Neverwinter Nights 2: Dev's continue to open up the gates!

J.E. Sawyer on spontaneous casting:

DO YOU ENJOY PLAYING CLERICS AND DRUIDS, MY FRIENDS?!

It was looking iffy, but Andrew "Woo-Tang" Woo managed to make spontaneous conversion of cleric and druid spells work closer to Le Rūlz. We might make it a little sassier on the interface, but here's how it currently works:

On the quickcast menu, just below the metamagic feat buttons, there is a conversion button (assuming you have cleric or druid levels). Clicking this will place a quarter-size (32x32 or 16x16) icon in the lower left corner of all icons for spells that can be converted.

If you are playing a good or neutral cleric, all cleric spells have progressively fancier cure/mass cure wounds icons. Evil clerics get inflict wound icons. Druids get summon nature's ally Roman numerals. Clicking the spell allows you to target as though you were casting a cure/inflict/summon spell and it eats the selected spell from your list.

It's just that easy!

He specified a bit later that the system could not be customized to cast some other spells via the .2da's. He did however confirm that the spontaneous switch caused the regular spell script to fire.

In another area Anthony Davis continued his whirlwind through the forums with the following tidbit on new tools available in the cutscenes. He was asked if there were fades, wipes, masks, filters, titles, subtitles, or borders by Daronas to which he answered:

At this point I believe it is only fades, though I think you can color the fade. You may have been able to do that in NWN1 too, I just can't remember right now.

I just sopke with Rich, and he confirmed that he added in colored fades for NWN2.

Further clarity was provided by Nathaniel Chapman:

Basically, in NWN2, a "cutscene" is just another way of saying "conversation". Cutscenes function exactly like NWN1 style dialogues at their core. Basically, you just flag a conversation property and that conversation will behave as a "NWN2 dialogue" - which means:

It'll use static cams for each node if they are provided (you place them in the toolset and assign them to dialogue nodes), or, you can select one of a set of "random angles", where the game engine will try to place the camera based on some engine-level criteria.

It will have the cinematic "black bars".

Just to clarify: We have NWN1 style dialogues (textbox in the upper left corner), and NWN2 style dialogues.

If you can not be certain that an NPC will be in-shot, you will not want to use a static camera - instead you'll want to use one of the "random angles". Some examples of random angles are close up, medium shot, etc. The game will basically figure out where to place the camera based on a "camera bone" on the model.

Static Cameras can be placed anywhere within the current area. So, if you want to have an NPC talk about something, and then the camera cut to whatever they're talking about, you'll need to make a dummy version of the area within your current area and place the static cam there.

Additionally, you can tell a random camera to pan or track to follow the speaker.

Some really good stuff.