Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Monday, January 19, 2004 - 23:32 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.

Derek French, Assistant Producer

Patch 1.62: Hi there. The first round of internal testing is starting Monday. If all goes well, you should see it at the end of January or early February. The Sea Hag, with VO and her special abilities are coming in 1.62

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Patch 1.62: The Live Team is working busy on 1.62. "In January" would probably be a good guess, but I'm just guessing (read: not making any promises) - I don't know their schedule. The RDD high stats issue should be fixed with 1.62.

Further
Medusae had a bow at one time during development of HotU, but we found out that ranged weapons have a number of problems with polymorphed creatures we could not work around, so the bow had to go. Otherwise, I fixed a couple of shifter quirks, including the wrong hides on blue and green dragons and the missing epic gargoyle hide (+7/25 damage reduction, hmmm). No promises any of these fixes will be in 1.62 through.

Further
Quote: Not to speak out of turn, but isn't it the task of a development team to make such things possible, rather than completely subvert them?

That depends - I added the whole item property merging stuff based very close to our design lockdown date as a result of fan feedback given here on the boards. Later we found that it wouldn't work correctly with bows, so we had either the option to cut the bows or to cut the item property merging - and so we cut the bows, which is a good trade off in my opinion.

Further
Quote: Rather than solve the problem?

When you are in "lockdown" that means that programming resources are tight and that features that can't be fixed easily are likely to be cut, especially if these things are not very important features. Cutting them is some sort of "fixing" a problem too. Having bows for medusae would have been nice, sure, but it wasn't worth sacrificing the whole item merging idea over it.

Weapon decay: If your idea involves putting the OnHitCastSpell property on any weapon in your module, please forget it immediately - it's the best way to ensure your module will be so slower than you can possibly imagine when playing with multiple players. If you want to simulate weapon decay, I'd rather use the OnEquip handler in your module to implement it.

Knockdown effect: you need to specify a duration (at least 3.0f for Knockdown) on the ApplyEffectToObject command.