Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by Veldrin)

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Database: WolfKC: We?re always taking the feedback from our fans and customers into consideration when we?re designing our games. If BioWare ever releases end-user tools for another project, many of the lessons we?ve learned on NWN will be incorporated into the design. Elof: Check the Live Team roadmap released last week. You?ll find that DB access functions are being added to NWN in the next couple of months. Enigmatic: You seem to think that because of my unwillingness to admit that a RDBMS is the best solution for all your data management needs that I don?t know anything about them. That is simply not the case.

Consider that the game and toolset use the same data. If they didn?t, then it would require that the data be on the user?s system twice, once in game format and the other in toolset format. That would exceed our minimum install budget. So, if they?re using the same data, it makes sense to share as much of the I/O code between them as possible. Now, unless you?re writing your own SQL engine (!) you?re using somebody else?s and that has additional licensing issues that must be addressed. In addition, for the toolset at least, you are increasing the complexity for either the users (they must learn SQL) or the developers (they must make additional wizards, widgets, whatever). If the developers choose to make it easier for non-technical people to use, they are not working on other features. If the developers choose not to address the end-user complexity problem they are almost assuredly reducing the number of people that will be able to use the product. Also, since a SQL engine offers more things for the user to do, it would of necessity require more QA time regardless of how the developers choose to deal with the extra complexity. Together, these things may have significant cost / feature implications.

Given that the game and toolset share the same I/O code, a SQL engine may require the game to exceed its memory budget beyond the minimum install limit since SQL engines require a lot of memory for caching and query processing. This may have a negative impact on frame rate because it?s less memory available for the graphics, AI / rules and networking systems. In fact, it may actually be slower for per-record retrieval than a flat file implementation. In a properly normalized database, you may have one table for areas and then a table for the creature instances in the area which refer to creature blueprints (in another table) which may have relationships to yet other tables for inventory, spells, feats, etc. In order to get that information out of a database, you must use a query with a multi-table join (or a pre-built view). Then once you have the data in your result set, each record must now be parsed into a corresponding game structure. The other alternative is to simply look at a header, find the offset and load the creature data into the game structure immediately.

Quote: While massively multiplayer games like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot probably use SQL databases to store their data, they have more control over the environment and hardware on which their game servers run. That is, the only minimum install requirements they have to worry about are for their client program.

Your comments indicate that while you may have some (or a lot of) programming experience in your problem domain(s), you have had little exposure to the kinds of constraints and issues in your development cycles that I have had during mine. Why don?t you actually try game development some time? It?ll give you a whole new perspective on software engineering and perhaps you?ll even gain some insights into the kinds of things I?ve been trying to tell you for last little while. Of course, that?s just a suggestion; there are even some ?Game Programming for Dummies? books out there now for you to take a look at. As I have said on numerous occasions, if the next project includes end-user tools and they require a DB, then they?ll get one. If they don?t, they won?t. That?s not political, that?s not side-stepping the issue, that?s not a lack of knowledge of the benefits of databases, that?s a reality of the fact that I don?t have details on the requirements for the next project. Would I like to use a database? Sure but only if we can do it in such a way as to avoid the problems I outlined above.

Rick Ernst, Lead Designer, Floodgate Entertainment.

Skills: I understand the sentiment here, but I think it's very unlikely that any skills will be added to NWN that don't have a clear in-game effect. This would just be too confusing to many players. As a general rule it's a bad idea to put something in a game that has no effect. And though I understand that you want to be able to give them proper effects via scripting in your games, they wouldn't have any effect in other games or the official campaigns. I can't speak to the likelihood of getting empty skill slots that a mod builder could customize. There are a couple of skills that I'd still like to see in the game as well. Early on we wanted to add Disguise to SoU, but it turned out to be much more tricky than we'd originally thought. Of course, the more physical skills will most likely have to wait for a system revamp.

Tumble is in. However, since the default difficulty setting in NWN does not have attacks of opportunity against PCs we've modified it a bit. This will no doubt anger some, but I think it actual works nicely. Now, as I mentioned before, there are no new animations for skills, which is a bit of a shame in tumble's case. Early on when we added Tumble to the list Bioware warned us that no additional animation would be possible for it, but we decided we'd rather have non-animating tumble than none at all. Hope you all agree.

Animations: Yeah, I've been around a fair amount lately. Lots of work means lots of breaks to stay sane. As for new animations, one of the things we discovered when we started working on SoU was that there are already so many animations for the player characters, that adding new ones is nigh impossible. So no sneaking animations, also no new animations for feats or skills... there's just no room for 'em. What we can add easily (since they aren't associated with the PC specifically) are spell effects, in particular recombining existing effects for new spells. Plus some entirely new effects for the Bigby's Hand spells and Caltrops, for example. A lot of our restrictions in SoU stem from the fact that we didn't want folks to have to wait two years before they got a new expansion. I can't really add to what's already been said about the content of XP2. As for FloodGates involvement with NWN after SoU... We've had a great time working with Bioware so far, and we'd love to continue doing so. We'll just have to wait and see.

We've been working hard to make the henchmen much more vocal, though I don't think we'll be including out-of-character comments like you describe. Hopefully you'll still find them likeable.

Headgear: At this point, even if Bioware were to add headgear that didn't replace heads in time for SoU's release, we wouldn't have time to create all the art and blueprints neccessary to include it in the expansion. I haven't heard anything from Bioware on this subject, but if it happens it looks to be XP2 at the earliest.

Stone of Recall: Though I'd prefer your posts to be a bit more civil, Haiml...The respawn button is necessary for online games, since reloading a save game is not an option. If you are playing alone and don't like respawning, I heartily recommend you pretend that button does not exist.

We will be including methods of faster transport in SoU, though we will not be using the Stone of Recall as it appears in the original campaign. We are attempting to address the players' need for something to reduce the tedium of traversing previously explored areas, without giving the player a device that allows him to jump back and forth to town in the middle of a fight. We also won't be using the same method through the entire campaign. In some cases we'll be using teleportation portals that require a 'key' to focus in on another portal, in other cases a magic item will provide PCs with a safe haven. We're still ironing out the systems, but it seems to be shaping up nicely.