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

Editing Questions: Regarding the ERF issues:

11.

As far as the game and tools are concerned, case does not matter for ResRefs. They are internally converted to all-lower case. But as you've noticed, ResRefs within an ERF may preserve the case used by the files as they existed on your hard drive before being packed into the ERF. When unpacked from the ERF, they will therefore have the same case. This is more of a convenience to someone who is manually looking at the directory contents, rather than something that affects the game or toolset. An application that creates or edits ERFs is not required to preserve case when adding files. It is free to convert the names to all-lower case when adding them, so that extracting the file from it would not result in the same case as the originally added file.

12.

We've updated the documentation to clarify this point. ResRefs can be 1 to 16 chars, with unused chars being nulls.

Regarding the IFO issues, all I can say at this time is: patience.

I believe the module.ifo file is scheduled for discussion in a few weeks. We probably won't be answering any questions on this until after that update. In the meantime, we'll be looking at more fundamentals with the next few releases. Our intent is to provide this information in the most logical and organized fashion we can manage with the time we have available. This means starting at the beginning and going 1 step at a time with the ultimate goal of being able to get your own game data into and out of the modules for play in the game. Unfortunately, Ras, groups like OK may find the first few updates rather elementary but that can't be helped. We have to target the entire community and do what's best for everybody. Now, I'm not suggesting that you don't ask questions; we are interested in what everyone is trying to accomplish, after all. What I'm asking is that you understand if you don't receive an answer from us as quickly as you'd like. I'm also suggesting that you communicate with _each other_. You are your own best resources. You've demonstrated it time and again on the other forums on this site and I expect no less here.

Ras, it's not a bad idea and I'm not suggesting you abandon any of the projects you're working on. I'm explaining that with the limited resources I have available the most effective way for us to communicate this information is by releasing the documentation and then answering questions about it, not the other way 'round. Remember, this site is about presenting a common place for people to get details about some of the internals of how our games work and offering them a place to gather, communicate and colaborate to make their experience with our games that much better. As such, it has to be presented in a logical and organized way for the people that have never heard of OK or aren't part of another end-user group that has a year or more of experience digging into our file formats. I really appreciate what you and the other members of OK have managed to accomplish and we are trying to help. You just have to give us some time to get the site caught up to your level. Don't worry, we'll get there but with E3, finishing KotOR and SoU not to mention work on XP2 (and other things which we can't talk about), we're stretched a little thin right now.

2DA Files: First of all, after looking at your spreadsheet, let me say that we have WAY too many .2da files. Now, as we get into talking about things like items and creatures, we'll begin discussing the .2da files that they use. Once we get the more fundamental stuff out of the way, it'll be a lot easier for us to start rolling on this.

More 2DA Files: We are gradually making this change to each .2da as the opportunities arise. As such, we don't really have a schedule for if / when it'll be done - sorry.

At this point, I don't believe there are any plans for reading descriptions out of anything other than the dialog file. The problem with descriptions is that they tend to be a little more... verbose and as such don't really fit in a .2da structure.