1/18/00 - Latest News

Heres some more pieces of info on Neverwinter Nights.

NPC Interaction with other NPC's

In NWN you can set up NPCs to walk up to other NPCs and begin dialogue as if they were a PC. We can have two old men who meet daily, sit down and play chess. One could complain about the other being late, triggering conversation in which the other old guy gets all crusty in response to the insults. This could degenerate into a fight or they could sit down and begin play.
The scripting language gives a huge amount of power to the module creator to implement whatever he/she desires

Multiple Things

1) As Ratber #CP# said, you could run two versions of the server on the same machine at the same time. For a head to head adventure you may want two parties in the same module, with different objectives or the same objectives, for real head to head competition
2) The PvP switch can cover the server, or it can be bound to areas within the module. For instance the city could be a non-PvP area while the sewers below are a PvP area.

3) The various options are still under design. The chat box and caption mode are not exclusive, as you can set all messages to appear in your chat box even if they appear on the screen. There is a radius of "hearing" which will block messages past a certain distance from appearing unless they are "shouted".

4) The situation you mention has the party commiting an evil act. The parties reputaion will decrease, possibly changin the alignment of one or more players, possibly even the Paldin for traveling with a group of nasty individuals. For a real answer, the DM can do almost anything he/she wants. If you desire to strip the character of all his/her xp, go ahead. If you abuse the power, players won't play on your server.

Communication

We intend to have some form of true, real-time voice-comm (ie: you speak into a microphone and I hear it in real-time on my computer).
We'll also be implementing a reasonably complex Tribes-style hotkeyed voice system, as well (ie: you press a hot-key and it triggers a pre-existing voice file on my computer). Various basic sounds such as injuries and death sounds would also be a part of this system, though probably not associated with a specific hot-key. I'm pretty sure we'll be allowing you to import custom voice files but, as was the case with BG, anyone who doesn't have the files on their computer will simply hear a default. It's not clear yet whether we'll do an in-game upload/download for the voices. They might be too big.

Source: Neverwinter Nights Vault