Draw distance and AOE circle

bbgun21

After hearing about Enhanced Edition in the works for NWN 1, I got excited and started to replay a little of it again to see if maybe there is anything to improve on which wasn't mentioned before.

And after playing it, so far the only things that I have seen which could be improved are:

- Higher draw distance

The draw distance in the original is very low, and I'm not sure if this is in some specific areas or whether it depends on daytime or nighttime but I believe this should be increased a tad bit especially from preventing enemies popping up suddenly and detecting you before you detect them.

- AOE circles

As you may know, there are no AOE circles in the NWN1 (whereas they are present in NWN2) with AOE spells like Fireball, Ice Storm, Horrid Wilting etc... nor there are similar things for cone-area spells and I honestly wish this will be added in the EE since it would help to know that you won't damage yourself or your henchmen whilst targeting some enemy with a Fireball.

Any opinions on this ?

Taro94

AOE circles could be somewhat difficult to implement, I think, given that the radius is specified in the script file. Specifying it elsewhere could potentially break backward compatibility.

But I think it could be done by specifying the radius extra in a 2da file. If no 2da radius is specified for a spell (which would be the case for custom spells in older modules) the spell could simply not have AOE displayed when casting.

FreshLemonBun

You can increase the player perception range in ranges.2da but there are some bugs with it, attacking out of range causes targets to vanish until you unequip your weapon. I think it's also tied in with the spot skill.

It would be really good if they could fix it up and separated things out more clearly so scripts can give people different perception ranges during night or change weapon and spell ranges with scripts for feats and metamagics.

A level 20 dimension door or fireball that reaches 400ft + 40ft/level would change things a lot.

jglvz256

I've always used nwshader for extending the draw distance in nwn1. It can increase the range of the fog or turn it off entirely, and without the fishlens distortion that the hack method causes. I am currently missing this in nwnee because I had really gotten used to the extended viewdistance.

Incidentally, fog distance is set by the module creator and can be different for each area. Earlier modules designed for slower PCs usually have the very lowest viewdistance set, whilst later modules (eg Daggerford) may have further viewdistances.