Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Wednesday, January 14, 2004 - 2:15 CET by chevalier

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

TLK files: As for multiple strings with the same contents, as Tim said, the reason is simple:

Lets assue we have a Toolset GUI label called "Fireball" used for the spell selection when adding a new Cast spell item property. We could of course use the same stringref in game for scrolls, spellbook labels, etc, and save a few bytes each time we do so - But: Now assume someone decides that it would be fine to have the caster level of the spell displayed in the toolset as well, so he changes "Fireball" to read "Fireball: " in order to display the caster level behind it in the Toolset - That would cause all the strings in game to change as well, and that would look pretty stupid in some cases. Another plus of the talktable system: Network bandwith. Instead of sending a potentially long string down to any client, you just need to send a StrRef and the client can access the string locally and display it.

GetLastKiller() problems: GetLastKiller is NPC only. You can use GetLastHostileActor() instead.

Weapon Master: Ok, I will try to explain why there are no unarmed weapon master's in NWN. The weapon master was not originally planned to be a weapon master. We had planned it to be a Kensei Prestige Class. At some point in the approval process, we were informed that a Weapon Master would make much more sense in the Forgotten Realms and that we should switch the Kensei class over to be the Weapon Master Class. At this point in time, adding the required feats and especially game mechanics to make an unarmed attack weapon master possible was not an option anymore, because of the required sigificant amount of time from both Design and Programming as well as some time from Arts. That's it - no bug, no oversight, no stupidity, just the effect of plain reality. If you ask me if there is a chance for this to change -I doubt it.

Bioware's script compiler: yes, we use the same compiler. I recompiled most of the scripts prior to our gold build using the command line compiler that can be found in your "utils" directory