Neverwinter Nights 2: Vault Day 2 Analysis - Adam Miller

Also, some quick quotes and thoughts from the article itself.

There are also currently tweaking the cloaks that are fully dynamic.

If I remember correctly, cloaks are dynamic meaning they move properly with the character animations, and not have true cloth physics. This might mean that we get a few "extras", like seeing cloaks move somewhat in the wind.

While it isn't possible to have a bridge where people can walk both under and over at the same time, Josh did say it would be possible to allow people to walk under a bridge if the bridge was set up as part of the environment. When you set parts of your level as an "environment object" type, they are removed from the walkmesh and basically you can simply through them as if they didn't exist, however by putting the bridge out of their reach both in height and by not allowing them to cross, then this type of set up shouldn't be a problem at all.

I think we've got a final answer to the age-old bridge question. If you wanted characters to walk under a bridge and then later walk over it, you'd have to make a copy of the area, make the bridge part of the walkmesh in the second area, and then copy all characters and such to the second area. It's a bit of a hassle, though possible.

The bigger issue is how the walkmesh works in general. It looks like only static placeables are part of the walkmesh. You can't, for example, create a dungeon puzzle where stairs are raised and then walkable by the player, unless you do the two area trick.

Tilesets

It was nice to see that we actually have seven tilesets, though I'm unsure how useful the last one will be. Probably the most important new feature is that tilesets can be combined. It's also interesting that you now pick and choose what tiles to drop in, rather than painting them down. I think I prefer this system, as its easier to pick a specific tile variant instead of having to randomly cycle through them.

. . . change the scripts associated with creatures and player characters on the fly.

We've known this is coming for awhile, but it's still nice to hear confirmation of this. This allows you to swap out the player OnConversation event and listen to specific things they might say along the way.

Global Variables

I'm still fuzzy on how these are different than campaign variables, which seem to work how they're described. It sounds like the real action is around other shared resources, such as dialog, scripts, and so on. From a module builder's perspective, this is a good news/bad news sort of thing. This sounds great for breaking a big module down into smaller, higher performance chunks. When releasing a new module every few months, however, it makes it a challenge to plan everything out well enough to have a particular script still be effective a year later.

There's other tidbits here and there, but most don't really need much analysis. Yes, it's cool to hear that they're already planning an expansion. Yes, head customization is good. As we get closer to live, I keep hearing more and more good things.