Act I - II, Diplomacy And Lots of Color

Been quite busy these intervening weeks, finally finished off Act I and am hip deep into II. Act I was long and like any good three act tale, the second act seems to be the lull before the storm. That is not to say that Act II isn’t good, it starts slow and the pacing picks up as you progress deeper in to the Act. I spent a lot of time early on buying and selling equipment looted during the arduously long first Act, doling out the good stuff to my companions where possible. It seems the OC dialog is particularly Diplomacy driven, though there are occasionally options for Intimidate and even Taunt. I would like the variant Intimidate rule to be optional on a character by character basis. While I find the Charisma based Intimidate a reasonable mechanic, for some characters Strength is just better suited. The Diehard Bruce Willis would likely employ Charisma, Schwarzenegger’s Conan, I think, would use Strength to get his way. In any case there’s a lot of XP reliant on Diplomacy skill, so my future characters will add points to that skill as much as possible. Gaining Influence over your companions is another important task and using your own personal diplomacy is nearly as important as using Charisma-based skills in dialogs. There is a lot of interaction where one answer gains influence on one character and loses with another. Early on, when you have few companions you just have to take your lumps, but later on, you can arrange your party so that you can keep rivals apart when necessary.

But my involvement with the game doesn’t with playing. I have been keeping a weather eye on the Neverwinter Vault for UI enhancements, clothing options, snowy terrain tile sets and other features that will increase my enjoyment of the game. Found a couple of nice ones that should make anyone’s list of must haves. I have mixed and matched XiDragon’s xUI and Charlie Vales CharlieUI – both mods will greatly reduce mouse clicks over time – and Gaoneng’s United Colors character creation mod is apparently a player favorite. If a complaint could be lodged versus United Colors, it would be that the manually changing the palette schemes for 16 races @ 6 parts per with 256 colors (24,576 color codes), not to mention dealing with the hex encoding of the colors in the files. Herein I found a way to put my skills to use and make some lives a bit easier. After a brief bit of study to see what was going on under the hood, I decided to write a C# application that read in the United Colors data files and allowed the colors to be edited using the standard Windows color changer dialog. My app would make editing those 24 thousand elements quite a bit easier. It also provides the option of editing the original 18 color palettes already provided in-game. One good idea begat another and I began adding various types of color gradient automation to make finding the right shade (or range) of color more quickly accessible.

I am still finding ways to improve on the original application (like the upcoming addition of Charlie Vale’s mod to make it easier to configure the various pieces), and I plan on making it more of a one stop place for adding and configuring the mods I use. With any luck other will find it useful as well. In the long run, I hope to make this a full featured app that will be able to acquire updates to any associated mods as the game patches (if the number of them grows large enough as well).

CharlieUI

United Colors

NwN2 Mod Configurator (Name of the next version, since its scope has expanded)

Into The Act I

At this stage in the release of Neverwinter Nights 2, I won’t go into detail about the Official Campaign content to avoid spoilers, I will concentrate on my impressions of the game and story and maybe some technical discussion. Moving along through the OC has been a bit of a struggle, not with the content per se, but with the controls, particularly the keyboard. The ‘WSAD’ system is fairly straightforward, but the game’s response seems overly sensitive. The slightest, quickest press of the ‘A’ key, for instance, often yields a turn angle of somewhere between 45º and 90º, quite a large change of direction, especially when moving. I have tried making adjustments through the Control Panel’s Keyboard applet in an attempt to reduce the hardware’s sensitivity (I may need to slow this even further), but I suspect that the angle of rotation on a turn is some factor in the game. Using the mouse for all movement is a little unwieldy as well because the camera angles and the character model can get in the way for small moves.

One feature I really like is the World Map, which brings back great memories of the old SSI Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance, Secret of the Silver Blades and Treasures of the Savage Frontier. Back in the day – 1988 for those interested in the History – these games provided hours and hours of D&D fun particularly when a group couldn’t be found to play pen and paper D&D. The original Neverwinter Nights on AOL – ancestor of the game we know and love today – sprang from these Gold Box series games in 1991. Gold Box originated the concept of the using the World Map for movement between encounters and dungeons. The World Map also captures the flavor of the pen and paper game where the DM will gloss over the tediously uneventful travel time and continue on to the meat of Adventure. It even gives module builders the ability to schedule ‘random’ encounters during travel.

So far I find I am enjoying the Campaign; story, plot and characters are rich and engaging, the cut-scenes and VO are excellent. The quests so far have been fairly typical and the roleplaying aspects haven't come to full fruit yet. I am looking forward to the time when my choices have broader effect on my character's companions.

Of Machinema [sic] and Neverending Nights.

I have been spending time visiting the Neverwinter Vault website, likely the de facto top fan site for all things Neverwinter Nights, and I happened to rediscover the old ‘Generika Adventures’ comic that was created by Maximus and Chris Irby. I had read much of that series when I used to frequent the Vault regularly, and now that I am back in the habit, rereading the entire series and the new content seemed like a good idea. The characters and plots are light and engaging and the jokes are bad – in a good way – making the time spent worthwhile for me. Go here to experience them for yourself, starting with the highest number and work your way back to 1.

I have a newly found interest in Machinima (which I think needs a spelling change, Machinema look like a better merger of machine and cinema to me), and I had fun watching the Neverending Nights machinema, available here in the videos section. Decent gags – I have a very difficult sense of humor to crack – and some interesting work in V.O. and filming using the old Neverwinter Nights engine. I haven’t seen a lot of different Machinema stories, but so far I enjoy the ‘funny’ ones the most. There is a ton of stuff out there and I will have to put some time into viewing the more serious fare to see how I like it. This may become a new creative outlet for me, particularly if I can find some inexpensive tools and learn some of the techniques.

First Impressions

I started playing the Official Campaign over the weekend and have some first impressions. Girruuth, a character I have used since the first Neverwinter Nights, is the typical Half-Orc I run through these campaigns. Girruuth started life with a level of Rogue and at second level began his career as a – high Str high Dex – Barbarian. The character creation process is simple and there are several choices to make for the characters appearance, nothing as comprehensive as the ample options available in Everquest 2 or Oblivion, but improved over the original game. Skill and Feat assignments are similar to the first game as well, with minor graphical improvements. No spells on this character so I will evaluate those screens at some later date.

I didn’t create any characters of other races this time out so some of this may not be accurate for all circumstances. I felt that, in light of what I have seen in other games, more character appearance options would go along way to making this a better experience. As many choices as there are, I can quite easily see how duplicate head/hair/color combinations will quickly crop on Persistent Worlds. Perhaps making more colors available for hair and things would be an easy enough change, for starters.

I really like the way they integrated the beginner’s tutorial in the game. It provides a fairly seamless way to introduce UI concepts to completely new players as well as those that just need to get used to the new interface. A couple of areas that will require some getting used to are the camera and WSAD movement. The camera seems particularly obstinate -- it never seems to point where I want it to -- and the movement controls feel extremely sensitive. Maybe there are some setting under options that can fix the movement but I have tried all the different camera's and none feels entirely satisfying.

Some final issues; I recently installed a new top-of-the-line video card and cranked up the graphic effects. As soon as I entered the first outdoor area I saw a shadow rapidly flickering on a boulder in an unexpected way. I don't know how much of this is NWN2 and how much is DX9 or the Video Card drivers. Also in the graphics department, there is a road sign tucked under some shady trees near the far side of the village that when highlighted with the mouse 'dissipate' the shadows. I am fairly certain that this is caused by the 'light' that the highlighted sign is generating effective dispelling the shadows until the mouse is moved away and shadows are restored.

All in all, I like what I have seen so far. The interface is something that I will need to get adjusted to and the graphics glitches are not really a big problem.

Neverwinter Nights 2 Released

I was a big supporter of the original Bioware version of the Neverwinter Nights game, I even wrote a scripting simulator for Neverwinter Vault before the game and toolset were released. It was used as a tool to teach non-programmers the basic skills they would need to work with the Toolset scripting language. I even added a couple of example modules demonstrating some scripting techniques.

Neverwinter Nights was one of the few games that I have played from start to finish, all the way through the two expansions with multiple characters. I tried several of the user create modules; enjoyed some, despised others. Never did try out a Persistent World for various reasons ranging from pvp (don't really care for it, I use games to relieve stress) to dealing with hundreds of megabytes of downloads on a slow connection (PW's tend to use large HAKpacks), not the least of which was my experiences playing over the internet with friends (not very promising with all the lag).

My intent with this blog is to write about my Neverwinter Nights 2 experiences with the primary campaign, the toolset, user created modules and hopefully even some persistent worlds.