chris421

Wow, full-color box art? as opposed to black and white, or maybe just two or three colors? --super. Obsidian, we truly don't deserve you. Also, I loved the post/warning on Bioware on how your customers are hate mongers. And the interview question on whether your fans are holding you back. Fantastically out of touch with reality. While I'm on the rant, 4ed sux0rs and will be the demise of the DnD franchise. After finishing the core manuals I felt bloodied so I spent my action point on a healing surge and chucked that refuse into the waste bin.

Sorry guys I'm leaking the beta video. ...the irony is this was just the Character Creation dialog. Great April Fool's. Glad to see Obsidian has as good a sense of humor as its customers. The Wii stuff is doable, btw. Might burn the fat off some of our butts.

Glad to see Atari throwing Securom out on their butts, at least that's what I gather from the "redoing security in-house" statement. 1794 petition signers can't be wrong. Been asking for an ETA on this every patch since 1.06: Where is the updated dedicated server creator? And where is a working ActivatePortal for seamless transitioning between instances on PW servers? --seriously. wtfrak?

Any chance we're going to see a pivot/rotate attribute put on speedtree objects in my lifetime? Forests of limited seed values would look so much better if only speedtrees could be swiveled slightly offset from their neighbors.

Occurred to me that I had added another 2GB of RAM to my PC two NWN2 patches ago. Turns out, the driver for my "Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fata1ty Pro" has a bug. Creative has a beta driver out with 4GB RAM issues on its fixlist. I disabled the /PAE /3GB switches in my boot.ini & can no longer reproduce the Blue Screen of Death in cutscenes. Pretty unique set of circumstances. Hope someone else can benefit from this post. Watch those drivers.

Also don't see jack about fixing the BSOD caused by simple cutscenes. For the past two patches the game has been unplayable. I run 32-bit XP PRo Sp2, 8800 GTX with latest production Nvidia drivers, 30" Samsung allowing my game res of 2560 X 1600. The cutscene crash happens in the OC, MotB, and all community modules that use them. Submitted numerous bug reports to Obsidian. Don't recall a reply to any of them.

If you're not going to fix ActivatePortal (again) with this patch, can we please--PLEASE--get a proper manual for nwn2server.exe listing ALL configurable INI options? What we have now is a f-ing mishmash of patch notes strung together from NWN1 onward, with random Obsidian developer blogs & scattered fragments of tweaks the PW hosters desperately need. Performance after you have about 15 concurrent users on even the most respectable desktop tends to be un-playable. Average hoster has no idea how to properly optimize their system...how to tweak OS/application behavior...split IO...qualify the capability of their pipe...how to setup a ram disk, etc. So at the very minimum, PLEASE give us a manual so at least your application isn't the bottleneck. Neither this http://nwn2.obsidian.net/support/techfaq.html nor this http://oeiprogrammer.blogspot.com/search/label/2da nor this http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewt...8&forum=118 nor this http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewt...um=118&sp=0 qualify as server manuals. For Christ's sake, it's like there's disagreement on what ports your product even uses. When a customer Goggles, "NWN2SERVER MANUAL", we should get a PDF written by you--not 50 conflicting opinions, complaints & misinformation from fans like me.

wow, thanks so much for moving that post. this whole 'internet thing' is way too complicated for my dim wits to know what's relevant to what subfolder of a f'n game site. thank geebus for ego-driven, pseudo-academic forum Nazis. 7,339 posts in 2 years. mighty busy RL life you have there, Mus. I wonder why they haven't made you a moderator so you could've just deleted the post yourself. Edit: Ehhehe--wanker.

Any bets on how long it'll take the community to use Expotron to revamp Zylch's models with jiggly T&A?

Sometimes I whistle the NWN tavern song till my lips are chaffed and bloody. New theme song was OK. All-time favorite game sound tracks would have to be Lineage2 and .

Obsidian could make a real 'night-and-day' difference over the current approach to skydomes via layered stacking of multiple TGA images. Skydome layers would be treated more like separate environmental placeables. Would have the following attributes configurable on each skydome layer: day hemisphere background color, (default: sky-blue) night hemisphere background color, (default: black/navy) day non-transparent pixel tint, (default: none) night non-transparent pixel tint, (default: none) day non-transparent pixel opacity, (default: 0%) night non-transparent pixel opacity, (default: 0%) day non-transparent pixel casts shadow flag, (default: true) night non-transparent pixel casts shadow flag, (default: true) day non-transparent pixel are a light source flag, (default: true) night non-transparent pixel are a light source flag, (default: true) hemisphere rotational speed, +/- (default: rate for a 24 hours day, but can be 0 to achieve a "fixed skydome" effect) hemisphere rotational axis (default: equatorial rotational axis, but can be offset 0 to 180 degrees). Would envision several Toolset Preset "multi-domes" as follows: LAYER 0 = distant stars LAYER 1 = galactic band(s) LAYER 2 = sun(s) LAYER 3 = distant planet(s) LAYER 4 = neighboring planet(s) LAYER 5 = far moon(s) / asteroid(s) LAYER 6 = mid moon(s) / asteroid(s) LAYER 7 = near moon(s) / asteroid(s) LAYER 8 = high atmosphere clouds / auroras / 'cavern world' stalactites / floating deity corpses LAYER 9 = mid atmosphere clouds LAYER 10 = low altitude clouds / floating castles / distant mountain ranges I don't think Atari / Obsidian can afford to have another ugly product release. And the Community can only tolerate so much of "most riveting RPG experience since Planescape: Torment" hype before we up and leave for good. If anything, these proposed changes would be very easy to implement and make pretty fantastic screenshots for PR.

Rob or Rich, Is it possible (for a user) to modify inventoryscreen.xml to add three new Item Slot Buttons, which map back to the hidden creature slots? I've tried to guess every conceivable constant, hex, and struct value Obsidian might've hard-coded with no luck. I've already tweaked my baseitems.2da to segregate gauntlets from bracers and added two new rows for clothing and masks, which don't interfere with armor or helmets, by way of using "Claw1", "Bite" and "Creature Hide" slots. It's very cool. I know I'm equipping my custom items because I can see my char stats react. Just need to know how do I address these non-standard creature slot "bags" via the UI? Thanks.

Basically the game was too new (or I was too lazy). But I had a similar plan way back then. It'd leave the UI relatively unchanged except for those three new (mask, clothing, and hands) inventory slots. Give your new players (and force-equip) their three uniquely tagged invisible 1-slot, weightless bags onenter of the module. I guess what the bag approach would break is every cursed item, disarming script, pickpocket, equip/unequip, and iterative slot checking function in the game. Considered using the creature slots for extra player ones as well. But those I believe have specific item type rules which allow only normal weapon items or creature weapon items...just like you can't mount a helmet to your feet. Would take some kludging of baseitems.2da to fix this. But not impossible within the current 5-bit item slot scheme. There is the oddball chance your player-race actually has an existing claw or bite attack already in one of those slots though, which would fall into inventory the moment they put something in them, if you didn't prevent this via a special IP intercept script. Curious how this would work for druids wild-changing. Still though, mapping hands to primary creature claw slot, mask to creature bite, and clothing to creature hide oddly enough--makes sense. A Pit Fiend monk would just have to deal with not being able to equip Fists of Balance. Boohoo. Best way is still for Obsidian to commit to ripping those hardcoded constants out of their DLL and use the damn 2DAs like the rest of us. With 2da caching working much better now, there's little excuse. Thanks again for the insight!

You know, in my early 20's I thought the same. One day I up and pawned all my childhood (mint condition) 1st edition D&D and AD&D books, box sets, magazines and modules to a hobby shop for next to nothing. Huge mistake. It was all really great stuff! And eventually would've been really valuable stuff. Just what do you think your PDF files will auction for in 50 years? My guess--not a damn thing. Will they even be readable, with shifting formats & dependencies on file converters? PDFs are good for lightweight portability and immediate searchable access at the gaming table. Now in my 30's, I'm married, have a house, and take great joy in rebuilding my physical collection. I have over 130 hardcovers--literally everything 3.5, some late 3.0, all the Salvatore series, and some Dragonlance. WotC is either hurting badly financially and/or is extremely shortsighted to abandon such a cherished institution (the magazines). Print is dead. But D&D isn't your local newspaper or your college textbook. The physical media to a certain degree is the hobby. How can I sit down and read about medieval mayhem while three popups flash by telling me I have new unsolicited email, I'm not running the latest XYZ, or my book's battery is dying. There's something to be said for an utter lack of technology.

Crosspost from NWVault. Relevant to the forum, Obsidian, NWN2, and the evolution of PnP.

DM client getting some luvin. That's good. But with all these PWs popping up, what ever happened to the promised multiplayer fixes slated for patch 1.06? We still don't have a working ActivatePortal function, which completely ruins the continuity in multi-instanced games. Also, a neatly distributable nwn2 dedicated server still isn't available, and embarrassingly your support site lists an ETA of January 2007. Hire me as a developer and I'd be more than happy to quit my current thankless job and work on these for you.

Um, what I described took longer to type than solve in my head. I know the scripts and data behind this game embarrassingly well. So your comment sure feels like the pot calling the kettle... As I'm sure you're painfully aware, the more interesting elements of D&D do not all necessarily conform to elegant, easily codeable systems. Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook and Skip Williams aren't sitting around lamenting, what feat or bonus they could regurgitate next, "to make life easier on the devs over at Obsidian". And I think you're fooling yourself that a properly represented RWoT would win complaints upon release. The Red Wizard is a beloved & villainous prestige class. Misrepresenting core DM Guide material, which is so readily replicable, in the way proposed frankly bites. Just saying if you're going to add new content--add new content!

What can I say, as prestige classes go, your Red Wizard was definitely--the easiest to code? Pretty mundane guy without the Tattoo scribing feat and the two Circle Magics. Definitely would've been a popular multiplayer class--just for the free player feat granting ability, let alone Red Wizard hunting parties running around casting as effectively 40th level casters. How much coding would it have been? A spell-like ability or two to bring up a menu to establish whether you're a leader or a participant, what options you want to tweak for the spell's output, a script to deplete the members' spells on use, a script to check the party is in proximity of each other? CAKE. In summary, thanks for the wasted prestige class slot.

Get the feeling no matter what opinion I express, Parat will disagree. Do you agree? FYI - the cost per GB for hard disks (per Tom's Hardware) is anywhere between 28 cents to $1 US. If Obsidian blessed its Community with 2-3GB of additional content I think you would be in the minority for complaining. And if that happens feel free to send me your paypal address and I'll forward you the $3 for "wasted disk space".

--Why? Because the product desperately needs improvement. Why should the casual gamer be required to delve a bunch of cryptic forums & repositories in order to gain access to content/fixes that should've been in the original purchase from the start? You're also giving that new player credit that they'll even know to look for mods. Instead, what's likely to happen, the new player will buy the game, become frustrated or disinterested due to features X, Y and Z, and then never buy a subsequent expansion. Ground-breaking, easy-to-assimilate improvements contributed by the Community would be travesties not to incorporate in subsequent official builds. And I believe it's one of the reasons why the EULA reserves the IP rights to any content the Community creates by (or) for NWN2. I think DLA and CEP contributions would be examples of this.

OMG, I would love to see Kivinen's Placeables hak incorporated into official patch 1.07. Representation of all dropped inventory as those f'n ridiculous loot bags is absolutely unacceptable by today's game standards.

All 769 2DAs are showing a March 1st modified date, which is contradictory to the patch notes. Thought maybe the much needed clean-up had occurred. But 'placeables.2da' still has its very obvious duped line #456. Also, fyi 'feat.2da' and 'baseitems.2da' extracted out into an odd place. Before I spend hours cleaning up all 'modified' files, do the people responsible for data integrity stand by the patch notes below...these 2DAs and these alone were changed/added between 1.04.870 and 1.05.912? It's a data driven game. When stuff jumps out this glaring, somebody has to tell the emperor his fly is down.

Harped on this before NWN2 released. But neither NWN nor NWN2 implemented character item slots correctly. http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/MagicItemRecordSheet.zip Wouldn't really take much to fix...a few new constants, script changes to check the additional slots when equipping/unequipping, revise a few items to make them graft to the appropriate slot when worn, the inventory UI, etc. I think most of us have given up wanting more visually from NWN2. so just give us PnP slots, logically instead. The number of hidden creature weapon/hide slots is extremely limiting as well. Would be cool to see slots for limbs beyond 2. 8 could cover simultaneous gores, bites, wings, extra limbs, spell-like abilities, grapple/snares, etc. seriously, the tail slot should not be forced to double as a bite (unless your creature likes to talk from his ass). would also love to see the current 1 slot for hide become 3. a slot for race, a slot for type and a slot for template. In the long run that could help the community (and OE) bang through the creation of unique creatures via a system of pre-defined skins. write scripts to target the appropriate slot would save time instead of iterating through an overwhelming number of IPs on a single hide.