NWN2 - v1.22 Patch Delay Comments

Dhruin

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Lucky Day writes about this comment from Obsidian's Rob McGinnis about the delay to the NWN2 v1.22 patch:
Here's the deal...

Originally the patch was delayed because of some translation fixes that were requested. Then Atari asked for some additional fixes to go in. Now we are waiting on a fix from SecuRom.

But, this delay has not gone to waste. We fixed a couple additional things and may fix a couple more for this patch. A couple of the fixes we made should clear up the problems people have been having with the Trial by Combat.

We are evaluating some ELC issues with Yuan-ti and the Favored Soul. Those may be fixed in 1.22 as well, or they may move off to 1.23 if it looks like it will take too long to fix them.

The patch has not gone to QA yet. Once it does, you can expect it to be about 2 weeks before it is released.

I will let you all know as soon as it goes to QA.
He also mentions they'd add area caching if they ever did a NWN3:
Area caching was something we looked into for SoZ. We would have had to re-write large portions of the engine to accomplish this - which means SoZ probably still wouldn't be released now. The NWN engine is extremely complex and making even a small change ripples through and causes problems elsewhere.

If we ever do a NWN3, we would probably do streaming areas - but that would make the toolset and area creation even more complex for modders.
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More information.
 
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What does it mean by streaming areas? Like Dungeon Siege where it's all one huge map more or less?
 
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It means they don't want to load complete maps into memory. Instead they somehow determine what's visible to the player and only load this part of the world / map. Update every time the player moves. Bethesda's games do this, for example.
 
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NWN1 streams areas and NWN2 sort of does partially. Yes, it means the whole map is not kept in a clients memory but only the immediate vicinity's map that the player can intereact with. The complete map is only kept on the server side (in abstract form usually) and handles the interaction.

NWN2 has taken most of this away with requiring a local, updated version of the server's PAC file which I believe is mostly the walkmesh. This has proved to be a disaster for multiplayer in NWN2, worse than specific hak requirements because now everyone needs a copy of it and not just a copy of the game.

Obsidian at first tried to convince the users it would be ok but the reality caught up to them shortly after release and they've been scrambling what to do about it ever since.

They had an autodownload solution for 3rd party files after one patch that apparently never worked, and even works less now.
 
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The loading time of NWN2 is just too long.I downloaded the POR mod,but never finish it,due to the looooong loading time.
If this problem is not solved,i think i will never play any mod of NWN2 again.
But i do play lots of mods of NWN1.
 
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NWN1 streams areas and NWN2 sort of does partially. Yes, it means the whole map is not kept in a clients memory but only the immediate vicinity's map that the player can intereact with. The complete map is only kept on the server side (in abstract form usually) and handles the interaction.
That's not the more understood version of streaming, as Gorath explains, and in fact I don't think this is what he was referring to. I think he meant rather than having to hit an area transistion and then cut to a loading screen and wait for the server to feed you information about the area contents ala NWN1 and 2, you have something more similar to dungeon siege or oblivion for example. Which need not be one massive area, but allow for neighbouring cells to be loaded up in the background seamlessly.

They had an autodownload solution for 3rd party files after one patch that apparently never worked, and even works less now.
They're bringing out an auto-downloader in patch 1.23 I think.
 
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