So I had a half-hour-ish call with Supreem, the CEO of Citadel Studios to talk about some of the concerns of the NWN communities. It was mostly from a technical perspective about what is/isn't going to be moddable in the future. Questions were gathered from Skywing and a few other community members. From the start, I just want to say how open to modding this company seems to be. Supreem was helpful, friendly, and open to discussing engine and license limitations. Here were the highlights
from my perspective.
TL;DR:
- License and limitations for the hacky shit we've done with NWNX, but there's less of a need for that stuff. We can get it in the future, maybe, but they don't want it done generally.
- The game is as super-moddable as originally thought, and they have a strong support for modders. NWScript sucks, so we had to do CLR eventually. Lua won't have the limitations of NWScript, so that's nice for future scripting.
- Client-side code is limited, but we only really used it for GUI in NWN2, and we don't need to do that in LoA.
The Big One: Cluster Extensions, Long-Term Reliability, Server Extensions:
In NWN2, the vault (character data) is stored on the server you are connecting to. In LoA, the vault is stored as part of the cluster. The cluster holds the character data, that is shared. This solves a lot of issues for us. We don't need to artificially create a central vault, and manually sync character data between servers. That's just part of the game.
But, losing EA/BioWare/GameSpy support wasn't fun for us. We had a big advantage though: we had complete access to the software, and no one really cared if we hacked it apart and did whatever we wanted with it. So we (read: Skywing) got us things like the Client Extension and xp_bugfix to ensure that for the most part people can just continue to use the game as normal. Can we do the same, with LoA, when the developers have moved over to LoA2, or if the company goes under? No. That's sort of the hard answer. If Citadel Studios dies, we may well lose the work we did. As I said at the start, Supreem seemed a really good guy. My impression from talking with him is that if he's in control at that point, he'd see software put out to not leave us hanging. But I don't know if we can guarantee that is the case.
Similarly, they don't want people hacking on their server executables. This comes from the perspective of security of their project and IP. They don't want a bunch of hacked apart servers. They are, however, open to providing different licenses to trusted groups. It may be possible in the future to do something to get around some of these issues, and get a more trusted/secure relationship with Citadel Studios.
General Moddability:
So, licensing is more of a concern, but moddability is where we would win huge. These guys want to make the server-side game as moddable as possible. The network stack and the like are hardcoded, but the game is systems-agnostic. Supreem didn't see any reason we couldn't implement something like D&D into the game. In NWN2, a lot is hardcoded. If we want to add Sneak Attack to spells, we have to work in Obsidian's systems, and their limitations. In LoA, we have to make our own spellcasting scripts, but we have access
everywhere, because we're in our own systems. Furthermore, with Lua, we have easy access to writing native extensions via DLLs. We had a big boon adding CLR scripts, but that really won't be needed with Lua and its versatility.
So that sounds neat. Downsides: client-side modding is limited. In NWN2, our client-side modding is mostly UI-based. But we have the capability to create and send UIs from the server. Part of this is because Unity doesn't allow C# scripts to be shipped in asset bundles, which are streamed to the client. Another aspect this restricts? The camera. I'll talk about that next.
All game modding is done through Unity, where you can do extensions fairly easily. All data is serialized into XML files, or put into asset bundles.
The Camera:
So, areas in NWN2 tend to be relatively small, segmented areas. Compare this to a game like Skyrim, where the world is in far larger chunks, with some magic trickery to make it all seem like one big space. LoA is more like the later than the former. But it's also not really designed with the same magic trickery. In a dynamic world, you're not really sure what is in the distance, while in one like Skyrim's, you can assume it will be the same and optimize everything (typically with load on demand distant terrain chunks). So. For now, the camera is stuck to that top-down thing that it currently is. They are open to changing it in the future, especially based on community feedback. But for now, it's unappealing.
I should note that DMs can have free cams, and are less restricted by all that nonsense.
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If we have further questions, I'm sure we can ask them, but that's what I've learned from the call with him.