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. 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.

Al Schilling, Product Manager

Mac Release: 7-you're pretty close with all your guesses. Though we'd love to include SoU, we have not been able to come to an agreement that would allow us to do so. We will continue to pursue the possibility of bring SoU to Mac. Don't blame Bioware. I can't say it loudly enough-they've been fantastic through this entire process. You're guess on the ship date should be very close. Remember that every component of NWN has to pass through an approval process. There are MANY entities involved. An incorrectly placed logo on the box could cause several days delay. Price? $49.99US. We realize that we need to knock a few bucks off the original $59.99 due to the lack of the toolset. There are those who contend that the toolset is half the game and, for some people that may be true. However, for the 90%+ that would never use the toolset, this will be the best computer D&D experience they've ever had. Heck, this'll be the best D&D experience for the other 10% too.

Well see now, here we go again. If I don't tell you right now that we're not able to include SoU with the Mac version, I'll be called a liar (or worse) who withholds information in an effort to cheat Mac users. I come right out and tell you and there's already a "no SoU-no sale" movement. Fair enough. I can only say that we would really like to bring SoU to Mac. No deal is done as of now. I can't "promise" that there will be a deal. Bioware can't just say "let's do it". There are plenty of licensors involved. We'll do our best.

Release Date: MacSoft has NOT announced an official ship date for NWN. Of course, we give our distributors estimates as to when the game will ship. However, for the reasons that Derek has already outlined, these dates should not be taken as gospel. The dates you find on various distributor websites is not necessarily reflective of the estimate we give them. If you think you've got an inside scoop on the ship date, you're wrong. It has not been set.

As I stated in my previous post, the dates you read on various distributor websites may not be reflective of our estimates. I've seen several dates mentioned. Some are completely unrealistic. Most of you have had a chance to take a look at the Tech Trial. You can see that NWN Mac is very close to complete. We'll get it released as soon as we possibly can. Understand that I can't take a guess and share it with everyone. Sure as heck, if we don't make that date, we'll hear more "Macsoft intentionally mislead us.." stuff. I'm not trying to mislead, confuse, or otherwise fool anyone. As soon as we set the date-I'll post it in these forums.

David Gaider, Designer

Custom Content: I'm not an expert on animations and such... but what type of model did you assign the creature as in your .2da? There are "simple" creatures (like a bear, for instance) that only have a few animations that they can perform. If that's not it and someone else can't help you here, we can always look into it. Mind you, we'd need more info about what you've done... it's hard to give technical support when folks start mucking around with stuff.

Henchman: Actually, Rogue/Cleric and Sorcerer/Barbarian. And through dialogue you can tell your henchman to continue leveling up split like this or to concentrate on one class (so if you have need a tank, you can ask the Sorcerer/Barbarian to start solely taking Barbarian levels). There's a third henchman that comes later, too.

Yes, just a clarification: the henchmen basically have three "modes" each. The default has them splitting levels between their primary and secondary classes. Dorna splits between Cleric and Rogue evenly. Xanos takes one Barbarian level for every four Sorcerer levels. Deekin is a pure-class Bard, however. Through dialogue, you can choose to ask a henchman to focus on one or the other class after that point (with Deekin you can ask him to switch to Rogue), or to return to their default level-up method.

As for Mischa, the difficulty in adding her in with a patch (and the reason we didn't do it before) is that the SoU henchmen have a *lot* of dialogue. Open up their dialogue in the toolset and take a look. Consider that all of the NWN henchmen were written in a week... the SoU henchmen took a week each, not to mention lots of QA debugging time. I wouldn't mind writing her, myself. Not sure where I would get a spare week, though. Certainly nothing stopping someone else from doing her up as a henchman, either.

Quote: We are allegedly getting the ability to have a proper OnHit scripted event in HoTU.

99% confirmed, yep. It won't be a seperate event but likely a scriptable item property for weapons and armor. Combined with the OnPlayerEquip and OnPlayerUnEquip events, I'm sure that'll give you all plenty of wiggle room, item-wise.

Quote: Quote: AND, what! I thought Bioware said they were never going to release a game packaged like this again!! How about a damn cd case for crying out loud!

We never said anything like that, I'm sure, because the decision doesn't rest with us. No matter how much we might prefer a proper jewel case for our cd's (I hate paper sleeves, myself... blech), the final say rests with the publisher.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Patch 1.30: The Live Team has been working on this issue for the last 14 days, every day, for about 14 hours a day and the results are the 1.30 Beta Update that has been around in 3 different version since Friday. Is 1.30 Live final yet? Not quite. Will it be out within the next 48 hours? Probably. Marketing has nothing to do with it and we are doing the best we can with the resources we have. Its kinda a big game, ya know?

This is not possible. A publisher will put loads of QA on a retail product, whereas they will put a much smaller amount on a game update. The 1.30 Beta has been the most solid, bug-free beta we have ever done, thanks to the fact that we are basing all the Live 1.30 off of the SoU 1.30

Quote: Are you saying that you would still be having this headach today if 1.3 had been released yesteday?

No, I am saying that if we did that, the 1.30 Beta would be very, very buggy and SoU would have been delayed in release. Since both those things are bad, we decided not to do them. Live 1.30 Beta 4 coming today. Live 1.30 final is still coming out on Friday.

SoU Online: Whew, tons of things to reply to here, so bear with me.

"Connection error: Your cd key is unauthorized."

Its not lying, but this issue has NOTHING to do with game versions. If you are having a problem with your CD Key, the owner should contact Atari Tech Support. They can find out what is wrong with the CD Key.

Quote: You are running the Beta patch. I believe you will need to have the official patch installed for SOU owners to connect (Since SOU has the official patch).

Incorrect. SoU clients can connect to the 1.30 Beta servers.

Quote: Confirmed that if you run 1.30 client (Shadows) and try to connect to a 1.29 server, you can't.

Correct. Mismatched game versions have NEVER been able to connect together. Install the 1.30 Beta 3 Update and all will be well.

Calm down. Every update we release, there are early adopters and late adopters. You will only see servers that are the exact same server as you. If you install the Live 1.30 Beta, you can all play together. Some people will do it immeadiately, others will do it later. The Final 1.30 Update for Live will be coming out on Friday. By next week, this issue will be a memory and its only a temporary issue.

Tech Trial: The Tech Trial only includes resources needed to progress normally through the Prelude.

Portrait Bug: This "issue" of a malformed portrait has been around since the game shipped. It isn't on our high priority fix list since if you make the targa correctly it will work. We will fix this, just not right now.

Database Functions: There is an issue with the database functions in the shipping version (1.30) of SoU. This issue does NOT exist in NWN Live 1.30. This issue only relates to player specific storage. Non-player specific storage is unaffected. This does not affect the SoU Campaign. This bug is fixed in Live 1.30 and in SoU 1.31, but there are consequences. Any player specific data storage made in SoU 1.30 will be broken/unreadable when the SoU 1.31 Update comes out. We are sorry for any problems that this issue might cause, but that is why we are telling you before SoU is available. Feel free to ask any questions here.

Quote: So when can we expect SoU 1.31

Unknown at this time.

Quote: or NWN Live 1.30?

Live 1.30 Beta 3 is available right now. Final should be out Friday

Item Level Restrictions: We turned ILR off in 1.30 for all versions as the changes to item values may cause this to trigger.

Requiring SoU Flag: For those of you who have the NWN: SoU expansion installed, and want to prevent your current non-SoU module from being flagged as "requiring SoU", here are two batch files you can create to activate/deactivate your SoU installation.

NWToolsetOrig.bat

@echo off
copy /y xp1.key _xp1.key
del xp1.key
start nwtoolset.exe

NWToolsetSoU.bat

@echo off
copy /y _xp1.key xp1.key
start nwtoolset.exe

Please note, that the change to the 'xp1.key' file will affect the Neverwinter Nights game as well. Please note, that the "start" command won't work for all OS's. If the batch file fails, just remove the 'start' command from the batch files. If you just want the status of the SoU install to be flipped between detected and not-detected by these two batch files, then please remove the lines for nwtoolset.exe. We will see if we can come up with a more elegant solution in a future Update.

The original plan was to not allow any option for this at all. 3 days ago, or so, we found a very hacky way for you to do this right now, without any code changes. We can find a better, and more elegant solution in the future. Would you rather have some solution right now, or no solution for a month or two and require you to maintain 2 installs of NWN?

Quote: So the mistake lies in the assumption by Bioware that everyone in the fan community would develop modules for SoU only and not legacy users as well.

That assumption was never made. Unfortunately, as of a week, the only solution we were able to offer is for you to keep 2 installs of NWN. That is why there was always a plan to offer a solution and we are doing the best we can given the circumstances.