Neverwinter Nights Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Z-Layrex)

David Gaider, Designer

Custom Content: We have already stated in several threads that we are interested in making custom content easier to add into the game. I, myself, explained some of the reasons this was taking longer than we expected and suggested that you will probably receive the answers and/or tools that you are looking for sometime in August. Adding custom content will never and can never be officially supported, however. It will never be a simple matter of just clicking a button and away you go... although the Live Team is interested in making those processes easier as soon as they get the opportunity. I'm sure most of you understand that. This is a smart crowd. We do know that custom content is and will be a boon to the game's life. There's no need to make impassioned pleas to inform us of this. The Live Team is working as hard as they can on things regarding the game and cannot work faster. Please keep in mind that custom content is far from their only concern... as we've said before, right now our priority is the bug situation. That some people might lose patience after the game has only been out a month is unfortunate, but that doesn't move the process along any more quickly.

More:
Well, here's some news for y'all, insofar as exactly what's coming down the pipe. The 3DSMax script that we use to create our .mdl files is probably going to be released very shortly. I should probably double-check that just to make sure, but that seems to be the plan. We also intend to write a GMax gamepak. The only trouble there is that we don't have anyone who can write it up at the moment... so there will be a delay for that, but it's coming. One change coming for the area properties of the toolset is custom messages. You know how it puts up random messages right now, like "if you lost your plot items, you can find them at the divining pool in the Temple of Tyr"? It will be changed shortly so you can select either 'random' or a specific quote that you wish to enter.

As for the custom music, there is (and has been for some time and is the main reason we haven't talked about it much because nothing was settled) a big kerfuffle regarding MP3 licensing that has prevented us from working this out as we wished. How custom music was supposed to have worked: put your .bmu file (which is not just an .mp3 with the extension changed) into the hak pak. Done. We know it doesn't work like that, currently. We are, however, working so that it does work like that. It will just take a little time, as part of the problem is the whole deal with the 2DA's. Give us a bit of time on this one: the process is not supposed to be as complex as it is at the moment.

There are also some issues being worked out regarding the 2DA's (especially via the labelling problem so you don't have to edit the dialog.tlk file) as well as the hak paks (thanks, incidentally, for those who helped with reporting the bugs a couple of weeks back... the hak paks are being worked on right now). Ummm... I think a re-skinning tutorial is also going up, shortly. There's probably some other stuff I forgot, and I bet there's a few corrections that will need to be made regarding some of the stuff above (so don't take it as gospel), but Derek said I could come and spill the beans, so nyah.

Bugs:

Quote: I've also never heard of a developer that didn't keep at least internal lists of known bugs.

We do. It's certainly not in a format that we can publish, however, if we'd even want to. The idea, after all, is that Infogrames handles technical support (the message board is NOT the place to report a bug). If you have a bug, you report it to them... and they inform us of the nature and number (and therefore priority) of the bug reports they receive. You shouldn't have to worry about whether or not it's already known about. As for our part, we do comb the boards (right now, anyway) to get info on extra bugs we might not know about... but that's not SOP. We don't have the time to respond to every post on those bugs... and while a central 'known bugs' list would eliminate part of the need to do so: a) most people wouldn't read it anyway and b) we have even less time to do up such a public list than we do to respond to every post. Bit of a catch-22 there, but that's probably as good as it's likely to get.

GetLastKiller():

Quote: Hey I've been having a swamp of trouble with getting the last killer of a pc, of course the problem is its for PVP which mean I have to make sure they were killed by a PC. I found getlasthostileactor works well. Still seen a couple of weird things but its what works best for me.

The reason GetLastKiller doesn't usually work for PC's is that whatever dropped them to 0 or -10 HP isn't what 'kills' them. Usually, in the OnPlayerDying module event, an EffectDeath is applied to the PC whenever they are supposed to die. So, in effect, it's the module that kills them... not their last opponent. GetLastHostileActor should work in most cases. I would also try a GetLastAttacker in the OnPlayerDying event, too, but I'm not sure how well that would work.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

Return Values For GetMovementRate():
0 = PC Movement Speed
1 = Immobile
2 = Very Slow
3 = Slow
4 = Normal
5 = Fast
6 = Very Fast
7 = Creature Default (defined in appearance.2da)
8 = DM Speed

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Text For Loading Screens: It wasn't an oversight. It was a deliberate decision arrived at after evaluating the list of outstanding tasks and determining their relative priority given the time remaining. The fact that one of the hints tells you about the Stone of Recall does _not_ imply that we figured everyone would have a Stone of Recall in their modules. The hints displayed in the load screens are generally to help players through the Official Campaign. A change to the text system (ie the way dialog.tlk is generated and used by the game and toolset) is probably not going to happen. However, a change to the way load screen retrieves its text is more likely.