Okay, I've been bottling it up, so this is go...
October 02, 2006 by Adam in NWN2
Okay, I've been bottling it up, so this is going to be a big post.
First off, Neverwinter Nights 2 is shaping up to be exactly what I was hoping it would be. The toolset is streamlined, with things like the ability to open multiple areas being extremely useful. The graphics alone are amazing, with incredible flexibility over the look and feel of areas. You can truly make areas that look very different.
This does come with a cost, the old "with great power comes great responsibility" sort of thing. When you get an empty tileset and place each and every table, chair, light, and so on, it takes awhile. There's tons to fiddle with. Of course, there's something called "prefabs" that I'm sure will start showing up on the Vault soon. They're pre-defined groups of things. For folks who just want to make a quick area, that should make things much easier.
There's other "gotchas" that have been brought up in the community already. Module sizes are going to be much larger, mostly due to exterior areas. All that information about terrain texture, heights, grass, and so on has to be stored somehow. It's hard to say at this point, but I'd be surprised if my first Dark Waters module wasn't tens of megabytes in size, compressed. The "full" version with music and voice couple easily be several hundred. So, plan your Internet connection accordingly.
There's some behind-the-scenes things that have turned out to be pretty cool. The toolset has a "plug-in" feature that lets programmers make tremendous changes to the way the toolset works. I think we'll see ways to import and export models, wizards for terrain creation, and so much more. You couldn't do much with the NWN toolset, so this sort of open functionality is going to be huge.
In terms of Dark Waters and what happens next, it's all about doing conversions now. I need to test out the import functionality (you can open old NWN modules, but things have to be tweaked). There's lots of areas to recreate. That should keep me busy for quite awhile. If I'm really lucky, I'll be able to recreate each area by the time NWN2 hits the shelves. I'm guessing it'll still take a couple months of testing and getting some of the models in. I really want to get at least flintlock pistols in the first module (there's a few scenes that might be silly without them).
So, time to circle back with the team today and start getting things organized. Here's a few screenshots to whet your appetite. Click on each for a larger picture.
 
 
Making Pirate Cards
I also wanted to dedicate some time to the Pirate Card game. The first module in the Dark Water campaign is less piratey than the others, so I'd like to give folks a taste of piratey goodness early on. The Pirate Cards game was released for NWN awhile back, but it's getting a major revamp for NWN2. I'm also hopeful that it can be released very soon after NWN2's release. The scope in some ways is small and should be much easier to pull together.
The biggest change is the way that the cards are being done. In NWN, I used portraits from the game itself, which kept the total size pretty small. NWN2 doesn't have portraits, so I ended up creating the images myself. It takes a lot longer to make a screenshot, but the results are very nice.
First, I start with a card editor. It did the font and placement of everything quite nicely, so all I had to do is make a screenshot. That was done in the toolset, placing things where I want, adding visual effects, and setting up lighting.
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