Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Steelgem)

Brent Knowles, Co-Lead Designer:

Radial Interface:
You can do both action->target and target-> action.

The radial menu works with target->action. Select the creature and then select what you want to do to them.

The customizable quickbar works action-> target. Select fireball...click on goblin...ka-BOOM!

Trent Oster, Producer:

Resolution & Radial Interface:
Resolution doesn't affect how far you can see. Higher res just has more pixels on the screen.

As for the radial menu, the right mouse brings it up and the escape key dispells it. You can also backtrack through the radial by right clicking in the center of the menu. As Brent stated above, you can go target-action by starting the radial on the creature, or action-target by starting on yourself or using a quickbar slot. You will have 12 quickbar slots and the quickbar essentially creates a "link" to the action, so if you have ten fireball spells you can keep casting until you run out of fireballs by using the quickbar hotkey or clicking on the quickbar button. The user interface is one of the most important aspects of NWN and we are going to tune it up until it meets our expectations.

Poly Counts:
I'm old school, started in 3D Studio rev. 2, used Lightwave for a bit (ver. 4.0-5.5). We use 3D Studio Max for our player character models. The models are fairly complex in terms of technical limitations so the part based armour system and the animations work. The easiest way to make your own characters would be to model over a template model. We don't have any plans to release a template model before ship, so I can't help much here. As for monsters, there are two types, simple weapon and simple. Simple weapon monsters can use any weapon and are pulling animation from the human animations. Simple creatures have the weapons in the model and have unique animations. The easiest models to build will be the simple creatures, you just need the correct naming scheme and animation names and they should work. Again, all of this is contingent upon hack pack support for user created content. We are still seriously looking at hack packs, but they most likely will not make our ship date.

Back to the original topic, our character models usually come in around 700-800 polys when assembled and weapons are supposed to be around 100 polys per hand i.e. a two handed weapon is around 200 polys (I modeled(sp?) the weapons and I was a little higher here and there) . Tiles are supposed to be under 500 polys per tile display mesh. This helps us keep the frame rate up and enables us to do real-time shadows and heavy particle effects.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Campaign Discussion Continued:
First, here is the WotC Forgotten Realms page. In the sense of PnP D&D, the FR is a persistent world. A pre-defined world created by WotC that many of us at BioWare are very familiar with. The problem is that when you say "persistent world" in a NWN setting, it usually refers to a server that runs 24/7, not a campaign environment.

To play any module as a player in NWN, you don't need to know a thing about the Forgotten Realms.

Aidan Scanlan, Writing & Design:

Party vs Faction Functions:
When a party is created, a new faction is created at the same time. You don't need 'Party' functions because they would serve the same purpose as the 'Faction' functions.

So when two characters join together as a party, they join a unique faction. Any other character that joins their party also joins this faction. If two other characters form a second party, they would also be given a unique faction.

Commoner Scripting: Response to a question of scripting the movement of a number of commoners around a city.

You could lay down a series of waypoints that all commoners share. You could then give them a script that randomly picks which points to walk to. This method is a little more complicated than simply using the random walk function, but it will give you a lot more control. After all you don't want a deer wandering into your dungeon...

Preston Watamaniuk, Writing & Design:

Magic Items and their use:
The item properties system will allow you to set one of two types of usage on an activated property. The first is the number of charges activating the property uses up, or the item will have a certain number of uses between rest periods. This way you can create items that are permanent or temporary.