I mean, installing mods that work perfectly with all the modules sometimes could be considered a pain.
When i install mods for bg/icewindale, weidu aka installer does all the work.
So i wonder why nwn doesn’t have something similar aka installers for mods.
Making mods work with each other is really harder compared to other modable titles.
Same with portraits; other isometric games use basic portrait extension aka bmp/png and nwn uses tga.
Is tga in any way superior to png? I know that both png/tga support transparency and bmp doesn’t.
Png was released in 1997 so i wonder why nwn still uses tga.
Oblivion have also great modding scene plus they have great tool released by modders called wrye bash to help you mod the game easier.
I practically cannot find tool/utilities that would make modding easier.
Tools like combining haks without losing anything inside a module and making sure they work with each other.
From my point of view, a person who has modded games for over 20 years, nwn is not mod friendly game which is kinda strange, especially when you take into account how many modules/persistent worlds they are/were.
So here are my two cents,
It would be awesome if anyone could share his thoughts on this topic.
Cheers,
The NIT tool can be used to install modules and other mods without much fuss.
Merging haks is enabled by 2da tools and nwhak.
That said, I seriously doubt whether any tool could ever force mods to work with every module.
To do that, there would have to be an agreed framework of compatibility rules, which wasn’t on anyone’s mind back in 2002.
I have seen that done, for example in the ill-fated Dragon Age modding scene, but even then rogue modders can break stuff.
Because NWN is an / the official tool for making new D&D adventures, most of the effort goes into making new modules (SP and PW). They never conflict with one another (unless simple protocols like avoiding override are broken).
There is also a lot of custom content designed for use by module builders (e.g. CEP 2.x). Builders do the integration, aided by a few guidelines like reserved ranges, so again the resulting modules don’t conflict.
The problem comes with game-wide mods. These are relatively unimportant, with few, if any, must-haves. Typically, modders test their creations on the official campaigns, but have no way of knowing whether they’ll work with fan-made modules.
Script mods are the biggest problem - it’s very easy to break modules that have custom scripts. At the other end of the spectrum, GUI and graphical mods may work for most / all modules.
I’ll leave the question of image formats to others who know more than I.
Basically what Proleric already said. BG/Icewind Dale have one gameworld, that of the official content, Oblivion has one gameworld, that of the official content. Yes technically there are other gameworlds that modders have managed to create, but they are basically insignificant in size and number. In Neverwinter Nights it’s the reverse, there is an official gameworld, but it’s basically insignificant, the main game is the custom gameworlds people create, no one really cares to mod the official Neverwinter Nights games much because its vastly easier to create your own gameworld than it is in BG or Bethesda games. This difficulty of making your own gameworld means just making content for the official gameworlds of BG or Bethesda games much more attractive.
Player mods is not what NWN was designed for. It was designed for builders and a multiplicity of discrete experiences as the other people have noted.
The game started development very close to 1997, so that gives some insight into why certain technical choices were made.
Should literally everything about this game be better than it is today? Probably yes.
Also you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. You are talking about mod friendliness when you really mean user friendliness. Baldur’s Gate isn’t mod friendly - its modding community painstakingly reverse engineered its file formats to make modding a reality. There are no official tools. Everything was written by the community and slowly grew over years.
That said, afaik there are mods for both games which are not compatible to another. Especially in Oblivion you have to respect the loading order of mods to avoid issues.
.tga is used over .png because it was easier to process back in the days. In the past .png didn’t have a discreet alpha channel which sucks working in game engines (eg. shaders).
Still playing the same class every time is boring, maybe it is me but i am accustom to variety of gameplay options that can be seen in Bethesda games.
The only saving grace is prc but it usually breaks something if i want to implement it into a custom module.
Understandable but still a strange choice to choose an image extension that is not natively supported on windows. Still they could add png support with the ee. Since they are basically similar nowadays.
The only thing comparable to how it is with NWN in a Bethesda game is going to be stuff like Nehrim or Enderal. The gameplay adjustments work in Skyrim because there’s the one solid world we’re all accustomed to, but in NWN you’re playing on servers that could do all sorts. One day you’re in a dark gothic adventure land, the next you’re at a fishing tournament (There is only fishing), or even a server that cuts out half the options.
PNG wasn’t natively supported on Windows when NWN was released. Windows didn’t have native png support until 2003-2004ish.