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The Community Blog (An Invitation)
New Community Blog (The Unintentional Gatekeeping of Video Games)

Neverwinter Nights 2 Blog

A blog by Rob McGinnis in General

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About this blog

Questions, Answers and a Little Bit More

Entries in this blog

NWN2 News August 8, 2008

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update August 8, 2008   Well, it's been a long time since I have done an update. I have been so busy lately that I haven't had much time to research anything for the community works section, but I wanted to come here and fill you in on some of the progress we have been making.   If you haven't heard already, we have an expansion in the works. Yes, it's true! The expansion (which we refer to as NX2) is titled Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir. With th

NWN2 News August 31, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update August 31, 2007     For this edition of the Community Update, we are going to start off with a note from Nathaniel Chapman. He is one of the Assistant Producers on NWN2 and MoTB and is now leading the effort for ongoing support with the game. This is in the patch notes, but I thought it would be good to post here as well. We will also take a look at the Invisible Blade prestige class and some great spears made by community member, Feydakin.  

NWN2 News August 3, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update August 3, 2007   Time for another Community Update. This week we are going to look at some new spell chants for MoTB, a new feature for builders in 1.07 and a great Persistent World. We will also get a small peek at the options screens for the new camera and controls and a great new community addon by cdaulepp!     New Feature for 1.07   One of the things we have been trying to do is include some of the improvements from the expansion in the pa

NWN2 News August 24th, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update August 24, 2007   Another week has passed and we are now another week closer to the release of Mask of The Betrayer.   This week we will announce the winners of the Fan Art contest and talk about the next contest and contests to come. We get another voice recording from one of the MoTB characters, and we take a look at some of the community creations.   Mask of The Betrayer   Over the last few weeks we have been seeing quite a bit of discuss

NWN2 News August 17th, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update August 17, 2007   Time for another Community Update! This week we will take a look at a great Community Initiative, read a bit about MoTB from a player's perspective and check out a couple great community modifications.     Community Content Compilation Thunderblade_33 has taken the initiative to develop a Community Content Compilation project. Rather than steal his thunder, I'll let him explain it:     I think this is a great idea. You

NWN2 News August 10, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update August 10, 2007   Another week, another update. This one should be fun... (Make sure you read to the bottom. That's where the juicy bits are).     For The Music Lovers! Many of you have been seeing me prattle on about how much I love the music for MoTB. Well, today you get your chance to hear for yourself.   This clip is the main theme from Mask of The Betrayer. Please right-click it and save the file to your hard drive before listening.

NWN2 News April 25th, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update   Hello again, everyone. This week I thought I would dedicate the update to a few of the community works. Just a warning, though: There's a lot of screenshots in this one, so it may take a while to load fully.     Formations, Formations, Formations (Not to be confused with the famous "Developers" speech, from a certain MS guy).   Jasperre has been working on a great little AI script that allows for formations! After watching the video, I aske

NWN2 News April 18th, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update   Here we are with the second installment of the Community News. It's been a busy week, to say the least.   Update to the 1.05 Game Update Update I think it's fair to say that the 1.05 patch has been my least favorite patch so far. Not because of content - the content of it is great - but because it has been a thorn in our side like no other. When we released the patch to everyone, a seemingly small issue was found that caused the toolset error ou

NWN2 News April 11th, 2007

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update   So, based on the feedback from the Bioware NWN2 forum, it seems we have been neglecting the news side of things. One of the issues is that we give out information in so many places, it's difficult to remember what information was given where. Hopefully we can change that with this Blog.   Starting today, I plan on releasing some news every week, when there is news to give. If there is no news, I will probably post about some of the cool things I h

NWN2 News April 1, 2008

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update April 1, 2008   Hello everyone,   Today's update is kind of special. We have a great announcement to make and I just couldn't wait until later.   NWN2 Expands to the Wii That's right, Neverwinter Nights 2 will soon be available on the Wii!   We have been working on this since the release of NWN2 and we are really happy to see it come out soon. It has taken a lot of work and a very dedicated and talented team of developers, but we are finall

New UI Callback Parameters

In 1.06, callbacks can take 2 new 'variable' parameters in addition to global:# and local:#.   The first new parameter type is listboxrow:listboxname   This will insert the row # that is currently selected in the listbox indicated by listboxname   For example, if I had a callback that looked like:   OnLeftClick=UIObject_Misc_ExecuteServerScript("myguiscript",listboxrow:mylb)   On the same UIScene I have a listbox called 'mylb' where I have selected the 3rd row.   When the OnL

Multiple Callbacks Per Event

By Rich Taylor   In 1.06, it will be possible to set up multiple GUI callbacks on a single UI event in XML. The syntax will be to use the event name and append a number to it. The engine will read in the callbacks until it fails to find the next sequential number.   For example, I could set up a UI Button to with the following callbacks:   OnUpdate=UIObject_OnUpdate_DisableIfLocalVarEquals(local:3,"true") OnLeftClick=UIObject_Input_ScreenOpen("SCREEN_OPTIONS","false") OnLeftClick0=U

MDB File Bitflags

Q: Some of the blocks in a MDB file have a 32-bit field in front of the vertex count field, which we assume is a flag bit vector. In most cases it has a value of 0, but occasionally some bits are set. What do they indicate?   A: The bitflags are as follows for skin and rigid packets:   const DWORD NWN2_ALPHA_TEST = 1 << 0; const DWORD NWN2_ALPHA_BLEND = 1 << 1; // #### SHOULD NOT BE USED const DWORD NWN2_ADDITIVE_BLEND = 1 << 2; // #### SHOULD NOT BE USED const DWOR

Is Flight Possible?

Question: Could flying ever be a possibility?   Answer: The NWN1 and NWN2 engines really don't have a concept of up or down when it comes to how the engine sees the world of the game. Adding that understanding would probably require a lot of work and the re-writing of large sections of the engine.

Interim Community Update

Neverwinter Nights 2 Community Update May 2, 2008   It's been a while since the last community update. As such, I thought I would give you a little teaser for some of the 1.13 patch notes, while I write the real Community Update. Please remember that this list is very much incomplete.   Bug Fixes   General The toolset and game now load hak files in the same order. Skills such as Search will no longer broadcast multiple messages to the chat window while in use. A single mess

Ideas for Consideration: Data Management and Feedback

'Sup G's?   Sooooo... lately I have been talking with some of the other Obsidz folks about issues that affect the making, use, and distribution of custom content. Chief among these are:   * The lack of an official hak editor. * The lack of an official UTF-8 string editor. * The lack of a place where "stand-alone" (unaffiliated with modules and campaigns) haks can live (override and data folders not really being a good home for such things). * The lack of documentation on the order i

Eye Alignment

Question: Is there any reasonably simple way to change the eye alignment on head models? The eyes on most of the gnome and elf heads are very oddly placed, giving the impression that they are always squinting or looking up. Very distracting in cutscenes- the impression I get from most of the Elves is that of whiny teenagers looking sullenly up at parents while getting yelled at. I get the impression that many of the head models were built in one race and modified to fit one or more others. I am

Couple new GUI script functions for 1.06

1.06 will have a number of new script functions that will give improved control over custom GUIs.   Two of the new script functions are:   SetGUIProgressBarPosition();   This script function will let you set the position of a progress bar (Between 0.0 for empty and 1.0 for full).   The other new function is:   SetGUITexture();   This script function will let you set the texture for a UIIcon, a UIFrame's fill texture, or a Button's Base Frame's fill texture.   Both script fun

Alpha Transparencies in Foliage

Q: Currently I am working on a community download pack containg a large variety of foilage placeables (ferns, shrubs, weeds, flowers, small trees etc.). I am using alpha layers in my textures, and currently have tried dxt5 interpolated alpha (this is what format I use for my foilage in other engines such as UT2003/4) and also dxt1 with alpha, but I get no transparency in the toolset. My models and textures are showing up in the toolset just fine, but the engine seems to ignore the alpha on my d

8-bit Alpha and Translucent Surfaces

Q: With 8-bit alpha, is it possible with the current NWN2 engine to use the alpha to make a surface translucent (as in 50% opacity with an alpha pixel value of 50%)?   A: There are two ways to make a surface translucent.   One way would be to make a special effect that edits the alpha. In the VFX editor this would be called a "game model effect". Then you'd have to assign the effect to the object via the toolset, or script.   The second way would be to export the model that you want the

2DA Caching for Script Lookups

(Rich Taylor gives us a peek into 2da caching)   Our lead scripter, Charles Mead, informed me that we did not cache 2DAs that were being queried by script. This resulted in ridiculous seek time for looping over large 2DAs.   He indicated that Bioware had fixed that in the 1.64 code, so I referenced the 1.67 code drop that we had and saw that they had implemented a system whereby the most recent 2 2DAs that were queried were cached.   I took that a bit further and made it so that the # o

1.06 Progress

By: Rich Taylor, Lead Programmer   The 1.05 beta was posted today. One tweak that I intend to have made before 1.05 final is to remove the 'tabs = 5 spaces' change in the script editor. While some people do want some option like that, I think it needs to be implemented as something that can be turned on/off/adjusted, so for now, it's best to leave it out and re-implement it correctly in 1.06.   As far as 1.06 goes, I've spent a lot of time this week integrating a lot of the NWN1 1.67 chang

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