NWN Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition - Beamdog's final enhancement - now with new premium modules

[Haplo]

Oh right, RDD did not progress the CL in NWN. Well, the Natural Armor bonuses and Tumble as Class skill still help a lot.

 

[Cael]

Oh right, RDD did not progress the CL in NWN. Well, the Natural Armor bonuses and Class Tumble still help a lot.

Yes, it does. Plus the UMD from Bard made it possible to use stuff that a Ftr/WM won't be able to. Like Monk boots...

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I tried NWN:EE recently and was pleasantly surprised that it looks and runs great on my system now, far better than NWN Diamond does alas. So what changed in my configuration since the last time I launched NWN:EE and it ran like garbage? Well, I have an OLED TV that has VRR/G-Sync but I don't see how it should make much difference but maybe it does, but I barely get a stutter now with EE even at 4K even when a lot of shit happens on-screen, ie major battles or areas with lots of placeables. However, i noticed that since the game doesn't have native support for HDR, it looks very dim on my LG C2 TV, which is otherwise a very bright display. Then I discovered a neat trick that forces HDR on in Vulcan/OpenGL games that normally don't support it. In the last few builds of Nvidia drivers, there's an option called "Vulcan/OpenGL Present Method". Set it to "Prefer layered DXGI on swapchain". It increases brightness significantly because it forces HDR on in games that don't natively support it or don't implement it properly, like RDR2.

NWN Diamond now runs as bad as NWN:EE used to run for me (enabling vsync causes framerate drops to 25 FPS but without vsync, the game has ugly tearing), which is a pity because I don't dare try to play random old NWN modules on EE. Looks like I'm stuck with EE for the long haul, the biggest negative being that you never know what might happen if if you try to play old modules on it. The classic module Saleron's Gambit, for example, has game-breaking area transition bugs on EE.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Recently played the DLCs campaigns. Scaling UI is a godsend.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Recently played the DLCs campaigns. Scaling UI is a godsend.

The best thing about NWN EE, and god how I wish Diamond had it. I discovered that Diamond for some strange reason only runs well at 2560 X 1440 on my system where vsync works properly with no halving of FPS. Any other resolution causes severe framerate drops with vsync on. But the game is unplayable at that resolution because the UI doesn't scale like EE's does. I tried a couple of old UI/bigger font mods but they don't work at all at 1440p or 4K (they're designed for 1080p which is not an option anymore since NWN diamond at that resolution runs poorly on my system now). I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be praising EE for its technical advances over Diamond but here I am.

 

[Gargaune]

New patch is out, 87.8193.35-40, built entirely by community members! Highlights below and full changelog here. Module builders might also wanna know that some .2da files have been changed. Also worth pointing out that this arrangement will probably continue, a .36 patch has been mentioned as "upcoming."

• AOE Indicator | Spells and spell-like abilities now display a targeting indicator displaying their range and, if appropriate, their AOE shape and size
• 8 Multiclasses | Added support for up to 8 multiclasses, configurable per-module
• Faster Load Times | Improved area load times by up to 100x (!)
• News Section | Added an in-game News UI that shows upcoming patches and community news
• Script-created UI Improvements | “NUI” (script-created UI) will no longer break input to the game (WASD, drag & drop)
• Play NWN as a Cartoon | Added a new "Toon" post-processing shader as a graphical option
• Goodies for Builders | Hundreds of new functions and goodies for module builders
• Hundreds of Bugfixes & Optimizations | More bugs squashed

On the one hand, I'm tempted to wait and see whether anyone else complains about issues, on the other, I really want "Fixed creatures facing east when standing on _POST waypoints" as soon as possible.

And I'd like to check out this "Toon" shader as well. From the sound of it, I normally don't go for that aesthetic, but I wonder whether it could be tweaked for interesting effects, either way I'd like to see it. I do find it irritating that this stuff gets buried in config files rather than getting GUI fields, though. I get it that it might be preferable if you're just launching a feature and wanna do some sort of limited public test before a full rollout, but the party controls are still stuck in the config file too, and it's been ages.


Also...

Bonus Art

As a bonus, here is an updated key art picture for Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark by Mike Sass, redrawn with more detail:

 

[ds]

• Faster Load Times | Improved area load times by up to 100x (!)

Hah it's changes like these that really make me wish the source was available so we could see what retarded shit it was doing before. Perhaps forcing a redraw of the loading screen (bonus: with Vsync) for every n actions performed. Or every developers favorite: quadratic algorithms. Wouldn't be the first game for either.

• News Section | Added an in-game News UI that shows upcoming patches and community news

I really hate it when games do that. Inevitably gets used to push ads for other games and has the potential to add issues when the game is abandoned and the backend servers shut down or just wen you don't have an internet connection. If you want to keep players updated provide an RSS feed or something.

That face

 

[Don Peste]

I think I like the cel shading, and the area of effect is a nice addition too.

 

[Fedora Master]

New patch is out, 87.8193.35-40, built entirely by community members!

lol so they gave up entirely on actually improving anything themselves now.

 

[Fargus]

Wasn't it modders who tixed BG2EE to a playable state too? I mean just remember how much of a turd it was at realease. Took years to make it playable.

 

[Gargaune]

I really hate it when games do that. Inevitably gets used to push ads for other games and has the potential to add issues when the game is abandoned and the backend servers shut down or just wen you don't have an internet connection. If you want to keep players updated provide an RSS feed or something.

I'm also not a fan of news panels in my menus, but I think it's unlikely to produce functional issues. The EE already has a network connection in the UI for the new curated content browser, but it works just fine if you're offline, merely tells you it couldn't reach the server.

I think I like the cel shading, and the area of effect is a nice addition too.

I still think the best addition to future-proofing the visuals would be a general soft out-of-focus shader, like depth of field minus the angle variability. Combine that with a toned-down version of this cel shading effect, and you might get something vaguely like Pathfinder: Kingmaker's visuals.

lol so they gave up entirely on actually improving anything themselves now.

I was sure one of you was gonna bitch about that, but let's see the glass half full. The EE came out in 2018 and I don't know a lot of non-MMO games that keep getting patches five years down the line, that Beamdog's supporting select fans to do what they want in their code is kinda cool. Bethesda's been pretty great about supporting modders over the years, but if you showed up on Todd's doorstep asking for source access, he'd sic the dogs on you. Nor is this is an abandoned title where someone up and released the code in the public domain, it's an active product that's letting the community tinker around inside after the business case dried up.

 

[ds]

I'm also not a fan of news panels in my menus, but I think it's unlikely to produce functional issues. The EE already has a network connection in the UI for the new curated content browser, but it works just fine if you're offline, merely tells you it couldn't reach the server.

That's good at least. I just checked it out and it is done needlessly annoying though with the new "News" button flashing until you mark all news as read. Ugh, why....

I still think the best addition to future-proofing the visuals would be a general soft out-of-focus shader, like depth of field minus the angle variability. Combine that with a toned-down version of this cel shading effect, and you might get something vaguely like Pathfinder: Kingmaker's visuals.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you have in mind but intentionally blurred textures don't sound like and improvement to me. I also wouldn't want cel-shading to be overused everywhere. While NwN graphics aren't really spectacular I also don't think they are really that big of a problem, certainly not NwN's biggest problem. Then again, I did grow up with early 3D graphics. And even as far as graphics go I don't think the limit here was mainly technical - NwN's default tile-sets are just not that well designed.

Nor is this is an abandoned title where someone up and released the code in the public domain, it's an active product that's letting the community tinker around inside after the business case dried up.

It was an abandoned title though before Beamdog showed up and doubled the price. If they are now not even doing any additional development themselves but instead relying on free fan work while still charging a higher regular price than what the game used to cost then that pretty scummy IMO.
And while it was already unlikely for the source to be released (just because its unlikely for any game), Beamdog showing up with the intention to milk it certainly did not make that any more likely. Meanwhile the open-source engine re-implementation pretty much lost steam within a year after the EE showed up. Now it's impossible to say what would have been if the EE never appeared but you can't say that Beamdog allowing some outside contributions means that the EE has been a positive thing for NwN.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

New patch is out, 87.8193.35-40, built entirely by community members!

lol so they gave up entirely on actually improving anything themselves now.

It was the community who made NWN worthwile in the first place

I tried NWN:EE recently and was pleasantly surprised that it looks and runs great on my system now, far better than NWN Diamond does alas. So what changed in my configuration since the last time I launched NWN:EE and it ran like garbage? Well, I have an OLED TV that has VRR/G-Sync but I don't see how it should make much difference but maybe it does, but I barely get a stutter now with EE even at 4K even when a lot of shit happens on-screen, ie major battles or areas with lots of placeables. However, i noticed that since the game doesn't have native support for HDR, it looks very dim on my LG C2 TV, which is otherwise a very bright display. Then I discovered a neat trick that forces HDR on in Vulcan/OpenGL games that normally don't support it. In the last few builds of Nvidia drivers, there's an option called "Vulcan/OpenGL Present Method". Set it to "Prefer layered DXGI on swapchain". It increases brightness significantly because it forces HDR on in games that don't natively support it or don't implement it properly, like RDR2.

NWN Diamond now runs as bad as NWN:EE used to run for me (enabling vsync causes framerate drops to 25 FPS but without vsync, the game has ugly tearing), which is a pity because I don't dare try to play random old NWN modules on EE. Looks like I'm stuck with EE for the long haul, the biggest negative being that you never know what might happen if if you try to play old modules on it. The classic module Saleron's Gambit, for example, has game-breaking area transition bugs on EE.

I wanted to keep playing Diamond, but browsing the wiki, there's tons of stuff that says this or that thing is bugged but fixed in the EE. Fan modules are going to have to be sacrificed... it depends on the creators and some of those are more than a decade old. Pity.

 

[0sacred]

New patch is out, 87.8193.35-40, built entirely by community members! Highlights below and full changelog here. Module builders might also wanna know that some .2da files have been changed. Also worth pointing out that this arrangement will probably continue, a .36 patch has been mentioned as "upcoming."

• AOE Indicator | Spells and spell-like abilities now display a targeting indicator displaying their range and, if appropriate, their AOE shape and size

• 8 Multiclasses | Added support for up to 8 multiclasses, configurable per-module

• Play NWN as a Cartoon | Added a new "Toon" post-processing shader as a graphical option

decline

 

[Gargaune]

I wanted to keep playing Diamond, but browsing the wiki, there's tons of stuff that says this or that thing is bugged but fixed in the EE. Fan modules are going to have to be sacrificed... it depends on the creators and some of those are more than a decade old. Pity.

I haven't come across any modules with EE-specific game-breaking bugs, aside from this one issue with forcefield doors that apparently Swordflight and some other modules ran into, but I think it's been fixed since. There may be some modules with highly particular implementations that break on the EE, but it doesn't appear to be a prominent problem. I played Adam Miller's Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher on the EE with no complaints, and that series is both old and, towards the end, very script-heavy.

 

[NwNgger]

I'm mostly a lurker here but I want to say, I remember playing Neverwinter Nights when it came out and I was a very small child. If memory serves it was my first ever RPG. I am still playing it two decades hence. I love this stupid fucking gimmick of a game. And I will cast Turn Retard on anyone who says it's mediocre. We will still be playing NwN in some form another 20 years from now. There will still be sick as fuck Persistant worlds. (I mainly play on a Mystara one currently and frequent the Star Wars and Shadowrun ones too occasionally.) and awesome campaigns that bend over and bugger anything Bioware has made in the last two decades. We will never see a game with the modding potential of Neverwinter Nights again. Bethesda games only come close due to third party tools like SKSE. On their own the modding tools for Beth games are still not on par with Aurora. And also Elder Scrolls is fucking boring.

 

[gurugeorge]

I'm mostly a lurker here but I want to say, I remember playing Neverwinter Nights when it came out and I was a very small child. If memory serves it was my first ever RPG. I am still playing it two decades hence. I love this stupid fucking gimmick of a game. And I will cast Turn Retard on anyone who says it's mediocre. We will still be playing NwN in some form another 20 years from now. There will still be sick as fuck Persistant worlds. (I mainly play on a Mystara one currently and frequent the Star Wars and Shadowrun ones too occasionally.) and awesome campaigns that bend over and bugger anything Bioware has made in the last two decades. We will never see a game with the modding potential of Neverwinter Nights again. Bethesda games only come close due to third party tools like SKSE. On their own the modding tools for Beth games are still not on par with Aurora. And also Elder Scrolls is fucking boring.

I really think a NWN/NWN2 Peristent World led by a good DM is peak CRPG videogame playing (especially if everyone gets into the roleplay aspect, so that it becomes sort of like amateur dramatics). To feel the virtual world coming alive and responsive to you (qua merry band of adventurers getting into the spirit of the thing) is nonpariel.

(I only really caught the fever for NWN2, which I gather isn't quite as good to build with, or had more headroom but people didn't take it up or something. But the graphics in NWN are just on the cusp of "too unbearably old" for me.)

A good MMO can be great if you catch the wave of the initial big uptake and it's really active. You can get a very strong sense of the virtual world being alive just from the background sense of people running around (which I think is actually what a lot of people get out of them - they put their noses to the grindstone and solo, but they just like having people running around in the background, as opposed to playing a single player game). Caught out of the corner of the eye, real human movement and action is just more realistic than the fairly dumb AI.

But it's that bespoke thing a human DM can do that computers can't yet do, that's so brilliant about PWs.

 

[Gargaune]

Oh, bloody hell...

I get this gem pop up twice in a row when I launch the Toolset after updating. Seems to run just fine other than that, but... The "Toon" shader doesn't work. I flip it to true in the config, and as soon as I launch the game in any way, it flips back to false. I wonder if it's this shader file above.

Don Peste, were those screenshots above yours, did you get it running?


EDIT: Nope, something's very wrong. Not only am I also not seeing the new spell target indicator, now I'm not seeing the spells either! As in I'll cast a fireball, the PC will animate, I'll hear the noise and see a light appear at the point of impact, but I'm not seeing the fucking fireball itself. Clearly, this shader crap's throwing stuff belly up.

I'll have to reinstall everything again... again.

 

[Shuruga]

But it's that bespoke thing a human DM can do that computers can't yet do, that's so brilliant about PWs.

Amen! The human-human interactions are what I enjoyed the most of my time on a MUD back in the day, both player-player and player-DM. I drifted away from MUDs for a variety of reasons and I never tried a NWN PW, though I've played tons of NWN SP campaigns.

Your post stirred up nostalgia for that kind of experience; maybe I'll give a PW a whirl one of these days.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

(I only really caught the fever for NWN2, which I gather isn't quite as good to build with, or had more headroom but people didn't take it up or something. But the graphics in NWN are just on the cusp of "too unbearably old" for me.)

NWN2's toolset lets you do more than NWN1 but it's significantly slower and harder to work with. It's really fast to bang out a rough area in NWN1 and start testing shit for example while in NWN2 you'll spend hours just setting up a rough area, let alone populating it. You might take the not entirely unreasonable line of thought that "More complexity means it takes longer but the end results are better" except that a lot of people liked making NWN1 modules in their free time on the weekends and shit, and one person working on a module for a month or two (Or more) can produce a fine adventure at the end with NWN1, while NWN2 requires MUCH more time and dedication and makes it not really worthwhile for someone doing it for fun. And it's also true that there are a lot of trash NWN1 modules but there are so many MORE modules for NWN1 than 2 that it still has far more quality than 2 ever did.

It's one of the biggest things that chaps my ass about NWN1 is that we're likely never to get another toolset for a game that hits the perfect sweet spot of complexity and depth. Sacrifices were definitely made for it (Looking at you, tilesets (And yes Bethesda games use Lego-brick snap together tilesets for dungeons and interiors and shit too but even those aren't as smooth and fast as NWN1)) but you can quite reasonably make small one-off adventures or even whole campaigns with NWN just fine, and the scripting lets you do even weirder shit if you want. The scripting's another good point, NWscript's decent enough to let you do a lot but the in-editor wizard means even people with no scripting/programming inclination at all could still keep themselves covered for most common cases. Then they even expanded it, since at one point I did a whole bullshit system to spit out a unique item based on the end-state of one module that could be destroyed at the start of the next module and adjust things accordingly for C&C and the rat bastards added a system so you could do all that behind the scenes anyway which is just as well because I got the next module mostly completed and then abandoned it because I got too wrapped up fucking around with cutscene scripting.

Don Peste, were those screenshots above yours, did you get it running?

For what it's worth I had the toon shader working on the beta patch just fine. Haven't fired it up after it went live, I'll do so now.
Yeah, booted up fine.

 

[Faarbaute]

• AOE Indicator | Spells and spell-like abilities now display a targeting indicator displaying their range and, if appropriate, their AOE shape and size

This is what used to separate the men from the boys.

I still remember fondly how this mental woman would constantly shit up the PW which I played on's IRC with accusations of cheating, because I used to intentionally single her out from crowds, both friendly and hostile, with spells like Isaac's Greater Missile Storm and Horrid Witling. She was entirely convinced that I was cheating.

 

[racofer]

So, does A Dance With Rogues work fine on NWN:EE?

 

[Gargaune]

(I only really caught the fever for NWN2, which I gather isn't quite as good to build with, or had more headroom but people didn't take it up or something. But the graphics in NWN are just on the cusp of "too unbearably old" for me.)

NWN2's toolset lets you do more than NWN1 but it's significantly slower and harder to work with. [...]

The issues with NWN2's Electron Toolset are:
1) the more freeform level design process and the higher graphical standard are both immensely more labour-intensive than NWN1's paintbrush system;
2) its GUI is - objectively - an ergonomics failure, full of unintuitive and cumbersome interfaces to a degree that it's impossible to overstate this criticism;
3) it was held together with string and duct tape, and there are bits and bobs that don't work on newer platforms anymore, requiring community plugins to supply those functions.

Basically, BioWare created Aurora as an integral feature of the NWN experience, individual, amateur module-building was a primary selling point pitched to customers (even arguably taking priority over the quality of the OC itself), power and accessibility were key, and it still is the best to this day. Electron, on the other hand, was obviously built to support the internal Obsidian team's (seemingly desperate) development efforts, and it was released to the public "as-is", merely as an added bonus.

NWN2 did enjoy some very dedicated solo builders who managed to create entire campaigns using Electron, but they were vanishingly few compared to what the Aurora platform got, and most of these necessarily couldn't achieve a level of fit and finish similar to official products. Probably the most polished and fully-featured community module was Baldur's Gate Reloaded (and, hopefully, Baldur's Gate 2 Reloaded by the end of 2023), but now we're talking about long term team efforts instead of individual hobbyists.

For what it's worth I had the toon shader working on the beta patch just fine. Haven't fired it up after it went live, I'll do so now.
Yeah, booted up fine.

I'll try a clean reinstall tomorrow instead of the delta patch, and if it still screws up I'll roll back to the prior build, I have the installers. But I am getting tired of this, it seems every patch I get it's a coin toss whether I'll end up wasting a couple of hours debugging it. It's not like I messed around with any non-user side components in my install, how the hell am I getting shader errors here?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I was expecting TOONS like cartoons; you know: loony toons, tiny toons, animamiacs, popeye, tom & jerry, the flintstones, etc etc ... Scooby Doo!

 

[Don Peste]

Oh, bloody hell...

I get this gem pop up twice in a row when I launch the Toolset after updating. Seems to run just fine other than that, but... The "Toon" shader doesn't work. I flip it to true in the config, and as soon as I launch the game in any way, it flips back to false. I wonder if it's this shader file above.

Don Peste, were those screenshots above yours, did you get it running?


EDIT: Nope, something's very wrong. Not only am I also not seeing the new spell target indicator, now I'm not seeing the spells either! As in I'll cast a fireball, the PC will animate, I'll hear the noise and see a light appear at the point of impact, but I'm not seeing the fucking fireball itself. Clearly, this shader crap's throwing stuff belly up.

I'll have to reinstall everything again... again.

Yes, my screenshots. It works for me. I think I have one or two small mods, just that.
I checked on Google (I can't believe how much it sucks) and Steam and couldn't find anything relevant.
Maybe try asking on the Neverwinter Vault Discord? https://discord.gg/pWVqMRX
Don't give up!