Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Marnix)

Bob McCabe, Writing & Design:

About Fighter-Kits: When you create a character, you have choices for skills and feats packages. This is similar to kits, as has been mentioned in this thread. So... you pick fighter for a class, and get the option of buying your skills and feats on your own or picking a package. If you pick a package, when you level up and when you first create your character, you may click the recommended button. This will allocate points as for how your class is. A swashbuckling fighter would see feats spent on dual wield and ambidexterity, and skill points spent on charm-based skills, or perhaps hide and move silently. So, in effect, you could have a kensai kit, but for the most part you're a fighter just taking what we feel are the skills that a kensai has.

DM-Tutorial: Yes, I'm pretty sure that we're going to have a module that is a DM tutorial. That would go a long way in helping to learn some of the controls and ideas of DM-ing.

Hair- and skincolor: I recently played through chapter one with an Alias (that TV show - I only saw the opening episode) look-a-like (skinny elf girl with pink hair)... aside from pink, you have multiple shades of red, brown, purple, blonde, blue, and green. Yes, I said multiple shades of colors such as green and blue! They even have superman blue (parts are black, parts are dark blue). Overall, quite the excellent selection I think with 56 choices at current. There's a couple different shades of white, it seems (good for wannabe drow, I suppose). And before anyone asks, there are 32 variations of skin tone and lots of tattoo colors too.

Mind Flayers: In the initial release of NWN, there will be no Mind Flayers or Illithids.

David Gaider, Designer:

Tiles: There are tiles which are 'features' and are self-contained...such as an inn or a single house. Then there are tiles which are 'terrain'...these have multiple visual versions (for variety) and 'weld' together as you place them. Generic buildings, water, forest, walls, streams...all these are examples of that.

You can control which visual version you get, too. Some of the water tiles in the city tileset have boats in them...in the water or anchored to the land/port side. Some of them don't. If you got one with boats...but didn't want boats...you could keep right clicking on the tile and it would cycle through the other versions, therefore allowing you to control what the appearance was.

We have several tiles, including pits, that actually go 'beneath the ground' for a certain distance. If you were to swing around your view of the area to look at it horizontally, the lower portion of that pit tile would extend well beneath ground-level.

You can have up to four 'elevation levels' by using the 'raise/lower' terrain function. They can either be used to create impassable areas or, if you add 'ramps', provide different levels within the same map.

On each tileset, these elevated tiles look a little differently. In the city tileset, there's very little natural ground...everything's cobble, and the raised tiles look like walls/stone faces and can pass for several things. In the rural tileset, raised tiles look like cliff faces. So while you can't have a cliff inside of a city, you could have one inside of a town (the rural tileset has a lot of buildings...but it's definitely less urban)... or you could simply use the raised tile available (which looks pretty good).

Height: Walls and cliffs are made by using the 'raise/lower' function...you have up to five elevation levels available. They are of uniform height and while they cannot be stacked directly on top of each other (you can't have one sheer cliff five levels high), they are stackable in a staggered fashion (like a staircase...though you can do this in as irregular a fashion as you wish).

There are no 'adjustable' towers...the only towers that exist are those that have been modeled and exist in a tileset. From the ground, though, you certainly can't see the top of them (you can't see the top of most things that are over one storey high). You CAN go to the top of the tower, however, IF there is a 'roof level' that exists in the model.
One of the smaller towers we have has such a level, and if the player goes to the top of it you can see an interesting view of the area around. Not the whole city...just the area (although that's usually pretty big). It actually doesn't look that bad, either, as the fog effects make the ground buildings look sort of hazy and distant...and if your area is large enough and the tower far enough away from the edge of the map you won't detect any irregularity visually in that way.

Dragging Bodies: You can't 'drag' a body, no. If the creature had a body item that was marked as 'droppable', it could drop a body item that you could put in your inventory and take somewhere.

The 'body' item is one of the large miscellaneous items...it's huge, and if you put it at the proper weight, nobody's going to have room to lug around more than one.

As to what that body item will do (maybe after a certain time the 'unconscious' body item destroys itself and spawns the creature again, when it wakes up), or how the module would treat a PC that's been put into a situation you've set up, will require scripting on your part. I haven't seen, yet, how PC death/resurrection is handled.. So I'm not sure if you can carry bodies but I truly doubt you will be lugging PC bodies about, though.

David Chan, Audio Producer:

Weapon Sounds: Different weapons will make different sounds when hitting flesh vs. plate vs. leather, etc. Parry sounds will be different as well. Weapons are put into categories in terms of the types of swing and impact sounds they make. Then based on your weapon and the armor type you are hitting it will make a different sound.

Sound Format: To clarify, sounds will be .wav, music will be .mp3 and voice might be .mp3. We haven't decided on the final voice format.