10/28/99 - Latest News

News on Neverwinter Nights
Berendir @ 2:17 pm EST

Heres a few different pieces of news from the Neverwinter Nights Vault.

The first news in on Custom Portraits, if your really concerned with how your character is seen:

To display custom character portrait, the player will have to download them. When you join into a game and your character has a custom portrait, the character will first appear with a stock or blank portrait while the client uploads the portrait to the server in the background. The game client will have an option to download custom portraits or not. If the option is on, the portrait is downloaded to the client and displayed. If the option is off, the portrait is ignored and a default is used.

The next piece of information is on scripting possibilities, and I'm guessing its talking about NPC's, and the creator of the world's ability to control their actions:

You can script an orc war party to patrol a specific area and you can even script a blacksmith in town to go home at 5:30 pm every day. Illusions are quite difficult to model in a computer game. We haven't ruled out illusions, but we are still trying to find a decent implementation.

The following news is on Modules, and your abliity to control how they work, and even creating competetive modules:

It will be possible to set up multi-party games where two parties compete towards the same goal (or towards opposing goals, if you choose to structure it that way). However, if you and I both download Module X from a fansite and host the module on our own computers, then we've just created two entirely separate games. The actions of you and your friends will have no impact on my game and vice versa. It would be just like having two games using the same StarCraft map.

As you set up the server running the module, you can specify if it behaves in a persistant model or a reset model. If the game is set persistant, the game will remain in the last state it was in. If the game is not set persistant, the world can be set to reset when there are no players logged in. You can also set the module to reset when it is completed and you can even set the server to automatically load another module when the current one is completed.