Neverwinter Nights Forum Update
Posted Monday, November 4, 2002 - 18:42 CEST by Z-Layrex

David Gaider, Designer

Custom Content:

Quote:So guys. for the 99% of the community who haven't a clue how to model does all of this meen? Does it make makeing models quicker and easier? if so by how much? and does this meen that we will finally be getting models flying around all ove the place?

There are still a couple of big issues which need to be resolved on our side before adding custom content into the game is *easy* for the end-user... which mostly revolves around the combining of multiple hakpaks and .2da's. I suspect that the release of the script will go a long way to resolving a lot of issues that the current content builders have had... and maybe make other builders more willing to put work into new content now that something official is out. But is it suddenly going to start raining custom content? No, probably not.

More:
We use 3dsMax 3.1 ourselves, and it wasn't a big leap to provide the script we used for NWN and put some time into making scripts for newer versions of that program. There has been some talk of doing a GMax gamepak, but there are some hurdles involved in that above and beyond finding someone with the time to write it (which in itself is a big hurdle)... so there are no plans for us to do that in the near future.

And More:

Quote: So it took Bioware 3 months to come to this decision and make this announcement? No GMAX Gamepak.

Just because there are hurdles that may prevent gmax support from happening in the NEAR future, it does not mean that it will not occur later on. We were able to get the 3DSMax scripts out to the community today, and we understand the benefit of providing gmax support as well. There are some issues we do not have direct control over that are preventing us in providing that support at this time, but we are doing what we can to find solutions.

Even More:

Quote: I will go a step further and state that "ALL" models, the crappy ones AND the high quality ones, are now going to be created wiht 3dsmax. Bioware just closed an avenue to creating custom content; it's their loss, as a large number of people were banking on a GMAX plugin.

Sorry, but that's not quite correct. There was already a community-made program to export models into NWN before we released our tools. Releasing our tools does not mean that 'suddenly' these models can be created and exported. The documentation that we included with our program, however, will shed a lot of light on the process for the community. Some may choose to use our program, same may use the community-msde one... either way, the documentation is what is going to improve things most community-wide. There is already a community-made GMax plugin, as was mentioned... and the documentation will probably improve its functionality, as well. The inherent limitations of GMax (such as the particle effects) are not going to change no matter what we do. Us not working on a GMax plug-in right now does not close off that avenue of creation any more than our release of the 3DSMax tools suddenly opened it. Hopefully both sides can benefit from the information... and hopefully in time we will be able to work on an official plug-in for GMax once those issues are resolved, as Robin said.

Custom Content: As for the sky texture... very nice. I'd be interested to see what the performance hit (if any) would be and how detailed such a texture could be (animated textures would also be very cool, if possible). If this is something that would end up not being too difficult for builders to use, it could be very cool when combined with a lower camera angle. Definitely something for us to officially consider if it looks good and there are no problems.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Organizing The Toolset: I completely agree with you. Being able to organize the list of areas, conversations, scripts, blueprints, etc. was one of the things I wanted to be able to do, too. Unfortunately, here's the problem:

If you are able to organize the resources in the toolset, it was reasoned, you'd probably want to see them so organized in the DM Client. (That's what I'd expect.) So, since the DM Client is not guaranteed to be on the same computer as the server, it would be necessary to transmit the organizational structure from the server to the DM Client whenever one connected to it. In the case of those modules you describe where you have dozens of areas and hundreds of scripts, you're talking about a huge amount of data. The available bandwidth budget just didn't support that volume of data. This reason also had a direct role in the decision to limit the length of the resource names to 16 characters. No, these aren't the days of the minivacs, but neither can we expect every player to have the good fortune to have a broadband connection.

Conversations: Simply open both conversation files in the Conversation Editor (there're several buttons along the top, including Open), select the node you wish to copy, copy it (ctrl + c or 'Copy' from the context menu) and then paste it (ctrl + v or 'Paste' from the context menu) into the other conversation.

Brenon Holmes, Programmer

EffectHitPointChangeWhenDying(): If I recall correctly, if a player with EffectHitPointChangeWhenDying() on it gets healed above 0, then the effect self terminates. Ie: The effect is only valid while the player in question is actually dying, once they're no longer dying the effect removes itself.

As for the length of time... think of it more like the amount of hitpoints you lose every 6/x seconds. So if you put 0.5, you'll lose a hitpoint every 12 seconds. If you put 0.2 you'll lose a hitpoint every 30 seconds... etc.

(6.0 / x) = time until you lose another hitpoint
(6.0 / 2.0) = 3 seconds (1/2 round)
(6.0 / 1.0) = 6 seconds (1 round)
(6.0 / 0.5) = 12 seconds (2 rounds)
(6.0 / 0.2) = 30 seconds (5 rounds)