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

Local versions: Bioware does not handle any translation - we don't have the manpower or enough people with language skills to do so and it is not our field of expertise - it's the job of the publisher and the publisher sets the release dates, handles the distribution and decides if a game is translated at all for a certain country - we have no influence on that. Translation isn't just rough translation of dialog.tlk either, it requires understanding of the game's structure, the quests and the all the little wordplays that are around in the game. There is nothing worse than a bad translated quest. If you want to tell someone how you think translations should be done, you would need to contact Atari, the publisher of Neverwinter Nights. But we are talking in circles here, right?

Patch 1.62:

These things should be in 1.62

Neverwinter Nights Game
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- Added more emotes to the emotes menu (Read, Drink potion, Meditate, Worship, Sit on ground, Fall down forwards, Fall down backwards).
- Added the Sea Hag to game resources (This includes creature model, template, voice set (VO), special abilities and portraits.
- Added the Stormy Sky skybox to game resources.
- Multiplayer Support for Custom talk tables. They now work in multiplayer games. If you don't have the module's required "*.tlk" file in your "tlk" directory the module wont load and you will be given an error message telling you that the tlk file is missing. This behaviour is the same as for Hak Paks.

DM Client:
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- Added a confirmation box to the DM "Jump All Players to Point" feature.
- DM spawned in Placeables now spawn in facing the DM, rather than always facing East.

Scripting-specific:
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- We now allow users to specify any Camera Traslation Speed.

Further:
Patch 1.62 beta 1 is now available, if you are familiar with how our betas work, I would really suggest you give it a whirl (it should fix this issue) and give us some feedback on it

DM Client: (You may hug CraigW for all of these)
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- Added a confirmation box to the DM "Jump All Players to Point" feature.
- DM spawned in Placeables now spawn in facing the DM, rather than always facing East.
- DMs can now attack things again.

Some game specific additions:
- Added more emotes to the emotes menu (Read, Drink potion, Meditate, Worship, Sit on ground, Fall down forwards, Fall down backwards)
- Added the Sea Hag to game resources.
- Added the Stormy Sky skybox to game resources.
- Custom talk tables now work in multiplayer games. If you don't have the module's required "*.tlk" file in your "tlk" directory the module wont load and you will be given an error message telling you that the tlk file is missing. This behaviour is the same as for Hak Paks.

Random treasure generation: actually there is some variable you can set on the module in the toolset to stop random treasure generation ... check nw_c2_default9.nss to find out how it is called

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Anti-aliasing:

Go to the "Options" menu.
Select "Video Options"
Select "Advanced Video Options"
Look for and move the "Anti-Aliasing" slider.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance Ninja

Third Expansion: We have no plans to develop a third expansion or a sequel to Neverwinter Nights at this time.

David Gaider, Designer

Romances & genders:
I'm not much interested in having a romance plot for any given NPC apply equally to any gender. We don't live in a gender-less society and neither do these characters, and I find it unreasonable that they and the characters and environment around them would treat the romances exactly the same way. If all one is interested in is the novelty or titillation of such a device, then perhaps it isn't a problem. I think doing so would be a disservice, however, to those players who are actually homosexual or who want that type of mature plot open to them. If we are going to do a homosexual romance (and we have, believe it or not), then it is going to include a homosexual NPC who initiates with a player of the same sex (and the player would be free to encourage or discourage such a romance as ever, so worrying about someone being offended is beside the point). Yes, that does take extra resources and so, yes, that means you might not see much of it but I truly think that's the only appropriate way to go if the subject is going to be tackled at all (and considering the subject's nature, I almost think it is more appropriate for a mature-rated game rather than a teen-rated one, though issues of tolerance are certainly welcome anywhere).If someone wants to remove the gender checks from the romances, however, and make a mod where Nathyrra treats a female character the same as she would a male (for instance), then they are certainly free to do so. I don't doubt that such a mod likely already exists on NWVault.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Digital distribution:

Quote: What I am willing, maybe even eager, to pay for is upgrades more than actual content. I mostly play online and would like to see repaired the "...numerous broken BioWare scripting fuctions..." as my DM puts it.

So would we. Expansion packs are a very bad economic model when it comes to fixing what's broken. The pressure is extremely high to focus your efforts on all of the new stuff and hit all the new bullet points. As a result, there isn't a lot of time to dig through existing code or underlying design decisions. Digital Distribution, on the other hand, operates at a much lower intensity level and more attention is focused on meeting the needs of our community. I share an office with Craig, our Live Team Programmer, and he's constantly scouring the boards for problems and pet peeves that people are experiencing. He's put some long-awaited fixes into the upcoming 1.62 patch and is looking forward to slowly working his way through the rest of the code and bringing it up to similar levels of polish. Without an ongoing revenue stream of some sort, Craig would probably be moved onto some other project (as I was) to meet the needs there. In other words, by purchasing a module that I may have created, you're not only supporting my position on the Live Team but you're also supporting the entire infrastructure that makes what I do possible (programmers, web developers, artists, etc). You're not just receiving a module, you're also receiving patches, new art content, new functionality, an ongoing board presence, and an invigorated community.

Quote: But what I'd really be willing to pay for is for BW to meld the best, most thorough community fixes to existing HotU issues into a single package available for download.

The lawyers' heads implode when we start talking about making direct use of community content or fixes. It's actually kind of fun to broach the topic every now and then (reminds me of playing with darts and balloons at the fairgrounds, actually). So, the bad news is that much of this kind of stuff is going to remain freely available from the community (rough life, huh?). From what I understand, there's some big community content news on the horizon, though, so keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks.

Further:
Thanks to everyone for the ongoing interest in this discussion. We continue to read every post but won't have a whole lot more to contribute until the DD concept is fully negotiated and approved with Atari, et al. So forgive us as we lay low and draw up plans for our mind control lasers.