Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by Z-Layrex)

Here are today's official 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

Prestige Classes: There are no rules for creating Prestige Classes in 3rd edition, other than 'use your judgement'. Unfortunately, that's not something that translates well onto the computer. "Okay... we're going to try and put together a system of class abilities that are, um, pretty much anything... with spell abilities of, ummm, pretty much any type... with pre-requisites that are, errrr, hopefully scriptable..." There's a few common themes that you find amongst the prestige classes, but not many. Trying to include enough of a variety to make a complete "system" (even a minimal one) would be kind of a nightmare. Then, too, we have to take into account that the way classes were added makes adding new ones (especially those prestige classes with spells) fairly problematic. And that's disregarding any issues with the do-it-yourself-rules that made us leave out the ability to build your own classes and spells and such in the first place. Could we eventually add in the ability for a mod-maker to include custom prestige classes? Maybe... but generating a complete enough system and re-tooling the entire class system to accomodate them easily lies strictly in the realm of a sequel.

More:

Quote: So at best bioware could leave the back door open for us to sneak in and make prestige classes as a form of custom content and distribute the modified 2da files in hak paks.

That's all well and good, Torias, but just what abilities would those prestige classes have? You wouldn't be able to give any of them spell lists (that's hard-coded, unfortunately), and while you would be able to determine changes to BAB, hit dice and saving throws, all the other class abilities would have to be added as custom feats... which would mean that in order for custom prestige classes to be at all meaningful we would have to go in and include not only the ability to create and insert custom feats easily but to make sure that they covered a wider breadth of abilities than they do currently. Not only that, we'd have to insert the ability to put all that together in the toolset... we'd never make such a large change only to have it restricted solely to custom content creators. You might say "Yes, do that, sounds great"... and, I agree, in theory it sounds ideal (short of the lack of spell list changes)... but the amount of total work it require to do all of the above is fairly prohibitive to say the least.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Patch Bug: Yes, we just noticed this and there will be a fix up later today. Stay tuned! This will cause a "missing resource" / "resource not found" error when compiling the module, but will not prevent saving the module and does not break the game. If you wish to avoid seeing these errors until the fix is ready, create a simple script named "resref" (without the quotes) with an empty void main() function. Sorry, 'bout this guys.

Tom Ohle, Communications Assistant

Tilesets: The next anything (non-desert stuff) you see will be Ruins tileset-related. I think. Again, all this stuff needs to go through Hasbro/WotC/Infogrames approvals--so if I submit stuff, it takes about a month for it to get approved (a little less, but I pretty much factor in a month for any approvals).

NW Wednesday: Unfortunately, there won't be any new screenshots this week. We've still got shots wrapped up in approvals. Today's stuff is pretty cool, though--it'll take a bit of time until we start releasing more really juicy info.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Patch 1.28: The 1.28 Update will be out today. It is all packaged up and we are doing all the last minute web page updates and server file transfers. It shouldn't be too long. The English 1.28 Critical Rebuild will be later this afternoon, though. Sadly, we do not have final version of the non-English versions of 1.28, but we hope to have Beta versions of them this week. The non-English Betas will be play-compatible with the English 1.28 version.

Tumble: Correct. Tumble is a skill.

Non-English 1.28: Localization has been backlogged and is not ready. However, we expect to have compatible, albeit Beta versions of the non=-English languages ready tomorrow.

Module Load Times: Sydney rocks. We didn't want to make too big a deal about it, but opening Chapter 2 dropped from 10 minutes to about 1 minute. Again. He rocks.

Leto & Patch 1.28: That message is the generic warning that we put up to cover the cheat/hack fixes we put in the game, in terms of server-side code. It doesn't have anything to do with Leto...

Patch 1.28 RESREF Error:

Greetings:

There is an issue in the current 1.28 English Toolset for Neverwinter Nights where deleting a script on a creature, etc. and it will replace the script with the word 'RESREF'. You can save and run your module and it won't break anything, but this is a significant enough problem that we are going to handle it outside of the normal patching process. We have a fixed version of the Toolset available for download right now, BUT you must also either back up your old Toolset or download the original 1.28 Toolset from us, otherwise you will break your ability to update the game to 1.29. This issue is an English version only issue, and will not be in the upcoming non-English versions of the 1.28 Update.

1. Back up your existing 1.28 NWToolset.exe file to someplace safe.

2. Download the fixed 1.28 NWToolset.

3. Unzip the contents of this zip file into your Neverwinter Nights directory.

4. Enjoy a 'RESREF'-free version of the Toolset.

When the 1.29 patch comes around you must either:

1. Restore your backed up Toolset from step 1, above.

- OR -

2. Download the Original 1.28 NWToolset.

Our apologies for this inconvenience.