Ruleset, part 1

Hi all, Sherincall here..

Seeing as we haven't been around for a while, it is only fair that we show something good when we come back. That something is our new ruleset. Unfortunately, it is not finished, so we can let you play with it just yet. Until such a time comes (soon!), I'll just give you a quick overview of it.

There are no classes in the Shadows and Silver ruleset: everyone plays as a generic PC class. Sounds dull? Not really. Rather than limiting a character to three strict classes, we allow seamless customization for all character types. If you want to play a sword master who is interested in the arcane, and also obsessed with locks, you needn't be a fighter/wizard/rogue. You will simply increase the skills you want. In order to achieve this, we had to modify most of the skills, and add many new ones. Here are the skills present in the S&S ruleset at the moment:




There will be a detailed explanation for all of the skilled listed above, but for now let's just say that the Arcana skills will be used to perform actions similar to spellcasting in NWN, combat skills will increase your battle prowess, such as attack bonus, armor class, damage and even attacks per round. Most other skills are self-explanatory.

Another novelty to the NWN skill system is that skills can now be progressed without gaining a level. So, if you want to train your marksmanship skill, you can either gather experience and put a point in the skill at level up, or you can pick up a bow and practice. This goes for every skill, and those cross class skills can only be perfected this way.

That's it for now. Next time I will explain how feats work in the new ruleset. After that, you will get a chance to try it for yourselves.. I'm eager to get some feedback.

Custom Content Spotlight: NWNCQ

If you've been living under a rock, you may have missed the latest awesome custom content. Well, I say latest, but it's been around for a while, steadily picking up steam. It's called NWNCQ, and it's an overhaul of stock BioWare tilesets. There's some other goodies like reskinned placeables, but most of the fun comes from seeing old gross areas that looked dated even in 2002 suddenly looking new and wondrous again. I decided to test it out on my all-time favorite server, Nexus: the City Between Worlds.



The screenshot above was taken in an area designed with using the standard Rural tileset. Oh, and you're only seeing two or three placeables (the campfire and the mushrooms) in all of that. While you pick your jaw up off the floor, lemme say this is because the idea of NWNCQ is to create environments that look incredibly detailed without the builder having to crowd it with placeables. You can get a thick, tangled forest using only the features included in the stock tileset. Additionally, since the detail is confined to the tileset, you don't have to worry nearly as much about pathfinding lag as you would have with a horde of placeables.



Probably the greatest thing about NWNCQ is that it's available in both hak and override form. This means you can incorporate it into your module, or have it incorporated into any module you play. Hence why I can hop onto a running server and see the beautiful content without having to get the admins to install it.

chico400, creator of NWNCQ, has incorporated some good design into the project to make it painless to use. First, override versions of the tilesets make it possible to walk through trees, rocks, and other added details, so you don't have to worry about places formerly accessible now being unreachable. The hak version doesn't do this, since you're planning on building with it and can work within its constraints.

Second, he includes a batch utility to selectively activate or deactivate overrides. While you could just delete the files of a particular tileset that you don't like, chico's utility puts it aside in a special folder. This is particularly good if, say, you want the updated look for one module but not another. Activate it before you play the first module, then deactivate it when you want to play the second.

Performance is very smooth, even with shadows and anti-aliasing, and chico has tried very hard to ensure that fading geometry works well. The end effect is that you have very organic areas that still run well and are a pleasure to play in.

Other features of the package include pseudo-bloom...



...pseudo-bumpmapping...



...animated lens flares...



... and nicer textures.







In short, it's easy, it's painless, and it brings old yucky areas back to life... whatever module you play on. Try it out!