Author Topic: Remake of NVN  (Read 797 times)

Legacy_jaffers

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Remake of NVN
« on: October 24, 2015, 10:17:05 am »


               

Neverwinter nights is my favourite game ever. It was one of the first games I ever played and I have very fond memories, because it was so good, and there isn't really anything like it anymore.


 


Now I can code in C, C++, and python and willing to learn other languages and I'm keen to remake this game with improved graphics and other things if people are up for it.


 


I don't know what engine to use, I'm not familiar with that, I am primarily an engineer, so if we can gather together a team I'd love to put my time and effort into remaking this.


 


I'm going to need artists and animater's etc. I'd love to do this



               
               

               
            

Legacy_henesua

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« Reply #1 on: October 25, 2015, 12:49:36 am »


               

You need to meet the real mccoy, aka DrMcCoy, and his xoreos project.


 


https://github.com/xoreos/xoreos



               
               

               
            

Legacy_DrMcCoy

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« Reply #2 on: October 25, 2015, 11:42:08 am »


               

Well, yes and no. xoreos is not really a project to remake Neverwinter Nights with better graphics, it's primarily a faithful, but free/libre open source software reimplementation of Neverwinter Nights (and later BioWare games). While, when the whole thing stands, it would be possible (and easier in general) to craft such an improvement ontop of xoreos, for now, the primary goal is to get the games running like they original did.


I.e. I am open to improvements of the games themselves, but that's not my focus. And all improvements should always be optional, so that the games can still be played vanilla style.


Apart from that, xoreos is of course not yet in a state where any of this is relevant. Right now, it can display ingame area graphics for all targeted games, and it has a stubby script system hooked up to all of them too. And for Neverwinter Nights, it can display menus and a partial ingame GUI, and show PC/NPC dialogues.


If you feel like this project is something you would like to contribute to, we would love to have you. It's written in C++, licensed under the terms of the GPLv3, and you can find the source code on GitHub here (as henesua already mentioned). The project's website is https://xoreos.org/ and there you'll some progress reports and screenshots. Please also have a look at our wiki, especially the Developer Central page and the rambly TODO.


Feel free to contact me personally, either here or through drmccoy(at)xoreos(dot)org for any questions. You can also mail the xoreos-devel mailing list, or ping me in #xoreos on Freenode IRC.


Me, I'm currently fiddling with an NCS (NWScript bytecode) disassembler and decompiler, to replace the one in the old OpenKnights nwnnsscomp [1]. The disassembler is already working (including support for Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II scripts), it can additionally create dot files that can be plotted into a flow graph with graphviz, and I have a bit of a stack-analysis going on to detect the parameter, return values and their types of subroutine [2]. An example disassembly flow graph of an NWN2 script is here: https://drmccoy.de/x...luence_band.png. If possible, I'd like to expand that into a full-fledged decompiler that recreate parts of the C-like NSS sources. Likewise, there's an assembler (to change a plain disassembly text listing back into a NCS file) and a full compiler on my TODO list.


If anybody is intrigued by any of these decompiler, assembler, compiler tasks, I'll gladly let other people implement them if they want to. Please, contact me about it, then. '<img'> These tasks are a bit more "classical" computer sciencey.


[1] Which, unfortunately, has been left to bit-rot. It doesn't compile with Bison 3, unless you look for a patch in an obscure repository, and it doesn't work correctly when compiled for 64-bit. The code is also a bit...arcane. I mirrored it here with some quick and dirty changes on my part. Also, because of its BSD-license nature, you'll find a lot of binary-only improved versions of it floating around, which I for one find a bit sad.

[2] Doesn't work when the scripts recurse, because of the halting problem.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_meaglyn

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« Reply #3 on: October 25, 2015, 02:23:37 pm »


               

There are several more modern versions of nwnnsscomp floating around.  I have one which is a fork of Niv's tree on github. I fixes all of the bugs I've hit in extensive use with an out of tree module build environment.  And it compiles on bison 3.  NIv updated to a cmake build and I've worked off of that. You can find it here if you are interested.  Note, this is for Linux. I don't think it will build as is on a windows system.    I force it to compile 32bit. Not really much need for it to be native 64bit.  I did have that working in 64bit except for one or two subtle issues I did not have time or energy to debug.



               
               

               
            

Legacy_DrMcCoy

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« Reply #4 on: October 25, 2015, 03:01:25 pm »


               

You can find it here if you are interested.


Neat! '<img'>

My changes were just some quick-and-dirty fixes to get it to compile, so that I can look at the disassembly of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II scripts. And manually trace the stack to figure out how the two new array and the two new reference opcodes are supposed to work. Then I threw it up on GitHub, just in case it's useful to anybody.
 

There are several more modern versions of nwnnsscomp floating around.


It's a bit unfortunate that they scattered so wildly. Somebody should maybe try to merge them all again into a canonical one? Or maybe that'll just create another scattershot fork.

Me, personally, I'd like to have a new, clean one, one that supports all the games natively. But I admit that it's partially my innate "Not-Invented-Here" sense driving me here. '<img'>
               
               

               
            

Legacy_WebShaman

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« Reply #5 on: November 05, 2015, 03:48:35 pm »


               

Basically (afaiac) if someone can get NWN to do real Party Mode (ala NWN2, but without the queue problems!), I would be a happy camper!



               
               

               
            

Legacy_Daopsin

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Remake of NVN
« Reply #6 on: November 06, 2015, 07:21:58 pm »


               

It would be good to see the game upgraded with better graphics. I remember someone a few years ago was working on some plugin which made the game have a proper day and night system with the clouds moving and everything. Sadly it never did see the light of day and the video of it working was lost on the old vault after it went down.