Neverwinter Nights Forum News
Posted Sunday, June 27, 2004 - 17:33 CET by chevalier
Here are today's BioWare forum highlights, collected by NWVault. 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, Live Team Producer
NWN:SoU European CD Key issues
If you have recently purchased Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide in the European market and are having problems playing online or registering your CD Key, you will need to submit all of your CD Keys for validation.
Is this the same fix required for the gold double box set if you cannot even get the original version of NWN to install because the key (as printed) comes up as invalid?
No it is not. You have purchased a flawed copy of the game from the retailer and you either need to exchange it for a working copy through them or contact the Atari support in your region and have them solve it.
German Patch?
German HotU shipped as 1.62 - no update is required at this tim until 1.63
Jay Watamaniuk, Community Manager
Looking for expert NWN fans
I am looking for expert tips from the best of the NWN community. What I plan is to have articles that detail the best tips from the community on the following topics:
Being a player
Character creation
DMing
Running a campaign in NWN
Running a persistent world
General tips
Keep your tips a reasonable length- such as under 150 words if possible although special consideration will be given to excellent longer tips.
Submit your tips here in the following format:
•What is your topic?
•What name would you like used if your tip is used?
•What is your tip?
For example:
•Character Creation
•Festilard the Mighty
•You can change the appearance of a pre-made character by clicking on customize button.
Georg Zoeller, Designer
Hacker Party in our Midst
BioWare does neither endorse nor oppose what the people in this thread are doing. The community server admins can organize or police their own servers as they see it fit, it's their bandwith and hardware.
BioWare will never globally ban CDKeys based on reports or complaints from the community, cases of global bans/account terminations are very rare and usually only happen for serious violations against our Terms of Service and a few other selected offenses.
In a somewhat unrelated note, we are investigating the option (read: investigating, no promises) of having the game write public cdkey and ip address of people who try to exploit certain issues that are currently present in 1.62 to the logfile (before booting them) so admins can get better awareness of people repeatedly trying to cause havok.
The server admin community has been very helpful with their feedback during the last month and *a lot* of issues have been identified and fixed in 1.63 because of that (sorry, no ETA yet ) have fun.
sj_tilemagic_i 2.0
I'll see what I can do
What is HitPoint History ... George?
Your character stores a complete history of levelups so when you remove levels it knows which feats, skills to remove, how many hitpoints to take, etc
Craig Welburn, Live Team Programmer
HotU and Original Play Disc
i recently, uh, stepped on my play disc for the original NwN game. i want to know if i buy HotU will i need it anymore?
Once you install HotU, you will need to insert the HotU play disk rather than the original NWN disk. However, if you ever have to reinstall the game for some reason, you'll still be out of luck. Hope that helps
Another GetNearestObjectToLocation Bug?
I believe all the following scripting commands:
GetNearestCreatureObject()
GetNearestCreatureToLocation()
GetNearestObject()
GetNearestObjectToLocation()
GetNearestObjectByTag()
Were designed in a way such that the object that you pass in can not be returned as a result of the "Nearest" test.
If you specify a location that no objects are currently at, then the game will find the closest object to that location and will not return that object as a "Nearest" object, but the next nearest object intead.
This makes sense in the context of a call to GetNearestObject(), since you want the closest object to the object specified (but not the object itself), but in the context of GetNearestObjectToLocation () where you've specified a random location in the area (which might not be near any objects) it doesn't make as much sense. Thus, it gives you weird unintutive results.
Although if you make a call like:
oObject = GetNearestCreatureToLocation ( CREATURE_TYPE_IS_ALIVE, TRUE,GetLocation(oPC), 1);
This will then return the nearest creature to the PC, but not the PC itself. I'm not really sure if this was originally the intended use of the scripting command when it was originally implemented or not. I'll have to do some poking around to find out.
Another GetNearestObjectToLocation Bug?
Thanks for the info Craig: you explained very nicely why it is happening but unfortunately as you implied it means GetNearestObjectToLocation is utterly useless.
To clarify: anytime we want to use it (predictably) we need to use an object's location so we might as well use GetNearestObject() instead. [snip]
Hopefully there is a chance that GetNearest..ToLocation can be made to work so that if no object exists at the generated location they will return the nearest object. A fix like that shouldn't have any effect on existing scripts since if ever it has been used it has (until now) required an object's location ... or those scripts are already broken!
In any event thanks and happy poking around.
Yeah that was pretty much my feeling when looking at these scripting commands as well.
I don't believe we've used those scripting commands much ourselves (other than one spot I found in SOU chapter 2) There is the possibility that we may have used these elsewhere in the generic scripts somewhere, if we haven't then changing the behavior shouldn't break any of the OCs. Which means that we may be able to safely make a change to the behavior of these scripting commands.
I'll have to investigate a bit more once I've cleaned a few other tasks off my work plate.
Sydney Tang, Programmer
Tools/Option doesn't work
Did you update to the latest patch? I recall that there was a bug with the Options dialog in an earlier version.