A very comprehensive preview, four pages worth, has been posted at Gamespy. In it, Feargus Urquhart, CEO at Obsidian Entertainment, talks about NWN 2 and what sets it apart from NWN 1 both in terms of the single-player campaign and the multiplayer aspect as seen through the eyes of modders and toolset users. More importantly for modders, though, the Electron rendering engine is also the one used in the tool set which means that mod developers will be able to adjust lighting, colors, terrain, movement scripts and dialogue trees and see exactly what it will look like running. In my demonstration, the team member adjusted things like ambient lighting, directing it up from the ground or down from the sky, turning the feel of the swamp from a muggy bayou to a Hellish lavascape to a frozen wasteland. The sky was shifted around, with the user able to adjust variable like cloud cover, cloud propagation, a new fog generator, and wind speed to simulate everything from a clear, starry sky to what looks like an approaching cyclone. Even better, the pre-defined tile system has been completely removed from the outdoor construction tools. Instead, everything in the game is now an individual item that can be grouped into user-defined sets. That means a player can define three completely unique houses on a city block, and then define that block into its own tile set, creating customized paintbrushes to build a city with.
You can read the whole article at Gamespy. |