Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Friday, July 25, 2003 - 18:29 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. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Expertise: Expertise is working as intended. You must remain stationary to gain any effects for it. It is not intended to help spellcasters avoid getting hit in melee as it is a melee combat feat (read the feat description)

Al Schilling, Product Manager

NWN Mac: I couldn't have said it better myself (or else I certainly would have). Having spent the last several weeks hammering on every little piece of NWN, our QA guys are very impressed with the "depth" of the game. Their concern is that there is so much to the game that it's tough for them to test it all. Tomorrow is D-Day for getting NWN to ship on time. If you don't see me post that all the approvals I've been working on for weeks on have been granted, you can all arrange the lynching party. However, the smart money says we ship July 30 (knock wood).

I'd love to answer your questions but I'm afraid I'm not in a position to do so. MacSoft has absolutely no say as to what Bioware, or anyone else can do with SoU. We have an agreement to publish NWN for Mac. We have no ownership of the IP. As to whether anyone from Infogrames (they're called Atari now) or WotC reads these posts, I really don't know. I worked for Atari until this past February, when MacSoft was purchased by Destineer. At that time, MacSoft handled just about all of the Mac publishing for Infogrames. I'm not sure if there's anyone there now who is monitoring Mac stuff. I can say that MacSoft would really love to publish SoU (and any other expansions) for the Mac. Now that we are days away from releasing NWN, I'm hoping that we can make some headway with getting an agreement in place for the expansions. But, I want to be perfectly straight with you here-don't expect an announcement within the next week or 2. Just to give you an idea of how tough finalizing something like this can be-I once spent 13 months trying to put together a deal for several titles with a certain large toy company. Of course, we don't have that kind of time to do something with SoU. Also, keep in mind that if and when we get a deal done, we'll likely be well under way with development before we can make an official announcement. Official announcements (in the form of press releases) have to be approved by more lawyers than you can imagine. (I know how much you like to hear about approvals so I thought I'd mention them here.)

Don Moar, Tools Programmer

Toolset: Looking at the toolset objectively, well as objectively as I can - :), I know that it is a real mixed bag of interface conventions. And the lack of the documentation that we hoped to provide doesn't help. So don't worry that one of the more obscure operations didn't immediately jump out at you. That being said, please be sure to check some of the fantastic tutorials that are available on this site and elsewhere on the 'net.

Toolset Limitations: Bijwi, you're right. There are more than a few game limitations cooked into the toolset itself. In most cases it was done to keep things as simple for the user as possible. By preventing the value of certain properties from exceeding certain ranges, for example, it frees the game from having to do the validity checks itself (and slowing the game down or outright crashing). If I were to do it again though, I think I'd take the approach of fewer restrictions and more warnings. That way, if you really, really wanted a 1x1024 or 2 x 512 or even larger area, the toolset would tell you that it's not a good idea but you could still do it. The topic of open-sourcing the toolset has been brought up many times in the past. Unfortunately, the toolset is tightly integrated with some of the key game systems. This means that it would require us to open-source them, too and we aren't going to do that.