QlippothVI wrote...
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I am rather hesitant when I think of NPCs pathing through those tiles. The last tilesets released for NWN (the new castles, castle interiors, and the beaches, cliffs and caves and such) is pretty bad, even for PCs.
Well, there are pathnodes and then there are pathnodes, and artistry vs practicality issues with everything in NWN.
Lots of folks don't follow the available pathnodes as a format structure when they build a new tile, so they end up with a bad match-up when they finally (if ever) get around to assigning that pathnode.
There are a HUGE number of possible pathnodes to choose from when creating a tile, but seldom does what is available match what you think SHOULD be available. Folks keep attempting to do things, especially with Z levels, that NWN was not designed to handle. Looks great on paper, but simply won't work well.
When a path node gets assigned, it must also be correctly rotated to match the physical tile. If either is wrong, then NPC's get stuck, and sometimes PC's when attempting to move long distances. Afterall, NWN was designed originally, to use fog at the 10 meter mark, and you were not supposed to be able to see/click more than one and a half tile away.
However, we builders and players alike, love to be able to see the entire area, and to be able to click and run to that distant location. Placeables screw that up, and bad pathnodes really screw that up. The engine CAN handle it, but only on a limited basis. If you as the PC runs away from your party, the NPC's have to stop and calculate the best path to your current position every ?? times per second. The greater the distance, the more likely the engine won't find a quick path and will default to the standard A path which is not accurate at all except on flat level ground with no placeables. Add a placeable tree on top of that flat grass, and the engine has to recalc, continuosly... add more than one and it just chokes. Now add a location 3 tiles away, with each tile having multiple placeables and you can see the problems stacking up.
A big powerful computer will NOT help with this, it is the code that chokes. It is just a limit of an engine writen to run on a 386 pc running windows 98, with 640k ram. Bigger computer won't help as the engine doesn't see it. Yes, you can set NWN to handle more ram to a certain limit, but that ram is used for vid, and for items/placeable stacks, not so much for incresing code power. It is still HARD-coded to run on a 16 bit computer, running win 98 in 16 bit mode regardless of any extensions that enable extra ram, the engine is STILL limited by those possible computers running that ancient OS with the 640k limit. The increases in power that were enabled with each new patch, never exceed the min spec power of 16 bit, win 98. They add to the power of aurora if the computer has more ram etc, but auroa itself will still run on win 98. In other words, Aurora doesn't have a clue about multiple cores (yes you can set the SINGLE core that it will use, but that is it.) or about 16 gigs of ram or about 64 bit OS.
For all of those limitations though, NWN is still the most powerful game/toolset combo that we have had the oportunity to use. No other game gives us the ability to build areas quickly, to create NEW tilesets quickly, to add thousands of placeables, to allow NEW creatures (complete with new animations if we the creators build them) etc... All of this in a D&D flavored game that follows base 3.x rules and has what is considered minimums for creatures, items, worldspaces etc., in the base game. Then allows us to increase all of that with custom content created by a community of diehard fans that continue to push the limits on what is available.
