11/21/99 - Latest News

Building in Neverwinter Nights
Berendir @ 8:31 pm EST

Heres some cool news from the Neverwinter Nights Vault on Building interiors, and a few other things.

Building Interiors

To speed up the module creation process, each building comes with its own default custom interior. If you so choose, you can take the time to mix and match different exteriors and interiors (say you want a tavern inside an old manor house, for instance) or link the door to some non-building location (the mage tower that is actually a massive illusionary forest inside). You can understand why we wouldn't want to make you go through that process for every building in the city, though.

There will be a small degree of customizability of these interiors but for the most part it will be limited to swapping in a small number of pre-fab variant tiles (most buildings will have optional subterranean access, for example, because every good adventure needs to go underground at some point, right?).

That said, don't lose hope. We've set aside two whole tilesets for different kinds of castle interiors (castle exteriors are a sub-tileset of the two urban sets). These will allow you to paint down the interior of a building in the same way you would paint down a dungeon. There may be a few other sub-tilesets that might be appropriate to this as well. If you've got a building you want laid out in a very specific way, these castle tilesets are the way to do it.

Heres some info on the Graphics Engine:

What you are looking at in the demo is the unmodified Omen engine. We are currently reworking to handle the different requirements of NW vs. MDK2. For example, we will be implementing environment mapping for really cool metal and armor effects, and a completely new shadow system. It will be a while before we have some screen shots that show any new features, but we will post them when we have them.