Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Tiamat)

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager:

Requirements (Again): Our minimum system specifications currently are a Pentium II 300 MHz or AMD K6-2 350 MHz, a TNT2 or Voodoo 3 class video card, and 64 MB of RAM. An internet or LAN connection will be required for those wishing to play multiplayer games, of course, and a 56k modem should allow any such computer to support approximately 8 players or so. As bandwidth is the primary determinant of server capacity, a cable modem or xDSL line will be able to support significantly more. The maximum number of clients (player and/or Dungeon Master) allowed on a server is fixed at 64.
As for Mac and Linux, we do not have the system requirements yet, so I cannot comment on those platforms.

Price of Magic Items: As it stands, the price of magic items is calculated as you assign it magical powers.
Of course the price could be slightly higher if it came with free Ginzu knives and car polish.

Lightning Bolts: Lightning bolts no longer bounce around the room. If you fire a lightning bolt it will strike a series of targets, in basically a straight line jumping from one target to the next, in front of you until it reaches the max distance or hits a wall. If no additional targets are behind your initial target(s), the lightning will stop.

Experience Division: I went and spoke with Preston about the experience system that is in place right now. He said that any experience is handed out to a party as a whole.
For example, if your playing multi player and the fighter whacks an orc everybody gets experience. Another large avenue for experience is completed quests. So if the rogue solves a puzzle or something that solves a quest, everybody gets the experience.

NWN For Children: It should be quite simple to slap together a simple module for your children using the toolset- in fact, it is being designed to be easy to use right off the bat. Detailed stuff and complicated plot will need a little more time to create.
If you haven't played for a while you may want to read a few things on how NWN will be different than the second edition D&D rules. There are some very important differences.

Pre-ordering: You will have to contact the supplier you ordered the game from as BioWare has nothing to do with this. That is not much help but we really have no influence, power, or say in pre-ordering the game at this time.

Fatigue: There will be no fatigue per se, but the penalties for not sleeping are not regaining HP, Spells or special abilities (like Rage) after combat.
This penalty for not resting far out ways any possible artificial penalty we could institute.

Invisible Objects: We do have invisible objects but information can be stored on the Area and Module objects.

Constitution Bonuses: When you increase your Con to receive another bonus you would receive the retroactive hit point bonus. For example a 4th level character increases his Con from 11 to 12, would receive 4 hit points- +1 per level.

PR Restrictions: We are still under restrictions concerning a lot of PR things. Sorry folks. It's not because we do not want to release 'big stuff', it's because we are limited in what we can release right now.

Exotic Weapons: There are some Japanese weapons but not armor. I, of course, can't be more specific right now.

World Map: Right now, we are shooting for the map being made up of a group of tiles. If everything goes right, each map should be connected by an area transition.
You do not transition to a new screen unless you go from one map to another.
As it stands, there is no world map- only local area maps. Mark D., Lead Programmer, and Scott G., Director of Programming, mentioned that the world map idea flipped back and forth between being in and out many times. At last count it was not in.

For Newbie Scripters: I went a spoke to Don Moar, our tools programming Overlord, to see what developments have been to help out module creators who have no scripting experience. I then talked to Brad, our Das Uber PR Leader, to make sure I could even reply to this. I can't give specifics at this point-sorry- but I can say that 'things' are being worked on right now to help the novice scripter. Hopefully, I can speak more specially about these things a little later. Don had some great news about what he is working on, but I can't detail it right now. This is a terribly painful reply, but the best I can do right now.

Humanoid Monsters: Most humanoid monsters have the same emotes as humans. They can sit and lie down.

Is the toolset sophisticated enough to allow an action taken inside the building / dungeon to have visible / audible ... consequences outside (e.g. pulling a rope and having the peal of bells heard all over the area)? As far as I know, this can only be done through the use of scripting.

Can NPC's (both joinable and non-joinable) have followers of their own? Can followers have followers? (e.g. Can I have boy with a pet dog / lizard / rat / tarrasque... following him around? Again, without scripting.) Good news here: henchman, such as mages, can summon monster who will then follow them around. No Tarrasques however.

Varying Dog Breeds: We have a wolf / coyote type model a mastiff, and a doberman type model expected.

Are there children models for monster races? Are there models of pregnant women? Unfortunately, we do not have the art resources to explore the many variations as could be encountered, such as monster children models and pregnant women, as it would add significant development time. For some of the variations that fans desire, we are relying on innovative use of existing models such as the large women model with certain clothing to simulate the pregnant women look. Marc, our art director, is only occasionally allowed to go home as it is, and we feel he may begin to refer to his computer as 'my precious, my preciousss'.

Can we create a cursed temple surrounded by complete, impenetrable darkness fifty feet around it (without resorting to scripting, placing permanent globe of darkness spells, etc.)? Not without scripting I'm afraid, as that is a pretty specific thing to want. As with the preganant women idea there are many clickable controls within the Toolset that can be jury-rigged to simulate a variety of special conditions such as a Fog Setting that was used by Derek French to simulate an underwater look (turn the fog blue etc.).

Trent Oster, Producer:

Number of Onscreen Models: The number of characters you can render on the screen at one time depends heavily on the video card you have. There is a CPU hit for the AI as well, so hihger system requirements will be needed for an army scene like you propose. I've seen 30 creatures on the screen at a time and I've seen 28 players on the screen at a time and in the current build it slows down fairly hard on a 600 Mhz system with a GeForce 1. We are optimizing the engine now and every few days bring a few more Frames Per Second, so any figures we give now won't be very accurate.

Spiders: Spiders cannot climb walls. We compensate for the reduced mobility by giving them a faster movement rate. The goal is of course to have spiders able to quickly descend on a party and attack with surprise. Using movement speeds and perception distances we can quickly re-balance the spiders for a more accurate feel.

Placeable Objects: With placeable objects, we might not have two visible states, but you can place a trigger anywhere you wish, so having an area transition on a placeable object is very possible. You could even script the transition so it requires a greater than 19 strength to open it the first time and then it remains open.
In short, NWN will not support everything one might desire natively, but with a little creativite scripting almost anything can be simulated.

Server: The server can be set to log a great deal of information. We have logfiles in excess of a Gigabyte at one time due to message appending. When the server is in debug more it spits just about everything out.

Single-Player Story: The single player story in NWN is also the multiplayer story. You can play solo, or with a group of other players and enjoy plot driven multiplayer adventuring. The story has undergone some very heavy revisions, and continues to be reworked on a daily basis. We are trying to include many of the play forms from our previous games, such as the open exploration of the original BG, the interesting subplots and cities of BGII while implementing a much more flexible rules system behind it all. The story will be an enjoyable one, I'm sure of that. Now that we fixed the Carl Lewis Zombies, the game plays a lot better too.

Tiles: NWN tiles (and all the art) are built around base helper objects. These "bases" hold most of the game specific data (animation names, durations, etc). You can have a number of objects linked as children to the base and they will be exported as one model. Each child can have it's own texture, so you don't really need sub-object textures. You can model the grass and road, detach the road faces as a new object and apply a different texture. make the road a child of the grass and you should be just fine (just don't move the road). Tiling works fine as long as the texture can be completely repeated (you can't crop sub sections and repeat them). Basically, the system works quite well after you adopt a certain workflow pattern and it allows us to keep the native data formats quite clean and quite fast.

Paying Money: You could have a choice in dialogue which is "here is the money". If you select that option it runs a script which a) checks you have the money and then b) removes the money from your inventory and then c) enables the next entry in the dialogue tree.

CGOnline Article: It has come to my attention that a number of people have become confused due to the CGOnline article. The confusion is about modules and our campaign. Our intial plan was for 20+ different modules organized over four environments. We have stepped away from that initial plan and have condensed each environment down into one module. What this means is:
1) The story will have as much if not more content than the originally planned modules
2) The larger modules allow a much more in-depth adventure and much more complex interaction with plots and NPC characters.
3) (the programmers love this one) NWN has to be much more efficient with memory and processor power as the modules we are shipping are over five times as large as originally planned. This ensures a high performance system able to handle large end-user created modules.
In summary, the NWN Campaign has not shrunk in the move from 20+ modules down to 4 modules. The story has become richer and more in-depth while retaining the length of story (and possibly even growing)
Hope this clears things up.

David Chan, Audio Producer:

Media Formats: Not sure about video formats, but audio will be a publicly available format.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Playing Modules: Only the server needs the module in order for a client to play on it.

DM Client: The DM Client is just another version of the player client. Both can be run full screen or windowed. In your example, you can run both programs at the same time.
As for availability of Windows cut and paste, that is something different entirely.