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.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Digital Distribution: Regardless of whether the DD concept happens or not, free content will continue to be available at the Vault and elsewhere, just as it always has been. The goal of DD is not to replace the free community but to supplement it and provide further options for those interested in premium content. What's more, the existence of paid content can actually help invigorate the free community by perpetuating an active player base, providing funding for ongoing patches and support, and adding top-notch content to the core game. DD does not exist in a vacuum, nor does the free content already being produced by fans of the game. I see it as a symbiotic relationship where each benefits from the existence of the other.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Placeables: One of the problems with putting a large amount of placeables in an area (even static ones), is that it puts a much larger strain on the path finding routines. It takes much more effort for the game to find an acceptable walking path (for players and creatures) through/around all those placeables. I expect that is the reason that you have seen a performance drop after adding many new placeables to your module. And yes, I have heard internally that putting placeables on a tile seam is very taxing on the path finding routines (and should be avoided if possible). I don't have much experience with the path finding routines myself, so I'm not sure exactly why this is the case.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Skyboxes: Skyboxes are a function of the Toolset. If you create an area you need to Area Properties->Visual and make sure to click the Skybox option and select a skybox. For the time being your choices are somewhat limited but we will be putting new skyboxes into future updates.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Patch 1.62: Patch 1.62 contains several game additions, most of them have been profiled at past Bioware Wednesdays, including a new creature (Sea Hag) with full voiceset and scripted special abilities, new emote radial options, some community requested DM Client additions and the "stormy" skybox texture. Of course these things can only come in a patch, otherwise people would have to use a hakpak when they wanted to use the new content, which wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Patches are not tied into our Bioware Wednesday's for obvious reasons - we want people to have them right away when they are done and not wait up to a week until the next wednesday to release them. If a patch happens to fall on a wednesday, that's a coincidence. If you wonder about Bioware created modules, I think there is a long discussion on that topic going on in the Witch's Wake forum.

Item properties: The temporary item property works just like an effect, which means that if the player who created it rests, it will vanish. To be on the save side, use an independent object which (i.e. a placeable or creature) to add the item property.

SoU Treasure System:

Quote: Was the treasure system introduced in SoU ever fixed? I believe there was a problem with it not being truly "random". The fact Georg wrote up an entirely different treasure system for HoT shows how much confidence they have in their own "official" system.

I wrote a different treasure system because we found the approach taken in SoU, while certainly handy for small modules, was unsatisfying for us when it came to balancing the loot. Going through dozens and dozens of chests to change certain items and to balance the loot was found to cost too much time - especially since you need to open/close lots of areas to do so. So we decided to write a different, 2da based treasure system for Hordes which is much easier to balance and maintainable (We could now even modify the treasure in a patch by just including a 2da - something close to impossible with the SoU treasure system). So much for analyzing this "fact".

Bug Reports: All things that can be said about this topic have already been said in the past, but allow me to repeat them:

We NEED the bug reports to be filed in an email. We need them because of the technical information on the people's system that are experiencing the problems and for the information required to reproduce the bugs. More important - especially for crash bugs - , we NEED the bugs to be sent WITH technical information from multiple people, because this allows us to track down things like conflicting driver versions, certain pieces of hardware, etc. (Just check the latest KOTOR patch notes for a good example about a problem that only happens on machines with a certain chipset and a certain bus frequency). Bugs reported in the bugtracker are 95% more likely to be fixed at some point than posting them here on the boards.

To be blunt, most of the "bugs reports" on these boards are useless for us, as they do not contain the required information for us to track down the problem problem and are littered with background noise. We just don't have the time to throughoutly read every single post to find potential bugs, so don't even start again with that idea of having a bugtracking forum, it won't happen. Let's put it this way: If a bug is not reported to the above mentioned email address it will most likely not end up in our bugtracker and the chances of it ever getting fixed are pretty slim. Usually, when I read a certain bug mentioned on the boards, I double check against our bugtracker to see what's up with it. If it's not in there, I assume someone has just recently reported it and it has not yet entered, but I won't enter it myself as it would end up as a duplicate if it is already on the list of the person managing the bug list.

So again: If you just post a bug here on the boards and do not send us the required information to the bugtracker mail, it will probably never get fixed. That Craig, Rob or I are reading the boards to find out what's people would like to see in the game and what things they like/don't like has no impact on this policy. The board is useful for the Live Team to get a good idea of what features people want to have added in the future, or to get a picture of things that don't classify as bugs (i.e. small enhancements like the added emotes in patch 1.62 or the confirmation box for the DM's JumpAll command) - it is not useful for bugtracking and not used that way.

And to discourage the "loudest whiner" stuff:

It doesn't work that way here - Bugs/Feature Requests are rated by a variety of criteria, including the potential number of people and systems affected, the severity, the part of the game where it is happening (OC is more important than Toolset or DM client, of course) and ultimately by availability of resources. It's an unfortunate reality in most gaming communities that there are people who read about bugs or even rumours about bugs somewhere and then start to complain about them as well - even if they never experienced the bug or the bug doesn't exist at all. Other people tend to reopen or "bump" their favourite topic all the time. No, the boards can give some indication on how the "hardcore part" of the community feels about certain things, but it's an inaccurate measurement tool for rating bugs.

Further:
Still include the system specs/OS/Game build version, even if you 100% sure that it is not connected to them. There are always conditions that might very well have something to do with your local system, even if you don't notice it in the first place. (Just check the 1.62 beta patch notes for an example of scripting command failing on Linux systems under rare conditions). It's not that we don't trust YOU to see that something is related to a scripting screwup or not, it's the fact that things often are not as easy as they appear in the first place and not everyone is able to see right on the spot if system specs are helpful or not.

It's unfortunate, but bug reports without game version and build number and often without technical information at all are quite common and they are just useless for us (scripting bugs in version 1.27 are not really relevant for us these days). We can't allocate time to verify a bug when there is not even a version number/OS information attached to it - you might as well not send your bug report in this case. If someone wants to report a bug in our products, we are more than happy about that and we provide direct a way to get your bug report to the programmers (and that's more than you can say about most game companies), but if the bug is not reported in the proper form, it can't be fixed. And really, creating a mail with the proper information only takes a few minutes, and that time is well spent, because it will ultimately result in your reported bug being fixed. A summary on how to provide feedback on bugs, exploits and what information to include can be found here: Click Here

And please don't misunderstand this as "we don't like when people post about bugs on the boards". It's perfectly ok to ask "hey, I experienced this, and it seems odd to me, anyone else?" before firing of a bug report - It helps us because it prevents non problems from being submitted, a real time saver. What I don't like is posts like "Hey, is this bug fixed yet, everyone knows about it ... " and then you go through the bugtracker and find not a single mail about that bug. (And this happens for beta's as well - I really could whack people who complain about "that bug I saw in the beta patch is still in the release version" - and never reported it).

Further:
Please don't "take"/interprete here. Bugs report without proper information attached WILL BE deleted because they are worthless for us. You are correct that this might discourage some people from filing bug reports, but I think that's intended - if someone can't attach proper system information, the whole mail is probably worthless for us(especially if version numbers are missing) and would end up wasting precious time for people fixing bugs that are no longer valid for a certain version. These mail addresses should not be mistaken as a support resource. While we usually help people that post with their problems here on the boards, Bioware does not provide official support to end users - that's done by Atari through the support resources listed in the menu on the left side of the screen. Our bug mail addresses are there as an interface to allow experienced users to bypass the "official" support channels and provide us with information that allows us to fix things faster than they would be otherwise - but this can only work as long as the mails we get provide us with the information we need.

If someone has a problem and is not sure what's causing it or if it is local to his/her machine he/she should contact Atari support. They have their own list of issues and if they figure out that there is something wrong in the game, they will forward it to us along with hard data. In case you are wondering about that sentence you were quoting. It is giving a definition of the things we want to have submitted to these email addresses. It is there to prevent people that have other issues not matching the listed criterica, like "My machine crashes when I change anti aliasing" from filing bug reports - those people should contact ATARI support and not mail to those addresses. This leads to:

- If someone has a problem with the game, he/she should contact ATARI support.

- If a computer is crashing - contact ATARI support (unless you can give us information like "Every time scripting function X is called on a player object it crashes")

- If you have a problem with the game, think you identified it as a bug (i.e. a script I screwed up), please send us a mail, but include the information we ask for.

- If someone doesn't understand the bug reporting process and experiences a problem, he/she should feel free to post on the forums and ask some of the more experienced people here to file it as a bug if appropriate.

I know this post may sound harsh, but please try to understand our situation:

Those mail addresses are incredibly helpful for us as they allow us to react much faster to problems and fix a far higher number of bugs than we would be able to do without them - but only as long as the information sent to them is useful. If I would tell you "Sure, I've read your report about Invisibility, and even if it had no version number and system specs with it, I checked the game, saw you were right and fixed it", that would be true, but it would encourage 10 more people to send bug reports without version numbers. Creating an artificial hurdle like "If someone is not capable of submitting a properly formatted bug, he is probably not capable of submitting a valid bug at all" sounds arrogant perhaps, but it's the best way to make sure that these mail adresses stay useful. To sum it up with an example for patch 1.62 beta 1. I know that some people have a problem with the resolution of the new skyboxes.

A bug report just saying
" Beta - The new skybox is low rez d00dz!" (don't laugh... these things are real)

would waste about an hour of our time by trying to figure out which texture pack / resolution this happened. An experienced user would have included the texture pack / resultion, graphics card and would have saved us a lot of time (time that might have been another bugfix). So if we force people to always include their system information (and deleting their mails right away if they don't do so) helps to filter that unwanted noise out of the line. I hope this clarifies the matter and didn't come over as too "Mr Grumpy" (Sorry for that, but I firmly believe in being honest with the community, even if it hurts)

Further:
Actually the NWN config program that is accessible through the game's launcher has a "report" button that opens a window with your sytem information conveniently ready for cut & paste. Just make sure you press the "Scan" button before pressing "report" so the information is current.