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.

David Gaider, Designer

Talking While Sitting: I believe the problem with the characters standing up to talk is two-fold:

1) Sitting is a "constant" animation... it must be continually played for a model to remain seated. In the standard OnConversation script, a ClearAllActions() call is made on the seated character, causing him to stop playing the animation and therefore he stands up.

2) Even if the ClearAllActions() is removed, there is a standard "talking" animation which involves the model bobbing his head and the like. This is done while standing and will pre-empt the seated animation.

So what needs to be done:

- take the ClearAllActions() call out of that character's OnConversation script.
- make sure all his conversation nodes have "No Animation" selected.

I believe when both of these are done, you should be alright. If I'm missing something (and that may be the case), you may want to look around here some more or check out the Witch's Wake scripts. Rob got the "No Animation" setting added so that NPC's could be talked to while seated or lying down and supposedly it works just fine this way now.

Custom Content: Well, I don't think it'd be all that much trouble to release the max files. I mean... I've seen a few directories around with the max files in them. It's not exactly as if it'd be a hardship for anyone to put it together. The only thing that might prevent it is if there are some proprietary or legal issues involved (no idea, there). But the original reason the topic of the max files came up was regarding the making of model variations, not "what can Bioware do for you?". Details on what the Live Team has planned on a larger scale is coming out shortly, anyway. Love the Cave Goblins, by the way. Make a female version, a chieftain and a shaman and I'll stop using the bohemian-hat wearing yellow ones we did.

I guess what I'm just suggesting is that while wholly new models are very interesting and certainly needed, if there wasn't a demand for these variations as well. I guess when I look at how I would implement, say, the kobold tribe from the Sunken Citadel or the goblin caves from Keep on the Borderlands in my mind I find it more necessary aesthetically to have a wide variety in the creatures (especially since there is so many of them) then worry about the fact that I don't have any hobgoblins for *their* cave. After all... the flipside of the coin when you say "I can't pretend a goblin is a purple worm" is that I, as the module maker, can choose not to put a purple worm anywhere if I know I don't have a model for it. I can't, however, choose to make a tribe full of goblins look different from one another if I only have the one model for it. Hope that makes sense.

Trent Oster, Producer

Problems With Demo: The demo has a resource issue where the textures were not stored in the correct manner. The game instead loads in the full size texture and then manually downsamples on the fly, causing a "laggy feel". With the full game this doesn't happen as the texture packs sort out texture size issues.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Mac Toolset: As you can probably tell by the BioTag next to my name, I am the lead tools programmer at BioWare. My primary responsibility over the last 3 years has been, along with a team of 1 - 4 other programmers, the development of the NWN toolset. My job included the selection of Borland C++ Builder as the primary development environment back in 1998 / 1999.

Before we started development, I looked at several cross platform development tools in an effort to find one that met the following requirements:

1. C++. This was necessary for performance as well as the fact that the toolset was going to rely heavily on existing game systems, such as the graphics engine.

2. Rapid GUI development (similar to Visual BASIC for Windows).

The toolset had to be able to support content creation 2 years before the game actually shipped. That's not to say the toolset was complete at that point because it had to go through numerous GUI and functional changes as game systems came online, changed or were removed. Like it or not, using the default Win32 API (or even MFC) would not have been sufficient to meet our deadlines. This means that cross platform development environments that _only_ give access to the basic platform API would have offered no significant advantage over developing in the target platform natively.

I looked at CodeWarrior, but at the time it didn't support requirement 2. I looked at various Java and BASIC solutions all of which failed requirement 1.

Now, unlike Microsoft, Borland was at least offering a Linux version of its C++ Builder product that was scheduled to come out well before our ship date. Given that C++ Builder met both requirements and was going to support 2 out of 3 target platforms, I thought it was our best bet.