Neverwinter Nights Forum News

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(Originally posted by chevalier)

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

Patch fixes: Maintaining any list would cost resources and would cause lots of grief for everyone because there are always people who can't read properly (i.e. plan == promise) and there is the fact that people tend to disagree about if things are a bug or not (i.e. automatic failure or devastating critical are working as intended, they are not bugged). If you have a particular worry about something you don't want to code a complicated workaround, just ask, you usually get an answer here (unless we don't like the way you are asking, of course) We sometimes jump in and commment on when a certain bug has been fixed, but doing this "on a regular basis" is out of question, the Live Team resources are much better used in different areas, including actually fixing bugs instead of maintaining lists. A sticky will never happen about this.

This is a list of things I *know* have been worked on already and will be in a future patch (please note the absense of a version number and the words "worked on"!) - Note that if something is not on that list, it doesn't mean it has not been worked on, I just don't know about it (after all I am not on the NWN project anymore). Please do not try to interprete this list. Nothing new on this list for those who read the forums on a regular basis.

Changed spells:
- Improved Invisibilty,
- Crumble
- Black blade of disaster (correct great sword related feats now)
- Elemental shape now scaling above level 20

Crafting Feats:
- Dupe problem with scrolls, wands fixed

Talktable:
- Multiplayer support

Skyboxes:
- Day/Night cycle & Transition
- other issues (size)

Scripting Commands:
- GetHasSpell works for cure/inflice spells
- CreateObject now returns stack object if player already has an object of a kind that is stackable
- CreateObject now should copy variables set in the toolset template
- SetCutsceneMode now doesn't set plot objects when called twice with TRUE.

Classes:
- Palemaster/bard multiclass chars now get their epic spells
- RDD ELC issues
- Shifter gargoyle shape carmour missing , epic dragon form carmour mismatch , not merging towershield properties

Other stuff
- Lots of Melee Touch attack issues (i.e. you no longer get a bonus from your equipped weapon)
- Problems with encountersystem above level 20
- OnHitCastSpell:UniquePower cost reduced
- Various Exploit fixes
- Made some changes to the AI statescripts to reduce lag on servers that dump all monster's into the same faction (bad habit).
- European beta (being worked on)

Bug lists:

Quote: We deserve respect as clients and provide us information about bugs that can ruin our gameplay experience, as I see, is an obligation of BIOWARE. Thank you.

While I agree that anyone deserves respect, especially customers, there is absolutely no obligation to keep a public bug tracker - as said, this would cost time of people who have better things to do, including fixing the bugs reported - it's just not realistic what you ask for and playing the "I'm a paying customer" card doesn't change that at all - there are more than a million paying customer's out there for NWN alone, if we would incorporate every single person's wishes, we wouldn't be making games right now. Actually, I don't think there are many game companies out there that provide the level of feedback and presence in their community as we do, including discussion of bugs and status updates.

Quote: would have a option BEFORE starting a game or taking a feat. Ex: Will I play a AA altough its failures, or will I take PARRY feat even knowing it doesnt work the proper way?

That's my favourite: A) parry is a skill, B) we invented it, so regardless how broken people claim it is, nobody can claim that is is not working or bugged. period. I'm not saying there could be optimizations to this skill, that's not the point - the point is that it's not a bug just because people don't like the way it works.

Further:
Again (for the last time), it won't happen, reasons above. Time is precious and a buglist that needs to be kept up to date and written by a PR monkey so people can not overinterprete it definitly a bad way to invest your time.

A:you said it would be fixed -
B: no, we said we are investigating -
A: no you promised -
B:

(And don't tell me this won't happen). A public bugtracker would be nice, but the world is not ready for that yet, the freaks that jumped the board just before patch 1.61 made that pretty clear. There are reasons why nobody in the industry is doing this (apart from it being a relatively bad sink for investing your precious time).

Further:
You are free to ask if certain features will ever happen, but naturally people won't believe it anyway. [ no psionics, no cloaks, no changes to saving skillpoints, no horses, no "z-axis", no official archmage prestige class ]

As for us not wanting buglists on the website for PR reasons - that would probably be the reason you would get if you asked a PR person about why not to have an official buglist. If you ask a designer or programmer, you will get other reasons, because we tend not to think of PR first (I'm certain that's driving Jay and Tom nuts from time to time). What it all boils down to: In the end everyone involved will have said no for whatever reason and that makes a pretty good final answer.

Whirlwind & Cleave: Hi Whirlwind and cleave don't "stack". You can do either one or the other - if it would be different characters could get "dead locked" while fighting in a crowd of critters

Epic bards: Epic bard's can't get epic spells, epic pale masters can. There was an issue that if you were palemaster/bard multiclass, you wouldn't get your epic spells from being a pale master.

Custom editing: Since several people PM'ed me about how to do this, here is the concept (servervault, hakpak required)

Let's say we want hide in plain sight to work only during nights.

A) Change the prerequisites to Hide in plain sight to something impossible in feats.2da

B) Create a new feat Hide in plain sight in feats.2da, using custom talktables, using the values from hide in plain sight before you changed the prerequisites.

Result: People still can select Hips, but it doesn't do anything.

Next:
C) Put a script in your module that monitors the time and signals two user defined events to the module (night start, night end).

D) Implement both user defined events so that they add/remove the real (old) hide in plain sight feat to the shadowdancer's in your module using a creature armor created for that purpose on the shadowdancer.

Basically you are done now. Players will select a useless dummy feat when making their character (since the hips functions are coded into the 2da row number for the original feat), but they won't know that. By adding the item property bonus feat on the shadowdancer's creature armor, he gets access to the original feat (which ignores all prerequisites when put on an item). When it becomes day, you just remove those item properties.

You may want to add some safety nets (i.e. some code in OnClientEnter)

Other things you could do with this approach:
- limit devastating critical to certain weapons or areas
- require a special outfit to be worn to use a certain feat
- remove certain feats when a player has a certain item.

Henchmen: Could your henchman have been dominated/stunned/blinded. Especially blinding is not apparent (no VFX) to the player and the poor henchmen doesn't tell that he can't see anything anmore. We had a couple of reports from QA while playtesting the game about this and in all cases it turned out that the henchman behaving this way had been blinded.

David Gaider, Designer

Deekin: The original concept for Deekin actually came from one of the designers at Floodgate who had Deekin as a bard henchman in the original Chapter 2 of the Undrentide campaign before I worked on it. I like kobolds and thought the idea of a bard kobold was cute, so I gave Deekin a bigger speaking part and included him in Chapter 1 as well. Deekin's personality as it exists now is based on a pair of kobold servants one of the female players in my D&D group acquired. The pair tended to leave the entire group in stitches, and when the kobolds got seperated from the party they actually (and unexpectedly) braved incredible dangers just to find them and then save them. So when I saw Deekin in the original campaign I just had to keep him in the picture and make him a star. And, no, he's not Jar Jar Binks, and any twit who thinks making such a superficial comparison is witty is about two steps away from transforming into Comic Book Guy.

ToEE & NWN: Georg has a point about the differences between ToEE and NWN. Not to say that we couldn't keep closer to the PnP rules in implementation (or try to), but there are some basic gameplay choices which you have to make which affect rules implementation at every level. I liked ToEE's combat system... quite a lot, in fact. Along with some great graphics it's about all ToEE has going for it, but since there's a lot of combat throughout that's not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine, however, that you take what ToEE has and suddenly make it multiplayer. How are you going to keep the turn-based combat system and yet have multiplayer gameplay which is acceptable? Are you going to require that players stay on the same screen at all times? If not, how do you resolve a player coming from real-time movement who enters a turn-based combat situation?

And that's only one of many considerations you need to make when comparing the differences between NWN and a single-player-only game like ToEE. Hell, just the other day I was talking to James and he enlightened me with the huge handicaps you're suddenly stuck with as soon as you include party members or henchmen... suddenly having such things as horse riding and 3-dimensional movement becomes problematic (not impossible, necessarily, but a huge obstacle that would require significant resources to overcome) because you have to account for all these extra characters on the screen. I'm not going to suggest that any particular type of play is inherently better... if a single-player game is all you're interested in or you just like the turn-based combat that it allows and have no interest in multiplayer or toolsets or what-have-you, of course you're going to prefer a game that specializes in your niche interest. The thing to avoid, I think, is underestimating NWN's achievements by ignoring the parts of the overall game that you do not like or are not interested in and the impact those parts had on the original design decisions. And, yes, a few of those decisions we probably would have made differently if we knew then what we know now, but such is the beauty of hindsight.

Public buglists: One thing that maybe hasn't been mentioned is that maintaining a public buglist doesn't do us much good. We need info on the bugs people encounter and how they got them to occur. At best such a list would make people who pay attention to such things (which is not many) to stop sending us information on bugs that are on the list because they think we already have all we need, not to mention that we'll get three times as many messages regarding perceived omissions and errors for the list itself, not to mention the "I didn't find it on the list, but here's a bug you should know about..." as well as the "this bug is a really vital thing to fix, why is it still on the list way down at the bottom?" and so forth. And all that still affects only those who would use the list. Which ends up with us spending a lot of time to maintain the list while deriving very little benefit from it. I admit it would be really nice to have something up for those people who are conscientious about reporting problems they find, and we do appreciate those people, but it's a luxury we simply can't afford and that's why you don't see anyone else doing it either. Bugs will always exist and our first priority is and should be fixing them.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

DM client: There is no dedicated icon for running the DM client. However, you could easily make one yourself.
Make a shortcut to nwmain.exe (by holding down the right button on nwmain.exe and dragging the icon to a folder). Then select "create shortcut here".
Then right click on the shortcut and select properties.
Then click on the shortcut tab in the properties window and in the "target" box add " -dmc" (without the quotes).