Future

[Legacy_RedConfusion]

               

Hello,

 

I think that everybody agrees that the strongest points of neverwinter nights is use the d20 system and allow people to create their own modules with toolset. It is impressive how people got into the creating part of the game. So much things were developed and customized, from creating modules and conversations to actual scripts and models. There is no doubt that neverwinter did a great job, as good as the players mobilization creating things like NWNX2, CEP and PRC.

I imagine that just like me, you grow up playing and creating content using neverwinter nights, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this forum. That was special. I feel lucky to have learn about this game on my infancy. But time has passed, we growed up, got a busy life and we don't have all the time we had earlier. Maybe you even went to "the tech side", and became a developer or 3d artist. I became the first.

 

But the true is, while we stick with bioware, we have no future here. It is a dead project and bioware will not open aurora source code. People leaded by DrMcCoy started the project xoreos, which is an open source neverwinter nights client, that runs the bioware modules. It is a really cool project, and I advise you to take a quick look at it. He needs people that understand opengl, by the way. But this is not what I wanted to the future of where we are going.

 

The way I see things is that neverwinter nigths don't belongs to bioware. It belongs to us, to the community that holds the game. So I really wanted it to be an open source game. While we stick at neverwinter nights and bioware, things will not improve. The only way to improve is going away for it.

What I suggest is quite simple, yet it is a lot of work: Implement a game like neverwinter nights, but totally open source and not related to bioware. That would actually be three softwares: One for creating content, other to open and play local content (like neverwinter nights client), and a third to host those modules through the network.

We can actually steal many ideas from nwn: The module files, a module is formed by areas, scripts, conversations, placeables and etc. We can use the D20 system. Heck, we can even use all models and placeables createad by players all over those years.

 

I know it is hard to find free time nowdays, but in the position I'm right now, I have plenty. The problem is that I don't know anything about opengl, and I lack motivation to learn it from scratch. I find myself a great backend developer, but yet only a backend developer. I can deal with network, rules and any callback need, but I can't do the graphics. So if you think you can help, let me know.

 

I invite you all to discuss and mature this idea.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               

I think i told it 10 times or more but to me what i want is to have support for shadowmaps. Thats it. If implemented everything will look extremely improved. Lights and shadows are the essence of ambience. At least for me. The guy who worked on NWshader was my hope but well, just that some hope. I dont think that NWN needs anything more then a good or true option for creating an environment that looks lit. Vertex light suxs. IT´s just dull and outdated and without shadows you cant even give a scene the little details you need to have. And yes lighting suxs!

 

So i agree with you on some points but i have abandoned the idea that i will ever create what i have in my mind because of the F****** limitations of the lights and doors too (they just work like bullsh**). There would be 10 ways to make doors a simple setup but NO, they went a way that is just stupid. There are a few technical things i just cant understand why they did it that way. Because it makes no sense and is not usefriendly. When i think about the old halflife triggers and functions why the hell couldnt they throw some of that stuff in. Well, good luck but i have the feeling NWN is for us and not for any generation to come. People have changed and while we stay with it... most dont even want to work on mods but want them to be an all easy going without using your brain and .... right have a passion for innovative and creative stuff that you only want to come to life and not to care about some imaginative Efame cuz of the downloads... muhmimu

 

Rant off!

And honestly this here will be the last community i want to be involved in. The best and most creative people are here and all others can jump of the damn bridges!

Babayaga told you so '>

NOW to hell with you '>

 

ps

when NWNenhanced will ever be made by BeamDog i wouldnt want to be involved in that. I dont mind people with strange oppinions lets say about their own roots...

 

pps

and dont understand me wrong. But your dedication you will put into a project like this will not be respected by most of the people you might try to pull into that dont have a real passion for modding games. They are leeches, clowns and pretenders most of the time. Selfobsessed wannabes with no clue how to work 10 hours a day just for your own joy without getting any money at all. I think i come to the point where i have the same feeling like Lord rosenkrantz had back in the days. Not to our community but to game communities in general. I´m disgusted by all the negative vibes that were brought into my passion for being creative and a shotgun wouldnt help it. I´m like hannibal lecter who would want more blood!

 

ppps

And the last sentence was no joke!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

talk with rolo kipp. he's doing this in jmonkey and has made some progress.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_leo_x]

               

It's worth thinking/dreaming about for sure.  Xoreos is a great project, but it's goal is the replication of NWN and other Aurora engine decedents (so far in single player mode only), which is quite different than what most people would want for a successor of NWN, I'd think.  I, for example, don't think the d20 system (and any pseudo-turn based stuff) is valuable at all, but would give a part for real time collaborative module editing like, say, the Cube2/Sauerbraten game engine and no hard-coded systems.

 

PS plus a scripting engine that could help folks develop slightly more real world gamedev skills.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_RedConfusion]

               

@nwn_baba_yaga

Thanks for your input. The great thing about open source a game like neverwinter nights is that the game mechanics are decoupled from the graphics, so we could port it to hologram if need in the future. I have read what you wrote, and thanks for the sincere criticism - I partially agree with some things you wrote (about ego, for example), and I still thinking in others (like the lack of interest of the current community in getting involved in the project).

 

@henesua

Thanks as well. Can you point me a way to talk with rolo kipp?

 

I'm in a travel right now, and in two days I'll be back home and hopefully will be working on a library for the game rules engine decoupled from any graphic in cpp. I have some drafts already on my notebook, that I'll be sharing on github.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

just a search a way.

 

here's rolo

http://forum.bioware...1798-rolo-kipp/

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Alleyslink]

               

no matter what the future holds, don't make the same mistakes as other who have tried to take up the mantle of NWN.

 

Jump

Swim

Climb

Mounts

Fly

(Grrrr) Loadscreens (as few as possible)

Multiplayer

 

Leave any of those features out and you are wasting your time.

 

Since before the NWN2 beta I have desired a game with modding capabilities that would cater to a wider variety of player tastes. This means the game should cater to many genres (fantasy, action / adventure and science fiction). Giving players and modders all these choices, (dragons, Nazis or aliens) who live in a (castle, bunker or space ship) and be killed by (magic missiles, M1 rifles or laser guns) wielded by (wizards, infantry soldiers or space cadets).

 

To this end I say D20 is a bad idea. Learn from past mistakes, if you are making a new system, do not limit your creativity with a system with no room for improvement. Because D20 is already established (and owned by a corporate entity), people will expect you to follow those rules. How will you make improvements to a system that is "done"?

 

Are complex games with modding capability a thing of the past? I doubt that very much, the young people of today are more technically savvy and active in CGI and coding. They are just waiting for the next great NWN to provide them with the tools to free their imaginations. If those people are given the tools needed they will draw in more players.

 

I have hope for the future.

 

LAST EDIT: Build it and they will come.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<throwing bananas...>

 

Not to get anyone's hopes up... <or set them nagging...>

...but, yeah. I'm in the very early stages of the jNwN project which actually has a different name to not step on IP toes.

Among the features I will be preserving are:

 

1. *Must* support legacy content for NwN and NwN2, including assets, scripts and entire mods.

   
2. *Must* be modular and extensible.

   
3. *Must* take advantage of open-source code libraries and content tools.

   
4. *Must* be cross-platform, minimum Win, Mac, Linux with Android planned and possibly iOS.

 

Tools will come first, for loading assets, converting them and saving them in both modern and legacy formats.

 

As Henesua mentioned, I'm currently focused on learning the jMonkey SDK which is java-based. The graphics, sound, AI and networking frameworks are on par or better than NwN2 and far more accessible.

 

While Xoreos is far leaner and better performing, and much, much farther along (I am *really* impressed by that whole project!) it doesn't go in the direction I think we need to go.

 

My right-this-minute research is in the BVH motion-capture format and it's integration in MakeHuman and Blender. There are massive open-source libraries of BVH MoCap animations and it looks like a really great work-flow to not only developing replacement assets for the Bioware IP, but opening up the whole framework to modders. Picture specifically a skeleton with morph targets that range from infant to elder (ala MakeHuman), with modifier stacks that range from female->neuter->male->beastial. A single humanoid skeleton that anim sets can be applied to or swapped out, upon which different mesh can be rigged (independently of anims), over which different clothing/armor mesh can be layered. Add in a modifier stack for health and a different one for tone, both of which affect how the skeleton affects the mesh (Health would "push" mesh, making it bulkier and more muscular, Tone would "smooth" mesh, going from ridged musculature to soft, rounded curves). Best of all, the effects can be dynamic, gradually changing the fit and fitness of a character during the progress of the game.

 

Anyway, NwN is *not* dead. and wont be for as long as we continue to monkey around with it :-)

 

<...at henesua>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<playing with old...>

 

It's worth thinking/dreaming about for sure.  Xoreos is a great project, but it's goal is the replication of NWN and other Aurora engine decedents (so far in single player mode only), which is quite different than what most people would want for a successor of NWN, I'd think.  I, for example, don't think the d20 system (and any pseudo-turn based stuff) is valuable at all, but would give a part for real time collaborative module editing like, say, the Cube2/Sauerbraten game engine and no hard-coded systems.

 

PS plus a scripting engine that could help folks develop slightly more real world gamedev skills.

Re: The engine itself, the architecture I'm envisioning is a framework decoupled from the actual game mechanics. The ruleset/game mechanics will be plugin modules. If you think about it, this *has to be done* in order to avoid the whole Dungeons and Dragons legal mess. Having said that, my project - officially "The Amethyst Tapestry", btw - will ship with two plugins... one to allow legacy NwN & NwN2 play and my own ruleset that I've been working on (PnP) for more than 30 years.

 

That ties into the second thing you said, about the scripting engine. Without revealing too much, I'll point you toward Blockly (Blockly is a library for building visual programming editors) and Codespells (A project I support).

 

<...building blocks>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<peering into the dark...>

 

I think i told it 10 times or more but to me what i want is to have support for shadowmaps. Thats it. If implemented everything will look extremely improved. Lights and shadows are the essence of ambience. At least for me. The guy who worked on NWshader was my hope but well, just that some hope. I dont think that NWN needs anything more then a good or true option for creating an environment that looks lit. Vertex light suxs. IT´s just dull and outdated and without shadows you cant even give a scene the little details you need to have. And yes lighting suxs!

 

You might be interested in this very nice little series of articles about Physically Based Rendering :-)

 

Just sayin'...

 

<...unknown future>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_mrkure]

               

I just have to warn you. If you want to create your own artwork (models, textures, animations and so on), it will be huge amount of work and you ll probably give up at some point, but this is what you probably know. If you are going to use NWN, NWN2 content, or just create software which can run those, you can end up with violating copyright. Look at this link, there were some fans which decided to create remake of ten years old game without approval of copyright owner. So, at first try to contact nwn copyright owner for permision, or you can be very disappointed over time. I dont want to argue here what is, or isnt under copyright law, just warning you, what could eventualy happen.

 

http://www.gamesindu...rade-fan-remake

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_DrMcCoy]

               

While a certain amount of modding and changing is on xoreos' roadmap somewhere far in the future, the main focus is having the original games run 100% the same (akin to ScummVM). Especially when you're talking replacing the ruleset, then yes, Rolo Kipp is correct that this is not really the direction I want to take it. '>

 

Still, if a straight-up reimplementation of the BioWare games sounds interesting for any of you, please do contact me. Help is always appreciated and I need more people working on xoreos for it to get anywhere.

 

I also like the idea of a new, extendable and modular CRPG, and in fact, in my projects folders are several now-dead first steps for such a thing. I normally go with C++ and Lua, though. Since none of my tries made it very far, there's unfortunately nothing salvageable or useful I could contribute to you.

 

And yeah, I wish you best of luck with the jNwN project. Do you have anything public yet? I'm not a fan of Java (to say the least), but I am quite curious how you're approaching this.

 

Oh, also, while I'm at it: many thanks to you and the rest of the Neverwinter Vault crew for keeping the community alive!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<shifty-eyed...>

 

Public? Me? *giggles a bit hysterically*

Um, nope. Main reason I've been so quiet about the Amethyst Tapestry, actually...

 

I've played around a bit with loading assets and getting mesh and materials (textures + specular/normal/glow maps + shaders) to load and switch in game and puttered a bit with keyboard/mouse/touch controls on physics enabled objects. But I'm mostly working out how to integrate the whole asset pipeline using MakeHuman->Blender->jMonkey and Audacity and planning a lot of things. It's all about the tools... As I said, you are far ahead of me towards a usable engine. I'm quite an avid fan. =) (I am Foxhaven on github ;-)

 

I am going with jME for now, primarily for the same challenge you are facing... graphics and OpenGL and all the hardware integration I will probably never have the savvy to code myself. I have satisfied myself re java's performance tradeoffs, mostly because I will *not* be implementing bleeding edge features, but circa 2008 era stuff that's working pretty good in jME already. That said, I wish I'd kept up with C (note, "C", not C++ or C# :-P I'm old :-). But I figure I can learn java well enough to twist it in the directions I want to go.

 

Add in to that bit that I am homeless and work on a laptop at HQ (*$) (Not an excuse, just an explanation). That will change shortly as I am moving, getting married and will be building my first real rig in years (The Beast doesn't count, Henesua ;-).

 

I should be moving a bit faster in the spring.

 

Say, old-man-racing-for-the-last-comfy-seat fast :-)

 

<...and shady>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_DrMcCoy]

               

I've played around a bit with loading assets and getting mesh and materials (textures + specular/normal/glow maps + shaders) to load and switch in game and puttered a bit with keyboard/mouse/touch controls on physics enabled objects. But I'm mostly working out how to integrate the whole asset pipeline using MakeHuman->Blender->jMonkey and Audacity and planning a lot of things. It's all about the tools...

 

Okay. '>

I guess it helps a lot when you can adapt the file formats and structure to your pipeline and engine, instead of having to work around existing weirdness.

 

I am going with jME for now, primarily for the same challenge you are facing... graphics and OpenGL and all the hardware integration I will probably never have the savvy to code myself.

 

Ugh, yes, talking with people who do have current OpenGL / graphics knowledge and having 90% of what they said fly over my head made me realize that there's no chance in hell I can catch up to that in a timely manner. I don't even really want to; it's just not that interesting to me. I tried hammering Ogre3D into my code, but I largely consider that a failure.

 

That said, I have found a person who is currently rewriting my naive graphics code, free time permitting. I'm very grateful for that.

 

That will change shortly as I am moving, getting married and will be building my first real rig in years (The Beast doesn't count, Henesua ;-).

 

I should be moving a bit faster in the spring.

 

Neat.

Please, throw me a line when you have something you can show publically.

 

And congratulations to you and your spouse! '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_RedConfusion]

               

@alleyslink The whole point in break free from atari and having something truly open source is that is easier to expand, including things like ride, flying, swimming, teleporting, taking a train or anything like that. I agree that a general purpose tool would be great for creating mods apart from medieval fantasy, and d20 is not the best to all cases. That is why my idea is make things uncoupled, that is, separated. The idea is having a implementation of d20, but if you don't want to use d20 you can simply switch the backend to whatever rules you like most, just as Rolo kipp explained.

 

@rolo kipp What I have is being implemented in C++, but not real C++: Only C with classes. No templates and impossible to understand messages after 2h compiling the code :-) I like the way you are thinking things, however right now I don't immediately agree with this point: "support legacy content for NwN and NwN2, including assets, scripts and entire mods". I think would be easier to provide tools to convert from one format to another. Also we avoid patent issues with this decision - I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think we can use that formats without owning the game. Also, supporting mobile would be **great**, but maybe is a step larger than we can take at a start? Since it mainly takes only the graphical part, I think you should know better.

 

also, congratulations! :-)

 

@DrMcCoy what you did was quite impressive and inspired me. I recently opened an issue for xoreos talking about compilation on readme. My login there is fotanus.