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.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Petrify: There is a variable you can set on a creature to prevent effect petrify from being cancelled. Check around the end of x0_i0_spells.nss, in the spellsDispelMagic (?) function. I am not sure if that property is in your toolset already, but you might want to grant the statue an item with SpellImmunity: stone to flesh or even better, Spell Immunity: Level 9 spells or lower

HotU Features: Dynamic itemproperties are confirmed. Setname is confirmed not to be in.

Damage Caps: Any spell that has a cap in its description will not advance above this cap in terms of damage. Some, like Flame Arrow, are not capped by the book...

Glyph Of Warding: Glyph of Warding does not go away when you rest, allowing you to secure your resting place against those evil wandering monsters found in the underdark

HotU Events: You got an OnEquip/UnEquip event handler in hordes

Quote: well I might be stating the obvious Torias, but if you look around, it seems that this is all we are doing on this forum. Nothing is really ever taken into considderation, because this is all useless babbling. Bioware and its associates do what they want, and we are basically talking to the wind.

Wrong, we are *considering* quite a lot of things requested by the community, but there is a difference between considering and actually implementing everything the community wants, right?

A few examples:
Support for most 2das in hakpaks
Support for multiple hakpaks
Toolset plot wizard
Kobolds
OnEquip/OnUnEquip Events
Dynamic Item Properties
Arcane SpellFailure +/- properties
Get/SetDeity
Epic Levels
Dwarven Waraxe, Whip

All things requested by the community and integrated into the game at some point in the past or future, some of that being major changes. But, if you are talking about the +1 spellcasting PRC, I guess the talking into the wind is actually more on our part. Anyway, creating hidden wishlist threads won't help anything, the featureset for Hordes is pretty much locked down already.

David Gaider, Designer

Large Monsters: Yeah, I'm afraid handling larger monsters is something that sounds cool but in practice would require an engine specifically geared to deal with them... you'd need pretty fancy camera work to keep it from being a big mess, for starters, and very different combat animations to deal with a completely different scale of combat. At the very least, the field of play would have to be so much larger. I think an engine that did all this is probably possible currently... but to combine it with an engine that does everything else that NWN does... well... that's going to take a while.

Quote: Come on Torias, show me the last post where you critisised Bioware. They bought your silence with a character in SoU OC...

Pfft. Getting a character in the game named after you is generally a dubious honor at best. And Torias can be plenty critical... in fact, if I hear his Parry or Discipline diatribe one more time I'm going to puke all over him. But it's easy to just throw out criticism, isn't it? Just spew some bile, and if anyone tries to defend themselves or be constructive, call them a weenie. We listen to our community plenty and value their constructive input. That input leads to a lot of discussion here and sometimes changes in the game, but either way it's all part of an ongoing dialogue between us and the people who play our games. And the fact that someone who doesn't come at us with like a sledgehammer with a grudge but chooses to be constructive and informative with the other fans needs to defend himself in this context still amazes me.

Quote: And about the Drow dual wield thing... If you played a Drow who didn't dual wield, I would find that rather out of character, since from my perspective (even if it were just a device in a novel) that is how most Drow go about their weapons training.

Fairly or not, this is the only part of your post I'll pick on. Is it true that dual wielding is a style specifically trained to drow males? Yes. Would a dual-wielding drow be a reasonable character, regardless of other traits? Certainly. Would he still be identified with Drizzt? Most likely. This isn't the character's fault, really... the fact exists that there is this overwhelmingly popular character that is identified with certain traits. The fact that these traits might not be specific to that character is irrelevant, and as a writer you just have to know that. I suppose it's possible that an archetypal character could be made different enough to distinguish itself from whoever it seems to emulate... but you'd have to add some pretty drastic and very clear points of difference in there that the reader would immediately see. It's nobody's fault that a "kindly, white-haired mage" archetype exists... and it's not impossible for such a character to be well-written, regardless... you just have to be aware of the similarity and work around it because you're automatically picking up all the "baggage" that comes with that character (tired of Drizzt? Well, chances are, then, that you'll automatically be just as tired of any Drizzt-like character that comes down the pipe, regardless of their relative merit). That's my objections on a writing level, anyhow. From a gaming perspective... that's a whole other kettle of fish.