Trent Oster on the official NWN boards answering some questions about NWN

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(Originally posted by Sylvus Moonbow)

Trent Oster had some good news on the issue of running two opposing parties simultaneously and at the same time:

"Both parties could be played by players, each with its' own DM.

The parties do not have to be in the same area. The only time this is required is when the area transition to the next area requires all players present (good plot tool).

Multiple start points are not a problem either. You can place as many as you wish and set the conditions to determine placement as you wish."

Answers a question on hardware specificity and the evils that favoring one chipset over another could bring:

"Our development workstations are mostly dual processor Intel P3 systems with Nvidia Geforce2 video cards. We have a few AMD systems in house and a variety of other cards and we will be optimizing for all platforms and all video cards before release."

And goes on to discuss the weather...:

"The toolset will allow changing the replay rates of environmental animations. With regards to sky textures, these will be fixed to the tileset."

Trent then kicks it into overdrive and tackles some really serious issues -- content creation, graphics and tilesets:

"1) Is it possible using the toolset (or even from an external source) to create new tilesets for NWN when the game ships?

(see #2)

2) Is it possible using the toolset (or even from an external source) to create new player/monster/item models for NWN when
the game ships?

The toolset will not allow the end user to create his/her own tiles, monster models or item models. The creation of the models and icons will require an art tool of some form. We are interested in supporting the creation of custom art and we are looking into a system to support custom content. Creating content will still require skill and a 3rd party tool.

3) Can a "map" use more than one tileset at a time? I.e. can we have an evil castle in the middle of a dark forest (a single zone/area/map)?

No, areas are limited to one tileset at a time. The main reasons are texture memory and tileset size in ram.

4) Will it be possible to make new "skins" (textures) for player/monster/item models?

(see #2)

5) Can we take an exisiting tileset and change its textures to simulate an other? i.e. take the grassland tileset and modify texture colors to simulate desert or snow?

In places we will allow the tinting of objects in the game to give a little more visual interest when possible. This will not allow the changing of textures in game. The changing of textures will require a 3rd party tool and the exporting of a new tileset."