Luridis

Here's a few... English accents on the voice-overs. Antagonists that repeatedly dismiss you as a threat in spite of your persistent interference in their plans. It's your job to fix this or it's the end of the world. (Emphasis on failure means end of the world.) Quests that you cannot fail without stalling progress in the main story line, instead of the story line changing to reflect your failure. Assassins you just know are coming that you can't reverse the ambush on. (Looks at Sydney Natale.) A possibility of making a mistake based upon your own assumption of nefarious intent in the above reverse-ambush. Companions you can't can't basically tell to GTFO and don't come back. Arbitrary and useless Achievement Systems that add nothing to the game and drive players to look everything up before hand.

Personally, I'd like to see... Basic item crafting available early on so you can upgrade your equipment. Enchanting is nice, but the materials for it should be so exceedingly rare1 that burning them is a hard decision. For the interim, I'd like to see temporary enchants for your equipment you can make and use on difficult fights, etc. i.e. Smiths could make sharpening stones that add keen or enchanters/alchemists that could make oils of +1, +2, or some that breach damage reduction, etc. Craftable healing kits for god's sake please... I really would like to hit the rest button less on the principal alone in NWN2. Please, let me save my healing spells for combat. I'd be happy to forgo the ability to use healing skill in combat for the ability to use it much more frequently out of combat. Some way to get rid of level/attribute drain and poison/disease out of combat without a priesty type in the party would also be nice. 1. ^ By "exceedingly rare" I mean "not very often", while still being on random loot tables. I hate when things like this come in regimented drops from specific encounters along the story line. This prevents you from ever "getting lucky" and having that woo-hoo moment because you're going to be able to put that fire enchant on your longsword sooner than you anticipated. Edit: One of the things I really liked about The Witcher is that health potions worked as a temporary regeneration instead of a flat dump into your health pool. Personally, I felt like it made them more of a tactical decision than a button to wanton spam during boss fights.

I don't want to see super-massive-over-the-top success of PE and subsequent porting to every platform under the sun. "What?" "Huh?" "Why?" Success, I do want to see, but... I don't want to see this place turn into Blizzard/Bioware forums over night, that's why. It's remarkably civil here at the moment and the last thing I want is an infusion of several million cheeto-eating-console-playing teens that have as little control over their commentary as they do their own hormones. The incoming nerd-rage-o-rama from such a success, over future IP development, would contain complaints about everything from the size of a female NPCs boobs to "dur why are there <insert-deragatory-name-for-same-sex-romances> in the game?". This place would become absolutely untenable in a matter of weeks. Basic principals of story evolution and creative license would be destroyed in their infancy by the sheer power of the weapon of mass destruction that is raging testosterone powered commentary. "Aww, come on... Why are you bashing on the kiddies." - I'm not bashing the kids, I'm bashing the behavior. The title of the topic is, after all, "What don't you want..." Games are rarely a black-and-white experience these days, just like any other creative medium. How many musicians do you know of where you liked every song on every album? Writers that you know where you liked every chapter of every book? Producer and every movie? Probably few, if any, I'd wager... So, here's a realistic projection for Project Eternity: You will not like every character. You will not like every quest. You will not like every zone. You will not like every mechanic. You will not like every feature. You will not like every model. You will not like every musical score. But... You still may very much like the game. It would be really nice if we could avoid millions of rabid internet rage posters on this one...

Last time I checked, forums were a place where discussions take place. Well, at least when they're not a screaming match. I'm reasonably certain that most of the folks in here are aware that Project Eternity is Obsidian's game. And, that they will be the ones to ultimately decide on how the mechanics will work. Most of us are passionate about games, in one way or another, including how they should work. So, people come, they talk, they huff and they say what's on their mind. I don't think there's any harm in that... Facts or not, people might have fears about how something might end up working. So, let them speak there mind, that can't actually hurt anybody. Hell, there may even be a potential exploit the developers had not considered that comes to light in the discussion. We all have opinions, no need to start a police force and impose Newspeak on everyone. Because this studio and a lot of their games have run on D&D systems, maybe? To deny that D&D influence is there is silly, especially when the PE Dev team was playing D&D during the final hours of the Kickstart campaign. Additionally, why are you attempting to sensor this discussion? According to the forum "Hormalakh" started it. I mean, you just did the equivalent of walking into a room full of strangers and saying, "Everyone shut up, I don't like all this D&D talk." If you don't want to talk about D&D then, by all means, start a new thread. Hell, my first CRPG wasn't based on D&D, the mechanics were made specifically for computers. (Might & Magic II) Additionally, what I've seen of the D&D books made in the last decade makes me seriously doubt they were anything but carefully considered, and were rushed out the door. That said, I still don't see why one thing or another shouldn't be discussed here.

While I'm sure whatever Obsidian comes up with will work well, I do have a couple of questions about this myself... Can DR negate this "miss damage"? What will prevent the player from stacking for miss damage? i.e. If you look at 3.5e, a system like this would basically make Frenzied Berserker required for any melee build. You'd use every slot you can to stack one stat (STR) at the exclusion of all others, to bring that bonus damage up. The weapon would no longer matter as your goal would be to be pushing huge bonus damage so that you can crank out an at minimum 1+60/2 for misses with supreme power attack. This could be made even more silly if sneak-attack couldn't be missed. I can see the same happening for casters. What do you memorize? Whichever spells have the highest half-damage on a save miss. They'd all feel like playing a Favored Soul in NWN2. (I don't even want to get started on how WoTC completely failed at a chance of finally making a decent chaos-aligned divine caster with that one; RP wise anyway.) That said, I can agree with Josh that missing is frustrating. The most annoying part of NWN2 for me so far is that whole concealment mechanic that just needs to die in a fire. Even with Blind-Fight it gets really annoying when you watch a fighter or ranger go 5 or 6 rounds and land one hit.

Well of course it's not all you do, and I didn't actually mean for it to sound that way. What I meant was that I don't think I could code for a living when so much of what I do wouldn't be for my own personal benefit. I like doing it when it saves me time, and wouldn't find it as interesting if it were part of some larger project not directly consumed by myself. You might say that, where coding is concerned, I like to tinker, but not get into large scale industrial production. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if it's what you like to do.

Effects on the environment, in spite of what you see in the video, is likely to be limited to something similar to the temporary bullet holes you see in other games. The big problem with making things destructible is that someone has to make a mesh and texture that represents something having changed. Even then, you'd need one for each kind of damage that it could receive and in each spot it could receive the damage. Otherwise, you might shoot the corner of a building and then see holes in the middle of the two adjoining walls. When the physics technology progresses to the point where you can give something a "material type" regarding it's structure, and an internal mesh that creates break-off points, then it can probably happen. Even then, how do you address things like burning, squeezing and liquification? Material types right now are limited to the way the object interacts with others regarding the simulated physics. Destructible things must me made as such from the ground up, including the way they splinter and shatter, etc. Think about the way boxes and pallets always shatter in one of a few animations that look the same in Half-Life 2. Even as real-time-rendering nears photographic quality, we still have a long way to go. Edit: If you've seen the opening cinematic for The Witcher 2 then consider this: I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut that every piece of that shattering boat was modeled by hand.

Do you mean spells that effect the environment and models? Like below? Clearly, it's just someone's experiment and the particle effects are pretty basic, but it shows that it can be done. http://youtu.be/aDht3p5Gr3M

I've always wanted to make games too, since I was playing stuff on C64 back in the 80's. But, after looking at the industry for the last 15 years or so there is one thing I am very certain of now: I still want to do it, but I'd rather not do it for a living. I'm a Sr. Enterprise Admin, I like it and I'm good at it. Ironically, I probably get to write more "passion" code here than I would have if I had worked for a gaming studio. The code I write is entirely related to making my own job easier, as opposed to some random middleware platform connector code I could care less about.

Unity's handling of physics looks good to me.

I don't think they'll disappoint with the models, Unity makes a lot of that stuff a whole lot less work for them. The video below was someone's first time making anything game related ever. Though, I suspect the person had programming experience already.

Yes, I did some reading tonight and I think it's entirely possible through something called a prefab, which is basically a game-object generic. They could attach scripts to a ModderPrefab that load the details from a file and then call an Instantiate function to place the object in the scene. We could look at the prefab and see all the events, delegates and constants (read: hooks in NWScript) that exist for say, an actor, but not the main loop code or scene processing code outside of the handlers in the prefab. You then essentially add your own mesh, texture, dialogue, location and transform value (facing direction) and it reads it from file and drops it into the scene. Now, the scripting is a more difficult subject. Being able to add complex logic really depends on whether or not they're going to acquire a run-time script processor, which some 3rd party Unity developers have made specifically for allowing modder access to your game. Or, if they're willing to come up with their own rudimentary configuration language that's parsed into generics at startup. There are run-time script processors available for most languages including LUA in the Unity add-on store. But, the real gem for this if it's there, and live in Unity's MonoDevelop engine is something called compiler as a service. If that is functional at run-time, which it's most definitely not on iOS, but I don't know about windows; that will be the real entry point for anything you would want to do.

I'll have to vote no... People have lives, and personal emergencies and responsibilities. "OMG Johnny is playing with the power strip." In my case, I have ADHD and a lot of times get distracted and actually forget I was in the middle of a game. Coming back to lost progress because my phone rang, I forgot to hit the space bar, and I spent a half hour talking to my boss about next week's project is not in any way shape or form an enjoyable experience for me. Something like this needs to be entirely optional or I will simply override it in the operating system: IF Monitor.Sleeps And Process.Exists(eternity.exe) Then SuspendProcess(eternity.exe) The psuedocode there for ya, build it into a process in Visual Studio and have it run with the start up of the game itself. For the record, trying to dictate my behavior in software I bought, on hardware I own is not only a bad idea, it's a futile one. Because, I will find a way around it and then I'll post it up on the net for the whole world to use.

Since you're asking for it as an option, sure as long as it's 100% optional on all difficulties. Likewise, there is a pause option I would like to see too: Automatic end of round pause. Oh and, something that can be toggled from the UI please. Why? For your average run of the mill encounter AI typically works fine. When you're in a heated battle is when things can go very wrong. i.e. You're a little late getting back to cue something up for the wizard and all of a sudden you have FF artillery going off in your warrior line that is already struggling under high incoming DPS. It's not like a PnP game where there's an actual brain behind each party member's action. This is you, needing to make all the decisions and that's made even more difficult with the real-time nature of a CRPG engine. A passive follow for combat would be nice too. I'm currently playing NWN2 and when you set the AI options to "Don't Engage in Melee" and "Don't Cast Spells" the idiot keeps running back and fourth, and around the corner, and down the corridor and aggros a ton of other mobs. If you turn AI off for the character they don't do these things, but then they don't bother to follow you either. More often than not I've got the whole party on "follow me" and don't bother giving the attack order until we're in a room full of enemies where I can safely cut them lose without them running to another door and opening it. Ya know so... "Don't Engage" and "Don't Path Like a Freak" in one button would be nice.

BTW: My apologies to the OP... I see he meant a self-contained application directory that doesn't reference the registry, etc. What I thought he was asking for at first was multi-OS compatibility in the same directory which would be insane amounts of work. That said, I'm not sure if it's possible anyway if they lean on any run-time libraries outside of Unity itself.

That depends on your UAC settings as well as 3rd party security software. There's also defined access scopes within the registry. I've had more than enough application vendors come back and say, "Oh our app needs access to this or that directory, run it as administrator." Poor design... Additionally, putting things outside your user directory typically doesn't give other users access rights to it unless placed in "shared documents". I'm well aware of the "tools available". I'm pretty familiar with MSI tables, VBScript, PowerShell, Python, C#, and a host of vendor scripting languages used by enterprise desktop management suites; of which I am myself a Sr. Administrator. That does not change the fact that application vendors do not follow platform guidelines and create absolutely wicked problems that *I* must sort out with one of those tools. Try dealing with services that need to be run in user space, "What do you mean the server must be logged in for it to run?" Or, applications that want to open FTP and update their program directories at run-time and don't bother to update the application shortcuts with command line options that changed in the newest version. I didn't say Windows was any better, but the FHS is about as confusing as they come when trying to explain, "No not that bin, the other bin, and check the home directory as well." You agree with me on not hard-coding file paths in the MSI table and then not agree with the use of a relative path? Relative, as in using environment variables, not as in relative to working directory, if that's what you think I meant. i.e. I meant... This: %CommonProgramFiles%\AppName\SharedStuff Not This: ..\Common Files\AppName\SharedStuff

Oh, forgot to mention that when I mentioned template... I wasn't talking about creating a game template. I meant a game asset template that you can then modify export from unity. The game itself would need to import this at runtime. I don't know if this can be done, but it's plausible.

Unity itself can also be used to create level editors... (see vid) I wouldn't worry about it too much. These guys are pros, and they know what the community wants from their RPGs. They're likely working on making their own level editor in the engine to speed up in-house level creation. Modifying that for community use probably won't be the kind of work that making the NWN editors was. With Unity providing the engine and full professional suite of building tools they're saving tons of time. There's also a host of 3rd party plugins out there for Unity they can license. Chances are better than not that they can find a host of modder friendly tools already.

PS: Look at the cut-scenes in this: http://video.unity3d.com/video/6912612/unite-2012-game-showreel

I think you're forgetting that Unity itself is a free download. Now, while Obsidian is pretty unlikely to provide modders with the raw game project to rebuild with their changes, they could provide a template project. The template could include raw game assets like models, textures etc. and provide hooks to in game events and code objects. When you're done and have built it and then drop it in a specific directory and the engine picks it up as an add-on module.

Applications attempting to write user specific data outside of user directories in Windows 7 fires UAC as intended. Believe me, I deal with hapless software vendors who do this sort of crap on a regular basis and it's not fun when you're trying synchronize deployment to 6,000 machines. Application vendors are supposed to expand user environment strings to store application and user data so that if something changes in a future update the action is seamless to the application. Examples: %APPDATA% is "C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data" on Windows XP %APPDATA% is "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming" on Windows 7/8 If the vendor had hard coded the absolute path into the MSI table then the application would likely fail to install or run properly on WIndows 7. This behavior is not unique to Microsoft operating systems. This is part of POSIX compliance and most *nix systems store information via relative path as well. That's why they have a dozens of symbolic links and the convoluted Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. The developers don't need to cater installation to you your client, that is your job. There are tools available, might I suggest SyncToy 2.1 and/or using a virtual disk:

Yea, I see you bypassing the w3 interface there Tale, but click any of those links on Obsidian's page and they die, even the one that leads back to Obsidian (404). The whole thing is depressing... I sorta missed NWN2 and it seems most of the community has dissolved now, save for the persistent worlds. Makes me wonder who's going to be the next one to make the roll your own adventure CRPG.

Yes, that's what I mean... It showed up, then got pulled again. And now, no one involved with NWN production over the last 10 years seems to be able to sell anything related to it. Gamer's Gate may be the only exception because it is a Swedish company and there may be laws there that treat IP contracts differently than our own. Neverwinter Nights 1 is gone too, which is part of the reason I think Atari somehow screwed up, or got screwed, and lost the retroactive license. Look at these missing pages: http://www.obsidian.net/games/nwn2soz/index.html http://www.nwn2.com Personally, I don't understand why, in the age of the internet, all D&D is still relevant. There are millions of people creating campaigns and creatures and worlds and lore. If all these people got together, formed an oversight board, and spent just one month of their free time working on a game system and supporting lore it would be the end of overpriced-typo-ridden book buying. Everything out there under an open gaming license; people would never again see things like take down notices. And, companies like Obsidian here could make and sell games based on the stuff without worrying about a license to the lore within the unique adventure they created. The same people who put all this together could create their own campaign boxed sets, take it to Kinko's, and sell it online. BTW: Why would Atari be transferring the license to Hasbro? Hasbro is the IP owner as of their purchase of WoTC. Atari was a licensee of the WoTC owned IP...

I'm a latecomer to NWN2. I'm about 90% through on Act I OC on two different characters. I'm currently trying to figure out if the Favored Soul is essentially broken unless you cheese levels from a turn undead class and get divine might at which point it feels massively overpowered. Also, why can't I have my way with the goat-girl? Just for once can we get a playful little romance that's not a "prince charming is our hero" cliché? It's about as difficult to find as a divine class that caters to chaotic and whimsical souls who choose to act because "that's just not right" instead of "duty, righteousness, and fealty." I also have a some progress into The Witcher 2. My next little side project will be digging up my C64 emulator and playing my way through Gateway to the Savage Frontier, because I missed Neverwinter's debut in CRPGs. Hopefully Egosoft will get around to releasing X-Rebirth soon.

All of this is speculation on my part. But, since no one involved is talking these are the best guesses I can make about why NWN1/2 has nearly vanished from retailers and commercial websites. Something has gone terribly wrong with the terms of a Atari - Hasbro settlement, particularly with the sale of Cryptic Studios. Personally, I believe Atari, and all the studios involved in the production of "Neverwinter" based IP have lost the right to use the name retroactively. Specifically when Atari sold Cryptic to that Chinese MMO sweatshop company, which was holding the current license to use the name. IANAL but somehow, my best guess is that someone in legal wasn't paying attention and didn't realize the retroactive use of the name was being given up. Why do I think this? Look at what has happened in the last year: Atari settles with Hasbro, Atari sells Cryptic to Perfect World, 6 months later all Neverwinter Nights related products disappear from Atari's site. All US based digital content distributors (GoG, Steam, etc.), pull the titles and will only say "no further information is available" when inquiries are made. All studios involved in Neverwinter Nights content suddenly remove almost all WoTC artwork and references to Neverwinter Nights not shown in plain text fonts: Obsidian, EA Bioware, and even Ossian's MoG home page is reduced to plain text. I ran across all this because, somewhere along the lines of the last 6 years, I never got around to buying NWN2. I went looking about a month ago and let me tell you it has been a headache. The web is littered by a metaphorical fallout of broken links to places that sell "NWN2" or the expansions. The platinum edition has risen to over $100 on eBay and Amazon. What went wrong? I don't exactly know. Either part of the Atari-Hasbro settlement involved no further use of the name or when Atari sold Cryptic the retroactive use of the name mistakenly went with that sale. Either way, this is bad, especially for Hasbro. Obviously, a lot of work goes into game development. Developers and publishers will not want to work with an IP owner that has a history of pulling rug out from under them on future sales of existing work. Especially now, in the era of digital downloads where things can become popular in retro gaming years after release. Even if Atari made the mistake during their sale of Cryptic, the appearance to me, and a lot of other people, is that Hasbro yanked the rights to sell a finished and shipped game. Not just one, but 2 games with 2 expansions and other DLC in the process. Yea I know, that didn't answer your question... but I'm hoping that it will shed light on the problem. Here is how I managed to finally purchase NWN2, the expansions and Mysteries of Westgate: Call up your local Gamestop and ask them to if they have "Neverwinter Nights Complete". And, if they don't, ask them to search inventories of nearby stores. I got one marked down to twenty-something dollars and it includes Mysteries of Westgate. The box warns you it won't run on 64 bit systems, but that's incorrect. Here's how I made mine run on Windows 7 Ultimate: First, download and install DirectX 9.xC for Windows 7. No, it doesn't come with version 9 natively installed, but if you have Steam and any older games installed it's already likely to be on your system. Next, install NWN2 from the DVD. When it's finished right click the NWN2 icon and select properties. Click the Compatibility tab, click the first checkbox and select Windows XP (Service Pack 3), and then click okay. The game runs for me glitch free this way. Cheers...