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

Live Team: Don't be too terribly alarmed as, to a certain degree at least, I'm exaggerating the facts to make a point.

My personal vision for the Live Team (the emphasis is on personal - this may or may not reflect the vision held by the company as a whole) is an aggressive one that might just allow everyone to have their cake and eat it too. NWN was a huge game with a lot of different elements competing for attention. As everyone here knows, we got raked over the coals by a lot of people for the quality of the Official Campaign on the one hand. On the other, we ended up releasing an almost entirely undocumented toolset and a DM client that had severe stability issues. We've come a long way since then and, thanks to all of you, NWN is stronger and better than ever before.

In reflecting on NWN's development, some of the people involved have decided that NWN's focus on the community was a step backwards in that it distracted us and even actively hampered us from creating the rich stories that were the focus of BG and KotOR (for the record, KotOR sales appear to be outperforming NWN's). Others have taken the exact opposite interpretation, believing that NWN's community focus was incredibly innovative, carving out a new, highly successful niche for ourselves in the growing RPG genre - abandoning mod-focused RPGs would be a step backwards (for the record, NWN sales appear to be outperforming those of the BG series). Personally, I'm of the opinion that rich, BioWare-style stories and robust, publicly-released toolsets aren't mutually exclusive. It's just that creating both of them is simply too much for any individual Lead Designer to be expected to wrap their brain around.

So my theory is that we let the core development teams focus on doing what they do best - making an amazingly fun RPG with rich stories, gorgeous artwork, rewarding combat systems, and great depth-of-play. Meanwhile the Live Team (in collaboration with the tools and programming teams, of course - we won't be doing this entirely on our own) works behind the scenes on designing an overall architecture that meets your needs rather than solely the needs of that core design team (because, let's face it, the two sets of needs are often very different). If all goes well, I think everyone wins and our fan-base most of all - not only do you get a great RPG experience right out of the box but you also get high-quality, well-documented tools with which to build your own games.

And where would we get the funding to make this crazy two-team dream a reality? Well, obviously, I hope the DD Project is successful beyond our wildest imaginings - after all, if the Live Team can do what it needs to do based entirely on it's own revenue stream, it will be pretty hard for the rest of the company to say "no." More realistically, we'll probably have to present a budget to Ray and Greg and to our publishers and explain what it is we're trying to accomplish and what kinds of benefits we feel it would offer to the project and the company as a whole, blah, blah, blah. BioWare is an innovative company that's open to new ideas and calculated risks. They value the community and they recognize the contribution that a mod-oriented game can make.

So what happens if this idea tanks for some reason and doesn't come to pass? Well, it's by no means doom and gloom. I think everyone's still keen on releasing some form of toolset with this secret PC project. Without the two-team approach, I expect there'll be more stress and anguish involved on BioWare's part as the various leads feel themselves pulled in two different directions, much as was the case for Neverwinter. I expect that both the toolset and the official campaign will be good but one or the other or both will probably end up being less than what the could have been. Only time will tell but, as I mentioned earlier, I think the Live Team's in a unique position right now where we can help everyone have their cake and eat it too.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Custom talktables: Yepp, that's a post I made in the custom content forum, I think Mayseth from the Vault is probably just a bit mad at me for making his life harder by posting a lot

The purpose of the "custom talk table"

The custom talktable feature was added because it was one of the last things blocking the community from adding new feats, spells, races, etc into NWN using hakpaks. If you add a new spell to the game, you need to modify spells.2da to add it - and inside spells.2da you need to define StrRefs (string reference) that point to strings in dialog.tlk for "name", "description", etc. These strings are displayed on the players GUI and are directly fetched from dialog.tlk. Basically if I enter StrRef 333, it will fetch string number 333 from dialog.tlk.

However, dialog.tlk can not be put into hakpaks and it is a global resource, meaning you can't just add strings to it and distribute it to your players, as your changes will affect all games that are played and will break compatibility with the auto updater. To allow the community to define their own strings, Tools came up with a scheme that allows module builders to add their own, custom talktable to a module. This talktable can NOT redefine existing strings, it can only add new strings to the game. Thus, you can't simply take dialog.tlk and copy it, you need to create a new, empty talktable and add the strings you want to add to the game there. There is NO way of overwriting existing strings - If you want to change the name of a spell, you would instead change the StrRef in the Name column in spells.2da to point to your new string in your own talktable. So back to your example of the champion of torm:

- You create an empty talktable (plenty of tools for that on the Vault) and add three new strings

0 bad strref
1 Divine Champion
2 Description for Divine Champion

- You need to modify the name and probably description column in classes.2da to point to your new, custom strref. In order to address entries in the custom talktable, you need to add 16777216 to the index number the string has in your custom talktable.

the classes.2da entry would look like this:

... name description ...
...
... 16777217 16777218 ...

There is a good source of information on the DLA team's custom content guide at ccg.dladventures.com, but I think the talktable page is down at the moment.

CEP: You reallize that Lisa is currently working on the DLA project. Coincidence? I think not. Doing a search you will also find me saying "aahhh" and "oohhh" to Lisa's (and a lot of other people's) work in quite a few threads here and on the Vault, and if you care to search a bit more, you will find I do this for a lot of custom content that manages to capture my eye. So no, I don't think I am biased when it comes to community created work, I rather blame you for only seeing the more prominent comments I make. Feel free to browse the Archives of the Custom Content Board or NWVault if you like - you will find that the claims in your post are not accurate at all.

There is a reason why I am often hailing CODI and DLA (and Lisa by the way) - these guys put out high quality content on a regular basis, and, in case of DLA and CODI, they provide the community with a stream of quality editing, modelling and custom content tools, frankly, without them there would be far less content overall. Also, these guys are working in a team, they put out more content than the average builder. And, by the way, Papermonk and rtRifts were pretty good at sucking many of the best people in the custom content community into their black hole projects, so most of the things that actually come out of these holes have to be pretty good. As for the "other combo haks", yes, been there, done that (was a member of the community for quite a while). I think I elaborated quite enough why I think CEP is something different.

I also think that there is nothing preventing people from contacting us if they think they made something important for the community and want it featured. Surely, we are out there on the Vault and our boards and notice cool projects - Jay is following up on them and at one point they may become a Bioware Wednesday item if we think they should get more spotlight - but chances are that we may not notice the humble builder next door who made this awesome tileset that sits like a hidden gem on the vault with only a few people knowing about it (That's the reason why you need PR today - i.e. contacting Maximus on the Vault and asking him to run a newspiece about your invention. Company A could have the best product in the world today, they still would sell less than Company B if they don't advertise it. Blaming Company B or the Ad guys in this case is stupid). So please, don't interprete our spotlighting of a certain project as "all other projects don't deserve recognition", because that's not what it means when we spotlight something. If someone says "Ann is a good programmer" - this doesn't implicate "Bob is worse programmer than Ann".

Finally I like to add something else: I find it annoying when people, on the day of the release of a free community project that certainly took a lot of people's free time, enthusiasm and energy during last months, jump in and complain that we give them the limited support we can to give - the attention we think they deserve, because there are other projects that deserver praise as well. - Good idea, let's all jump to some guys graduation party, smack them in the head for passing out invitations flyers when so many other people graduated at the same time and don't throw a party - after all it's nothing special.

I find it weak if people, right at release date, jump in any thread they find about this project to point out "better solutions" and "failures" in the project. There is plenty of time for critique and I am sure the CEP team is open to all suggestions, but with the right (or rather wrong) timing and tone, it is easy to damage or ruin their well earned satisfaction of having released their awesome project (I know what I'm talking about here). Sure, constructive criticism is fine, "They are not worth the attention they are getting" isn't nice for sure. And to clear up that myth: Neither Jay or Tom are telling me or anyone else here on the boards what to "hype" or praise or whatever - if I find something I like, I say it. If I don't like something I say it as well (see above). That's one thing that sets our community boards apart from so many other developer boards on the internet, and probably one of the reasons why I am posting here, even if I am no longer activly working on the NWN project.

CEP 2H katana:

Quote: Which one? Ive been wondering about this for awhile with the fairly common katana is a twohanded sword/ one handed sword threads, would it be possible to make a two handed katana and assosiate it with the existing katana feats?

The problem here is that the game wouldn't know that the 2handed katana is actually a katana. The connection between feat and weapon is hardcoded - if it wouldn't be, there would be no problem with just using "katana" to include "2handed katana". Basically baseitems.2da would need a "HardCodeFeatRef" column that would link to the internal hardcoded feat that would need to be used for the weapon - something currently not in the game. Maybe, if your DD project is successful, this feature could be added to the game at some point - currently I don't think there is manpower available to make and test this change.

CEP Portraits:

Quote: Wouldn't this be really trivial to do? Just need a new version of portraits.2da that cuts out the offending portraits.

Which throws up a good questions - should you settle for the least common denominator in order to ensure that you are don't offend some users - or should you include a greater number of things in order to offer the most options - and leave it up to the user to remove things they don't like (which can be done via a .2da override)

There is no real answer to this except that you can't please everyone, even if you try, and is somewhat similar to what we face when developing NWN - should we clean our game from the controversial elements in order to avoid alienating people (evil path? romances that go beyond "hold my hand and walk into the sunshine"?, the harpy picture (from the monster manual). Where do you draw the line? Should we remove casting spells because there are still people out there that think this is blasphemic? I can remember the backlash on these very boards when there was the rumor that there will be no children in Hordes...

As said, I don't think there is a real answer to this questions, it's all opinions, and in the end everyone has to decide for himself how much tolerance he has to different views or if it would be better to settle for the least common denominator so nobody gets offendend. Through, and that's my personal, probably european view -How much would be left of i.e. the internet if you would take out all content that is found to be questionable in one or another country?

NWN 2: I have to point out that the same magazine claims for several years now that we are working secretly on BG3. Bioware is currently not working on a sequel to NWN, thus it will be hard to present it at E3 - unless Trent secretly did all the work at home

Official campaigns: You can not post a modified version of NWN, SoU or HotU's campaign on the internet, sorry - this part of the game can not be redistributed. Sorry.

Get*ObjectInInventory Functions:

Think of it like this (simplified illustration)

4 objects in a player's inventory:

o1->o2->o3->o4

1. You call GetFirstObjectInInventory(), the pointer get's set to the first object

o1->o2->o3->o4
^

2. You call GetNextObjectInInventory, the pointer moves forward

o1->o2->o3->o4
-----^

3. You call DestroyObject, but DestroyObject always takes place after your script has finished, so nothing happens right now

o1->o2->o3->o4
-----^
4. You call CreateObject which adds another object to the inventory, unfortunately at the position in your linked list the cursor was pointing to:

o1->oNew->o2->o3->o4
-----^

5. Your chain of objects is now messed up. You call GetNextObjectInInventory, and the situation looks like this:

o1->oNew->o2->o3->o4
-----------^

Since we are evaluating object 2 again, jump to step 3. above, an infinite loop is created. You add more and more new objects to the game, but since o2 never gets removed (as DestroyObject will run when your script has finished), you end up with a "too many instructions" error).

Technically this is not 100% what is happening, but I think it conveys the problem.

2DA editing: The color for the input parameter of that function can be found by opening an armor in the toolset, bring up the appropriate color palette and counting from up to down, left to right starting with 0 to the color you want to find. So 8 in the example below would be the first color in the second row of the color palette (no weird binary math involved here, sorry)

[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
[8][9]...
[64]

Patch 1.63: Sounds weird and unintended - could be some resource limit being hit (i.e. max number of files of a certain type or so), through I'm not aware of any major limitations to tilesets.

I know 1.63 has some changes to our resource manager, I would suggest retesting with 1.63 when it comes out and if it still persists and you can provide us with a way to reproduce this, send a bug.