NWN:EE 8159 Patch Notes and the Steam Beta Begins!

The next step towards the launch of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is a beta on Steam. Over the next few weeks, we’d love to hear feedback from Steam = players on Friend Lists, Steam Workshop, stability, and about any translation errors.

To get access to the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Steam beta, pre-order NWN:EE on Beamdog.com. Find out more about how to get your Steam key here.

Community participation in the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Head Start program has been amazing! Your submitted bugs, feature discussions in the Beamdog forums, and participation with the input and roadmap Trello boards has really helped light the way. Keep on letting us know what features and fixes you want to see!

UPDATE REGARDING THE NEW SHADERS The old means of specifying a custom shader through the .txi had limitations. In particular, the .txi was initially intended to be a place to store information about a specific texture, not as a repository for other information. We’ve decided to create a new file type to encapsulate a material template. Instances of this new material file type, with a suffix ".mtr", can be shared across multiple meshes, and will specify things like textures, shaders, and uniforms.

What follows is a sample material file that includes examples for all currently supported fields: customshaderVS vsSkinned // Specifies a custom vertex shader: vsSkinned.shd customshaderFS fsFancyNew // Specifies a custom fragment shader: fsFancyNew.shd texture0 myDecal // Specifies a texture that will be bound to texUnit0 in the fragment shader. Will override bitmap/tetxure0 in the model texture1 myMask // Binds to texUnit1 in the fragment shader. We support up to fifteen of these textures: texture0 - texture14. parameter float vDiffuse 0.8 1.0 0.65 1.0 // Creates a 4-float parameter that will be bound to a shader uniform of the same name (if it exists) parameter float fModulator 0.5 // Creates a float parameter that will be bound to a shader uniform of the same name (if it exists) parameter int iCount 2 // Creates an int parameter that will be bound to a shader uniform of the same name (if it exists) To use a material like this one on a mesh, simple add the following line in the .mdl file: materialname myNewMaterial These new materials, though not complete in build 8159, will be available in build 8160. Apologies for causing any confusion or frustration in the modding community.

Fixes

• Added a crash fix happening on the Multiplayer screen.
• NWN:EE now shows the disconnect reason even when playing on a localhost server.
• Multiplayer server filters (“Latency”, “Game Name”, “Don’t show empty”) are back.
• LAN game discovery is back.
• “Masterver knows our address” no longer spams into the logs.

Features

• Servers should now enumerate and connect faster
• Steam Workshop now supports thumbnails properly. To add a thumbnail image, include thumbnail.jpg or thumbnail.png in the root directory of your mod
• More work has gone into Steam Friends; they should now display properly, regardless of server reachability.
• Per-vertex color streams, named “colors”, can now be supplied per mesh in model files. This will permit content creators to send per-vertex colors to any shader with the named attribute “vCustomColor”.
• Previously only one texture coordinate stream (named “tverts” in the model file) was supported per mesh. We now support three additional texture coordinate streams, named “tverts1”, “tverts2”, and “tverts3”, which will be linked to any shaders with the named attributes “vTcIn1”, “vTcIn2”, and “vTcIn3”.