Please join us for an Never Winter Nights Chat!

What: Chat to talk about Never Winter Nights. Find out how the game is progressing

When: Thursday, March 1st, 2001 6:00 p.m. PST (9:00 p.m. EST)

Where: http://rpgvault.ign.com/chat/ in channel #ignvault Those who prefer to use a regular IRC client can connect to host17.webmaster.com, #ignvault

Who will be there: Team members from BioWare and Black Isle.

It's been a year since Gloomveil.com opened the doors and let the Fog roll in. Since February 2000, this online world has grown in breadth and depth, attracting adventurers from every dark corner of the globe.

We're celebrating our one-year anniversary with the Tales of Gloomveil fiction contest!

There are three cash prizes to be won - you could score $200.00 US for a first place win. To win, you must be 18 years of age or older, and submit a "Tale of Gloomveil" for our consideration. May the best Tale win!

In fact, we should have simply had a scaling system that adjusted ALL encounters in the game according to party and player composition and level. Neverwinter Nights and all of our future role-playing game will be using a scaleable encounter system.

Wow, and I thought BG2 actually had a scaling system...I guess that's a testament to a good interface, eh?

I'll end with an example of this entire process. About a year ago, we wanted to set something up for item creation. We knew we wanted the end-user to be able to piece together component parts from a specific sub-library, so that a large variety of unique items could be created. For example, a sword would be built from a large variety of separate hilts, cross-guards and blades. It didn’t take us very long to have some (well, really, two) prototype swords built and hard coded into the game for testing.

Having proven the concept, it has taken eight months before the final system has been completed. We had to conceptualize the huge library of parts, come up with naming conventions, figure out size formats, optimize the graphics engine to efficiently deal with multi-part objects, decide what the relation was between the inventory icons and their in-game representations, and so on. But being able to implement our original plan has been very rewarding, and now, after working out all of the uncountable details, creating the art, designing what items to make, and writing all of the code, we can finally create real items.

If the guys can take a page from the book of StarBucks (personalization = market share), then this game will be flying off the shelves. Make your own conclusions here.

Neverwinter Nights is progressing steadily but we’ve certainly come to recognize the sheer amount of effort it takes to pull off a project of this scope. As for where we’re at right now, the system itself is almost in place. We have a graphics engine, we have most of the underlying system in place for a rules engine, we have a solid networking layer, our interface is becoming increasingly present and functional, the basic art content is almost complete, and the Neverwinter Toolset will soon reach a point where the Design Team can start making final game content.

You can see the rest of the interview here.