After successfully going through the solo game, I recently joined ALFA and am playing on-line (my first multi-player experience ... and its a duzzie!)

Its amazing how different gameplay is. My first character died while I was trying to pause so I could work through the radial menu and cast Summon Animal.

This is advanced gameplay. No pausing, no saving, no mistakes ... and it raises a few questions for me.

1) Walking. I have an elf who wants to walk in town. Is there any way to do this other than stealth mode?

2) Talking. Is there a way to talk without having to click the mouse in the chat line? In a long conversation, that gets real old, and it makes it almost impossible for me to walk and talk at the same time.

3) Unlocking the Camera. Is there a way to unlock the camera and give me more of the screen "in front" of me? Recently I was with a group at the edge of the woods. There was a bandit just out of sight for me, but the rest of the group was able to lock in and fire. Their arrows were rushing past me as I charged into danger, just so I could target him.

I'll have more soon ... but any help on the above three would be very helpful! :good:

1) I believe you hold the shift key as you click to walk.

2) A couple of things: For general talking, just hit return and the cursor automatically goes to the chat window. For quick responses like *winks and grins* and "Luck be a lady* ( ;) Bel) you can assign text macros to some of your quick bar slots (just right click on the button you want and choose text macro)

3) There's a way to add this to your config file, but I keep forgetting to look it up. But to do it in-game, type the "`" key to bring up the console entry cursor (shows up in the upper left corner) then type "unlockcamera 1" (without the quotes). This allows the camera to be adjusted much further than normal (look down angle most importantly for me), but to see farther ahead of yourself, you want to bring the camera in close to your character.

[ June 05, 2003, 21:39: Message edited by: Blackthorne TA ]

Hey! This is interesting! I started a few weeks ago with MP on GameSpy, but I stopped because of 'a lack of experience'. I didn't play the Single Player game too often and tried MP. Just what Math sayd: No mistakes or you died, you're fried or petrified.

About the Text Macro:
I spent several slots for the most common questions and phrases I use. At some Servers, shouting is not allowed, but when I use a TextMacro, this automaticly happens (it seems) and I got kicked off :o Is there a way to use these texts for 'Party' too?

ALFA always seemed to be a Private Party, to me. Correct? If so, what makes ALFA special, who can join? If not... erm.. then why did I think it was?

And: Do you people happen to know a nice ROLEplaying server? Hence the 'role'. Almost every MP games I joined were infected with level 20 powergamers.

ALFA is indeed a private party, but you can get a pass. Go to the site and apply for membership.

What makes it *special* is that powergameing is strictly verboten! Character vs character combat is allowed, but if you off someone's PC without a great "in character" reason, you're in deep trouble.

Go fill out an application at www.alandfaraway.net (http://www.alandfaraway.net) It takes about 10-20 min, and maybe a week before they reply. I've gotten in on my first attempt both times, but some need to reapply ... and that is allowed.

When you make a text macro type /tk before you write your text. The macro's default is shout, adding the /tk changes it to talk mode.

That's probably why you got booted...Too much shouting.

When I heard ALFA was going live soon, I started playing multiplayer online. I wanted to get a flavor of it before I tackled the real deal. It's a good suggestion. I made it to 18th level on one server with a Rogue/Sorcerer...He was fun to play!

MoN:

I am a part of a roleplaying guild and our PW server is slated to come online tomorrow at 2pm CST. There is no application required to join and you would likely be able to start tomorrow with everyone else at level 1. In order to get the password for the PW, we had to read the rules and reply that we had read them and would follow them. The roleplaying has been fairly well enforced in my experience, even on the test server.

Death is not handled as severely as it seems that ALFA's is handled. At low levels (<4 IIRC), there is no penalty for dying. At higher levels, the standard, OC penalties apply. It is mostly PvP enabled, but any PKing must be roleplayed for valid, IC, in-alignment reasons.

Stop by Bioware's Guilds and Registries section and check out the Broodslayers Guild. We have been in the top 5 most active guilds since before I joined last fall. Some of our most active members are located in Europe, so there have been people logged on at all hours of the day.

Next dumb question ... can NWN run in window mode? It is next to impossible for me to swap back and forth from the game to other applications ... but sometimes my PC is just sitting, and i'd like to surf/research/work.

Any ideas?

It is possible. There is an addition that must be made to a .ini file. I can't recall it off the top of my head, but you may be able to search Bioware's site for the line to add.

I'll try to look it up tonight and post it here.

Thanks Stick boy! You da man!

I have some waiting to do tonight ... with a dead character and all ...

You're dead again Mat? What happened this time? And do you need to be resurrected, or are you waiting for your hitpoints to recover?

Here's what I found to set up your NWN for running in windowed mode:


Under [Display Options] in your nwn.ini put these lines for windowed mode

FullScreen=0
AllowWindowedMode=1
I have tried it and it worked for me, but my system was not all that crazy about doing two things at once when NWN was one of them. ;)

I have a question as well. If you have a multiplayer character in one server, then move to another one, do the characters come with you, or do you need to create another one? I never had any characters showing up in the character selection even when I had played a character before.

That completely depends on the servers you want to play on. If they are unrelated and only allow characters from their vault to play, they your characters do not come along.

I believe some servers allow your own local characters to play, but then they don't have as much control over how powerful the characters are.

Also, related servers could share a character vault so that your character would be available for any of these servers. ALFA does this.