Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Arwen)

Bob McCabe, Writing & Design:

Journals: You do indeed have a journal in Neverwinter Nights. There are currently three panes on the journal. One pane lists your quests that are unresolved, one pane lists your resolved quests, and one pain is titled notes, and is a place for you to write down what you will. Mine is filled with sweet nothings, dedicated to myself .

Character classes in the population: Personally, i've always felt that the classes and races were, to some (minor) degree, set up to match the population ratios. for example, humans are, to many, considered the best race (no multiclass penalty, extra feat, extra skill points, no negatives). they have been designed as more powerful so that more people will play them, and the ratios will fall into place. i'm not sure this is quite as fitting when it comes to classes, though... but in terms of ease of use, fighters and rogues are easier to understand than wizards and clerics... and fighters and rogues should be the more common of the adventuring classes...

Character development: Neverwinter is pretty standard for a CRPG in the sense of character development. But specificially, it uses the D&D rules - though Neverwinter is using the 3rd edition of the ruleset, as compared with Baldur's Gate (a game you mentioned having familiarity with) using the 2nd edition.

What I mean by standard for a CRPG is that, basically, you allocate stats for your character, and then allocate skill points and feats. You might choose to make a fighter who is good at locks, or good at parrying, or able to fight with two weapons at once.

Once your character is created, you gain experience through your adventures, and when you have accumulated enough, you advance a level - just like Diablo, just like BG. When you advance a level, you gain hit points and skill points, as well as potentially gaining feats (class specific or otherwise).

Hide/move silently: Just a quick addendum that we were doing multiplayer last night. There were 5 of us going. I played the rogue. The game begins with characters starting off in a bedroom area. I spawned in with three others. The three ran off, leaving me and the about-to-spawn fifth member. I went into stealth as the fifth was spawning in, so he never saw me.

I snuck over to the one exit from the room and set a trap. Then I sat there picking his pocket. He ran out of the room, oblivious, sprung the trap and was very surprised. He then went into his pack to grab a healing potion and realized he had none (I later stole his armor & weapon (when he unequipped them to run around naked), and most of his gold). The cool thing was that he never saw me. I amuse myself.

Of course, if you asked the others in the party, they would say something about holding me upside-down afterward, but that's irrelevant...

Yes, rogue's have the potential to be very mischievous. I very well believe that everyone is going to be forced to put skill points into their spot and listen if they happen to play on a server with rogues (or other stealthy types) that cannot... restrain themselves. Which will also force those others to put points into intelligence (to get more skill points) and wisdom (to get more bonuses).

Balancing is neat.

Traps: I believe party members are protected from traps set by party members. In this situation, as you guessed, we weren't yet partied up. On a side note, rogues can flag traps that they spot, but cannot disarm, so that their party members know where to step so in order not to set them off.

Traveling between towns: At current, it's more like Baldur's Gate before you have been somewhere. For example, to get to Beregost from Candlekeep, you have to walk through a few maps.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager:

Encounters: While I can't comment on any plot stuff, I can say that mighty and terrible creatures are running around the place squashing all sorts of hard working peasants, fuzzy animals and old people. Only you, the intrepid adventurer, can put a stop to this mayhem.

While a designer can put down encounter areas that spawn in scaled encounters for your party, a designer can also put whatever creature he or she wants in an area and no matter what level you are, you face what that creature- ready or not.

Starting points: The number we are currently testing with is 30 points based on a system of starting each characteristic with a base of 8...'

Module creation: We hope to make the creation of a module as painless as possible. Today tom and I needed to slap together an example module to demonstrate the DM Client. We created a few areas, had a basic plot, created some custom monsters and that was it. No scripting, no nothin'.

If you have a DM you can fake a lot of scripting stuff on the fly. Through dialogue you tell the players they a certain gem to gain access to the secret tunnel. They go and get the gem and you 'DM Unlock' the door when they return. No scripting done.

So, yes, you will be able to create models without scripting- very good ones actually. The scripting really comes in handy for writing no DM modules where things needs to happen without a human hand helping out.

Derek French, Assistant Producer:

Random Item Generator: Yes, you can have "random treasure" but it is random from a "pre-determined list" NOT random from "any possible item under the sun". There are no DM Tools, just the DM Client. From there you can affect anything in the game, but it MUST exist in the module file or savegame in the first place. You CANNOT create new items at a whim. You have to use the Hak Pak editor to open a save game file and add new resources that you first created and exported from the Toolset. You then need to restart the server with this Hak Pak saved save game. Then, you have to use the DM Client to spawn in these newly added resources and save the game again.

The only "editor" that can be used to make items is the Toolset.

What you did before this, is you told the people that are playing on the server that you are DM'ing on that you are about to do a few things. First, you save the game, then you kick them all and shut down the server. Then you start the Toolset and create a new module that includes this new item. You then contact that one player that wanted this item via ICQ, IRC, or some other non-game method because your server isn't running right now. You start the server and load this "item giver" module. That player connects, picks up the item, then logs off. You unload the module, then load the other save game again. That player should be able to enter this module with the new item.

Custom loading screens: I said select, as in, select from either Game resources or Hak Pak resources. If your image is in there, then it will appear on the select list.

SetAreaTransitionBMP(AREA_TRANSITION_USER_DEFINED,"myimage.bmp");

Or you can tell it to pick a random one.

SetAreaTransitionBMP(AREA_TRANSITION_RANDOM);

I think it not only accepts .bmp but .tga as well, but I don't have time to check.

David Gaider, Designer:

DM avatar: Actually, you are stuck with the avatar. As the GM, you actually see your Avatar character on-screen... no getting around that.

You are not limited to the same properties that other characters are, however. You can walk, but you don't have to... you can teleport about quickly both in the current area or between them (it's very easy... you can either teleport to a spot by clicking on it or selecting anything off the chooser menu... area, character, polygon, object, whatever... and jump quickly there). You have access to your powers both through a character radial menu as well as the menus on top of the screen (and can learn to use the menus exclusively if you like).

The players won't see your avatar, of course, unless you manifest (I once Shapechanged myself into a fire giant and then manifested... that proved festive).

But you are not an omniscient, bodiless presence. You do see the area through the eyes of your avatar, so to speak. It takes some getting used to, but I've found it quite functional.

Henchman death: If anything special is to be done with them, it has to be put into their OnDeath() event.

In the official campaign, they will be waiting for you at the same spot where the PC gets resurrected if they choose to respawn (which is easily accessible, though I won't explain why).

Personally, if you didn't have that system, I would script them so their body didn't fade... they would just lie there dead until and unless you raised them. It's up to you, naturally.

Stores: I was curious about some things with stores recently and learned a few things. Here's basically how they work:

- a 'store' is basically an invisible object in the game that maintains an inventory and has the functions built into it to buy and sell to players. It splits up its inventory into four categories... anything bought from it comes out, anything sold to it goes in. Any item may be marked as 'infinite', which means the store will never run out of that item. You set it's mark-up and mark-down as well as whether it buys stolen goods (as well as the mark-down for those)... this is always based on the base price set on the item.

- we usually place these stores by a merchant, since they are activated by a script command (usually placed in the merchant's dialogue). The player cannot interact with the store object, itself, in any way. I'm not sure if it matters where you place the store... likely it's easier to place it by the merchant who uses it so you can keep track of the instance.

- as an object, the store can have scripts attached to it. My guess would be that you could add and delete items from its inventory just as you would with any other object's inventory. Whether there are scripting commands to change other facets of the store (like the mark-up), I don't know. Probably not, however (you can't change the properties of most objects except in the toolset).

You can create stores however you wish, though. We have stores in the official campaign that only deal with specific things... a fletcher who only sells bows and arrows, a druid who only deals in druidic items, and so forth.
Here is the scripting command that opens up a store object for a player:

OpenStore(object oStore, object oPC, int nBonusMarkUp=0, int nBonusMarkDown=0)

BonusMarkUp = the amount added to the default 'mark up' setting of the store when it sells stuff to the player

BonusMarkDown = the amount added to the defaul 'mark down' setting of the store when it buys stuff from the player.

So let's say we have a storekeeper who doesn't like elves, right and charges them double what he charges everyone else? Easy!
int PCRace = GetRacialType(GetPCSpeaker());
if (PCRace == RACIAL_TYPE_ELF)
{
// store for elves at 100% additional markup
OpenStore("Storekeeper1",GetPCSpeaker(),100,0);
}
// regular store for non-elves
OpenStore("Storekeeper1",GetPCSpeaker(),0,0);
And naturally you could make any other calculations for the markup/markdown as complicated as you wish.

As to objects specific for each player - two problems I can think of when doing it this way:

1) If you're talking about the same store blueprint, each instance of it has the same tag. How do you identify which one you are dealing with if you have more than one? Tags cannot be changed on the fly.
The only way I could see having a store be 'personal' to a PC is to set an object global in dialogue. Once it is set, if they global = PC, then go ahead and open the store... if the global != PC, then don't. The store would still have to have a unique tag in order for it to belong only to the PC, though.

2) I can't see how this would work as a bank. You can't give gold directly to a store. You might be able to 'reverse' the markup/markdown so he charged you when you put items in and paid you when you took them out, but that would be based on the value of the item AND there is no way that you could prevent someone else from taking that item unless the store was only useable by a specific PC as above.

Priest abilities: Domain spells are in, though obviously not all of them will be represented (they've tried to keep the number of spells available via each domain about equal, as well, as a result).

Domain powers may be in, as I've said before. We shall see.

In-game books and scrolls: Yes, we have books and scrolls. Yes, you can make books and scrolls... if you're making the module. A player cannot write books and scrolls on the fly, no.

Tilesets: Rural and Forest have water tiles that can pass well as lakes or rivers, but the land adjoining the water tiles couldn't be called a beach, per se (there is some color and texture variance, but I'd call it more rocky than sandy).

No swamps.

Rolling hills? Depends on what you consider 'rolling'. The Rural tileset has the height transitions that are required to make hills. These are not curved, however, because of the inherent limitation by having interchangeable tiles.
Mountains. The Forest tileset has the impassable Cliff tile which makes for great mountainous terrain. The Rural heigh transitions have several versions which have fairly rocky terrain, plus other rocky-type tiles... it could easily simulate rocky terrain, certainly.

Outer walls. For castle walls, the City Exterior, yes. There are walls in Forest and Rural, as well, but not so large.

Rivers. There are streams that you can lay down in Rural, Forest, City Exterior and Cavern... these are crossable by foot, however. If you want something larger and impassable, you must use the water tiles. A mix of the two works well.

DC checks: You mean you want to make a DC check for something not done by the game? Like swimming or the like?

If all else fails, there's a dice roller on the radial menu.

Module scale: I really think too many people are thinking solely in terms of 32x32 areas. I have yet to use a single one that large. Even if I really wanted the players to trek across the equivalent of a mile of wilderness, I would still break it down into smaller and denser areas... at the very least, it would allow for more objects and creatures active in the current area without a big resource hit, if nothing else.

Personally, my recommendation would be to go with a maximum size single area of 16x16 unless you really have to.

Trekking in-game through a full 'mile' of wilderness will take longer than you think, as well. You can make shorter distances seem far longer (and far more interesting) by making the path through the areas circuitious due to the terrain.

The more areas and content you have, the larger your module size will be... and the longer it will take for the module to load and save (the time for individual areas to load is irrelevant to this). You can have as many resources as your hard drive can hold... just consider how inconvenient you consider load/save time when adding a lot of areas in. Unfortunately I've no specific figures yet to offer you on how many areas/resources = a certain size module or load/save time.

Noel, Programmer:

Stores: The store markup/markdown can be set on a player by player basis when the store is opened. You can have multiple players in the same store at once all with different buy/sell prices (the rate applies to all items in the store).