Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Tuesday, January 14, 2003 - 23:03 CET by Veldrin

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.


Al Schilling, Product Manager

Mac Update: I just returned from the MacWorld expo where we had a great time showing off NWN Mac! First, thanks to the folks at Bioware, and especially Jay Watamaniuk, who made the trip to SF to meet with the Mac faithful. Jay did an outstanding job and it was an absolute pleasure to have him present at the booth. On the good news side, NWN looks great on the Mac. A few bugs left to squash but the game is quite stable and nearly complete. Just to clear up any confusion about the capabilities of the Mac version; all PC created mods should work with the Mac version and the DM client IS included with the Mac version. All of the parts of the game that Bioware is responsible for are looking great.

Of course the bad news was our announcement that the Aurora Toolset won't make it to Mac. This is obviously very disappointing to Mac users. I can only say that we at MacSoft gave it our best shot. When the estimate for the port came in at double our budget, we still opted to go for it. Unfortunately, after the developer had spent several weeks on the code, they informed me that things were much more complex than they had initially thought and that the estimate would double again. They also warned me that this was an optimistic estimate and that it could be much longer. This should not be considered as a criticism of the developer. I think that people generally have a hard time accepting that toolsets take many years to create and are often more complex than the game engine itself. This makes porting them to another platform extremely difficult. Although I really can't say that porting anything is "impossible", it certainly can be "infeasible".

I'd like to thank those of you that have written in regard to your feelings about the toolset. I'll be monitoring this thread closely for the next few days and would be happy to respond to any well-reasoned opinions or questions.