Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Steelgem)

Like Vile, this is my first posting, I will be lending a hand in keeping the Neverwinter News up to date. Look forward to meeting some new people The following information was found while parsing through the Black Isle Message Boards.

Rob Bartel, Co-Lead Designer:

Bridge Sizes & Tile Anchoring: On a technical level, the only limit to the size of your bridge would be the area size itself (32 tiles -- or significantly longer of you make it twisty). Aesthetically, I think long bridges look fine. Each of the variations have some form of support mechanism to justify why they're able to stay suspended.

As an aside, I had been tossing around the idea of using the forest tileset to make a dungeon level: build it all out of bridges, cliff-faces, and bottomless chasm. Remove the directional lighting, add a few appropriate sounds, and you've got a very convincing subterranean rift, I figure.

Don't look down!

Destroyable Items: The current plan is to provide a 'bash' option in the radial menu for any placeable object, chests included (unless the module designer declares otherwise, of course). We're planning on having animations for the destruction of each type of object but that will ultimately depend on whether or not the animators have the time to do so.

Crash, bang, boom

Specialist Wizards & NWN: Yup. They'll be implemented according to the 3rd Edition rules where Heroic Feats such as Spell Focus allow you to specialize your Specialist Mage even further.

Ph.D. in Necromancy.

GenCon Demo: Tile placement & painting: I'll try to help Derek out here.

In a way, tiles are a bit of a fuzzy concept within the toolset (which is a good thing, as it makes for more natural-looking environments and provides a greater degree of flexibility to the painter). When you place a Feature, you're actually placing down an individual tile. When you paint a Group, however, you're actually placing something that spans multiple tiles. In many cases, though, you're actually painting on the intersections of tiles and that's what you're seeing in the GenCon demos.

For instance, if I click once with a height transition brush, I'm actually modifying 4 different tiles to do so (each of the four tiles is still primarily at ground level but one corner of each has been raised). The actual raised portion is still more or less 10 meters x 10 meters in size but it's really an intersection rather than a tile in and of itself.

There's another tile type called a crosser and it's used for things like roads, bridges, streams, and so forth. Crossers get painted on the intersection between two tiles. If I click once with a bridge brush, I'll actually be creating two dead end tiles that join together in the center.

It sounds complicated when you try to describe it in words but it's pretty intuitive when you actually have the mouse in hand and are creating your areas. Hopefully this has helped explain it a little, though.

Muddifying the fuzzifications.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Converstation Editor & NWScripts: Sorry to break it to you guys, but the NWN Conversation Editor does NOT generate NWScript. You may have NWScript on individual dialogue lines, but the CE in no way is a Wizard nor does it generate NWScript.

Q1: Can you call/activate a tree dialog via script?
A1: Yes, you can set an NPC's next action to "start conversation" with someone.

Q2: Can you activate a script from the Dialog editor based on the converstation flow?
A2: Yes, each decision line of the CE can have scripts attached and can call other scripts to run. What you describe is completely doable.

Q3: If a CE is attached to a character, and that character is removed from the module will the CE be removed as well?
A3: Conversations are attached to the character but are available as a conversation resource throughout the module. What you are talking about is exporting and importing. We are planning to allow exporting and importing of everything in a module.

Q4: Does the CE generate an external file?
A4: No part of the toolset automatically generates any external files. It is all held together in a single module file. Again, this comes down to exporting and importing, which we plan to fully support from within the toolset.

# of CD's to run both a Client & Server: If the server you are running is a dedicated server, then no, you do not need another copy to run the game client.

GenCon Demo: Tile placement & painting: What you were seeing is a difference between painting types of tiles in a tileset. I have rewritten this paragraph about 10 times and had someone read it and noone can understand what I am talking about. Its really hard to explain without a screenshot, but it is just a tile painting method as opposed to overlapping tiles. Its one of those things where once you see it in action, you will understand what you are seeing.

Hopefully it'll be apparent where the tiles are laid out -- it might be a little frustrating to "cycle thru" a bunch of specific tiles to get the one you want in an area, only to have the height-transition brush, or road-brush, etc. come along and adjust it.

If we place a specific tile from the tileset, maybe it can be "locked" in place?

Whoooo, thanks Rob! This is why I should get a writer/designer to do this stuff in the first place

When you cycle through an available tile, you are only cycling through a subset. You will never have a different type of tile pop in from a different subset. eg. if you have a flat plain tile, you won't suddenly get a road, stream, or height transition.

All tiles are basically locked until you go in and modify a single tile.