In February I was approached by a writer at PC Gamer for an interview about NWN via email. He asked some questions, and I was able to get back to him after a few days at length. I'd hoped to provide enough material for him to sample for an article, but I haven't seen him post any articles yet, so I've decided to post my reply on the blog here, because it's easy, and it might never get posted.
I've removed the names from the emails to protect identities.
EMAIL from Interviewer
Hello NAME, my name is NAME. I'm writing an article on Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition, and NAME referred me to you for you work with Beamdog managing community and feature requests.
I was wondering if you could speak a bit about how the NWN community views the Enhanced Edition and what they expect of it.
Also, can you tell me a bit about the creation of custom content and how NWNEE is improving the process of creation in the game?
Finally, what drew you to the NWN community initially and why are you still a part of it to this day?
Thank you, I appreciate any help you can give me.
Reponse
NAME,
Thanks for waiting, I hope this answers the questions that you have.
Beamdog has taken the opportunity of refurbishing a long-established game-design platform, Neverwinter Nights.
While the Bioware game is another installment in the D&D franchise, and the gameplay resembles other similar games, the way in which the game was originally distributed, with a suite of creative tools allowing game-owners to fabricate their own adventures, has separated the game entirely from others in the genre.
An excerpt from The Art of Neverwinter Nights: Landscapes
Frames from the neverwintervault.org EE reveal on Nov. 21st, 2017
There is a lot of suspense in the NWN community. This kind of overhaul is something that I think everyone in the community hoped for, but never thought would happen. Of course, everyone wants different things out of the improvement of the game, not everyone has the same priorities, and I still feel that in terms of creative materials, there isn't anyone who has the same "dream version" as anyone else, when things become specific.
Beamdog, of course, will have to be specific with changes. I think there may be a few people who would prefer no changes than the implementation of optional changes, even if the latter includes the former, it is impossible to please everyone in this regard.
While part of the community is waiting for the details to settle and hope for the best, most of the community is excited to see the game rejuvenated and expanded. Beamdog is taking a "Swiss-Army Knife" and adding more tools, designing them to be less likely to break, and making it smaller and lighter all at the same time. During the growth of the game through different developers, measures have been taken to work around restrictions, or settle for approximations.
While there have been a lot of clever solutions created to add more material to the game in such sideways manners, it is still often the case that such methods lack the uniformity, flexibility, and stability of core features.
For instance, an extremely common method of adding custom features to the game is to intercept players somewhere between making a new character and playing the game. "Entry areas" are provided to "finish" character creation with new features specific to the module. Beamdog's modifications will offer ways to tailor the built in character creation process directly.
The Beamdog Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition Logo
Also, can you tell me a bit about the creation of custom content and how NWNEE is improving the process of creation in the game?
Regarding creating custom content, I'm actually a very new contributor, and didn't start making things until last summer. This only lasted for a few months before I became involved with early tests of the new game.
I'm on an old Apple Mac Mini, so OSX has been an obstacle for using a lot of the custom content creating tools. This at times lead to me diving further into documentation and research, which in the end allowed me a far greater understanding of the game's workings.
A lot of content customization can be straight forward, though. With the right model and texture formats, adding new objects to the game can be accomplished with the game's content packaging, which serves to bundle and distribute assets, and inject them into the game.
An excerpt from the popular Custom Content Guide v3.0
The NWhak.exe utility for compiling and extracting game resources from .hak files
The essential aspect of the system, however, is that most assets have to be either strictly named to follow conventions, or they must be addressed by a 2da database that references game resources in text format.
For the curious, these details can be found in a popular Custom Content Guide made and appended by community members since the game's release.
"Working with Skyboxes" Blog post
Most of the stuff that I work on is stuff that I've had a problem with. I've worked on the skies a lot, because they appear in the game at low resolution. I've worked on weapon textures because they're common. Generally there is a decision somewhere of changing something that effects large parts of the game, or needs improvement so much more than the rest of the game, or both.
The level of quality one could put into the assets was somewhat constrained, by modern standards. Despite being advanced for its time, the NWN engine doesn't support a lot of the complex lighting systems that have allowed recent games to achieve their new levels of quality in their appearances.
Weapons texture override experiments
Finally, what drew you to the NWN community initially and why are you still a part of it to this day?
When I first tried Neverwinter Nights, it was because I saw the preview included in the release of Baldur's Gate II. Having enjoyed the Baldur's Gate games, I felt a similar game focusing instead on a single character, with the support of new 3d engines and dungeon master tools could be something of immense interest to the game playing audience at the time. When I bought the game I was already playing Ultima Online in the early stages of the "massive multiplayer" gaming revolution, and it wasn't long (I think a few hours into the official campaign) before I looked to multiplayer persistent worlds, that miraculously already existed on the game's release (the toolset was released early), to search for that smaller unique take on the multiplayer world building I had participated in on UO.
Disregarding a several breaks of a few months to a year each peppered in the last 15 years, I've been playing the game since, and have travelled and enjoyed a decent array of individual servers, some with similarities to each other, and others with an entirely new approach that departed from the expected D&D experience. In the last few years I started DMing and developing, and so I don't play as often as I used to, but participating in that aspect of the game has been rejuvenating for the game for me as well. Working with the back-end, it is really incredible when you realize the extent of how limitless your design options are, and that your biggest constraint is your own ability to conceive new ideas and invent improvements.
NAME
AKA Symphony
Thanks for reading, and look forward to my next blog: Textures and texture formats
— Symphony
