NWN2 Toolset Review #1

Created by Obsidian
Reviewed By Adam Miller
Review Posted on 2007-01-23

I've been using the toolset for a long time and it's difficult to properly review it. Things that drive some folks nuts I probably don't notice anymore due to workarounds and simply getting used to things. On the other hand, things that once seemed miraculous are now ordinary. Making an exterior and painting terrain was incredibly cool once, but now is merely yet another task along the way to making a game.

Fortunately, the toolset seems to be quite effective at making games for NWN2. A few tasks are still slower than I'd like, such as working with scripts, but have improved considerably since launch. Creating areas is slow, simply due to the huge flexibility available. When I can place individual pillows every which way and tint them to my heart's content, it's difficult to know where to stop. Making areas easily takes ten times longer than NWN. The good part is that the results can be stunning and I don't have the feeling of monotony I had with NWN.

The new camera/cutscene system is great. Cutscenes were often one of the hardest things to do with NWN. Now it's a simple matter of placing cameras, writing a quick dialog, and a couple quick scripting commands. Before I was always fumbling around with angles and diameters and ending up with weird camera issues.

Though this is rarely mentioned and often taken for granted, the new graphic capabilities are great. I love being able to make new VFX in the toolset, making it easy for anyone to make custom spell effects, portals, or whatever. Adding normal maps to models, increasing polycounts, and bringing the NWN engine into the modern age is great. It's been fun making new models for the game in part for those reasons.

The new flexible walkmesh system is great, and the pathfinding is far superior to NWN's. Of course it means you need to bake after every significant change, yet another example of greater flexibility requiring greater responsibility and care.

There are some odd bugs still. I see lighting issues with water on occasion. I sometimes have problems with doors snapping into doorways. Closing script windows will sometimes lock up the game for me. I've seen module corruption more often than I'd like, making backups a mandatory part of development.

As it stands, I'm giving the toolset a solid 7, with an 8 likely coming with the next patch. The toolset is complex and has a few issues, but the folks at Obsidian are working hard to improve usability and resolve the last of the toolset bugs. For comparison, I put the Half-Life 2 and Unreal Editors around 5 or 6, simply because their complexity makes it difficult for anyone but the most diligent to use. The NWN2 toolset is a nice compromise between power and ease of use, not perfect, but better than any other toolset I've worked with.

Here's a few other collected tips I wish I'd known when I'd started working with the toolset many months ago. Some of them are pretty obscure, so feel free to let your eyes gloss over.


Adam's Arcane NWN2 Toolset Tips

Custom Content

When working with custom content, I highly recommend using the campaign folder. Nearly everything can be stuffed in there, from TGA files to new models. The only exceptions are music and 2da files, which have to go in their proper places. Feel free to create a shallow directory structure to keep your files organized.

I've been compressing raw wav files down to mp3s with good success. I'm using WinLame with custom compression settings: Bitrate of 64, Mono encoding, constant bitrate, Nogap encoding, and Prepend RIFF WAVE Header. I have no idea what all those things do, but they play okay in the game and the file size is greatly reduced.

When making custom models, be sure to name your meshes something unique. NWN let you name your meshes whatever, but you'll see weird caching issues if you don't for NWN2. As a plus, you can update your MDB files while the toolset is open, change a placeable appearance, and see your changes appear.

Scripting

A few things have changed with scripting. One of the ones that got me in trouble was the JumpToObject and ActionStartConversation combination. I got used to being able to jump a player or NPC to a location and start up a conversation. Now the start conversation script fires up immediately, before everyone is in place, and the conversation fails. I've mostly switched to a method where I retry the conversation. It's more cumbersome in some ways, but seems to be more reliable. Another approach is to make a new trigger and have the conversation fire only when all players and NPCs have jumped into the area.

Visual Effects

You can make nifty floating placeables by using the Air Elemental creature and applying a visual effect to it. Your custom visual effect will use the "model" type. Just pick a model in the game, attach it to the pelvis (or something) and off you go.

Extract the NWN2_VFX.zip file somewhere handy, as it has all the game's visual effects in it. There's lots of good examples to copy and modify as you see fit.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is a neglected part of toolset work, while being critical to any successful game development. Here's a few tips.

Make a QA Widget. Mine spawns a dialog that lets a QA person fiddle with game variables, jump to key points in the game, gain XP, and perform other behind the scene tasks.

Break a big module into smaller ones, unified by a campaign. Load times are pretty harsh, especially if you're making a change, testing it, and repeating over and over. By making smaller modules, your overall load time should be much reduced.

If you have a fancy crafting system or another complex thing you want to implement, make a test module for it. I had a single interior room that I seriously abused when testing my flintlock pistols. Load times were measured in seconds, rather than the minutes it takes to load the full module.

Adam Miller