Neverwinter Nights

[Lanei]

**snip**  It is possible to introduce new classes? Can you set up your own cinematics? Can you do some pretty advanced AI scripting with the tool (like could you write a mini-war type scenario where you direct some troops and initiate some skirmishes)?  

From what I remember of the limitations of the scripting engine just after release of the base game:
- You can't add classes.   This might have been changed with an expansion, since the expansions did add classes.
- You can have cinematics, either scripted in the game engine, or included in the module.
- You can script a war scenario, with NPCs attacking other NPCs.

[Alkiera]

You can add classes, at least prestige classes.  It's been done, just look around.  It involves Hak Paks, tho, and I'm not real clear on _how_ it's done.  Apparently it seems like you should be able to add base classes as well, but base classes don't work out right for some reason, from what I've read.

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Alkiera

[Elohite]

base classes seem to have a bit of hard coding in them at character creation... from what I understand you can add new classes people can level up to after creation, but the attributes of a class at creation is somewhat hard coded.  Problem for rangers who wish to use the updated v3.5 class from the beginning.

[Vehementi]

To the OP:  You can get the game and expansions off Ebay.  NWN Gold costs $25 US buyout (i.e. it costs less than $25), and HotU costs $14-17 US buyout.  The easiest thing to do is get the CDs from a friend/internet and then email the sellers asking if they can just email you the CD Key and discard the game afterwards.  That way, you get the game instantly and don't have to pay shipping.  I did this yesterday - got the HotU CD Key for $14.99 US, and I would have paid about $15 for NWN Gold if I hadn't been able to barter with a friend for his CD Keys.

I guess if you're going to cry about how email is insecure or how you distrust the sellers etc, you can go buy it retail.

[Rasix]

To the OP:  You can get the game and expansions off Ebay.  NWN Gold costs $25 US buyout (i.e. it costs less than $25), and HotU costs $14-17 US buyout.  The easiest thing to do is get the CDs from a friend/internet and then email the sellers asking if they can just email you the CD Key and discard the game afterwards.  That way, you get the game instantly and don't have to pay shipping.  I did this yesterday - got the HotU CD Key for $14.99 US, and I would have paid about $15 for NWN Gold if I hadn't been able to barter with a friend for his CD Keys.

I guess if you're going to cry about how email is insecure or how you distrust the sellers etc, you can go buy it retail.

I guess you trust people more than I do.

More than half of the NWN Gold crap was foreign (most from Thailand), sorry, not going to deal with international shipping.  With shipping costs most great deals like that end up marginally better than retail, and you get to deal with Ebay/PayPal/international shipping/possible piracy and fraud.  No thanks.

If I knew someone with the disks, then maybe I could ask someone to crack open a box and send me the keys.  But then what's to stop them from using the keys themselves or just reselling the game?  I can't exactly ask them to email me an avi of them torching the cds.

I know many people have embraced ebay as the great den of deals but I'm a lot more comfortable buying from an EB Games or a local shop.  Ebay gives me no real sense of security. I've yet to really use it for anything other than selling MMORPG items (which may explain my inherent distrust of the procedure).

[Rasix]

Well, I bought it.  Now I can't get the thing to fucking work.  I get random crashes when creating characters, when loading areas, etc.  It's not even a very descriptive crash so I can look up what to do.  It just gives me that wonderful Windows XP crash screen; "Send Error" or "Don't Send Error" is not something I want to fucking see.

I've updated all of my drivers, etc ,etc. I've never ever had this many problems trying to get a game to run. I thought it was a sound error at first (Fucking NForce) but even with sound disabled it craps out.

I just fucking pray that EBgames will let me return this fucking heap of shit.  And PC game makers wonder why consoles get 75% of my business.  

BAAAAAAAAAAH.

[geldonyetich]

In the past I had discovered Neverwinter Nights had a nasty habit of crashing on me when other apps would be relatively stable.  Hard lockups or spontaious reboots (which are by default how WinXP handles a BSOD - I disabled that little feature).

How I ended up fixxing it was going into my Cmos DRAM settings and disabling the T1 command and setting my "Fast Mode" CMOS setting from Ultra to Normal.    No apparent performance degregation in FFXI bench, but it totally stopped my NWN lockups and that was good enough for me.  

This translated into less lockups in other applications as well, so ultimately I'm chalking up the issue to shitty hardware/compatibility issue.   (Probably the memory - have to set my SDRAM CAS# Frequency to 2.5 instead of 2 or I run at 512MB instead of 1 GB.      I'm just glad I got NWN to work stably at all.)

Anyway, the whole experience has me thinking that any issues you have with NWN are really issues with your systems hardware being used to the limits.   This is because the kind of sophisticated high end processing work NWN pulls, few other games dare to tread.    Overclocking often leaves holes gaping wide open that full throttle apps like NWN will find problematic.

On the other hand, KOTOR has a nasty habit of crashing every 4th or 5th time I zone, and it has some NWN lineage in there.   Perhaps NWN isn't the god's gift to data archetexture I think it is.

[Trippy]

Well, I bought it.  Now I can't get the thing to fucking work.  I get random crashes when creating characters, when loading areas, etc.  It's not even a very descriptive crash so I can look up what to do.  It just gives me that wonderful Windows XP crash screen; "Send Error" or "Don't Send Error" is not something I want to fucking see.

I've updated all of my drivers, etc ,etc. I've never ever had this many problems trying to get a game to run. I thought it was a sound error at first (Fucking NForce) but even with sound disabled it craps out.

Make sure you've patched the game(s) to the latest version from here:

http://nwn.bioware.com/support/patch.html

You may also want to visit the Support forums here:

http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewforum.html?forum=49

NWN is one of those games, unfortunately, that causes problems for many people (typically sound and graphics issues).

You can also check your Windows XP Event Viewer to see if NWN was kind enough to leave you a more informative error message in there.

[Rasix]

Got it working.  When it started crashing at the same time, everytime during loading I figured it was a bad file somewhere. Complete reinstall got it working.

I remember this game sucking upon release.   This SoU campaign is pretty decent so far, if not terribly difficult yet. I think I'll play through the game before diving into the construction set so I can see what you can actually do with it (theoretically).

[Alrindel]

I know many people have embraced ebay as the great den of deals but I'm a lot more comfortable buying from an EB Games or a local shop.  Ebay gives me no real sense of security. I've yet to really use it for anything other than selling MMORPG items (which may explain my inherent distrust of the procedure).

Well, over the years I've bought about twenty items on ebay, including a DAOC account, a new SWG box, a never-used Eve Online box, and a CoH Beta disk.  For all those items I just had the person e-mail me the CD-KEY (and in the case of the DAOC account, the password).  So far, no problems whatsoever.  There are still more honest people than dishonest people, I think.

[Vehementi]

I bought two copies of HotU (one for myself, and one for my girlfriend), a copy of SoU (for her), and bartered on IRC for some guy's NWN Gold CD Keys.  Everything worked so far without a hitch.  $43 CDN for two copies of the entire game and expansions (she got a NWN key from a friend.)  And by copies, I mean CD Keys.

If you find an ebayer with a highass rating, you can pretty much trust them.  It's in their best interest to be honest and not fuck you over, else you'll leave legitimate negative feedback (as opposed to retards who don't check their mail and then leave negative feedback, which is what 90% of the negative feedback consists of, apparently.)

As for the copies being in Thailand, again, don't have them ship it to you.  Just get the CD Key.  Now you get the ultra cheap (and functional) asian prices, without the horrific asia->america shipping prices.

[Rasix]

Dealing with all of the crashes this game can produce is just a trial in itself.  After getting it working, it had a crash that corrupted the entire game module, FUN!

Several reinstalls later and a complete system reinstall (I was due for one, Windows installations don't age like wine). I got it working. Except there's always a problem with the art. It NEVER installs correctly.  There's always some 2D art that is missing.  One time it was all spell icons and some character portraits.  Now it's all of the loading screens.  Also, certain art items in the game have made me crash.  I can't open a certain chest without it crashing.  

I'm not sure anything actually fixed anything beyond now at least I can create characters and so far haven't run into any unavoidable crashes. Of course, I now have two alternating save points incase one gets corrupted.  

People that make games this technically troublesome need to not be making games.  There's just no excuse for this kind of shit.  Yes, they've made a game that's a great model for user created content and their 2 expansions have produced better gameplay, but really, I haven't played a game this buggy since Fallout Tactics.

[Jain Zar]

It was never buggy for me under 98.  Under XP?  Whole new ballgame.

[Alkiera]

I've run it under 98SE and Win2000, and never had any problems either.  I have had issues with other games that ran fine under 98SE and look terrible under win2000, namely anything using Direct3D v8 or 9.  D3Dv7-based stuff seems to be okay, mostly.  This may be partly due to the age of my card (geforce2 GTS 32mb) and nVidia driver differences between the two OS's.

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Alkiera

[HaemishM]

The biggest bugginess I found in NWN was in Win98SE, and only on the construction set. For the first few months, that thing would either crash randomly, or it would corrupt my modules for no good goddamn reason. I know I started over twice on the campaign module I was making because of the corruption bug which they finally patched out. I ended up saving every five minutes and then copy/pasting backup copies into a separate directory in order to have a chance of finishing any module with more than 4-6 areas. I might actually have finished the module had I not lost so much time to that bug.

[Alkiera]

Haemish, the NWN Toolset WAS incredibly buggy under 98SE, I agree.  Above I was mostly speaking of the game.  The ToolSet is another matter, tho 2 expansions later, it seems to be somewhat more stable.

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Alkiera

[Alluvian]

So who all is running the game under XP?  Sounds like Rasix and Jain Zar are having issues with it in XP.  Haemish, have you run the game in XP?  Does it run better for you in that OS vs 98SE?  Or did you give up on it after your 98SE problems?

I am waffling on whether I want to try and get into it again.  Not looking forward to any massive frustrations after my fan fiasco.  Which followed right on the heels of my router dying.  With a network card failure stuffed in between.  It has been a bad couple days for my little LAN.

[Rasix]

Here's what I've gleaned from the unofficial support forums.  If you have any of the below, NWN may be a bitch to get running on your system:

Win XP/NT/ME
NTFS partition
Any new video card, particularly an ATI (it also tends to hate some AGP settings)
Onboard sound.
ATI motherboards.

Even if you're in the clear above, there's just a lot of things that can go wrong installing the game (files get corrupted, maybe the NTFS thing) and getting it to run at all for some people is problematic. There's also little quirky errors that you'll only find by scouring the damn support forums for hours.  Seemingly runs the most stable on old systems, but then they run the game very sluggishly.

I guess what I'm saying is, buy at your own risk.  Pretty much any place you purchase it from will have a return policy that makes getting your money back a near impossibility.

[daveNYC]

Win XP/NT/ME
NTFS partition
Any new video card, particularly an ATI (it also tends to hate some AGP settings)
Onboard sound.
ATI motherboards.

But other than that it's fine?  Sad.

[Rasix]

Win XP/NT/ME
NTFS partition
Any new video card, particularly an ATI (it also tends to hate some AGP settings)
Onboard sound.
ATI motherboards.

But other than that it's fine?  Sad.

Well, it's doable with the above. But that's where about 90% of the problems tend to be.  And yes, it is sad, no game should suffer so many different technical fuckups.  Broken quests and unbalanced gameplay would are welcome compared to something just not working.  

It's pretty bad when a game as old as NWN still has a thriving tech support forum.

Ohh god, I haven't even cracked open the toolset yet.  *braces for pain*

[Megrim]

So who all is running the game under XP?  Sounds like Rasix and Jain Zar are having issues with it in XP.  Haemish, have you run the game in XP?  Does it run better for you in that OS vs 98SE?  Or did you give up on it after your 98SE problems?

I am waffling on whether I want to try and get into it again.  Not looking forward to any massive frustrations after my fan fiasco.  Which followed right on the heels of my router dying.  With a network card failure stuffed in between.  It has been a bad couple days for my little LAN.

Well i am (or was, haven't touched it for ages) running it on XP-Pro and have not had any problems.

But then again i don't seem to get many of the problems that apparently plague the mainstream.

[Signe]

I am too, and it's running fine.  My hair, however, is seriously bugged. :(

[boley]

Playing under XP fine with zero problems, and I have been playing a ton over the past few weeks.

After taking a look at the self-help tech support forum I noticed it had a total of 25 threads active yesterday.  About half of those were actually related to technical problems.  Not exactly a huge number considering the amount of people that actively still play the game.

[Rasix]

Well, now that you 3 said it worked in Win XP, all of my problems magically vanished.  All of the missing art shifted into it place and the game sent a pop up to my screen promising to never crash again :)

To be fair(and less of a dick), I played last night for an hour without a single glitch besides some missing screen loading art.  

The game seems to transition between pathetically easy and hard as hell on the drop of a hat.   Using Deekin now as my henchman, he's goddamn hillarius although not terribly helpful being that I play a monk.  Thus I have no lock picker, no trap unsetter and no healer.  It's almost time to reup the dwarven rogue bitch.

I figure my problem is something install related because it doesn't fit ANYTHING on the boards.  I might have some bad CDs, I don't know.  I get different art problems and different crashes every time I reinstall.  But the crashes will be consistant.  Like on this install if I crash opening door #3, I will always crash opening that door.  It's not sound related, because it'll still crash with sound off.  I don't think it's video related, because I have a fairly decent card and up-to-date drivers.

/shrug  I figure once I beat SoU I'll give installing another shot but try to make it as clean as possible (no other processes running, etc). Because I imagine corrupted art files will wreck havok with trying to make a module.

[Alkiera]

Using Deekin now as my henchman, he's goddamn hillarius although not terribly helpful being that I play a monk.  Thus I have no lock picker, no trap unsetter and no healer.

The first can be solved once you can afford a pair of the gloves that add magic damage to your attacks... just punch everything that's locked.  The second becomes less of a problem at higher level, when it nearly takes an act of Ao to cause a trap to actually succeed on hitting you.

That said, the rogue/cleric may well be a better choice, I admittedly didn't take Deekin as my henchman(for my monk) until HotU, when he's a pretty uber bard.

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Alkiera

[Alluvian]

You guys like the rogue/cleric mix?  My wife used to play dwarven rogue/cleric in it and we found it pretty difficult to get the game to agree that she was sneak attacking so she rarely if ever got the extra damage, and when she did it seemed random (sometimes it would kick in for no reason when she was face to face solo fighting something, but we found it nearly impossible to set up a scenario where it would work).  The cleric portion seemed to be a bless bot pretty much.  Some nice buffs in there that really helped, but the healing is pretty useless in the game considering how plentiful the healing kits and potions are.  And the kits and potions work even better than the cast heals.  This is from the original campaign.  I don't know if all this changes with expansions.

We own two copies of the game and I have the itch to play through it (or an expansion) with my wife, but the first time we gave up in frustration about halfway into act 2.  Her character kept getting corrupted forcing us to remake it with exp and item handouts in the DM module.  This had to be done constantly almost every play session.  The main savegames also started getting more and more corrupt as we played causing mission flags to get reset and such.  We had to start redoing things we had already done.  At one point we got stuck.  There was some key/item we needed to get into a place we had already completed, but we were mysteriously missing the item.  The game decided to change it's mind and say we didn't do that part of the game so we could not continue.  We searched the items in the DM module but none of them were the item we needed... and it didn't poof back to the well thingy in the hub like it should have.

So uninstall went the game.  It doesn't sound like it is much more stable these days.

[Alkiera]

You guys like the rogue/cleric mix?  My wife used to play dwarven rogue/cleric in it and we found it pretty difficult to get the game to agree that she was sneak attacking so she rarely if ever got the extra damage, and when she did it seemed random (sometimes it would kick in for no reason when she was face to face solo fighting something, but we found it nearly impossible to set up a scenario where it would work).  The cleric portion seemed to be a bless bot pretty much.  Some nice buffs in there that really helped, but the healing is pretty useless in the game considering how plentiful the healing kits and potions are.  And the kits and potions work even better than the cast heals.  This is from the original campaign.  I don't know if all this changes with expansions.

Agreed that heal spells are not overwhelmingly useful in the game, for some reason, primarily due to the numerous potions/kits.
As fas as sneak attack, I haven't had any problem with it.  The rule is that if your target doesn't get his dex bonus to AC, i.e. is surprised, or actively fighting something/someone else, you get your bonus sneak attack damage.  If you're tanking, you get it pretty rarely.  I've played both fighter/rogue and monk/rogue.  It's handy for the skills, but sneak attack is dubiously useful for both.  Only really handy for killing things that are beating on more-fragile teammates...  and lots of things are immune to sneak attack.(undead and golems, for example)

We own two copies of the game and I have the itch to play through it (or an expansion) with my wife, but the first time we gave up in frustration about halfway into act 2.  Her character kept getting corrupted forcing us to remake it with exp and item handouts in the DM module.  This had to be done constantly almost every play session.  The main savegames also started getting more and more corrupt as we played causing mission flags to get reset and such.  We had to start redoing things we had already done.  At one point we got stuck.  There was some key/item we needed to get into a place we had already completed, but we were mysteriously missing the item.  The game decided to change it's mind and say we didn't do that part of the game so we could not continue.  We searched the items in the DM module but none of them were the item we needed... and it didn't poof back to the well thingy in the hub like it should have.

How long ago was this?  There have been a lot of patches to fix problems with the mission/scripting engine, and the expansions did add a good bit of stability.  I too had some problems playing thru initially, corrupted savegames, etc, but my last couple times thru had no problems.

So uninstall went the game.  It doesn't sound like it is much more stable these days.

 It depends alot on your system, apparently.  If you had crash/blue screen/etc errors before, you may likely still have them.  A lot of the corruption/mission issues seem to have been fixed, however.

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Alkiera

[Alluvian]

We started playing right after release and gave up in frustration about 3-4 months after.

Not much crashing problems, some random seeming crashes in the module maker, but we didn't have many ingame problems.  The thing it that does not mean anything to us anymore.  We both have new systems with new OS since then.