Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Sunday, November 9, 2003 - 4:01 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

Live Team: There is a lot of Live Team stuff that will hit the community with HotU/1.33:

- user talktables
- hakpak conflict analyzer
- extended store functionality
- won't tell
- won't tell
- ...

The Live Team was quite busy with that stuff (in addition to creating patches, etc) - that's the reason why there were no "new content" releases after Shadows.

Quote: I'd love it if the shapes would be almost as good as their real specialist counterpart (eg. fighting shape vs fighter), since you don't get all items transferred, can't use any items beside potions, and so on. Then again, a mind flayer would do the job.

That would take away the point of playing one of the other classes I guess. No a properly built fighter will always be more powerful than a shifter shapeshifted into a fighting form, but the shifter combined with any druid buffs or special abilities he might have from another class isn't bad either. Plus they have the flexibility of just jumping into mindflayer shape and blasting those with a low willsave

To use a shifter NPC with the AI need to do a custom AI script. The default AI doesn't handle shifting as it doesn't handle polymorph or a druid's shapeshifting ability now - the reasons for this are multiple and anyone a bit deeper into AI scripting will be able to explain them to you if you are interested. The good thing is that HotU makes it much easier to write a custom AI.

Bard Song: Depending on which route you go, you actually may Not want to pick lingering song/lasting inspiration. Why? If you want to make extensive use of the damaging effect of curse song, you want the duration to be as short as possible, as creatures that are affected by the song will not take damage from singing the song again until the song has expired. However, with lasting inspiration you can make pretty sure that the debuff effect of curse song/buff effect of bard song lasts as long as possible ... your choice.

Quote: If they implement the D&D maths correctly for bonus stacking, it's 105 rounds with lingering song. Any multiplcation is done on the original unmodified number, and THEN flat additions are added.

It's 105.

Visual Effects: You could overwrite the mdl files for original ones, but yes, Astorax is correct, anything that is a ProgFx (-> VisualEffects.2da) is hardcoded. HotU will add a variety of new beams (no sound versions of existing ones, no sparks version for some, black and green beams, a flamethrower beam and a "metal chain" beam).

Trent Oster, Producer

Dwarven Defender: As a Dwarven Defender I never stepped out without my handy dandy Dwarven Waraxe. It is a new base weapon, but it uses the battle axle appearance type. We added a few new battle axe graphics to fill out the set though.

Adamantium Golem: When you meet up with the Adamantium Golem it goes very badly for you very quickly. I wandered in and was quickly knocked down and stepped on until dead. My advise is save often!

David Gaider, Designer

Campaign: With such a short campaign, the chance of having class-specific content is pretty low... the chance of having prestige class-specific is almost nil. Ergo, no quests in the HotU OC will recognize the fact you are a shifter or what form you are in... it IS scriptable, however, as shifting forms does change your actual racial type.