Since some people may have misunderstood I would like to clarify once again that I am not angry at Beamdog nor was I expressing a negative opinion towards them with my previous post. It wasn't even directed at them.
Let me be very clear that I do not engage in hype. I believe that hype causes otherwise reasonable people to expect too much and project those desires as promises onto other people or groups, promises they never actually made. I think that's unfair and so I don't engage in the practice. At the same time this also means that I never feel betrayed because I only expect what I know for certain. I think a lot of people got ahead of themselves early on in 2017 and 2018 as they theorized about what they would like to see, and that soon became an unwarranted expectation. As Julius clarifies Beamdog is a small team, and since NWN does not seem to have been an outstanding success I think the progress is somewhat justified.
That said I do sympathize with some perspective of frustration about the progress on particular issues. I agree that Beamdog probably has their priorities wrong but it is not our company so we can't make them do it differently. An example of this is the multiplayer functionality for the console versions of the game. I believe that the immense popularity of the Ravenloft PotM action server stands as testament to the success of the multiplayer for console. Any other recent fluctuation in player counts seems to have been largely driven by the holiday season and recent sales, as corroborated by Steam Charts and activity on the various online stores following sales.
While I do think it's fair to criticize certain decisions and disagree with their priorities for NWN development I think people should remember that at the end of the day it's their decision. The console multiplayer port wasn't good for the community but there might be other factors such as contract details with WotC or Hasbro.
As always I will continue to say that I feel the priority of Beamdog should have been and should be bringing the entire NWN community together. There are still hundreds of players at peak hours on Diamond Edition servers vs several hundreds more on EE, whether you agree with the content of those servers or not their absence is a significant hit to the NWN EE community. Phones, nwsync, achievements, new content, and now consoles. These were all things various people touted as set to have a big impact on the player base but have contributed an almost imperceptible difference in exchange for a lot of development work. All I know for certain is that Diamond Edition has active players representing more than ten times than all those other things combined. Wish it wasn't so but it is.
A renderer is a whole different issue and it's going to take time. When it releases it probably wont have updated assets or only with very small tweaks to texture processing, then you might hear comments like "I thought the graphics would be improved?" That's life!
Personally, unlocking custom spellbooks has now given me enough to do until the summer and lets hope they fix the issues with that (and racialtypes) soon enough.
It's best to not get our hopes up too high, I can honestly say my expectations were too high and I didn't appreciate the work needed to fix and open up NWN.
It is frustrating the lack of communication, my hope for down the line is they make a new series of modules or even a new campaign but not before they open up the restrictions and fix lasting issues.
I think it's important to be realistic and understand what's being offered. Whilst a new renderer may well mean lots more possibilities it's not going to be a silver bullet, instantly transforming the game. Even if all the assets that ship with the 3 main modules get updated (which I very much doubt) there's just too much other custom content out there for it to get updated as well to make for a consistent visual experience.
Average gamers seem to have expected NWN:EE to look 'modern' and that's basically all they were looking for - this explains all the disparaging chatter re 'what's been enhanced?'. Most of these gamers are only out to play single player, official content. I think BD would be well served focusing more on producing premium modules that take advantage of the new tech if they want more success. I spend most of my time playing on PWs but from a broader market perspective I think that new premium content would be better for the game overall.
I'm still wondering if NWN: EE could take off again in a big way with a bit of a push. The toolset and multiplayer elements are still quite unmatched today. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the 3e rules.
NWN's only flaws are that it looks so crude and that single player campaigns are uninteresting because of the lack of a proper D&D party.
Thanks @1varangian we are trying to show what can be done with NWN1 now days along with pull new people to the community. However while doing so we are also working to help others who would like to learn how to create custom content for NWN1 as well
I have even started working on a web page for people who want to learn custom content.
Plus once we have our server up and running we are going to release our content to the community to use as they see fit in hopes that it will help to get other to want to create something as well textures, models, scripts, modules, or whatever.
With heavy heart, I have to share that we've made a decision not to continue the work on the NWN Renderer.
For more than 1.5 years, we've been tearing down the renderer, we had a vision of what we wanted to accomplish with it. The technical and creative vision of the renderer was mostly driven by Cameron Tofer.
Unfortunately, the renderer from the ~2000 era turned out to be a too tough nut to crack. We tried everything and even in February Trent wrote it was still being worked on.
With the renderer re-write work stopping, we're not stopping our support for NWN:EE. You might have noticed a few regular updates released in recent months, and more are on the way. The iOS version of NWN:EE is drawing closer.
I'm also curious if there was any progress that can be salvaged and what the detailed explanation for the cancellation is. I think most people would be happy if there were a few performance tweaks, and various maps, with improved lighting, fog, draw distance, and built in controls for things like area saturation and bloom. Shader programming from NWScript would also be a big plus.
I know a lot of that was made possible by community tools about ten years ago. I'm just wondering if there will be some progress in that regard even if it does not entail a complete rewrite of the renderer, even if it only works for PC, or if render-related updates will cease completely.
Any chance you could get us some more information on that?
I appreciate you letting us know about this disappointing news. I too am curious about the details of the decision and why it was determined that an improved renderer was not feasable, though I don't expect many answers.
I am also most likely too optimistic to think that ending this work will free up resources to implement some of the features that have been sitting idle on Trello for so long...
I think most people would be happy if there were a few performance tweaks, and various maps, with improved lighting, fog, draw distance, and built in controls for things like area saturation and bloom. Shader programming from NWScript would also be a big plus.
I know a lot of that was made possible by community tools about ten years ago.
If this is true, it's a huge embarrassment for this project. Was more really available from modding tools 10 years ago?
I think most people would be happy if there were a few performance tweaks, and various maps, with improved lighting, fog, draw distance, and built in controls for things like area saturation and bloom. Shader programming from NWScript would also be a big plus.
I know a lot of that was made possible by community tools about ten years ago.
If this is true, it's a huge embarrassment for this project. Was more really available from modding tools 10 years ago?
Various things were yes, using nwnshader and nwncx, except that most left it as proof of concept, and stuck with simple shaders like depth of field which is now part of NWN EE's own features. More was still possible however clunky because they were basically hacking the client to force it to do things it wasn't built to do. Various texture maps, texture swapping, and turning shaders on and off with scripting/using switches was possible.
Now the actual developers have access to the source code you would think things would catch up more quickly. I suspect they got stuck on high ideals of how rendering ought to be done rather than implementing end user rendering features at all costs. Without a proper explanation we wont know however, but I expect the response will be stability over power, meanwhile the bug list increases either way.
Ironically you'd probably only get those kind of tools again if the developers stopped active development of updates, but the community is much smaller than it was 10 years ago.
With the renderer re-write work stopping, we're not stopping our support for NWN:EE. You might have noticed a few regular updates released in recent months, and more are on the way. The iOS version of NWN:EE is drawing closer.
Exactly how will this affect the work on the enhanced beamdog models? Last I heard their development will resume once the renderer is finished. Now with that story off the table... I'm anxious of whenever or not the recreation of vanilla NwN assets will suffer the same fate.
With heavy heart, I have to share that we've made a decision not to continue the work on the NWN Renderer.
For more than 1.5 years, we've been tearing down the renderer, we had a vision of what we wanted to accomplish with it. The technical and creative vision of the renderer was mostly driven by Cameron Tofer.
Unfortunately, the renderer from the ~2000 era turned out to be a too tough nut to crack. We tried everything and even in February Trent wrote it was still being worked on.
With the renderer re-write work stopping, we're not stopping our support for NWN:EE. You might have noticed a few regular updates released in recent months, and more are on the way. The iOS version of NWN:EE is drawing closer.
Sounds like you are throwing Cameron Tofer under the bus!
What happened to the art assets that Beamdog/ Ossian was working on. Do they require the new "renderer".
Beamdog already showed of years ago, what is possible without a new "renderer".
How? If I understand Apple's app store rules correctly, new apps using OpenGL will not be approved. You would need a new Metal-based renderer.
I wouldn't be surprised if they *did* finish the job for iOS because that's been the priority, and now they're like, we don't want to backport this to the other platforms. iOS has been the highest priority for a while, especially at the cost of the Android version.
Not gonna lie. Kinda mad right now. Only reason me and a friend started planning and scripting for a new PW was because we were looking forward to some "new life" to be breathed into this game with a new renderer. Even though it was taking a long time we were still holding out hope. Feeling pretty deflated now.
I'm guessing the original renderer, given the timeframe and the primitive graphics, didn't do vertex processing on the GPU. This is probably the biggest issue. If the transform and lighting aren't processed on the GPU but are done on the CPU instead, high-poly models you load into the game will eventually kill performance.
With 64-bit some vocal people were also saying that it would greatly improve the graphics, I think they really misunderstood the point. Even then 64-bit could in theory improve the memory so possibly help to raise the amount of resources in an NWN module they couldn't in practice because it was tied to all other various things. So why all the trouble for 64-bit? Releasing on iOS seems a likely reason. I don't know about the other requirements but it would be a bit weird if they also had to give up on the iOS port, though I personally think it will be about as fruitful as the Android port.
It would be a let down if all that came out of it was required changes for console and iOS releases, and they couldn't salvage any rendering features for PC.
It also seems hard to fathom that they just couldn't do the basics of rendering in a modern way. The person that made the Aurora-engine emulator (not piracy because it doesn't supply the content) years ago was able to render geometry and textures from NWN to DA. Plus if they couldn't load the geometry to graphics cards I assume that would have been a roadblock sooner than one and a half years later.
At least we have keyholing to melt it all away, right? Right? ..... Right?
The Enhanced Hall of Justice and HD Remake weapons and shields released by beamdog 2 years ago still looks great so I hope they still work on new content like that in addition to the further work on the core game engine. I was never especially interested in the new renderer and always wished they put more resources to other things like new content, new fixes, etc.
Comments
Let me be very clear that I do not engage in hype. I believe that hype causes otherwise reasonable people to expect too much and project those desires as promises onto other people or groups, promises they never actually made. I think that's unfair and so I don't engage in the practice. At the same time this also means that I never feel betrayed because I only expect what I know for certain. I think a lot of people got ahead of themselves early on in 2017 and 2018 as they theorized about what they would like to see, and that soon became an unwarranted expectation. As Julius clarifies Beamdog is a small team, and since NWN does not seem to have been an outstanding success I think the progress is somewhat justified.
That said I do sympathize with some perspective of frustration about the progress on particular issues. I agree that Beamdog probably has their priorities wrong but it is not our company so we can't make them do it differently. An example of this is the multiplayer functionality for the console versions of the game. I believe that the immense popularity of the Ravenloft PotM action server stands as testament to the success of the multiplayer for console. Any other recent fluctuation in player counts seems to have been largely driven by the holiday season and recent sales, as corroborated by Steam Charts and activity on the various online stores following sales.
While I do think it's fair to criticize certain decisions and disagree with their priorities for NWN development I think people should remember that at the end of the day it's their decision. The console multiplayer port wasn't good for the community but there might be other factors such as contract details with WotC or Hasbro.
As always I will continue to say that I feel the priority of Beamdog should have been and should be bringing the entire NWN community together. There are still hundreds of players at peak hours on Diamond Edition servers vs several hundreds more on EE, whether you agree with the content of those servers or not their absence is a significant hit to the NWN EE community. Phones, nwsync, achievements, new content, and now consoles. These were all things various people touted as set to have a big impact on the player base but have contributed an almost imperceptible difference in exchange for a lot of development work. All I know for certain is that Diamond Edition has active players representing more than ten times than all those other things combined. Wish it wasn't so but it is.
A renderer is a whole different issue and it's going to take time. When it releases it probably wont have updated assets or only with very small tweaks to texture processing, then you might hear comments like "I thought the graphics would be improved?" That's life!
Personally, unlocking custom spellbooks has now given me enough to do until the summer and lets hope they fix the issues with that (and racialtypes) soon enough.
It is frustrating the lack of communication, my hope for down the line is they make a new series of modules or even a new campaign but not before they open up the restrictions and fix lasting issues.
Average gamers seem to have expected NWN:EE to look 'modern' and that's basically all they were looking for - this explains all the disparaging chatter re 'what's been enhanced?'. Most of these gamers are only out to play single player, official content. I think BD would be well served focusing more on producing premium modules that take advantage of the new tech if they want more success. I spend most of my time playing on PWs but from a broader market perspective I think that new premium content would be better for the game overall.
NWN's only flaws are that it looks so crude and that single player campaigns are uninteresting because of the lack of a proper D&D party.
I will post a few screenshots below and links to where you can find out more about us
Website: https://nwndarksun.gamerlaunch.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NwnDarkSun
Facebook: NWN Dark Sun
NWN Dark Sun
I have even started working on a web page for people who want to learn custom content.
https://topnwn.guildlaunch.com/
Plus once we have our server up and running we are going to release our content to the community to use as they see fit in hopes that it will help to get other to want to create something as well textures, models, scripts, modules, or whatever.
With heavy heart, I have to share that we've made a decision not to continue the work on the NWN Renderer.
For more than 1.5 years, we've been tearing down the renderer, we had a vision of what we wanted to accomplish with it. The technical and creative vision of the renderer was mostly driven by Cameron Tofer.
Unfortunately, the renderer from the ~2000 era turned out to be a too tough nut to crack. We tried everything and even in February Trent wrote it was still being worked on.
With the renderer re-write work stopping, we're not stopping our support for NWN:EE. You might have noticed a few regular updates released in recent months, and more are on the way. The iOS version of NWN:EE is drawing closer.
TR
I know a lot of that was made possible by community tools about ten years ago. I'm just wondering if there will be some progress in that regard even if it does not entail a complete rewrite of the renderer, even if it only works for PC, or if render-related updates will cease completely.
Any chance you could get us some more information on that?
I am also most likely too optimistic to think that ending this work will free up resources to implement some of the features that have been sitting idle on Trello for so long...
If this is true, it's a huge embarrassment for this project. Was more really available from modding tools 10 years ago?
Various things were yes, using nwnshader and nwncx, except that most left it as proof of concept, and stuck with simple shaders like depth of field which is now part of NWN EE's own features. More was still possible however clunky because they were basically hacking the client to force it to do things it wasn't built to do. Various texture maps, texture swapping, and turning shaders on and off with scripting/using switches was possible.
Now the actual developers have access to the source code you would think things would catch up more quickly. I suspect they got stuck on high ideals of how rendering ought to be done rather than implementing end user rendering features at all costs. Without a proper explanation we wont know however, but I expect the response will be stability over power, meanwhile the bug list increases either way.
Ironically you'd probably only get those kind of tools again if the developers stopped active development of updates, but the community is much smaller than it was 10 years ago.
It was said you would destroy recreate the Sith renderer, not join them give up.
Sounds like you are throwing Cameron Tofer under the bus!
What happened to the art assets that Beamdog/ Ossian was working on. Do they require the new "renderer".
Beamdog already showed of years ago, what is possible without a new "renderer".
Nothing new released by Beamdog in 2 years. What was released looked promising. No new renderer required.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/972100947047084540/0A9318B342A9B07543C3E0E44763E5419B287007/?imw=637&imh=358&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=#000000&letterbox=true
Exactly.
How? If I understand Apple's app store rules correctly, new apps using OpenGL will not be approved. You would need a new Metal-based renderer.
I wouldn't be surprised if they *did* finish the job for iOS because that's been the priority, and now they're like, we don't want to backport this to the other platforms. iOS has been the highest priority for a while, especially at the cost of the Android version.
It would be a let down if all that came out of it was required changes for console and iOS releases, and they couldn't salvage any rendering features for PC.
It also seems hard to fathom that they just couldn't do the basics of rendering in a modern way. The person that made the Aurora-engine emulator (not piracy because it doesn't supply the content) years ago was able to render geometry and textures from NWN to DA. Plus if they couldn't load the geometry to graphics cards I assume that would have been a roadblock sooner than one and a half years later.
At least we have keyholing to melt it all away, right? Right? ..... Right?
Yea like the walls, the floor...
TR