New Renderer
MaximB
Member Posts: 4
At November 23 Livestream it's been said:
"We got a first look at the updated renderer for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition this week, and there are very interesting things coming down the line for NWN:EE.
The first priority for any graphics engine improvements on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is the new renderer, as it very likely will have a big, positive impact on things like replacement for the PLT format, or 2da editing. This is a complete overhaul of the renderer, and it will allow for multiple rendering paths (for PC and mobile).
One part of the rendering update is 3D. Toolset updates are currently being looked at and prioritized, but are contingent in part on the rendering update."
So, does it mean the graphics of NWN:EE will be better? prettier?
What exactly does it mean?
"We got a first look at the updated renderer for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition this week, and there are very interesting things coming down the line for NWN:EE.
The first priority for any graphics engine improvements on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is the new renderer, as it very likely will have a big, positive impact on things like replacement for the PLT format, or 2da editing. This is a complete overhaul of the renderer, and it will allow for multiple rendering paths (for PC and mobile).
One part of the rendering update is 3D. Toolset updates are currently being looked at and prioritized, but are contingent in part on the rendering update."
So, does it mean the graphics of NWN:EE will be better? prettier?
What exactly does it mean?
Post edited by MaximB on
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Comments
There should be some significant performance increases once the new rendering code is complete and integrated, as it would clean up a lot of the outdated rendering processes the Aurora Engine currently uses.
http://blog.beamdog.com/2018/11/november-16-livestream-recap.html
While I personally won't mourne the passing of plt files they too are simple enough to edit in Gimp as there is a plugin. I don't know if the current adobe photoshop can still use the plugin that is available for that platform.
TR
It was commonly believed here on the forums, whether said by a moderator or just community speculation, that the new renderer would make it's way to EE on PC once the console ports were done, as it was also believed that the new renderer would be on the ports themselves.
Was this just speculation on the community's part?
Where is the renderer in the overall roadmap? We saw some promising screenshots several months ago, but there hasn't been much word on it since.
The latest dev patch indicated new features like "Level of Detail", and that's what made me think of this.
Stick to primary sources and confirmed statements.
@FreshLemonBun I've noticed a lot of negativity in your comments, lately. It's your choice, ofc. But we didn't "move on".
But you can see how people would feel negative lately, right? We know precious little about the renderer, what's coming with it (if anything) and whether or not the renderer is even what you should have been spending time on given the EE's state.
While it seems to be a new trend especially in game development that devs blaim the consumer for their so called negativity instead of acknowledging their own mistakes or flat out intended bad decisions, this "negativity" is a direct reaction to actions or lack of them.
So if you (in that case beamdog, not you yourself) feel "negativity", a bit self reflection would be a starting point instead of trying to blaimshift towards your paying customers and hardcore fans who are the ones creating content and keeping the game alive.
It might be very hard to grasp the concept, but people who are here to complain and yet still hang around, people who show emotions (negative ones!) towards you (the company) are actually very dedicated and very involved. These are the ones who didn't just moved on but want a better game and better decisions. These are the oney who want to stay around and want this here to be great success.
Else they just woulnd't care.
So instead of trying to be personally hurt by some people who are saying what they think is wrong and confronting you with the things thare are not right, take this feedback seriously and use it.
The last thing you need is self pitty.
Personally I can absolutely understand the so called "negativity". I moved from being comapletely pro you guys, to completely disappointed and angered.
Yes I see there are improvements, yes I totally appreciate some great changes and work that has been done with the latest patches. Not everything is bad of course.
But then you guys pulled of the "arelith exclusive" stunt and lost completely my faitha nd good will. I have yet to see if you manage to be able to create a positive thinking within myself of you gus again.
I doubt it though. Since damage has been done and true faces have been shown. And yes not sure how I feel about your comment I quoted. I get some strange EA vibes here.
We never leave anything unfulfilled. Bringing Siege of Dragonspear to mobile took us several years, but we did it.
We were fully focused on getting the console versions out of the door in 2019. It took a lot of efforts. MP was a different challenge itself, a big one.
The renderer work started before the console versions, and it still continues.
It's still in the works. This is one of the reasons no huge details about the Renderer have been shared. Another reason - the people who can create such an article are constantly busy with more urgent work, - for example, that work that made the MP update for Xbox possible to release just last week.
We managed to release a few patches at the end of 2020 for PC, addressing a few urgent requests. We're not done yet.
___
I know FreshLemonBun as a reasonable forum user so I wondered about the details of their comment. I got those details, and it clarified things. When I get a chance, I try talking to users a bit less formal.
Just as Beamdog is a small team, this forum is more a home-like for players were the close and often informal dialogue happens. This is not a support site of a mega-corporation, we're not trying to find long and misleading explanations. We're speaking openly and directly. We have @niv on our team, a NWVault community person first and foremost. We're talking and helping players on Discord. We're active on Steam.
We're happy to have such involved players. In the summer of 2019 our Android team looked at the Input Trello board deciding what features should be implemented. They tried to implement as many requests as possible and make the Android version of NWN:EE more user-friendly.
This is the approach of our team - to stay close to players. Yes, it's impossible to talk 24/7 about plans and their implementations.
In 2018 Trent said it would take 3 years to implement what was being suggested for NWN:EE. 3 years. We're in February, 2020, so it's going according to the plan - with the exception that the renderer stuff turned out much more difficult and time-consuming than our estimations.
Patience is a virtue that is in short supply in this day and age. Everyone wants instant gratification and has the attention span of a turnip. Maybe patience is something that comes with age...
And yes, the console ports were released and we don't have it on PC, but we can already see how they shifted back again to PC with how many patches were released on the last 4 months.
If you are *that* needy for the new renderer just play PS4/XONE/Switch release as it has some of it. You can't expect BD to release a new renderer in a year nor two. That's something it takes a lot of time. Just look at Warcraft 3 Reforged, they announced it on 2018 but it was being on the works 2 years prior to it and it was a bigger team only focused on it.
The only recriminable thing is the lack of information of how it's progressing but oh well, at least they won't drop it. If they resisted and made BG:EE a non bugged mess from its release we know nwn:ee won't be scrapped for something fancier.
Firstly thank you for even reaching out to contact me in order to forward to your reply.
And secondly, I realize I have been a bit too polemic, especially since it was unjustified directed towards you, who is of course not responsible for how things are done.
So my apologize if my words towards you were a lot more harsh than they should have been. I think it was just the anger that has commulated up since a few months now regarding this whole NWNEE thing.
In essence what I just wanted to point out to you personally is, that "negativity" is not negative. It is a positive thing, it shows you that people are unhappy but dedicated. Else they would just move on and never look back. That was what I wanted to point out.
In terms of the renderer, I can wait, I allways said it. Done when its done as long as it has been worked on.
Though if you take that much time and postpone (expected) release dates all the time, there should be more information.
There should be something to show. To give people hope, so they can see progress. Not a fully fletched out gameplay movie with cool effects... a few screeshots "hey look at that, experiement X291" is allready enough to keep people happy, they can see progress, can look forward. Expect cool things.
I know you guys are busy, yet there is allways time to forward a screenshot or a small techvideo you could show aound.
The second part of my post however was something that personally angered me a lot.
And that is simple: Neopotism. (And yes you can deny it or call it something else, but in the end it has the same effect)
And there we're going full circle.
You say you have worked on the console releases and the stuff that needed to be done there, the MP patch. Great! Really cool.. now tell me ... who beside Arelith and Ravenloft benefit from it? Rethorical question of course.
This decision you(Beamdog) have made; this ... awefully communicated spit in the face of every other content creator within the community was enough for me personally.
I don't know why it has been done, as there was no real communication, but in my opinion in that case there should have been NO exception if not everyone could benefit from it. Now this stinks fishy, as it clearly shows how deeply interlinked arelith and beamdog is and where the conflict of interests show.
I am really mad about you guys for that stunt you pulled off and that has nothing to do with the releases of patches and the renderer. I can't stand injustice. I am totally aware that I personally would have not really benefited from it, but the action itself was so despicable, i could no longer keep silence.
Actually I am very happy with the frequency patches came out lately and especially the changes made in there. It is a lot more than I have ever expected, but unfortuantely it will never compansate for the trust loss you created with the thing above.
There are a lot of things fishy within the community which is why I left it months ago and keep working for myself on my project. But the fish allways stinks from its head. Allways.
But yet again, please don't take this part personal. It is not directed towards you as a person, but towards you as a representive.
Personally I allways have appreaciated, and still do, the amount of communication and personal interaction with us the community and I am fully aware that you try to balance your responsibilities as a representive of a company with your personal involvement and being part of this community.
Ok cool idea. I will just connect to my PW then ... oh ... wait ... for some reason it doesn't work. Mhm strange ... why?
Could you help me please so I am able to follow your (allways) helpfull and well thought through advice?
EDIT:
I order to not hijack this topic any further, I will stop responding here. I want to apologize for the derailing of the topic, it just somehow happend.
Sorry for that, I think I have said everything anyway, of course you guys can reply and I will read it!
If necessary I am of course allways open for deabte in PMs or through other means of contact.
Yes, i can, like I always do.
First, no one on Arelith nor Ravenloft knew that Beamdog was making their servers available to play on consoles, they have no evil corrupt relationship. It's a no brainer to know why those both servers were the firsts to be available. Tell me Leaf, is yours already finished? Can I access to it? And how many players play on it? +60 like on Arelith or Ravenloft?
Second, it was stated that if you want your server to be available you'd need to reach BD and talk about it with them. They are open to add more to the server list. Same thing a few conditions have to be followed through, like you must use nwsync and it can't be bigger than 4gb.
And third, there's nothing fishy about the community. If you go telling people they are stupid and take their heads out of their butts no wonders they'll proceed to ignore you or have a community manager to stop you from being rude to everyone.
I'm not needy for it at all. In fact I didn't even want it in the first place. My concern is the lack of information and whether the effort spent on this could have gone to something people asked for. IWD2's source code was lost, but that doesn't mean it is incapable of being reverse engineered.
And if they want to focus just on NWN now, why are people still reporting tons of problems? Perhaps more pressing, why are there so few quality of life changes to make the game less dated? I just don't see how work for such a small team is best devoted to a new renderer.
I'm thankful for all the work Beamdog has done bringing these games back and touching them up as they have, but patronage isn't unconditional. The Trello board's basically dead. The forums have slowed to an abysmal crawl in the news department.
To have a working game, as optimized, they must redo a lot of it. It's easier to rework the whole renderer than to try to fix what has been broken since 2008 without any document to know how their code works.
The effort spent on this will payback, it's already doing it. LODs, swap textures on the fly, shader support (we already have it, but it would be an improvement as by the demo Soren shared it looks like it's going to be changed to a PBR material one), the resman and texture binding... And that's part of it. We can see how they changed how shadows work, specularity, added refraction and reflections on water, etc. They both improve how the game looks and how it performs. I can finally make big ass maps using Zwerkules's Medieval City, fancymapped and all without my fps going lower than 40.
And I don't know what QoL improvements NWN can have when the interface and controls are pretty intuitive and work better than the ones in NWN2. It's more similar to what we had on Dragon Age: Origins, heh. Still, i guess we will be able to do crazy stuff once the complementary UI is released and we'll be able to mess around with it.
And not only that, just go and check the patch notes, they have a ton of fixes, a lot of them from way back to 1.69, sooo...
My disagreement about the UI and controls aside, QoL doesn't only include those things.
The game could stand to be more user-friendly in a lot of areas, for example allowing abilities like 'Rapid Shot' to be a permanent toggle instead of temporary. I'd value these things over the game looking a little better any day. I'm not even trying to say that a renderer is unwelcome, only that its overall value to the end user is questionable when compared to other things they could be working on.
We are just so used to NWN running like a rollercoaster between 20 and 60 fps, that they are focusing on finally making the game able to run on anything. Hell, even a PS4 Pro struggles to achieve 60fps! I'd rather have them work on the renderer and optimizations than edit how the game is played. We had the same thing for almost 20 years, it won't hurt to wait a little more for whatever QoL they can do.
Let me use BG:EE as an example once more: they first made the game run properly before enhancing how it's played. We first need for NWN1 to achieve a stable framerate without leaks and crashes before tackling how the game is played.
I'll be honest, I've never had any trouble with stability. Not on EE, not on Diamond. Both on this PC. So while I'd love to buy this, I do not.
There are other problems people have related to playability that aren't being addressed by the renderer, as well. But I'm not going to beat a dead horse. I've said what I will, and Julius decided to let you respond in his place when half of the problem is communicative.
Back to waiting for BG3.
it's kinda hard to pin point the issue. i just know one module [ prophet] had an npc just standing there when he should be making us fallow him to an inn
and the other is in tales arterra awakening part 2 a cut scene does not play properly as your companions are not in the scene.
Odd as this may sound, did you try opening the modules with the EE toolset, building it, and then saving it. I had an issue sometime back with an older module - companion not following commands - and was able to "fix" it by doing that.
that dd not seem to do anything. i do feel the recent patch is the cause as i noticed very small things happening since it came out. like some modules not having their summaries on the right in the custom module screen.
This is already possible. Set "sticky-modes" to true in the settings.tml (or ini file if you haven't updated). For some reason this wasn't really advertised (that i saw... didn't know about it until another player told me) as a new feature for EE. Not sure why, one my favorite additions
Well, it might have been that you never pushed the game beyond what vanilla/CEP does. Just make an area using Medieval City, make it 20x20, fill with placeables, have the skybox, every single effect on and shadows too. It will tank your FPS both on Diamond and EE. It's a fact. Hell, you can't even see it on any gameplay on Switch/PS4/XONE with vanilla assets.
You don't want to buy it? Ok, but it's there, and that's a huge issue if they want to release new content. Tyrants of the Moonsea runs like crap too, a lot of not caused by the renderer but to how the game is programmed. You can see how in the last dev build the game finally reaches 60fps (instead of hard 30-40) to then tank down to 30 thanks to how busy it is with scripting.
If you want a easy to try case, just log in to Sinfar and walk around the very first area, their port. It runs like crap.
But oh well, i won't change your mind. I'd rather have a game that runs properly, that being not forced to make small areas, not able to fill them with stuff because it tanks the performance, have animations on tiles without making it die and be able to have high poly models with LODs to finally reach 2020 graphic standars, rather than them making some wild adjustments/balances and break how it is played, after all, we had the same controls for 18 years.
And i'm no fanboy eh, I just say what I'm happy about. I've been playing PWs at 30-40fps for far too long to care about small gameplay tweaks when they are finally able to make it stable, look gorgeous too and bring us the means to create high quality content.