Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Thursday, January 16, 2003 - 17:39 CET by Z-Layrex

Here are today's official 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.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Addition To Road Map: Camera-loosening won't be an official change, and will most likely only be available through a console command. There won't be any GUI or art changes done to support this. This is primarily to reduce the amount of I-forgot-to-undo the-Camera-Hack-and-now-I-can't-patch issues.

More:
PhotoShop PLT exporter next week.

Release Dates: Release order does not equal difficulty, nor does it equal importance. And don't assume that there is just one programmer doing all of these things. The Road Map lists the currently expected release order for the features listed, based on their current state as of this morning.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Monks: It's been stated but I made the mistake of thinking Str was super-important for a Monk and it really isn't. It's very nice to have of course but not as important as Dex and Wis. Lots of Monks I have seen played don't wear armor so the free Armor Class bonus from high Wis is an ace way to build that up. Since they have a lot of Rogue skills the Dex thing really helps. Plus most people want to take Weapons Fin with unarmed and the higher the Dex the better the to hit bonus. Monks rock.

Portriats: I have actually gone out and grabbed portrait packs from various places at sites like NW Vault and so on to add to my current portraits. Plus I have added my own cut from art I have found on the net using the portraits tutorial on this web site. I love having a huge amount of portraits as the ones in the box can get overviewed and old after several months.

Patch 1.28: Derek was mentioning today that he is getting most of stuff he wanted to go into the patch up and running. This is very nice as it indicates that no extreme wierdness was encountered that would set things back 100 years in it's release. Should be soon...

SoU: Keep in mind folks that I have read reviews of SoU's game play on different sites as well. This is a bit of shock since it is not released, finished or even working properly yet. All prices, reviews and release dates mentioned by retailers or other folks are pure speculation unless otherwise stated as fact here. In other words, we do not have a clue what the price will be. Remember Floodgate, with help from BioWare, is creating SoU and it is the area of the publisher to market, distribute and ultimately sell the product. There is a huge difference between developer and publisher.

Rob Bartel, Co Lead Designer

Subraces In Witch Wake: To those of you experiencing subraces mid-game, I apologize. There were some troubles in the subrace code for WW1 so, at the last minute I made the decision to remove it. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to catch all of the code so there are times when it still crops up. If I re-integrate subraces into WW, it will be a collection of custom subraces designed specifically for the series (ie: not the standard Faerun races currently cropping up). Some of the beta testers are currently working to integrate them into WW1 for those who wish to replay the module with the appropriate subrace.

In the meantime, I've been busy rewriting a lot of the template scripts in preparation for WW2 (just finishing up the ability checks in conversation -- if all goes as planned, you'll be able to retry failed checks but the DC will increase with each failure). There's a Witch Wake survey buried beneath the red tape somewhere, too, and hopefully it will emerge fairly soon. It has some good questions on it and I'm looking forward to getting feedback from everyone.

WW Template: Sorry, the frozen player syndrome is a product of some sloppy code on my end that I never did clean up in the template. I was doing some preliminary cutscene stuff in the OnClientEnter event that I should have been doing in the AreaOnEnter event instead. As such, when I grabbed all of the latest WW1 resources and reintroduced them into the Template, that one came along for the ride. If you look in the hc_inc_on_enter.nss script, you'll see some SetCommandable() functions. SetCommandable(FALSE) freezes you and SetCommandable(TRUE) frees you again. Fiddle around a bit in there and you should be able to get it working.

Darcy Pajak, Assistant Producer

Use Magic Device: First let me say there are some great ideas in this thread, some of them we haven't thought of. We'll be sure to consider them when looking at UMD. Second, our goal is always to keep the fans happy and satisfied while playing NWN. The feedback these forums provide actually goes a long way in guideing our design decisions. Finally, we have not looked at spicifics regardign UMD yet, as we are focused on SoU, and XP2 (name comming soon). So I'm going to lock this thread. Thanks for the feedback everyone, especially SirFrancis, Torias, Carl, and Vanor. You guys rock!

Riding Animals: Adding riding animals is just about the hardest thing we can do for NWN. We have no plans to do this for SoU, or the second expansion pack.

X-Pack Question: The expansion pack will come out when it's done. (current plan is early spring). And it will cost what the publisher and the vendors feel it's worth.