Posted Sunday, July 25, 2004 - 1:06 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.
Georg Zoeller, Designer
What *DO* NWN's many acronyms stand for?!
http://nwn.bioware.com/developers/
Is there going to be a nwn 2?
Possible? Sure, why not. Is it a valid topic for the Hordes of the Underdark Forum? certainly not. There is already a thread about that in the offtopic forum, so I'm closing this one down.
Yet more dispel bugs
Not a bug. We decided that spells will never remove item properties as there is a good chance they would screw up custom plots and more. If you want a spell to affect item properties, you will need to change the spellscript.
New payment method?
We have no plan to make people pay for patches, that would be just wrong. We have plans for a "Digital Distribution" system that would allow people to purchase quality modules or module series specifically created for this project on line through our webpage. This is a project by our Live Team and you read more about it in the Witch's Wake forum.
NwN/SoU/HotU end of life?
"odd"? The list of changes has not been released and will not be released until we hit public beta. But this shows up when I search for posts by myself on the topic "1.63", and frankly, it look a lot like some kind of list to me Click Here Now given that someone with a BioWare tag is talking about stuff like this, it seems to be a reasonable conclusion that there is actually a patch 1.63 planned
Would this speed up multiplayer loading?
Since I'm guessing the game just compresses individual areas and sends them to you when you go to a section of a module, would having the actual module decrease loading time? I ask because I'm on a modem, and my ISP has connections throttled down to 30k, and despite having a very fast comp, going between areas quite a bit of time.
NWN's network stream is compressed and area information is fairly lightweight (one of the benefits a tilebased game offers). What's in the area (creatures, players, etc) and their actions makes the majority of information you get over the network, and as said, that's compressed already. Also keep in mind that it's up to the individiual module designer to make areas "nice", which means resisting the temptation of using 32x32 areas (a module that uses 32x32 areas is a badly designed module).
nw_s0_gate script broken?
You always want to avoid using Actions* inside spellscripts because spells are actions themselves.
Long dialog delays
If you are playing a custom module in multiplayer, keep in mind that if there may be a lot of text, it needs to be transfered down to you. Also the module designer might have gone a bit wild with the number of potential responses on a node, which could cause the server to run so many conditional scripts that it would choke.