Just saw this by OldTimeRadio and think it deserves its own little prop and shout out.
NWN OmnibusAn ENORMOUS collection of searchable NWN reference material in one place!
View the introduction on YouTube, HERE What is the NWN Omnibus? It is an attempt to gather the majority of NWN reference material together in one place and allow very quick keyword searching against
all of the documents at once. It includes reference documents as well as forum threads.
Who is going to get the most out of the NWN Omnibus? Any NWN Custom Content creator or NWScript writer who finds themselves frequently searching through the old BioWare forums using Google, the NWN Lexicon, or the BioWare "For Developers" documents for
specific topics. Since so much raw information is available for searching, those who will get the
very most out of the Omnibus are individuals who already have a decent working knowledge of how Custom Content and NWScript work but who often find themselves needing to look up specific keywords or topics to further advance their pursuits.
Is it complete? No! This release of the NWN Omnibus comes with a huge amount of information to search through but I still think there's more useful information which can be included in the future. Offline versions of the
DLA Custom Content Wiki, a few more of the
old archived BioWare forums,
reference sheets for BioWare tileset textures...and so on, and so on. I encourage others to experiment with their own combination of reference materials, customizing the Omnibus so it is most useful for their needs.
What program drives the NWN Omnibus? The Omnibus is a customized version of a portable
DocFetcher distribution. You can also find the Wiki for DocFetcher
here.
What programs were used to make the NWN Omnibus? Since DocFetcher works best with html, most of the programs involved were tools which converted (whatever) to html. For PDF conversion, I used
pdftohtml. For CHM,
CHMDecoder. For downloading the BioWare forums, I used
ForumD Does having the NWN Omnibus mean I don't need to download all that other reference material, individually? Well...yes and no. It depends on how knowledgeable you are in the first place. For the most part, you shouldn't need to download the information separately.
But because there is an enormous amount of material in the Omnibus and because the material has been converted to html from various other formats (like PDF or CHM) some of the material might not look as good as it does in its original form. Good examples of material which didn't convert as well as I would like are portions of Eligio Sacateca's Custom Content Guide and script snippets from the BioWare Scripting forum. In cases like that, the NWN Omnibus helps at least pinpoint whether a particular resource has information on the topic one is searching for. Remember, the NWN Omnibus is a powerful topic search tool. Trying to learn the basics of Custom Content from the NWN Omnibus' version of Custom Content Guide is going to be quite a bit more difficult than just reading through Eligio's guide directly.
Can I add my own information into the NWN Omnibus? Yes,
DocFetcher is extremely flexible and allows adding or removing indices quite easily. Download the portable version and play around with making your own customized distributions. If you release DocFetcher-friendly modules to the Vault, just drop me a PM on the BioWare social site (or write me from my Vault profile) and I'll try to add a link to your entry.
How do I install and run it? Just unpack it to a folder on your hard drive with about 500 megabytes free and you're good to go! It should also work perfectly from a USB thumb drive. Just run DocFetcher.exe (or DocFetcher.sh for Linux, I believe)
What information does this release of the NWN Omnibus contain? 2DA 169 - All 575 .2DA files, current to the 1.69 release
3DS Max Export Scripts - BioWare 3DS Max export scripts documentation, which includes a good deal of information on NWN Custom Content in general. Downloadable separately
here BioWare For Developers - All 22 documents covering NWN file formats (and other things) from
this page
BioWare Forums - Offline archives of the following forums from the old BioWare website, each thread in its own .HTML file. The following full forum archives from the old BioWare site are included in this release: NWN Custom Content (ARCHIVE), BioWare News Discussion, Custom Content, For Developers, Scripting, Server Admin & Toolset.
Also Stickied threads for
every forum were included.
Custom Content Guide 3.0 - The "Bible" of Custom Content. Downloadable separately
here.
GMax & Maxscript Help - Help files for GMax (3DS Max 4) and Maxscript, downloadable separately
here Lexicon 169 - The "Bible" of NWScript (and many, many other things as well!), downloadable separately
here Tileset Construction - BioWare's NWN Tileset Construction Tutorial, downloadable separately
here. I don't include any of the files, just index the information.
TXI - Every TXI officially released by BioWare as part of their content, segregated by the bif they were found in. Extremely useful for looking up how certain TXI commands were used by BioWare and whether other commands or setting were typically paired with them.
