some changes to the resource caching system (and some other minor optimizations) that improves performance. Since there is a performance improvement, the game most likely now has more free time to do low priority AI updates on things such as moving AOE spells. This is most likely why the Circle against alignment spells are now keeping up with your character. If the server operator decides to significantly increase the size/load of the server in the future (since it is most likely running better now), the problem will most likely come back. Keeping the module to a reasonable size, and writing efficient scripts should allow AOE spells to keep up with players.

    GetHasSpell crash hotfix
    Personally, I'm doing both :p Also, this may be related, Counterspelling any of those spells with innate level set to 10 crashes the server; so I'm definitely going to change those to '9' as well as never use GetHasSpell on them.
    Looks like Counterspelling uses the same code path as GetHasSpell(), so Georg's 2da fix is definitely the way to go until the next patch is released.

    Dispel Magic problem
    ...What they broke however was that now buffs have the strength of character level rather than caster level....
    Actually it has always been that way. :) That behavior did not change in the 1.64 patch. It turns out there were actually two separate bugs with dispels.

    1) The often reported bug that the scripting commands EffectDispelMagicBest() and EffectDispelMagicAll() ignored the pasted in caster level parameter and used character level instead.

    2) The never reported bug that the spell effects being dispeled were also using the character level rather than the caster level in determining whether or not the effect was able to be dispelled.

    We fixed the reported bug 1. We did not fix the unreported bug 2. Now that we've been made aware of the second problem, it will hopefully be fixed in the next patch (not sure when that will be released at the moment).

    AI Changes & v1.64? Did something break?
    There was a fix made to how spell casters buff. The change was in AdjustBehaviorVariable() to return 0 rather than nVar in a particular case. This change seems to have introduced the problem with Special Creature abilities not being used anymore. Changing this back, should revert back to the previous behavior. We are looking into a way to allow both the creature abliitiles to work and allow the buffing to work properly still.

    Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

    NWN and its expansions
    If you purchased the Spanish version of the game, it will install in Spanish. To get English in your game, you must purchase an English version.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2018
    chevalier, Oct 17, 2004
    #1
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