April 2004

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BioWare Wednesday
Posted Friday, April 30, 2004 - 13:58 CET by Sorcerer

(Only the D&D-related part posted.)

New Epic Builds - Dark Stalker & Dragon Savant
The newest NWN epic character builds are out! Beware the Dark Stalker, by Carl "Syrsuro" Torvik. Wherever you may run, he will hunt you down. Wherever you hide, he will search you out. Whatever defences you establish, the Dark Stalker will slip by them unseen. The second epic is the Dragon Savant, by Lockindal Linantal. Born a dwarf, walks as a dragon, with his power the Dragon Savant defends dwarves and destroys their enemies. Discuss.

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Atari Dodges the Temple of Elemental Evil Patch Beta 2 Queries
Posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 22:44 CET by chevalier

Steve Moret has revealed that Atari dodges his queries about the ToEE Patch 2 beta. They haven't replied to any e-mails since over two weeks ago when they confirmed receiving Mr Moret's e-mail concerning the matter. Here's a bit of what he says:

I've been holding off posting about this for a while now, but seeing as Atari doesn't want to respond to my questions as to what’s going on from their end I'm going to let you guys know what has happened on my end.

On the morning of April 12th, 2004 I e-mailed the ToEE producer at Atari what we hoped to be the final beta of patch 2. Verifying that he did receive it, that producer wrote back indicating he was going to try and get it into testing as soon as he could.

That was the last I've heard from Atari.

In these subsequent weeks, I've been e-mailing that producer, another producer, and the PR manager for ToEE to try and find out what the status of the patch is. To date, I have received no e-mails back.

Read the whole thing at Atari Forums.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 10:41 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Saving crashes: Things that were discovered to cause crashes during saving in the past were:

Using a custom portrait that was saved in the incorrect tga format (or was saved in some specific image editing tools).

Having the date of your sytem clock on your PC set to some thing completely inacurate.

Both of these issues were fixed in previous patches. If you haven't patched your game up to the most recent version (1.62), I suggest trying that first.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

NWN:

Quote: Instead it plagues all PW's except for the ones who have imposed draconian strictures on their players.

PWs are not the scope of NWN.

Quote: Because Bioware decided to cut corners the rest of us have to deal with a completely artificial set of restrictions that varies dramatically from server to server and DM to DM. There's good game design and implementation that creates amazing possibilities for people. Then there's mediocre game design and implementation of a great game concept that creates something less. Bioware has done the latter at this point.

No, you have to deal with the restrictions that arise from using NWN as something it was not intended as. Thats your problem and you have to deal with it. It's not that we didn't say often enough that NWN's scope was not PWs or so...We are happy to add new features and make changes that benefit the PW part of the community from time to time. We have done so in the past, and we will do so in the future (i.e. deactivating the copy character feature for server vaults was requested by the PW community) - but it is not and will never be the major focus we have. The majority of our customers are playing the game the way it was meant to be played - and thats where the majority of our resources has to go as well. Making the changes to the skill point allocation during character creation does not benefit enough people to be worth the hassle that would arise from it.

NWN and DMs: I wonder what your "route" comment is supposed to mean... (As I said several times before ... if you think you won't be able to live with the answer, you might want to consider not to ask as at all). Zelphi pretty much explained it. NWN was designed to be played with a group of people and a DM - or SP. In SP, the player can do what is fun for him/her. If you play with a DM is there, just like PnP, there is either trust or the DM can use his powers to crack down on people that exploit the game in a way he doesn't approve. Even if there is no DM and you are playing with casual friends, it's your decision as well.

If you are talking PW again here ... sorry, then you are out of luck - our need to fall back to DMs or scripted solutions, because that's not NWNs original scope and you will have to live with that (or work around it). People logging in/out is usually a reaction to resting restrictions, by the way - and if you feel it's exploiting, tell them and kick them if they do not want to follow your rules - just be careful that you don't get too extreme with micromanaging what your player do, because as soon as it's no longer fun (i.e. waiting several hours real time to be allowed to rest), they will usually find a way around it. Also please don't misunderstand this - I have nothing against PWs - I have great respect for many of the PW builders out there and what they managed to do with an engine that's not designed to be used in that way.

Lag: 300 areas means a lot of management overhead in the game. The game will start to skip lower priority events (such as time updates) in order to keep up running at a fairly reasonable speed.

Weapon effects: No, if you have two item properties of the same type on your weapon, only the higher one will take effect, that's how it's supposed to work.

Shifter: The nonweapon shapes are mainly useful for "utility purposes" (i.e. the manticore has a superior ranged attack, the kobold commando is a stealth expert and so on, the mindflayer is nice to reduce whatever brain is left in that attacking grunt into jello).

Polymorphing: It's not that simple. Polymorphing you could modify stats, it will unequip items and do a lot of other things to your character that can interfere with which spells you have memorized, etc. In NWN there is no spellcasting while polymorphed and it is highly unlikely that there will ever be any. The official campaigns have been balanced with that in mind

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SP Happenings #47
Posted Tuesday, April 27, 2004 - 19:19 CET by Sorcerer

I didn't get as much work done on the redesign this past week as I would have liked, but I still made some progress. I've been shuffling around some content placement, added a few new pages and started linking the pages together. Hopefully I'll have more time over the next few days to start tackling the rest of it.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Monday, April 26, 2004 - 23:17 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Console XP removal: I believe that you should be able to pass in a negative number into the console command to remove XP (although I'm not able to test it at the moment to be 100% sure).

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Saving skillpoints: Saving skillpoints would create lots of GUI grief, add another layer of complexity to the character creation (see how many posts about "why can't I take Prestige Class X" we got here already) and thus would have made the game less accessible to the casual player. I wasn't there when the decision was made in the first place, but I completely agree with it - adding the additional code, GUI and feedback to skill point fragments, etc is not worth it - if players don't want to do it, they are free not to do it, if they want to do it and their DM doesn't want it, he can communicate that to them. As for PWs that don't have DMs to check characters and don't want to rely on scripts, well, NWN wasn't designed with those in mind.

Action queue: Actions work through the action queue, and don't run on dead or busy objects.

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BBC News Reflects on Dungeons and Dragons
Posted Monday, April 26, 2004 - 23:11 CET by chevalier

BBC News have posted a large article in which they ponder the development of D&D since creation by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson through the breaking point in the eighties up to the downfall in late nineties and the current moment. Among others, they discuss the variety of options that makes this system so enthralling, but here's the catch: enthralling to the point of substituting mundane and unattractive real life self with an entirely imaginary fantasy alter ego, braver, stronger, wiser, smarter, faster, handsomer, and just generally more than the original, able to perform miracles, save damsels, slay dragons, cast spells, right wrongs, raid tombs, drink ale, and live dangerously whenever he feels like it. A vast collection of player memories and opinions follows.

In 1974 two men in the US Midwest, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, created Dungeons and Dragons, the first ever role-playing game.

Developed out of war gaming using table-top miniatures, the paperback rule books were an instant success, a genuine phenomenon which spawned an industry and influenced a generation of film-makers, writers and videogame developers.

An estimated 20 million people worldwide have played D&D since it was created, with more than $1bn spent on game equipment and books.

"I thought we would sell about 50,000 copies," says Gary Gygax.

Co-creator Dave Arneson recalls: "When we started playing we thought we were kind of crazy. It seemed to start quite well and sold better, and better and better."

Read the whole thing at BBC News.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Saturday, April 24, 2004 - 12:34 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Patch 1.63:

From the 1.63 internal buildnotes

- Added support for 8 new custom animation types:
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM3
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM4
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM5
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM6
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM7
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM8
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM9
ANIMATION_LOOPING_CUSTOM10

Module size:

Quote: Well i got a question what would be a safe mod size ? and why are the dragons and balors turnning and facing away from me every time they cast a spell?

That depends on your hardware, but I would say that you should avoid growing your module above 50-60 MB. The largest module of the official campaigns has around 32 Megs.

Scripting 2DAs: The des_* .2da's are all used by the scripting language only, they are not used by the game engine itself - and as far as I know, those .2da's are only read by the server, as the script is executed on the server as well.

Script cache: a) The existence of the script cache says about nothing about the execution cost of any specific script - yes, ExecuteScript can be potentially expensive - if you execute a very large script - of course (like one you get when you are running a single huge OnActivate script....). Also the "cost" of "scheduling" (there's nothing scheduled here, ExecuteScript works in-line and synchronous with the calling script) another script operation is not unknown, you can easily profile it either using a debug executable or a tool like NWNX2 - And while there is a management overhead in ExecuteScript, it's neglegible, especially in OnActivation script - the HotU default AI is calling ExecuteScript in every single EventHandler, plus a potential number of times inside the combat AI. The script cache is there to reserve memory for larger scripts - so they don't have to be loaded from disk into memory for each execution, it's not there "because scripts are slow" or because "executescript is slow".

b) Have you heard of things like binary search? or Hashtables? There are better methods to find a certain object than searching through "a potential number of scripts". I.e. to locate a unique string in a list of 10.000 strings using simple binary search you need around 13-14 compare operations - I'm sure most modules with 10.000 items would have a lot more than 13 useable items, probably more than 100.
There's a reason we have tags and resrefs in Aurora, if NWN would use sequential string compares in it's resource management system to locate resources when they are demanded, the game wouldn't have finished starting after 5 minutes.

c) While you are free to assume that NWSCript is appallingly inefficient, you are also free to be wrong. NWScript is quite efficient (thats why a lot of the game, including the AI, is done in scripting, as opposed to "in the engine). Not to say that there is no room for performance enhancements to the engine, as one is being investigated right now, but we are really happy with the performance of our scripting language.

d) To come back to the subject - a "slow" OnItemActivate script is not going to "lag" your server, regardless what method you use - You could see a hickup any time someone uses an item, but that doesn't qualify as lag - lag is generated by a fairly constant overload of your system. If you are looking for lag, search for scripts with a higher execution frequency - creature AI, AoE spells, recursive spells (I.e. acid arrow) and expensive module/placeable/creature heartbeats or DelayCommand chains.

So, once again, using tagbased execution to manage OnActivate scripts in your module is definitly much better than having one huge OnItemActivate script plus it's more beautiful and manageable. "Tagbased scripts cause lag" is about as precise "DelayCommand is better than Heartbeat".

DM features: To give you some feedback, I've discussed a few ideas from this thread with Craig and he says that DM reserved slots and optional mandantory masterserver response are things that he "would like to put in the game when he finds time to do it". Of course that's no promise and it certainly doesn't mean those features will be in 1.63 or 1.64, as "when he finds time for it" is not really something you can plan for

Jonathan Epp, Quality Assurance

Tileset limit: There's a good chance that this will be fixed in the 1.63 patch. I can't guarantee that just yet, but it's looking hopeful. If the fix works and makes it in, there will still be a limit, but a higher one (probably 50 or something). There is a memory usage concern when using lots of different tilesets in the same module. A programmer would be able to explain this better, but basically the game needs to load up the tile data for all areas of the game. If you use the same tile in many areas, that data only needs to be loaded once. But when you use many different tilesets the game needs to load data for a lot more tiles. I'm not sure if that's 100% technically correct, but that's the gist of it anyway. If, as a builder, you never ran into the old limit then you needn't worry about this memory concern. If you plan on going above the old limit (assuming the fix works and makes it in), then it's probably good to be aware of this issue - though I'm guessing most builders in that category don't really think too much about people with min-spec machines anyway.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Hak Paks: The problem is that hack packs have to be associated with a module. So in single player, you select the module to play first (which in turn loads up the hack pack), then you create your character. In multiplayer, you connect to a server which may or may not have a module loaded at that time, and thus you can create a character before you know what module you are going to be playing (and thus there is no way to know yet what hack packs your up coming game session will be requiring). I doubt that at this point we will be making any significant changes to the way the multiplayer connection system works to address this issue, but less likely things have been know to happen.

2DA Files:

Quote: Will we get a list of the new animation names? As this extends the custom anims added in HOTU,
I assume it will be...

...
custom3start
custom3lp
custom3end
...
custom9start
custom9lp
custom9end
...

I was wondering if the custom10 aninations would be called 'custom10' or 'custom0'?

Yep, that's pretty much right. They are named:

Custom3start
Custom4start
...
Custom10start

Custom3end
Custom4end
...
Custom10end

Custom3lp
Custom4lp
...
Custom10lp

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More Interplay News
Posted Saturday, April 24, 2004 - 0:21 CET by chevalier

It seems Interplay is in really big trouble despite its management's best efforts to hide that. Not only do they fall behind with the rent, but they also owe their own employees quite a lot. Even the health issurance part. Here's a clip from No Mutants Allowed:

Interplay haven't been paying the health insurance payments for the last few months, it seems IPLY recently revealed this to their employees and several just left the meeting. They also told the employees that they really didn't have to come in this week, since there's a good chance they won't be paid.

And another one from RPGCodex forums:

There's supposed to be a big meeting at Interplay on Friday (4/23). The employees are going to find out if they are getting their backpay or not.

Stories going through the grapevine said that Herve tried to sell Interplay to Vivendi this week and got laughed out of the building for the price that he was asking.

I expect Interplay to close its doors tomorrow (4/23) at least for development, and file for bankruptcy soon after.

Read the whole thing at No Mutants Allowed and RPGCodex.

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Herve Caen Buys Interplay Shares
Posted Friday, April 23, 2004 - 0:55 CET by chevalier

Interplay's CEO, Herve Caen, has bought some Interplay shares. Check it out at Pinksheets.

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Johnn Four Interview at NWVault
Posted Friday, April 23, 2004 - 0:50 CET by chevalier

NWVault have interviewed the latest hired BioWare team member, Johnn Four, who's also the head of roleplayingtips.com. They speak mostly about his way to BioWare job, D&D roleplaying experience and the site he runs. Here's a snip:

3) So how did you end up at BioWare and what was the process you went through before being hired. Was there anything you found particularly interesting or different?

I decided last year that I wanted to be involved with my number one passion: games. I did some research and BioWare was at the top of my list for companies to work for. So, I discarded all the other companies and focused on getting a position within BioWare.
I hit the BioWare jobs page every day for several weeks and then I saw my dream job come up: web content developer. I submitted my resume by email and then launched an intensive harrassment campaign until they granted me an interview. Oh no, wait, that was how I met my wife.

Anyway, I flew in from Vancouver on a Thursday morning, went through four interviews, and flew back that night. What a day! I was amazed and assured by the interview process. I was amazed by the number of interviews that were arranged with various people at BioWare, including both Joint-CEOs! I was also assured because it meant they were serious about hiring the best. How I slipped through the cracks, I'll never know. ;)

Read the whole thing at NWVault.

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Latest Poll Results
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 22:11 CET by Sorcerer

What we asked:

Q: Do you use an optical mouse (no ball) with your gaming computer?
(342 votes total)

Yes (240) 70%
No (59) 17%
Not yet, but I'm thinking of getting one (43) 13%

Interestingly, an overwhelming majority of the gamers who voted (70%), use an optical mouse.

Only 17% still use the classic kind (or some other type), and 13% of poll participants don't use one yet, but are thinking of getting one.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 0:03 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Patch 1.63:

Quote: Epic Gargoyle form missing its stats.

fixed

Quote: Iron Golem form has the elemental immunities backwards.

Not sure

Quote: Flipping between items via the quickbar ends up getting an item frozen in place in the inventory.

Probably fixed

Quote: Casting a spell then going into drive mode makes the model get stuck in the casting animation.

Probably fixed

Quote: Archer NPC's keep attacking stealthed/invisible PC's.

Fixed

No word on the others, haven't been paying attention to the patch notes for a while.

CD-key privacy:
The best way of keeping your CDKey private is to follow the basic rules of computer security.

- Don't install unknown software
- Don't open your NWN directory for file sharing
- Keep your system up to date (i.e. install every available ASAP)
- Run an anti virus programm and a fire wall
- Don't share it with people, regardless how friendly they are
- and don't double click on those pesky email attachments.

If we added a method of only allowing the CDKey from a certain IP, Atari Customer Support would go down in a storm of violent complaints from people who forgot about that feature or have dynamic IP Addresses. It's your responsibility to keep your CDKey private - and it's in your best interest as well, because if someone can grab your CDKey, he will probably be able to grab a lot of other sensitive data as well.

Shifter: If your shifted form had a constitution bonus (i.e. the dire tiger), you will loose the bonus hitpoints gained from this from when you shift back. If that brings you below 0, you're dead.

Random number generator: The random number generator is just that, random, at least as random as your operating system allows it. But, as every DM knows, there's always a good amount of paranoia in players when it comes to dice as well.

Further:
The more annoying people in my old PnP party used to "test" their dice extensively before a session and "retest" them before each "important" roll. That's the best way to get them DM appreciate diceless roleplaying

Crafting 2DA: yes, there is a .2da that defines all the choises, des_crft_appear.2da or so.

It's structured this way:

X X+1 X-1

if I remember correctly, which means that X is your current appeareance, X+1 defines the index of next appearance you get in the dialog and X-1 defines the index of the appearance you get when selecting previous in the dialog. So

10 12 9

would mean that if you currently have appearance #10, selecting next would pick the appearance at row 12 in the 2da, previous would get the appearance at row 9 in the 2da. All you need to do is modify the .2da and put it in the server overide.

Ranged attacks: Please note that there is currently a bug with creatures that use ranged weapons not properly unacquiring hidden targets. It will be fixed in 1.63

Patch 1.63 fix: There was indeed a bug that left visual effects stay around forever (as some people may have experienced in combinations with "goblins" and "green dye" in the HotU OC). The circumstances where this bug would appear were:

- if you had multiple copies of the same visual looping effect (VLE) applied to you at the same time, AND
- they all came from different sources(creatures), AND
- you then had another new VLE applied, AND
- this new VLE was of a different type than the original ones, AND
-this new VLE was applied before the first multiple VLEs had had a chance to expire,
THEN the original VLE would play on the creature forever (and would never go away until you logged out).

(I am sure this bug had negative effects on Craig's sanity, hopefully only temporary). It has been fixed for 1.63.

GFF file corruption: File corruption can happen to any file format, files stored on certain file systems (like FAT/FAT32) are more likely to be affected than others. A single flipping bit can invalidate a compressed file beyond the ability to recover it. Files can get corrupted for a variety of reasons - due to a crashing computer during a hard disk write, virii or trojans, unstable or experimental drivers, programs violating the toolsets memory space, hardware defects (especially bad memory) and hardware incompatibilities/bugs. There are a couple of things you can do to make corruption less likely (i.e. using a more robust file system like NTFS5 or a journaling file system like reiserfs (if you use linux)).

Your first and foremost protection against this will always be backups, frequent backups. Secondly, if the toolset crashes, don't take it easily. You can use the recover functionality to get your module back, but there is no guarantee that this module is 100% in good shape. Also, if you run the toolset, run it alone - other programs you run in addition to the toolset can possibly interfere with it - especially the game - do not run a module in the game that you are editing in the toolset! Detecting corruption is another difficult topic, as a corrupted object might not be apparent as corrupted at all. Surely, if you have a 0 byte itp file in your module, you can pretty much tell why it is failing to load in the game, but in a lot of cases you might not even notice that something is broken.

So, to answer your question - I think it is highly unlikely that we will invest time in the features you describe. To do it right, the game would need to introduce CRC's or similar means to ensure the integrity of every single file packed into a GFF, not only adding a size to it, but also resulting in significant management overhead to both game and toolset for verifying those checksums. A repair feature would be highly complicated to impossible as destroyed data can not be magically recreated - even if you could restore the file format, the data inside the gff might will be destroyed and will possibly crash the game anyway. One more thing: The larger your module gets and the more files are stored in it - the more time will be required for file IO, increasing the chance for an accident to happen. Keep your modules small, NWN was not created with 150 MB, 200 areas, 15k items modules.

Yes, it's unforunate that modules sometimes, on rare occasions, get corrupted, but so do office documents, savegames, etc. If corruption is caused by a bug in the toolset, we will fix it - our experience (about 8 people working up to 12 hours a day for several month on HotU with the toolset, experiencing a single module corruption due to running game and toolset at the same time) pretty much says that investing significant time in the features you requested would be a bad investment. There are a couple of options you have to increase your chance of recovering from a corrupted module

- You can export any static file from your module to a secure location, probably using a third party program (like VSS or even tripwire) to make ensure integrity and give you the option of detecting changes in those "static" files.

- Save the source files out of the toolset's \nwn\temp0 directory to a save location from time to time.

- (again) do frequent backups and do not hesitate to revert to a backup instead of restoring a crashed module (you can still recover the files you worked on manually before reverting and verify they are ok).

- make sure your storage is in a good shape and run frequent file system maintenance (i.e. defrag, fschk, etc)

- lastly, our file format is open - you might find someone in the community who will write a gff validation or even repair tool for you.

I don't expect you to agree with this post, but you know the rules, only ask if you are willing to accept the answer

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake: "WW1: Remastered" will continue to be free but yes, we are hoping to convert WW2 and others into a revenue stream for the Live Team. While I agree with a lot of your thoughts regarding the underlying concept of Linux, our personal experience was that Live Team staff (myself included) kept getting poached by paying projects such as Jade Empire or the expansions. It unfortunately came down to a question of converting the WW series into a revenue stream in its own right or saying goodbye to the series (and the overall concept of a Live Team) altogether. We chose what we considered to be the lesser of two weevils, and hopefully the results of that decision will be content well worth your gaming dollar. Our intent is that the money raised will go back into helping the community through various Live Team initiatives, ranging from ongoing support of Neverwinter to the development of more community-centric features in upcoming titles.

Further:

The FAQ's a bit out of date but it should cover most of the bases. The key thing that's changed is that, after a year of being pulled away from the WW series to work on Jade Empire, SoU, and HotU, I'm diving back in and doing "Witch's Wake I: Remastered." Basically, that means I'm updating the original module with post-expansion resources and some new techniques on the back end in preparation for the remainder of the series. Also, we're hoping to make the series part of a larger Live Team initiative (run a search for DD or Digital Distribution on this forum if you want more info) that will provide for the support of NWN and future mod-oriented titles well into the future. We'll be in a position to talk about that a little more once we've sorted out the details with our publisher, Atari, and we'll update the WW FAQ at that time

The community: Well I will say this much: We definitely hope to be able to work with some of the top talent in the community, provide them with strong internal support (even to the point of adding features to the game to help them out), a robust QA environment, and so forth. My own personal belief is that we can accomplish a lot more by working together than by working apart and, in the end, that's going to benefit the community as a whole. In essence, such a move would be a more formal extension of my original attempt to use the Witch's Wake series to showcase the best the community had to offer. As with all things DD-related, however, there are a lot of questions still up in the air. We're moving ahead but it's a slow process and it's very hard to tell at this point where all of the cards will land. Once things fall into place, we'll let you know.

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Interplay's Forums Down
Posted Wednesday, April 21, 2004 - 22:41 CET by chevalier

Interplay's Forums are down. Apparently, sacrifices need to be made on the way to Interplay's bright new strategic alternatives coming true.

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Interplay's "Strategic Alternatives"
Posted Wednesday, April 21, 2004 - 22:32 CET by chevalier

Interplay's CEO, Herve Caen, claims Interplay has recently improved much and returned to profitability. Also, according to him, Interplay's real power is well beyond the actual shareholder value. Conveniently, the current top priority is to increase the said value. They have called upon SG Capital investment bank to provide assistance in embracing this bright future. One of the first steps is changing their stock sticker from IPLY.OB to IPLYE.OB.

IRVINE, Calif., April 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Interplay Entertainment Corp. (OTC Bulletin Board: IPLY - News) announced today that it has retained the investment bank SG Capital to assist with an evaluation of strategic alternatives designed to enhance value to Interplay's shareholders. SG Capital will provide, among other services, assistance with the Company's financing efforts as it attempts to secure additional capital for product development and operations. SG Capital will also assist the Company with general business strategy and advice regarding potential strategic transactions, including a possible sale of the Company or its operating units.

Commenting on the announcement, Interplay's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Herve Caen said, "Management and the board do not believe that our current share price reflects the true value of the operations of our company. Accordingly, we have engaged SG Capital to explore strategic alternatives to improve and maximize shareholder value. We believe that their experience, capabilities and market focus fit the needs of Interplay and that SG Capital is uniquely qualified to assist the Company in this effort."

Mr. Caen continued, "With Interplay's recent return to profitability and the strong performance of our industry as a whole, management and the board believe that the time is right to explore strategic opportunities for a much-improved Interplay."

Read the whole thing and trace IPLYE.OB at Yahoo.

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BioWare Wednesday
Posted Wednesday, April 21, 2004 - 22:04 CET by Sorcerer

(Only the D&D-related part posted.)

Two New NWN Epic Characters Posted
Ding, ding! It's round four of the NWN Epic Character builds. Check out the gruesome Undead Lord who calls demiliches pets and the half-dragon Blade Juggernaut who enjoys a good fire belch every day. Created by Christopher "cdaulepp" Aulepp, you don't want to miss these epic builds. Discuss.

The Community Expansion Project Is A Hit!
The wildly successful CEP has been downloaded a stunning 142,871 times since its release March 24. The community has embraced the custom content package with open arms, no doubt because of the huge amount of free, high quality content it contains. Also note that the CEP team is working hard on the first CEP patch as we speak. NWCon II took place last weekend and was a great success. The transcript of Thursday's kickoff chat has been posted at the Neverwinter Vault. Discuss.

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BioWare Discredits Microsoft Purchase Rumours
Posted Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - 21:41 CET by chevalier

BioWare prefer not to say anything official, but they downplay the importance of the news of recent purchase by Microsoft Games. Here's an excerpt:

Officially, it is BioWare's policy not to comment on rumors. But the online chatter had the developer willing to provide a tad more than the usual boilerplate response. "To us, it's really thin air," a BioWare staffer told GameSpot today, referring to the unsubstantiated Web posts. However, the representative would not straight-out deny the reports of its purchase, either, allowing some speculation about the alleged deal to linger.

Read the whole thing at GameSpot.

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SP Happenings #46
Posted Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - 19:38 CET by Sorcerer

Well, I can say that I've managed to progress considerably with the redesign over the last week. All of the pages of SP apart from the Games section have been converted, and I've also put together a number of new pages, required by the new design. At this rate, the new design should go up fairly quickly (a few weeks), provided there are no complications when it comes to testing everything. Of course, converting the Games section will probably take more time than everything else, because the majority of the content is there, and because most manual changes will be needed there. Stay tuned for updates.

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BioWare Bought by Microsoft?
Posted Monday, April 19, 2004 - 16:09 CET by chevalier

Ferrago have posted rumours about Microsoft Game Studios buying BioWare. Here's a snip:

The latest issue of Polygon magazine is reporting an unnamed source from within Microsoft's Game Studios publishing division as stating that Redmond will imminently announce the finalisation of a Bioware purchase agreed. The continued rise of Microsoft within the industry will, rumour has it, be confirmed at E3 next month.

Read the rest at Ferrago.

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Brynsaar Interview with Michael Posey at NWVault
Posted Monday, April 19, 2004 - 16:05 CET by chevalier

NWVault have included Michael Posey in their Hall of Fame for his Brynsaar Persistent World. Apart from an extensive interview, they have posted some screenshots. Here's an excerpt:

1) Could you give our readers some personal background on yourself.

Well, to start off, I'm a geek. Always have been and always will be. I've been playing D&D since it came in a red boxed set. In the last 20 or so years I've played or DM'd just about every game in existence. In Nov of 99 I discovered a game called Asheron's Call and it became my hobby for 3 years. I went from MMORPG to MMORPG until 02 when I moved to Seattle to work for Atari. First day in training they gave me NWN and told me to play it for 6 hours. All I can say is that I was instantly hooked and still am.

2) What are your responsibilities at Atari now? Do you still play with NWN on the job?

Currently I'm phone/email support and the defacto NWN guy here in Seattle, I QA'd SoU for about 2-3 months, which was very cool. We only get to actually play games during training or when we're researching a particular issue for a customer. Granted if we're not on a call or doing emails then we can play any Atari game we want ;)

Check out the whole thing at NWVault. You might also wish to visit Brynsaar homepage.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Saturday, April 17, 2004 - 23:34 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Digital Distribution: Yeah, the system we're developing should handle this just fine. Ultimately, you'd be paying for the ability to play the module rather than the right to download it. If your dog eats your computer or some such tragedy, re-downloading the content you've already purchased should be relatively painless.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

NWServer: If I remember correctly the framwwork that was used for the Baldurs Gate Games was multi threaded in that regard, and it apparently caused a whole lot of trouble, so for NWN the decision was made to go single threaded. I don't see any significant reason (that includes "market") that would justify to rethink that decision.

Shifter: Polymorphed creatures (and the shifter is just that) can not cast spells (except those in the special abilities radial). It's unlikely to change, but of course I won't rule it out completely, there is always a small chance. If it ever would change (which again is unlikely), yes, a .2da column would be the way to go.

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NWCon II BioWare Chat Logs at NWVault
Posted Saturday, April 17, 2004 - 23:30 CET by chevalier

NWVault have BioWare chat logs from NWCon II. Here's a clip:

QT|Fandomlife for bioware: Is there anything that has been done by the community that in retrospect you would liked to have included in the official releases?

BioNinja I got this one.
BioNinja The easy answer is the simplest: EVERY-FREAKING-THING!
BioTorlack *cough* command line script compiler :P
CODI|Shkuey They cried when we got the stick figure model out the door first, I know it
BioNinja But the complex answer is more involved: In hindsight, it's very easy for us as a company to ask ourselves "Why didn't we do that?" or "Why didn't we think of that?"
BioGeorg what's up Tim, the commandline compiler is nice, just not as fast as yours :)
BioNinja But, as with the community developers, we had to take a good hard look at what kinds of things were going to work the best with the ggame concept we had.
BioJay It always comes down to time. The game has to go out at some point and it takes a vast, talented commuity to show us some curve balls when they get a look it. Why some the most talented work here. :)
BioNinja If we kept everything that we'd wanted to include, the game STILL wouldn't be out yet. In various stages, features were cut. Some of these features were very cool and would have made the game look uber-cool, but I don't think any of them would have made a better whole game experience.
BioGeorg but with our fairly frequent patches, there's always room to add one thing here and there.
BioNinja Horses, for example, got us a whole ton of flack. But if you look at the game as we released it, horses wouldn't have played out very well.
BioGeorg Both Tim and I started in the community...
BioJay And they are both very crazy. :)

Get the whole log at NWVault.

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Sean K. Reynolds Interview at GameBanshee
Posted Saturday, April 17, 2004 - 3:02 CET by chevalier

GameBanshee have posted an interview with Sean K. Reynolds of Interplay and formerly of Wizards of the Coast, who had worked on Baldur's Gate 3. They speak about his responsibilities, Jefferson project (BG3) and cRPG genre in general, as well as pen & paper D&D.

GB: What were your responsibilities during the development of Fallout 3 ("Van Buren") and Baldur's Gate III ("Jefferson")? Can you give us a brief background of what each game was going to be about?

Sean: Well, Interplay hasn't officially confirmed what each of those code-named games was, so I'll just refer to them by the aliases....

For Jefferson I was assigned some of the game areas or (for the larger areas) pieces of areas. I was responsible for populating those areas with creatures and NPCs, writing their dialogues, and describing their general behavior (the exact details were handled by the scripters). I was nominally in charge of one of the factions/regional groups, so I created a style guide for their attitudes, accent quirks, and manners of speech, which the other designers used when their areas called for a representative of that faction. The crux of the story is that your character ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, becomes associated with a supernatural creature, and because of that association everyone else in the game suspects you of treachery, wants to kill you, or wants to recruit you to their cause, all of which tie to the activities of a determined female criminal.

Read the whole thing at GameBanshee.

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CODI Foundations Trailer Released
Posted Friday, April 16, 2004 - 23:38 CET by chevalier

CODI have released a trailer of their Foundations project bringing Planescape content into NWN engine. It comes in two versions, high res and low res and shows off the new features.

Check out the trailer at NWVault, low res or high res. It comes in RAR format, requires DivX 5.1 to play and is absolutely fantastic.

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Interplay Menaced with Eviction
Posted Friday, April 16, 2004 - 23:31 CET by chevalier

Interplay, the publisher of Baldur's Gate saga, Icewind Dale series and Planescape: Torment, are three months behind on their rent and have been given three days to pay or leave their headquarters.

Besides highlighting the disparity between its cash balance of $1.2 million and working-capital deficit of $14.8 million, the notice also revealed interplay is facing eviction from its Irvine, CA headquarters. The filing states that "As of April 1, 2004, the Company [Interplay] was three months in arrears on the rent obligations for its corporate lease in Irvine, California." During the conference call, Caen revealed the rent for Interplay headquarters is around $150,000 a month, meaning the company currently owes its landlord approximately $450,000--nearly half its cash on hand.

Given the amount of money involved, it's not surprising that legal papers have already been served. "On April 9, 2004, the Company's lessor served it with a Three-Day Notice to Pay Rent or Surrender Possession," continued the 8-K filing. "If the Company is unable to pay its rent, it may lose its office space, which would interrupt operations and cause substantial harm to business." With Interplay's ambitious schedule of upcoming releases--which include Kingpin and Descent sequels and a console game based on Fallout--a forced move of its 113 employees would be inconvenient, to say the least.

Read the whole thing at GameSpot.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Friday, April 16, 2004 - 0:34 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Screenshots: Yup- I use the Print Screen button. A couple of things to keep in mind for a higher quality of screenshots:

1. Unless you want take a picture of floating numbers turn off all the Feedback options.
2. Hit the key 'H' to remove the game GUI.
3. Think about sacrificing game speed for nice visuals by raising your resolution and/or ramping up the anti-aliasing.

The screens will be saved in the NWN directory.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake starting class: It depends. A combat-oriented class can still be of comfort in WW1 as the beasties are there to be dealt with even if you don't receive experience specifically for killing them. That said, I recommend picking a class you may not typically play and seeing how WW responds. Every class is viable though wizards and sorcerers might be the toughest due to the rest restrictions and limitations on familiars. But they get to cast Charm and Scare in conversation. Experiment a little and then come back and tell us which class you enjoyed most.

CEP magazine release: I believe some modules (including Witch's Wake 1) were cover mounted on CD at one point. Also, a lot of the Australian magazines have gone to cover-mounted DVDs and are always hungry for content to fill them up. If you'd like to see your favorite magazine cover mount the CEP, send them an email telling them how cool it is, provide some links, and encourage them to mount it for one of their upcoming issues.

Tilesets: I faced this exact problem while remastering my original version of Witch's Wake 1 in preparation for our proposed Digital Distribution project. I ended up taking a screenshot of the original area and repainting the equivalent terrain in the new tileset (cycling through individual tile variations where I felt it was important). I then opened the old area, ensured that all of the various object types were visible, and zoomed out far enough so I could see the entire map. I swapped over to object mode, dragged a selection box around the entire area, and used Ctrl-C to copy all of the objects it contained. I then went to the new area and used Ctrl-V and moved my cursor around until it looked like everything was in the right place. One click and I was (pretty much) done.

There are some limitations to this approach, however. All objects will snap down to ground level so if you've made a lot of z-axis changes or stacked objects on top of each other, you're going to have to redo all of that work. Also, I found that encounters lost their spawn points in the copy/paste process. I just drew a quick map on graph paper and marked down my spawn points there, then recreated them by hand. The GFF solution might be a better approach in some cases but if you have two non-equivalent tilesets (forest and HotU's icy, for instance) you'll probably run into troubles.

Witch's Wake 2:

Quote: Might we "masses" have a release month or quarter for WW: remastered and WW 2, please? I'm in the middle of my 7th run through HotU and it's wearing thin. Official Bioware modules, where art thou?

Nope, no dates available (except for Stan's). A lot of the details are out of our hands right now (Atari signing the contract, WotC approving the individual modules) so we have to wait until those are sorted out before everything starts becoming a reality. On our end, there are also a variety of technical tasks being worked on (a revamp of the website, creation of a secure storefront, piracy prevention mechanisms, etc). Meanwhile we have the development of the modules themselves, some of which are waiting on the issues discussed above (once Atari signs the contract, we'll be able to allocate additional manpower and it will free up some further initiatives as well). In short, it's a complicated process. Progress is being made on all fronts, however. Hang tight and we'll let everyone know once that day comes within sight. In the meantime, take the opportunity to play some of the great community mods out there or start a regular DM'd session over at Neverwinter Connections.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

30% Idle CPU Useage: As I explained in another thread, we do not see this as a high priority item. Since the server is empty, it doesn't matter if it has 30%. And you can not conclude that if the server takes 30% CPU when empty it would take 30%+x when full, that's not how it works. 30% CPU load does not have any meaning when it comes to performance. You can have 100% cpu load and performance is still good and you can have 10% and performance is bad, for one or another reason. If there were no artificial sleeps in the server code, it would always take 100% anyway.

Screenshots:

Quote: But why using the TGA format? Why not JPG or PNG for that matter.

Tga is good for lossless, high quality screen captures - JPG and PNG both need to be encoded and JPG always is associated with quality loss in favour of compression (through PNG can be lossless as well IIRC).

Further:

Quote: Actually, the question is why not BMP, which has been used in all IE games (and pretty much everywhere else)?

Actually very little things are done without reason today:)

TGA (Truevision / targa file format) has some advantages over BMP:

Up to 32 bit color depth (opposed to 24 bit in BMPs), gamma setting, integrated thumbnails and alpha channel support (not really needed for screenshots). And of course it makes sense to have the best quality for screenshots.

The only thing that speaks for BMP is that it's "the" native Windows format and even Paint can read it , but then again, NWN is available on several other platforms and any good image viewer supports TGA.

CD key: There is no way you can get the real CDKey of a person by scripting. All you get is a public version of the cdkey, a signature/hash that can not be reverse engineered into the real key. Also there can be no "key generators" for online play as there is no algorithm used to generate cdkeys - all valid keys have been random generated and are known only to us. I strongly suggest not trying out any "key generators" as all they do is to present you a list of stolen or even fake keys while scanning your hard drive for your own keys to send them back to the developer of the key generator. Also please keep in mind that your cdkey can be invalidated if used in conjunction with a stolen key.

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Interplay Trades All Rights to D&D Games
Posted Thursday, April 15, 2004 - 22:12 CET by chevalier

Interplay have abdicated all rights to D&D games in exchange for full ownership of Dark Alliance. This means no Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale saga titles from Interplay anymore. Dark Alliance will no longer be based in Dungeons and Dragons system, either. Interplay will not abandon the PC market entirely, but the focus is on console games, which generate 80% of Interplay's income. Cooperation with Obsidian, who hire former Black Isle Studios employees, is within the realm of possibility.

Check out over forty minutes of Interplay conference call.

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The Temple of Elemental Evil Review at GCC
Posted Thursday, April 15, 2004 - 20:45 CET by chevalier

Game Club Central have posted a review of the Temple of Elemental Evil, rating it 6.0 apparently because of lack of multiplayer, rated 0, since all other components have been rated higher than the outcome score. Here's a snip:

ToEE doesn’t lack on content. The tabletop version of ToEE offered many days of game play and its digital counterpart is no exception. There are a ton of characters and side quests to keep any RPG’er happy, plus the overall story of ToEE to keep the player busy. The game also changes based on what approach the player takes. The player creates or chooses characters to form a 5-person party, based on their ethical alignment toward good or evil.

In game navigation through the world is done via a point and click interface, controlling the whole group or per member. ToEE has a Formation feature allowing the player to group the members in any way they choose. A Log Book feature keeps track of the Party’s quests and other items such as Reputation (which is factored in), Rumors, Keys, Local and World Maps, and even a section call Ego showing which of the party members does the most damage, least damage, dies the most etc. Pop up windows are available keeping track of past dialogue and die rolls

Read the whole thing at GCC.

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BioWare Wednesday
Posted Thursday, April 15, 2004 - 13:29 CET by Sorcerer

(Only the D&D-related part posted.)

NWCon II Kicks Off This Thursday Eve!
Be sure to attend the kickoff chat for the second NWNCon on April 15th at 7pm CST (GMT-6). Hobnob with members from the City of Doors Initiative, Dragonlance Adventures, d20 Modern Group, and BioWare staff. And then Friday through Sunday will be overflowing with awesome gaming events and informative panels; so clear your schedule, adjust your chair, and stock up on the pop and chips--it's gamin' time! This week we've also posted a new profile about NWCon that's an interesting read. Discuss.

Builder Alert: Awesome NWN 3d Tool
Ever wanted to craft your own critters, weapons, or placeables? Check out NWMax. Produced by the DragonLance Adventures team to manage the huge content demands for their upcoming module, this wonderful, time-saving tool will help you craft new models and tilesets faster and easier than ever before. It's based on discreet's free gmax software, and while NWmax won't model for you, it does remove the barriers to community creation of 3d content. From the interested amateur to the advanced builder - this is an exceptional tool at the very best price - FREE. Discuss.

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Article on D&D and ToEE at Kuro5hin
Posted Wednesday, April 14, 2004 - 3:34 CET by chevalier

Kuro5hin have posted a long article looking into the details of D&D rules implementation in computer roleplaying games, particularly the Temple of Elemental Evil. Here's a snip:

The problems experienced by TOEE users might be best described as systemic, rules based problems that were not developed by Troika, but by RPG rules publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC), a bastardized version of what TSR used to be in its hey-day, prior to the removal of a very important figure from the company: The Father of RPG, Gary Gygax, first created Dungeons & Dragons with a bunch of people who hung out with him regularly, and it was through this intensive and subjective process that the rules of all future video games were spawned. Hit points, stats, skills and all were first developed by Gary using Tolkien's work as a solid base for story and development, following the footsteps of military styled board games, yet significantly altering the process to suit a whole new genre of gameplay: the Pencil & Paper Role Playing Game (PPRPG).

Read the whole thing at Kuro5hin.

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SP Happenings #45
Posted Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 20:25 CET by Sorcerer

A couple more reviews have been added in the Mod Reviews forum since the last SP Happenings, so check them out if you haven't yet.

I've been pretty busy with the site redesign over the last few days, and while it's tedious and slow work converting all of the existing content, reorganizing it for the new design, and adding new content at the same time, I'm making progress. Today I spotted a bug in the conversion script by pure accident, but I'm glad I did, because it was something which would require all of the pages to be re-checked manually later if left in. Hopefully BTA will squish this annoyance and I'll be able to go back to converting soon. In the meantime, I'll have my hands full with testing the content I've converted thus far, and adding new content connected with the optional Community Supporter accounts.

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Latest Poll Results
Posted Tuesday, April 13, 2004 - 17:07 CET by Sorcerer

What we asked:

Q: Are you going to download the Community Expansion Pack (CEP) for Neverwinter Nights?
(214 votes total)

Yes, definitely (131) 61%
Maybe, haven't decided yet (51) 24%
No, never (32) 15%

Nearly two thirds of people who have voted (61%) are going to download the Community Expansion Pack for Neverwinter Nights.

24% of poll participants were still undecided at the time of voting, but only 15% voted that they will never download the CEP.

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Site Redesign and New CODI Screenshots at CODI Homepage
Posted Sunday, April 11, 2004 - 22:59 CET by chevalier

City of Doors Initiative have redesigned their homepage and published new screenshots of their project implementing Planescape material into Neverwinter Nights engine featured in the last BioWare Wednesday. Behold the screenshots at CODI.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Sunday, April 11, 2004 - 17:07 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Dragon Shape: The epic feat "Dragon Shape" now grants a +6 enhancement bonus on the claws.

Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

HotU campaign: The HotU OC was play balanced for this amount of experience being given out. If we changed it at this point, it would make the HotU OC way too easy (and not much fun to play), or would require us to redo large parts of the OC in order to rebalance it (too late to be doing at this stage). So this is the desired and intended XP behavior for the OC and we currently have no plans of changing it.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

AtariOnDemand: For the record, the AtariOnDemand service, while interesting, is no relation to the DD Project as being discussed here at BioWare. But yes, it does appear that more and more companies are beginning to explore the concept of digitally distributed products. I expect the industry is going to undergo a pretty fundamental shift in this regard over the next 10 years.

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The Temple of Elemental Evil Review at WarGamer
Posted Friday, April 9, 2004 - 14:02 CET by chevalier

WarGamer have posted a six page long in-depth review of the Temple of Elemental Evil, without a rating. Here's a snip:

The good news is that from there I had lots of options. First, I was given the choice of my party's overall alignment. Then I was allowed to either custom build up to five characters or choose them from a list of pre-generated ones. Being an experienced RPGer, I built all of my own from scratch. My only complaint in this department was that the selection of character portraits was limited, and most of those available were, well, really ugly. I got the distinct impression from those portraits that it was assumed I would be playing characters of an evil alignment. Sorry Troika, but my monk is lawful good and the rest of the party tagged along with one flavor or good or another. I would have appreciated some portraits that better reflected those choices, but aside from that quibble the character generation process was enjoyable and I loved the freedom of creating my party entirely from scratch.

Read the whole thing at WarGamer.

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Neverwinter Nights Review at Four Fat Chicks
Posted Friday, April 9, 2004 - 13:57 CET by chevalier

Four Fat Chicks have posted a review of Neverwinter Nights, without giving it any rating except for a thumb up. Here's an excerpt:

Mommy G was an asskicker. Mommy G wielded a longsword and sliced right through everything that got in her way. She tried to be a good person most of the time, though. As always in these games, Mommy G met her maker on a regular basis, especially at the beginning. After she moved up a couple of experience levels, though, she became tougher and lasted longer in battle. That's when the game started being fun—I'm never too fond of dying all the time in any game.

Once you get into the meat of the game, you mostly get the standard step-n-fetch tasks, with the occasional brain-bender thrown into the mix. Neverwinter Nights usually gives you several quests to work on at any given time, so if you're hornswoggled by one, you can just go on to the next, and chances are the first will resolve itself along the way.

Read the whole thing at Four Fat Chicks.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Friday, April 9, 2004 - 13:54 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Multiple servers: I think using multiple servers (hardware) or server instances (same machines) for large modules is recommended - it's the original idea we had with NWN - running a hub module and distributing adventurers to other areas, worlds, servers, planes, whatever. The main problem why this never became too popular was persistency (IMO) - people want their world to be consistent and persistent, more than was originally expected (I'm guessing here, I wasn't working at Bioware when this was discussed). Things have changed since then. We have BWDB - granted it's not the fastest way of storing data and not really helpful if you have a lot of players, stuff going on - but it has it's merits (i.e. you can use it move henchmen between servers with a player. Then there is NWNX2 and it's cool plugins, which allows for virtually 100% persistency between your worlds. And there are variables on items...However, it's not an easy task to split your world once it has been created and you need to put a lot of work into the management for inter server communications - but if you do, you can achieve a couple of things a "one module" approach can't deliver.

- Expansion areas: You can make areas in your world that are only accessible by players with the expansion pack - doesn't sound too exciting, but think of it this way: This allows you to run a "plain vanilla" main area where people can enter your server, get a feel for it and engage in your world even if they have just NWN, maybe not even a hakpak. You still can make use of special tilesets and features in the expansion packs for all those who have them installed by running expansion servers

- Rolling changes/hotswapping. You can close off certain areas in your world for modification without having to put down your server - you even could completely replace one part of your world on the fly (i.e. that nice elven kingdom with a twisted version after it was run over by the drow armies)

- Management overhead - Smaller modules result in less managment overhead. Two 50MB modules have an edge over the single 100MB module, at least when it comes to game

- More players - through this forces you to cleverly design your world to make sure players are distributed over it - but that can be helpful as well, it's not really desirable to have all your 64 players concentrated in one spot anyway.

- Different rules. You can have very different rulesets on different servers, ranging from different difficulty settings to pvp rules to modified .2da's in a different hakpak.

Nice features and clever world design can lessen the impact a multi server world has on your players. Distinctive design borders between the modules/areas running on different servers help (i.e. an "underdark" server or "the continent overseas" server) as they can simulate distance / travel time. Using NWNX you can allow communication between server by providing things like a "pigeon postal service" to deliver information to player on another server. NWNX2 also can help to create portal lists (i.e. that chalkboard at the habour to the "new world" where every player who is currently playing on the "new world server" is listed) - so players can find their friend much easier. As for performance - that's probably more for the Linux forum - it should be possible to create a script that "renices" process priority of empty servers - cutting cpu usage by empty servers down.

Quivers:

Quote: Didn't DLA already make dynamic quivers?

Yepp, but I think they used the armor appearance changes to add a neck part with the quiver. In any case they pointed out that using VFX could allow the community to do these things far more efficiently and that you should be able to add your own VFX and specify if they align with the player instead of overriding the few effects that were hardcoded to do so. So yes, a properly constructed VFX could probably used to simulate all kinds of neat equipment like quivers, sheath, exploded heads or even cars, coaches or ships (no more weird polymorphs). We experimented with that stuff in Hordes a bit (check the last entry in visualeffects.2da) and found some interesting use for it.

Delay Commands:

On DelayCommands:

There is no hard rule what's better or worse DelayCommands or Using heartbeats - each way of scripting has it's own merits, but there are a couple of common misconceptions. If you take a 6 second heartbeat and replace it with a 6 second delay command chain, you will most likely not see any improvement, you would probably have a small performance hit as there is a management overhead for running those delayed commands. If there are a lot of pending delayed commands, I can set things becoming problematic (Tim can surely say more about that than I can). A situation you might want to avoid is something like delaying several commands up for execution in an OnHitCastSpell script or any other event a player might get influence over the execution frequency - especially OnHitCastSpell can run out of control very fast (the usual high level weapon master in the crowd of goblins). So just not using heartbeats will not give you any performance gain, you need to be careful and profile actual script execution.

Get*ObjectInShape troubles: Just wanted you scripters to know that GetFirst / GetNextObjectInShape have been identified to cause problems in some very specific setups.

If you have something running a GetFirst/GetNextObjectInShape loop
AND
This loop runs a damaging effect on NPCs
AND
the damaging effect is NOT delayed

There is the potential for a corruption of the "current object pointer" that is used for that loop, causing it to ignore certain objects in the area of effect and maybe further instabilities. This problem will probably be fixed in a future patch and there are a few scripts that are affect by this which will be changed with the patch as well. In the meantime, if you have scripts that match those conditions outlined above (most likly only custom spell or trap scripts), you should make a minor change to them to prevent the problem from happening. Example if your script looks like this:

o1 = GetFirstObjectInShape
while (GetIsObjectValid (o1))
{
effect eDamage = EffectDamage(d6());
ApplyEffectToObject( DURATION_TYPE_INSTANT,eDamage,o1);
}
o1 = GetNextObjectInShape

Change it to

o1 = GetFirstObjectInShape
while (GetIsObjectValid (o1))
{
effect eDamage = EffectDamage(d6());
DelayCommand(0.0f,
ApplyEffectToObject( DURATION_TYPE_INSTANT,eDamage,o1);
)
}
o1 = GetNextObjectInShape

Do not remove the creation of the damage effect inside the delayed part of the function, it would detach it from the creator.

Action commands: Any Action* scripting command a creature executes is added to a list of pending actions. If I have a script that does:

ActionMoveToLocation
ActionSpeakString("I'm here");

A character will first move to the specified location and then speak "I am here". Setting the commandable flag on a creature to FALSE means that the list of actions the creature has can no longer be changed until the flag is revoked. This means that the creature will continue to do what is on it's list and then stop. Even commands like ClearAllActions that empty the list of actions of a creature will not work. Using this flag you can construct actions that can not be interrupted by a PC. IF a player would attack a creature with this flag set, the creature will ignore it and not enter combat, because it has been told not to allow any changes to it's current action list.

Further:

currently we can not give any eta on 1.63, could be a few days, could be several weeks - it depends on a lot of different factors. Thanks for your patience, the wait should be worth it.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Dual-wielding vs sword & shield: This is a much debated topic. I like duel-wielding but thre are some pretty big downsides as I see it:

Good things:

1. With all your feats (i.e. Two-Weapons fighting) and proper weapons (i.e.at least one light weapon) the overall -2 to hit for each weapon is pretty low even at moderate levels.
2. The chance to get another roll to hit at the low levels with that extra weapon is the biggest advantage. At higher levels however you do get several attacks in a round and one more might not be a big deal.
3. If you use only one weapon for both hands (i.e. Short sword) you can get double the value out of any feats you take that focus on that weapon.

Bad things

1. Nobody but the Fighter get a lot of feats and you may not want to spend your precious feats on this when there are a lot of things you want to grab.
2. You lose all benefits of having a shield for AC and any potential magical properties that it may have (especially at higher level with better loot). Being able to take one more swing instead of, say, +5 AC, Fire Resistance and Cure Serious Wounds seem a pretty big sacrifice. On that note you also lose the ability to hold anything in that other hand (a torch for example).
3. As mentioned you will have a lot of attacks at higher level anyway- did you want to spend, at minimum, 4 levels of feats for one more attack?

Epic Builds: Well hey there everybody. I was given a heads up on this particular thread as something I might want to step and defuse. Yes, that's the word used- defuse. I must admit I'm a little surprised that the group that is, by my estimation, the very skilled hard core fans would have such concerns about whether content they have helped to create will be featured or that I have dismissed their work wholesale. The reason I am surprised is that I had assumed that most everyone here are experienced with BioWare development process, scheduling and the Wed content queue. The CODI interview we published this week was completed over a month ago, the d20 interview was even older than that. Sometimes material is completed well ahead of time and other times content is rather last minute as unscheduled changes get made.

As for the Epic Builds I think they are an excellent resource that has generated massive discussion, renewed interest in high level modules and campaigns and given me a new assortment of top-flight content to add to this web site. I personally think they are very cool for the amount of detail that they show. I have recently completed the last two of the four epic builds I have received over the last few weeks to our web mark-up master. Despite opinion to the contrary each build requires a certain amount of time to prepare in terms of screenshots and web mark-up. I have received the latest epic build this week 'Puff the Magic Dragon' which I did recommend that the name change because it is simply safer and easier to go with a completely new name over an established name. As for Summoned Red Dragon as the new name I have not decided yet as I'm sure you have noticed that all of the Epic Builds have a two word name such as Damage Adept or Reliable Archer and keeping that convention adds a certain amount of style to the page.

This may be a little out there as far as some people do not really care about such things but...part of my job is keeping material that is published at a certain level of quality. This is why sometimes work on the screens, for example, might be far more work than any sane person would ever want to devote to one screen but that is what is important to me. So with Puff I have 5 epic builds in the queue. You will have also noticed I 'm sure that the last time we ran the Epic Builds items we gave out two a week for three weeks and you now know how fussy I am about synchronicity...

Further:

I see my post did not have the intended effect of explaining in a way how things work out for Wed items. What I was hoping for was that folks would get the idea that I like the epic builds and that they are on the schedule along with other items and we do try to follow a schedule so we on the production side of things can plan for the coming Wed by preapring stuff now. Last minutes things are generally crappy and may contain horrible errors that are unprofessional. We do our best to avoid this by getting an item ready ahead of time, and checking it with a critical eye before we publish it a zillion people. Things take time. If there is an upcoming item that you have a personal stake in you can be assured that it has not been forgotten but may have been pushed back because other item came up before hand that had a time issue associated with them

As an aside, this quote:

Quote: Jay is a Bioware employee, and as such, his opinion (or that of another Bioware employee) on this subject is the only one that matters. We (community) have our personal opinions, but they don't really matter.

Is incorrect. I've said it before and, evidentally, I'll just have to keep on saying it. You people are only reason we keep our doors open. You buy our stuff. I think it makes sense to listen to you. If you do not like our stuff then we all must find other jobs. In fact I can prove that the voice and power of the community is of a reconized importance to Bioware...I have a job. My title as Community Manager says that they are willing to hire someone to oversee this section of the gaming world. Now I think Torias said it best with his we need to settle down here. The epic builds are very cool and headed your way as I helped to get them into the line up for upcoming weeks. I'm very glad they are so popular with folks. They are popular with us too.

So once again to review:

The epic builds are coming. We listen to your opinions. I was hired as proof BioWare thinks you're all important. Every time we release a game we want you like it. I like pie.

Jonathan Epp, Quality Assurance

SetSkyBox: For this particular function (SetSkyBox), I was the one who asked Craig to put it in. I thought it was a good idea, and definitely saw the value in having such a function. It's possible Craig had even seen a request for such a thing on the boards before I asked him though. I know I saw a request for it here shortly after that. And that request I saw had another interesting little suggestion that I hadn't thought of that just might get in...So in other words, these boards are a good place to post suggestions. It's not the only place we go looking for ideas (we have minds of our own too, you know!), but we do lurk around sometimes to pick out a few things from time to time...

Less used features:

Quote: Scripting? Use F2 to complete a line (I use it all the time when typing the lengthy DURATION_TYPE_TEMPORARY lines in coding. Also eliminates most spelling errors, as long as you know the first three letters of the words. Works for constants, functions, etc. Double-clicking the words in the right-hand box also adds them nicely.

Do many people know about this? To me, this is one of the most useful little features the toolset has - anybody who does scripting should use this. To expand on Eldernurin's comments, hitting F2 will open up a list. If you have started typing a few letters, it will select the first thing starting with those letters, or the closest thing to it if there is no exact match. Use the arrow keys to find exactly what you want, and hit enter. The list will contain all functions, constants, and variables. This includes both the default ones (nwscript), as well as any in include files that are being used, and in the currently open file. If any don't show up, you may just need to save out the script file so that the editor will re-read what's currently in it. The Filter option on the right can also affect what is shown in the list, so make sure the Filter field is empty if you can't find what you're looking for.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Encounters:
I'm not sure if it still works this way (been a while since I tested this), but we originally planned for encounters to be triggerable by NPCs. The thought was that an individual player would activate the encounter and spawn-in some bad guys, then they would trigger their own encounter and spawn in reinforcements for the player. (Think the cavalry coming over the hill to rescue the player.)

Tim Smith, Programmer

TMIs: TMIs are only generated when the current script running requires more than a preset number of NWScript instructions. It has nothing to do with real execution time.

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Article on Same Sex Romance in RPGs at Slate
Posted Friday, April 9, 2004 - 13:43 CET by chevalier

Slate.msn.com have posted an article on same sex romance in computer games, especially RPG and most notably the Temple of Elemental Evil. After a brief summary of same sex romance opportunities in games, they move on to men playing attractive female characters, effeminate male NPCs and straight players facing unwanted same sex courtship.

How's this for virtual reality? Even as President Bush tries to squash gay marriage with the Constitution, same-sex unions are beginning to crop up in video games. Recently, Atari released The Temple of Elemental Evil, a computer game based with nerdish precision on the actual dice-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons rules. It has the requisite elf magic and fighting orcs—but it also has a gay wedding, as Matthew D. Barton described in his (rather stunned) online review of the game. Barton brought his scrappy band of adventurers into a town where they met a slave character named Bertram. He explained that if Barton could defeat Bertram's master in battle, Bertram would repay him by marrying one of the male members of his group. Barton duly won Bertram's freedom and watched as two male characters were cheerfully wed.

Read everything at Slate

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Latest Poll Results
Posted Thursday, April 8, 2004 - 20:09 CET by Sorcerer

What we asked:

Q: How much RAM does your gaming machine have? (Click on My Computer on your desktop, then hold Alt and press Enter to look it up.)
(456 votes total)

512MB (177) 39%
More than 512MB (132) 29%
256MB (75) 16%
128MB (29) 6%
384MB (17) 4%
Between 128MB and 256MB (9) 2%
Less than 128MB (7) 1%
Between 256MB and 384MB (6) 1%
Between 384MB and 512MB (4) 1%

Much to my surprise (obviously, as the poll didn't even go into specifics after 512MB), the wide majority of our visitors who voted in this poll are more than sufficiently equipped with RAM. 39% of them voted that their gaming machines are equipped with 512MB of RAM.

Equally impressive, 29% of people who voted have more than 512MB at their disposal.

16% of poll participants have 256MB, followed by 6% of those with only 128MB.

4% have a decent 384MB, followed by a little less decent "between 128MB and 256MB" of 2%.

Standing with 1% each are the last three values: "less than 128MB", "between 256MB and 384MB" and "between 384MB and 512MB".

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BioWare Wednesday
Posted Wednesday, April 7, 2004 - 21:23 CET by Sorcerer

(Only the D&D-related part posted.)

NWN City Of Doors Initiative Profile
Heads up berks! The City Of Doors Initiative, "Foundation", is almost here. We tracked canny CODI team leader Papermonk down in his birdcage and got the latest chant about the project before he could wriggle away and give us the laugh. CODI is all about bringing the revered Planescape setting to NWN, and if you're not barmy, you'll check it out. If you are barmy, drop me a note 'cause I got some prime Gehenna real estate if you've got the jink! Discuss.

NWCon II is coming April 16-18!
Last Year's NWCon was a huge success and this year's event will be even better. Swing by and attend DMed sessions, multiplayer DM-less mods, PvP arenas, and team events, all scheduled through the Neverwinter Connections player matching service. Plan to attend the expert panel discussions on a wide variety of topics that include Designing and Building Long Term Campaigns, Playing PnP Style, Custom Content Creation, and much more! NWCon events will run Friday April 16 to Sunday April 18, with a kickoff extravaganza on the evening of Thursday, April 15. For more information, visit the NWNCon Site, forums, and online store. Discuss.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 22:38 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Witch's Wake: WW1 is pretty is pretty short (about 3 hours) so you can probably burn through it in an evening or two. If you intend to continue with the series, I will recommend you play the Remastered version as it includes some new database functionality that allows me to track the choices you make in WW1 and apply them to what goes on in the rest of the series. The original version of WW1 doesn't have this. As I said, though, the module's pretty short and I suspect a lot of people will enjoy playing through both versions of the module. If you want an idea of what to expect from the Witch's Wake series, play through the Charwood subplot in the NWN OC or Chapter 3 of HotU, as I wrote those as well. And I definitely recommend checking out some of the top fan-created modules on the Vault as there's some really top-notch stuff there.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Animations: One thing regarding Bioware encounter triggers / spawners - All monsters created by those get the flagged with "mobile ambient animations" - this will cause them to run a some code in their heartbeat script that has been identified as "taxing" on the game performance while we were working with Hordes. While this isn't a problem in your average module, it will become a problem on huge world setups like the ones posted here. Especially if you experience frequent action queue overflow or timeouts messages in your DM client message area, you should try to avoid this kind of setup - one solution is to recompile the default AI scripts after deactivating the line that makes monsters use the ambient animation system when they get spawned.

CPU usage: There is no problem here. High CPU usage does not cause lag in the game (it may cause lag in other applications running at the same time, but that's the reason why it is recommended closing all other applications when you run a game).

Feedback: I would replace "complain" and "whine" with "ask for". Sure some people complain and whine, but usually it's those that submit well written proposals/requests that make the difference. Someone gave us a very good reason to include SetSkyBox, we found their request compelling and there it is...If we hadn't constantly improved NWN over the last couple of years, adding 200+ new scripting commands, new functionality for both game and toolset, the game wouldn't be as popular as it is right now.

I don't see us trapped in some kind of vicious circle here, allowing us to collect and integrate feedback from our community is one of the great benefits this site offers us, and one of the reasons for the continuing success of NWN. If we had stopped improving NWN after release, I don't think a lot of people would be still playing it. Sure, every once in a while someone whines, but hey, we have over 1,700,000 registered users, chances are good that someone will complain in a negative way - the positive feedback still has the upper hand. The next patch is going to change/add several other things the people from the custom content community have asked for so they can make even better modules.

Game crashes: This problem sounds like you have a problem with your machine, probably broken RAM or a hard drive problem. I have heard that there is the possiblity of the toolset corrupting a module if you run it in the game the same time it is open in the toolset and manage to crash it. But I'm not aware of anything that could corrupt the whole game, especially consistently. We worked with about 10 people on hordes, about 10 hours a day for several month, and I can only remember a single time a module got corrupted (reason above) and that's the reason why the toolset now performs auto backups on your modules.
Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer

Patches:

Quote: Actually, you want the second one if you have HotU installed. The first is for if you only have NWN. I think x1 is for SoU and x2 is for HoTu and what does x12 stand for ? Those who have both?

Yep x12 for those that have expansion pack 1 & 2 installed.

x1 for expansion pack 1 (SoU) only.
x2 for expansion pack 2 (HotU) only.
pc for NWN installed without any expansion packs.

The updater will try to go to the Internet to find the patch, if the patch files found in your NWN directory either don't have the right game version number, or don't have the correct prefix for the expansion packs that you have installed.

Forum languages: People are welcome to come and discuss topics on our forums in the language of their choosing. Not everyone speaks English well, and our games are frequently translated into other languages. You will notice that there are language settings that appear on the left sidebar in some of our forums.

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SP Happenings #44
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 22:27 CET by Sorcerer

With the long-awaited site update now done, I should be able to go back to the site redesign and have something to show in that department shortly. Expect news on that next week. We've had some quite interesting developments on the message boards over the last week with The Sensorium and Mod Reviews forums opening, and old Whatnots getting archived. We now also have the first review in the Mod Reviews forum: Ascension/WeiDU. Check it out and post your comments.

Server Problems, Part 2: I've done all that I could in the attempt to bring memory usage on the server down, but it really helped very little. As the server will be hit even harder once the new design goes live, having to get more RAM is only a matter of time. For now, I've managed to stabilize the server, but the memory overload is noticeable in some areas. If it gets any worse, I'll really have no choice but to shell out that extra $270 a year for a memory upgrade.

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The Temple of Elemental Evil Review at Realgamer
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 22:25 CET by chevalier

Realgamer have posted a review of the Temple of Elemental Evil and given it a rating of 7.6. Here's a clip:

Missions and sub-quests are pretty varied and allow your characters to gain experience and skills as well as earn some valuable items such as weapons and gold. Unless however, you are an experienced player of Dungeons and Dragons you have a good chance of adding useless skills to your characters so taking time to understand what everything and everyone does in invaluable to the game.

The Temple of Elemental Evil boasts some great graphics, environments are huge and nicely detailed and character models are animated brilliantly. Clothing flutters and ripples in the wind and lighting, shadows and spell effects are impressive.

Read the rest at Realgamer.

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Baldur's Gate 3 and Neverwinter Nights 2 Rumours Clarified
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 22:22 CET by chevalier

Atari PR have come to explain what Grok really meant to say. While BG3 and NWN2 are intended to happen at some point, they are far from being officially announced. Apparently, it really was no April Fool Joke, but nothing serious either. Here's an excerpt:

Well, now that we're into the working week, we've had a chance to check with that very same Atari PR rep, Brandon Smith, as to just what's going on. As it stands right now, neither title has been officially announced. Rather, the point of his post was to say that Atari owns the rights to both of these franchises (and all new Dungeons & Dragons videogames for that matter), and has no intention to abandon either of them. In other words, even if Baldur's Gate III is not in active development right now, Atari has every intention of producing another Baldur's Gate title for the PC. Further, they know very well that another BG title has big shoes to fill, given the glowing reception that the first two games received from both critics and players. Atari wants to do right by the series.

Read the whole thing at IGN.

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Steve Moret Interview at Troika Chronicles
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 22:15 CET by chevalier

Troika Chronicles have interviewed Steve Moret on the Temple of Elemental Evil Patch 2. They discuss the features, current status and probable release date. Here's a snip:

What bugs have been fixed in the second patch and are there somethings you want to fix in future patches?

Lots of prototype changes (size fixes for items, value corrections, weapon type changes), a few magic items were incorrect (e.g. Jaer's Spheres of fire) those are fixed, we've revamped the random number generator, lots of quests have been updated/fixed, a bracer stacking bug has been fixed, a criticals not confirming on a matching AC bug was fixed, some strength bonus bugs with 2handed weapons have been fixed, a bug where magic projectiles helped your melee was fixed, the IO subsystem has been abstracted out so people can write tools that work with the game easier, and a few more miscellaneous bugs have been fixed.

Read the whole thing at Troika Chronicles.

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Site News - New Additions
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 19:45 CET by Sorcerer

Subsection Updates -> Fantasy Books

Forgotten Realms Books subsection: Annihilation (R.A. Salvatore's War of the Spider Queen) added, Elminster's Daughter (The Elminster Series) added, Forsaken House (The Last Mythal) added, Venom's Taste (House of Serpents) added, Dawn of Night (Erevis Cale Trilogy) added, Lady of Poison (The Priests) added.

Dragonlance Books subsection: Temple of the Dragonslayer & The Dying Kingdom (The New Adventures) added, The Legend of Huma & Stormblade (Heroes I Trilogy) new paperbacks added, Tanis, the Shadow Years (Preludes II Trilogy) new paperback added, Amber and Ashes (The Dark Disciple) added, Search for Power (Dragons from the War of Souls) added, Prisoner of Haven & Wizards' Conclave (The Age of Mortals) added.

Terry Pratchett Books subsection: A Hat Full of Sky (Discworld Novels) added, The Art of Discworld (Companions, Guides, Maps and Related Books) added.

3rd Edition D&D Books subsection: Eberron Campaign Setting (Eberron Material) added, Serpent Kingdoms (Forgotten Realms Material) added, Expanded Psionics Handbook, Races of Stone & Planar Handbook (Guidebooks, Handbooks, Sourcebooks) added, Giants of Legend Huge Pack (D&D Miniatures) added, Map Folio Two & Complete Divine (Various Accessories) added.

Miscellaneous Books subsection: Secret of the Spiritkeeper (Knights of the Silver Dragon) added.

Also, many new sample chapters have been added.

Subsection Updates -> Community

Message Boards subsection: Forum listing updated to reflect the recent changes (forum additions, archival, link changes etc.).

Subsection Updates - Games -> Baldur's Gate

Tips, Tricks & Hints subsection: The Great Book of Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast added.

Editors, Hacks & Custom Characters subsection: Claw of Kazgaroth Blur Remover added.

Subsection Updates - Games -> Planescape: Torment

Tips, Tricks & Hints subsection: Stories of Torment added.

Subsection Updates - Games -> Baldur's Gate 2

Tips, Tricks & Hints subsection: Secrets of Journals updated.

Editors, Hacks & Custom Characters subsection: 5 mods added/updated, 2 portrait packs added, 4 mod links added.

Subsection Updates - Games -> Neverwinter Nights

Walkthroughs & Guides subsection: NWN, SoU & HotU Reference Guide updated, 4 new Hordes of the Underdark walkthroughs added.

Tips, Tricks & Hints subsection: Guide to the "Ultimate" Melee Character added, Nasher Leaves His Stuff Lying Around added, Shifter FAQ updated.

Editors, Hacks & Custom Characters subsection: NWN Character Manager Plus added, Epic Character Builds added, Leto updated.

Miscellanea subsection: 1 trailer added.

Toolset & Related subsection:

Main: Community Expansion Pack added.

Subsection #1: 4 new additions.

Subsection #7: 3 new additions.

Subsection Updates - Games -> The Temple of Elemental Evil

Editors, Hacks & Custom Characters subsection: 1 portrait pack added.

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Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2004 - 1:11 CET by chevalier

Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Data storage:

Quote: For variable storage NWNX is also an option. It wouldn't be too hard to write a NWNX plugin to store variables using a balanced binary tree or a hashtable and serialize this data when the DLL is loaded/unloaded. Sure, it means encoding everything to a string, but this is still far more efficient than dealing with the builtin BWDB. I've done this as part of a rather large extension to NWN for our PW and it works quite well.

NWNX is a nice tool for storing data that is not constantly required - i.e. tracking stats (kills, death, house ownership, guild affiliations) - especially the latter ones are required very seldom and there is no need to store them constantly on an object if you can just load them on demand from the database (mysql prefered, ms access odbc is slow). I'd suggest wrapping all Set/Get variable calls into a seperate function for your module so you can run profiling on how often variables are accessed - and decide which ones have to be moved into the database and which not. Variables on items are especially dangerous for huge modules since there will be a lot of items around after a while (I'd noticed this with HCR a lot). In a huge module, you shouldn't do things like tracking the burntime of a torch on the torch itself, I'd try to use a different approach like torches with charges that need to be activated (i.e. create a set of matches item, remove the item property light from the torch by default and add it as temporary item property when the matches are used on the torch).

NWN problems: