Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Monday, May 26, 2003 - 17:20 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.

David Gaider, Designer

AI: The AI's better in some respects, such as spell-casters choosing their spells, but we haven't had the time to devote to it that we might have otherwise liked. Hold us to a higher standard or not, we have a lot to do... a bright and dedicated fan with a very specific agenda and lots of time is always going to have the potential to outperform us, like it or not. I can understand the desire to only look out for official updates, but they're not always going to include everything you want. And as far as henchman leading a PC rather than following... I can tell you right now that that's just not going to happen. Wow, I can't even begin to imagine what that would require beyond the henchman making his or her own decisions on where to go and leaving you to follow or not. Which woiuld make it beside the point, really.

Statues With Petrification:: I don't think the stoneskin effect has been changed.... on some creatures you're going to see the swirling rock thingy and that's all there is to it. There's a reason for that which one of the artists explained a long time ago, but I don't remember it anymore, sorry. You can make statues with the petrification effect, sure... just remember that the creature still shows up as a creature in the engine. The player will be able to examine the creature and see the description, along with the status icon indicating that it's been petrified. If you're okay with that, then go hard.

Item Costs: The info I collected for this is in the hands of the Live Team, and it's something I'm told that they intend to work on... in time. They have a number of other higher-priority projects on their plate, currently.

Quote: All they need to do is allow us to put negative numbers in the "additional cost" box. I really can't see why this is hard to code for them...

I don't think there is any difficulty associated with this. When was that said? Just because it isn't difficult, however, doesn't mean we'll get right on it. We go through our lists in order of priority, not ease. Lower-priority stuff might get done out of order if it's perhaps encountered and fixed on the way to something else. So the Live Team will get to this eventually, even if it's not as snappy as you might like.

Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager

Evil Druids: My take on Druids is that they are balanced between good and evil as nature serves neither. I think the concept of an evil druid would in line with a druid that has chosen to support a group that has opposing views to the player characters (such as a band of orcs and so on). The druid will seem evil in the eyes of the players but they will have there own reasons for doing so. This does not mean that there are no eeeeeevil druids out there however. I just think that a druid will work for it's own or nature's own purpose which may run counter to PCs.

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Command Line ERF Tool: I don't know if one's freely available or not, but all the information required to build one is now freely available on this site for the enterprising person (people?) willing to give it a shot.