Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 1:42 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.
Derek French, Assistant Producer
Linux: Let me be very clear here. As soon as all the issues that are critical for releasing the Linux Beta are resolved, we will be posting the files. Not one second longer. We are just not at the state right now. You want a Beta. I want you to have the Beta. We are just not there, yet.
1.28 Patch: Unfortunately, it only rears its ugly head in a specific situation and we would have to add a huge amount of exception processing and art changes to fix this. This bug was evaluated quite extensively and due to time contraints, we won't be able to address it at this time. In that same time frame, we estimate that we can fix about 5 other gameplay affecting bugs over this rather prominent visual annoyance. Hopefully, we will have a beta 1.28 for you early next week.
Quote: And the worst blow of all: the camera angle. I was *astounded* by Bioware's complete disregard for their *MANY* upset customers who complained about this game-design flaw. When at last a player in the community hacked the .exe to unlock the camera, Bioware's great lie ("It Cannot Be Done") was unmasked, and I lost a ton of respect for this company.
We have NEVER said it could not be done. We are, in fact, giving you a console command in the next patch to unlock the camera slightly. What we did say about the camera angle, is that we designed the camera angle and the world that way intentionally and have not plans to change it in an official capacity.
Henchman AI: We're definitely trying to improve the survivability of henchmen in addition to improving their interaction. For example, we're trying to get them to respond to 'go stealthy' commands, so rogues and bards can sneak around with their stealthy henchmen. We're also hoping to implement a 'Don't attack until I'm attacked' command. This way your henchman won't go tearing off at the first sight of a beastie. With any luck you'll be genuinely sad when your henchman kicks the bucket. And we're working on something for that as well...
Al Schilling, Product Manager, MacSoft
Mac: I really don't have anything new to post but I wanted to assure you that (between jelly doughnuts, Fooey) I am following the posts. We are still being held up by some issues with video drivers but, progress is being made. Hopefully, I'll have some more info for all next week.
Trent Oster, Producer
Reflections: I know, missing a detail like than in a little game like NWN, what were we thinking . Seriously the reflection system is quite complicated and we had a lot of difficulty ourselves. With the limited resources available to the Live effort, bugs like this may languish for a while. We try to fix the biggest bugs we can and with the variety of things you fellows are trying keep bringin up new issues which would never be seen in a traditional commercial game.
Rick Ernst, Lead Designer, Floodgate Entertainment
SoU Release: In many cases, the delay before an american-developed product's release in Eruope is due to localization. (Translation, for the most part) This not always the case, nor is it the only factor.
Quote: With that said the people that do TV, Movie, and Video Games ratings (like ESRB) can suck my ****. Always blaming depicted violence as being the cause for social deviance. Who do you think is more likely to kill someone? A person playing video games that depict people being killed or a person that lives in an impoverished area? Personally, I think the person playing video games (enough to where it would effect their mood) would be too busy playing video games to go out and commit crimes.
I've spoken with the fine folks at the ESRB and the last thing they would ever do is blame video games for violence. The ESRB works very hard to be an impartial ratings board so that consumers can make informed decisions about what they buy. I think they do an admirable, and underated, job very well. Keep in mind that the ESRB is pretty much the only thing preventing legislators from passing laws making certain types of video games unlawful. Do not speak ill of the ESRB. They are our industry's reaction to concerned people who do not understand video games. They are on our side. If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at the sound-bite chasing legislators who always look to popular culture as an easy scapegoat come election time.
Quote: 14 monsters sounds good to me. I hope that's 14 monster types though, I can't imagine 1 Wyrmling being much good, you need one for every colour of dragon.
There will be wyrmlings for each color of dragon, and then some...
The rural winter tileset is, as its name implies a winter version of the rural set. I think Tom's description of it as a very detailed reskinning (with added details) is accurate. And as for those wyrmlings, they sure are cute. And then there was this other small dragon that had just the prettiest...Gotta go - Rick and Darcy are coming after me with Sea Bass.
14 new monsters means just that. We aren't counting each wyrmling as a new monster, we aren't counting each formian as a new monster, we aren't counting each... Oh, wait, I can't say that yet, can I? Never mind. In any case, 14 new monster types.
Tilesets: I suspect you may be a bit surprised to discover that each tile set is made up of around 200 to 250 tiles. Each element of terrain (such as the suggested water or tree tiles) added to a tile set requires around 30 to 40 new tiles. The more types of terrain you have in a tile set, the more tiles each individual terrain type needs to have. If you add water tiles to the forest, for example, you need water tiles that border forest floor, tiles that border cliff, tiles with roads across them, tiles that border the pit, tiles with pit on one side and cliff on the other... on and on and on.
Creating a new tile set is a huge undertaking, and adding a new terrain type to an existing tile set is still a huge amount of work. Though system requirements are an issue, due to the additional textures that a terrain type would require, the biggest issue is simply the artist (and as ever, QA) resources needed to put one of these things together and make sure it works. Hope that puts our additional three new tilesets for SoU into perspective somewhat.