Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Tuesday, February 11, 2003 - 21:13 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.

Mark Brockington, Lead Research Scientist

Memory Leak: No, I do not promise it will definitely be in 1.28. I only promised that I would look at this in ten hours when I get to the office. There are other stakeholders who determine what gets into each official patch.

I didn't state this earlier in the thread, but thank you for pointing this problem out to us. I did look at the bug this morning and replicated the bad behaviour in a nice little unit test. It's a nasty problem (not simply a missing destructor). We are currently trying to figure out how to fix it in a safe way that doesn't create new bugs.

David Gaider, Designer

NWN 2: I understood that he was talking about a sequel. There have been a lot of things which people have suggested (some of which were on his list) which we have consistently stated would require the kind of team that would exist to create a sequel and not an expansion... hence his list, I imagine. The real consideration for these things is whether or not we would be looking at creating a brand new engine for a sequel or whether an attempt would be made to incorporate features such as a proper z-axis and graphical layers for open-faced helmets and clothing and such into the current engine. Making a new engine means you give up the benefits of having an already-stable engine to begin work on (which is an ideal place to be, production-wise, such as was the situation going from BG to BG2). Using an old engine, however, means that while many major upgrades may indeed be possible some things just will not be. Things like the z-axis and graphical layers were put aside long ago in NWN's development as problematic... so I'm really not sure which end of the scale those two features would fall on, here. Mind you, I'm not even certain whether plans exist for a NNW2 at this point. Still... it doesn't hurt to make suggestions for what you'd like to see. Certainly there's more latitude for larger changes than in an expansion, and I know I'd rather see suggestions like this for a sequel than have people asking for the impossible out of an expansion.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Resolutions: Sorry, but we had to drop the official 640x480 as there was just not enough room for all the GUI elements. I will get that part of the FAQ fixed up tomorrow.

1.28 Patch Size: It will be about this size because we are moving our override files into a patch BIF. So we are deleting 32 Meg in the override directory, and extracting a 32 meg patch BIF. Can't be helped at this point.