Beamdog Update, March 19, 2019

“Axis & Allies Online has been a labour of love from a lot of the developers over at Beamdog. We’ve been working hard to ensure we’ve made a game that is faithful to the source material, and just as fun to play.” ~ Cody Ouimet

These are busy times at Beamdog. We thought we’d give you a quick update on what we are up to:

• Axis & Allies Online is available to wishlist on Steam. Take a first look at screenshots and get ready for an official adaptation of the classic board game! Axis & Allies Online is coming soon to Steam Early Access for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Next Wednesday (3/27) at 09am PT we will have an AMA session at https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/ about Axis & Allies Online with our community manager Julius Borisov! Hope to see you there!
• Beamdog is heading to PAX East! We’ll be in Boston from March 28 - 31. Come meet us at the Skybound Games booth, where Trent Oster, Luke Rideout, Alfonso Munoz, and Sarah Dawson will be showing a playable demo of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for PS4 and Switch so you can try it hands-on. Check Skybound Games’ Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts for more details on bringing Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate ll, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights to consoles.
• The playable demo of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for PS4 and Switch at the Skybound Games booth will feature the voice and portrait of Evelyn from the Dice, Camera, Action! pack for the first time.

“We are Axis and Allies fans and we’ve worked hard to build a fun, accessible version of the game and we hope you enjoy playing it as much as we have.” ~ Trent

• Check out the latest Axis & Allies Online interview with Beamdog CEO Trent Oster and Producer Cody Ouimet by Axis and Allies.org about the origin story of Axis & Allies Online, development insights, and more.
• Back in February, Trent Oster gave an interview to The Fly where he discussed Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, console ports, creating original games, and more.
• Check out the latest issue of community magazine Wild Surge for an interview with Beamdog Marketing and PR Lead Sarah Dawson about Axis & Allies Online!
• Beamdog has 50 employees as of last week, and we’re still hiring! We’re looking for Programmers, Lead Programmers, and Designers to join our team!
• Last week we launched the new and improved Beamdog.com which now covers both the D&D games and Axis & Allies Online. As a part of our site update, the Beamdog Client also received a small update (2.1.11 ver) to point to the Beamdog Store’s new URL. If you’re using the Beamdog Client and haven’t updated yet, it should still work normally.
• Kate Welch, game designer at Wizards of the Coast, moved on to play Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition in her show, Welch's Game Juice. Join her on Twitch every Thursday at 3pm PT to win giveaways!

Let us know your thoughts on our new website!

• The next patch for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is not quite ready. As we mentioned in December, once we started on the renderer and 64-bit integration in earnest, that became our main focus. We have a team dedicated to the renderer, and the 64-bit merge has happened, but we’ve got a road ahead of us before we’re going to be able to put a bow on it and make it public, as the console branch requires us to spend time adding controller support, to spend time cleaning up some long-overdue UI problems, and other changes that will have far-reaching benefits in the long run.
• We don’t have a full feature list we can share with players yet, but the new renderer for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is very robust, and gives us, potentially, access to all the bells and whistles one looks for in a modern game. Luke thinks players and modders will be pleasantly surprised by its capabilities.
• A controller version of the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition UI for PC wouldn’t be impossible. The controller branch currently is distinct from the PC branch because Neverwinter’s UI wasn’t designed with a controller in mind, meaning we have to include a number of changes to UI and camera behaviour that we would have to reconcile between the console and PC versions. But either way, it would likely be something to investigate after the Console version ships.
• The iOS port of NWN:EE is in progress. We don’t have an ETA yet, but it is being actively worked on, as well as updates to the Android version in parallel.
• We have a team of dedicated QA who are testing all of the builds, logging bugs, performing regression testing, and confirming both functionality and bug fixes on a daily basis. All of the development team are responsible for fixing the bugs on the features that they work on. The “New” status in the public bug tracker isn’t a measurement of time in the tracker, but an indication of whether an issue has been triaged and escalated. If a bug is listed as “New”, it means it’s still in the queue to be triaged.
• The Dice, Camera, Action! voice and portrait pack will introduce a new vendor - Alveus Malcanter (voiced by Mark Meer). You’ll find him in each game (Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition) selling four items tied to the Waffle Crew. Any further items he would carry would always be thematically tied to the pack they’re distributed with.
• We looked into the possibility of an easter egg banter between Alveus Malcanter and Baeloth (since Mark Meer is the voice of both, as well as a few other voices in the game) in Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Unfortunately, it was out of the scope of what we could do for the first iteration of the Alveus Malcanter character.
• We’ve made significant improvements to pathfinding and collision in the console ports of our Infinity Engine games. Luke hopes to back-port these improvements to PC, but they’re not a part of the 2.6 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition (which is still in the works).
• Luke has been interested for a while in making Ascension an official “DLC” for Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and a few other similar mods, but there are some challenges in that: we can’t legally distribute content that we don’t own or have permission from all involved parties. In the case of some, where the people who worked on it are not in communication with us, our hands are tied.
• It appears that the primary reason that Catmull-Rom was dropped in the 2.0 patch was that it caused some very large performance issues with the mobile versions of the game. It is something that might be worth looking at restoring, but we’d need to do a little more research as to why we were unable to keep it in the first place.
• There seems to be an issue with an old implementation of Android softkeys not playing nicely with Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition after they were updated to work with a newer version of the Android OS, which we had to do for security reasons. On some devices running Android 4.4 KitKat and earlier, the softkeys get in the way of the fullscreen game, but we’ve been unable to reproduce and fix as the issue only occurs on select devices that are no longer supported by Google.
• The 3.1.4 patch for Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition (which includes the Czech localization) has been live on Beamdog for a while now! If you have it installed via the Beamdog Client, it should either already be version 3.1.4, or updateable to 3.1.4 now. You can confirm the version number in the lower-right corner of the main menu after launching.

If you have a question for Beamdog, don’t hesitate to ask us on our forums. We'll try to get answers from Beamdog Producer Luke Rideout and then will directly communicate them back to you (above are Luke’s answers to the community questions asked in February, 2019).

Beamdog Update, February 20, 2019

“Axis and Allies Online is Beamdog’s love letter to a board game that played a huge role in my youth.” ~ Trent

A month has passed since our last livestream. And what a month this has been! We feel it’s the right moment to share all the latest studio news and updates on our games!

• Our latest project is Axis & Allies Online, an official adaptation of Axis & Allies 1942, Second Edition: a tabletop classic beloved by history buffs and strategy gamers around the globe. Axis & Allies Online will be coming soon to Steam Early Access. Make sure to sign up for the Axis & Allies Online newsletter for the latest updates on community, strategy and development!
• We partnered with Skybound Games, the publisher behind Slime Rancher, The Long Dark, and other fantastically fun titles, to bring our D&D Enhanced Editions to console - for the first time ever. Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition will all come to Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PS4 in 2019! Check out the full announcement by Skybound Games here.

Your beloved D&D classics are coming to console!

• We've been hard at work on the new shader pipeline for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition that will eventually debut in the new renderer. Check out an early technical demonstration and let us know your thoughts, custom content creator or otherwise!
• Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition has been nominated for Best Digital Game and Best Narrative in the Design and Game Awards. Please vote for NWN:EE if you think it should win!
• Celebrate GOG.com’s Lantern Festival Sale! Get up to 52% of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition and DLC! Save up to 33% on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and its DLC!
• Kate Welch, game designer at Wizards of the Coast, plays Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition (and will soon play Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition) on Twitch every Thursday at 3pm PT in her new show - Welch's Game Juice. Join Kate to have fun with D&D and win prizes!

These screenshots show a glimpse of changes which will come to NWN:EE with the new renderer (everything is still in development).

• The 2.6 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is still in development.
• We’ve explored the possibility of Catmull-Rom Bicubic scaling, as well as as a few other solutions for scaling (eg. ESRGAN scaling) for the Infinity Engine Enhanced Editions, but haven’t pulled the trigger yet on implementing either.
• We received a number of questions about UI for the Infinity Engine Enhanced Editions games and our plans regarding it going forward. Now that the console releases are announced, we can share that we’ve been doing extensive updates to our UI system that could very possibly end up paying dividends for the PC versions into the future. For the time being, however, all of the UI work we’re doing is centered squarely around the console versions of the games, so any changes to the PC UI won’t happen for a while.
• We can’t get into any specifics regarding new story content for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, but there are things currently in the works. We have one full-time writer in-house, and work with external writers as opportunities arise.
• We haven’t released new enhanced models to the Steam Workshop for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition in a while because with the current rewrite of the renderer we want to ensure that what we release, by way of new assets, makes the best use of it.
• We’ve recently done some work to update the compiler for the Neverwinter Nights Toolset. We have removed the DRM that was preventing the Premium Modules from being read by the Toolset, but there are some strange issues still which make parts of the Modules behave strangely in the Toolset. There are final steps that still need to be taken before these Modules are ready to be opened up in the Toolset. There is no ETA on this, as we’re focusing on the upcoming console releases.
• To chat in Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on Android, you need to tap on the chat bar, which is positioned right above the hotbar (along the bottom of the screen). The virtual joystick is a different method of moving your character around from Neverwinter Nights classic point ‘n click interface: the left half of the screen can be used like an analog joystick, to walk your character around in 360 degrees, and the right side of the screen controls camera rotation, by swiping left and right.
• We don’t have any specific ETA for the new UI for our Translation Tool but it’s in the works.
• We’ve spent a lot of our time as a studio working on adapting legacy codebases for modern systems. In those cases, we had access to the source code of the games, and we had people (involved in the development of the Enhanced Editions) that were members of the original development team, including our founders, Trent and Cameron.
• Looking into the past has been an interesting journey for us, but Beamdog is starting to look forward. We’re interested in working on our own original products, so it’s likely that the next things you see from Beamdog will be original products, instead of more Enhanced Editions. We can’t say for certain what the next project is. Right now we’re looking at our options.
• We’d like to thank all our players and followers for their patience. We’re deep into development on console versions of all of our Enhanced Edition games. We’ve got a dedicated team working on all of Baldur’s Gate, Siege of Dragonspear, Baldur’s Gate II, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights to get them ready for release on consoles, and that’s taking up the larger part of our company resources. Those that aren’t on those projects, are hard at work on Axis & Allies Online. There are some resources still looking at PC (for the Infinity Engine games), but in the short term, console is our main directive. The 2.6 patch has been a long road, which we still haven’t reached the end of either. We’re extremely grateful to all of our fans for their understanding, and continued love of the games.

If you have a question to Beamdog, don’t hesitate to ask on our forums. We'll try to get answers from Beamdog Producer Luke Rideout and then will directly communicate them back to you (above are Luke’s answers to the community questions asked in January, 2019).

Beamdog.com Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Changes

We've made a few changes to Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on Beamdog.com to help with smaller download sizes and to allow for individually purchasable DLCs. 

Multi-Language Pack
Language packs for French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish are available as free add-ons. You can install video and voice for your non-English language of choice by downloading the "Language Extras" from the dropdown menu.


Digital Deluxe Bundle Changes
The Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Digital Deluxe edition on Beamdog.com has been changed - the bundle has been spit up into the base game and separate DLC packs. 

Everything you bought is still yours! NWN:EE and all the DLC of the Digital Deluxe edition has been added to your account. If you’re missing any DLC, included in the Digital Deluxe edition, let our customer service team know via support@beamdog.com and we’ll get that fixed.


The old Digital Deluxe edition will no longer be updated. To continue getting the latest NWN:EE updates, please switch over to the base version of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition (Retail) under the Beamdog Client dropdown menu and download the individual DLC packs. 

If you would like to avoid re-downloading Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition data, choose Options -> Open game location, and rename the numbered folder 00839 to 00785. NWN:EE DLC in folders 846~851 can be copied into 00785. If you experience any issues, try clicking the Verify button on the Beamdog Client. Contact Support@Beamdog.com if problems continue.

December 14, 2018 Livestream Recap

“I’ve been playing D&D since I was about 8 years old - it taught me to be creative, to be collaborative, and fostered a love for storytelling!” ~ Luke

During the last Beamdog stream of 2018 Beamdog CEO Trent Oster and Producer Luke Rideout shared the latest news on Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, NWN:EE on Google Play, and Infinity Engine games. They also announced a contest to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of Baldur’s Gate! Find out more here!

Missed the stream? It's on YouTube and Twitch! Here's a quick summary of the highlights:

• Get Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition Official Soundtrack at 75% off on Beamdog.com this weekend!
• Save on all our games and DLC as a part of the Winter Sale on GOG. Get Infinity Engine games and DLC at up to 75% off, and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and its DLC at up to 33% off until January 3, 2019!
• Get your best start to 2019 with a new job at Beamdog! We want more web developers, programmers, lead programmers, and technical artists!

Trent remembers Baldur’s Gate was shipping 20 years ago!

• December 21, 2018 marks the 20-year anniversary of Baldur’s Gate! To celebrate we’re holding a contest: Share a favorite Baldur’s Gate memory! Learn how you can become an owner of a Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear Collector’s Edition signed by the Beamdog team, or one of the other 56 awesome prizes here!

“D&D definitely influenced everything we’ve done!” ~ Trent

• We rolled out a change to the Beamdog Client this week. In order to install Video and Voice for your language of choice for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, you now can download “Language Extras” for each language from the Beamdog Client dropdown menu. Language packs for French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish are available as free add-ons to keep the core game download size small.
• The next Development Branch build for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is planned to be be released next week. The next stable patch for NWN:EE will come out early next year, with new main menu art, Steam achievements, bug fixes and features, including True Type Font support, keyholing, and fine UI scaling.
• The 17 bone limit has been a long-standing limitation of Neverwinter Nights. We’re working on expanding the bone limit, and that will be included with the 64-bit update for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.
• We have a lot of things in the queue for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. New emotes/combat animations is a feature we’d like to look at eventually.
• We don’t have detailed official “recommended” specs for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, but the hardware requirements for NWN:EE are not very demanding. Minimum spec is currently an Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of RAM with any DirectX 9, OpenGL 3.0 compatible video card. Any PC built to run Windows 10 that isn’t running an integrated GPU, and many that are, should be able to raise NWN:EE settings to the Max. It all may change a bit once the new renderer for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is done, though.

Thanks, everyone, for your tremendous support in 2018! On December 21, 2018, we’ll share a blog with a bunch of our favorite entries to the “Share a favorite Baldur’s Gate memory” contest! Good luck, everyone!

November 23 Livestream Recap

Trent calls the current NWN:EE renderer rewrite “a reimagining of the renderer”.

Today Beamdog CEO Trent Oster and Producer Luke Rideout shared the latest Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and studio news, talked about the NWN:EE Android Beta, and chatted with Grumpycat, a DM on the popular NWN:EE persistent world Arelith, about her experiences as a longtime Neverwinter Nights player and DM.

Missed the stream? It's on YouTube and Twitch! Here's a quick summary of the highlights:

• It’s Black Friday, and all our titles and DLC are on sale on Beamdog.com and Steam! Enjoy these fantastic deals: 66% off Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and up to 75% off NWN:EE DLC! All the Infinity Engine titles and DLC are at 50% off!
• Vote for us in the 2018 Steam Awards! We’d love to see nominations for Labor of Love and Best Developer!
• The Black Friday sale is live on GOG as well! Get our Enhanced Edition titles and DLC at up to 75% off!
• Want to be the first to learn about our sales, news, and more? Sign up for our newsletter!
• Embark on your new adventure! We're hiring, and looking for a Web Developer, Programmer, Lead Programmer, Technical Artist, and Network System Admin!

“The Beamdog forum is my direct communication channel!” ~ Trent

• The Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Android Beta was updated this week to allow cross play between desktop and mobile. Got the beta? Jump into a persistent world and let us know what your experience is like in our survey and the Beamdog forums!
• The sooner we get responses to the survey, the sooner we can get to your feature requests. Please try to get the survey filled in before we close the Beta. We might keep the survey open for a short period after launch, but not long.
• Patch 1.78 for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition was released this week in the Beamdog Client, Steam, and GOG. This patch contains client & server changes and new features like NWSync, allowing auto-downloading for NWN:EE server content data.

"I make the worlds players play in more alive!" ~ DM Grumpycat

• The 2.6 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is still awhile away. According to Trent, we’re waiting on a process issue.
• 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.
• On the topic of server monetization for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition servers, we adhere to the WotC Fan Content policy, which means that you can create and distribute content as long as it’s free. You cannot require payments, subscriptions, or otherwise gate your content. Read the terms of the WotC Fan Content policy here.
• Currently we don’t have a way to automatically synchronize your NWN:EE saves between platforms, as they don’t share a cloud service.
• We have started to look at what needs to be done to bring keyholing (currently available in the Android Beta of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition) to the PC version. We don’t want to completely remove tile fade as we’d like both systems to co-exist.
• We have plans to bring back the game type filter in the server browser for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.
• DM GrumpyCat has been DMing for about four years on the popular persistent world Arelith and playing Neverwinter Nights for around eleven years. At first, she was afraid of becoming a DM, but picked up very fast. There are differences in being a tabletop DM and online: instead of 4-6 people, on a persistent world there can be around 200 players, and a DM has to keep in mind interests and desires of all of them.
• According to DM GrumpyCat, Neverwinter Nights is unique. On a persistent world she can start a story, disappear for some time, and then find all the spin off stories created by player collaboration.
• If you’re a DM, let us know on the forums about your wishes and feature requests for the DM interface in Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.

Excited for what’s next? Come and join the next livestream next Friday!

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition 1.78

Today, we are shipping Development Build 8186 to the stable branch of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition as 1.78!

This is the very same build that was recently updated on the development branch and contains no changes since then.

The previous build (8181) is available as a Steam branch, so you can switch back if your favorite persistent world needs more time to update. To do so, select 'oldstable' under the beta dropdown list in the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Steam properties. 

New Feature: NWSync

This update contains a major new feature called NWSync, which will allow players to easily download required content data as they join servers, without having to manually manage HAK and TLK files. In this first iteration, this will mostly benefit persistent worlds, as it requires special setup on the server owner's part.

For details on this feature, please see the source repository that contains all the needed tooling and links to the most up-to-date documentation, here.

Client Changes

Features:

• We added a new console variable that enables a over-time FPS display. Type "fpstrace 1" into the game console to enable.
• You can type `Gamma x` in the console, where x is a floating point value larger than 0. The default is 2.2. This value is persisted to nwn.ini (under a new configuration key). Gamma only affects the rendered ingame scenery, not menus or UI, as it is applied through a FBO shader, not GL/system-wide gamma correction. 
• The game now supports normal DDS textures without having to mangle the header.
• The game now supports KTX texture containers.
• The game now writes out all Aliases to nwn.ini even if the file already existed.
• We bumped the default maximum texture memory to 256MB. Previous settings of 64MB are rewritten to this value. The new minimum is 96MB. The bigger-by-default texture memory should improve stability in some situations.

Fixes:

• We fixed lighting uniforms not assigning properly on some GPU drivers. This should address some flickering and maybe improve stability.
• Premium Modules don't show in "Other Modules" anymore.
• Yet another crash for creature appearances with PERSPACE=0 has been addressed.
• The multiplayer server browser now shows a progress window when downloading the server list. It also switched over to libcurl, which should prove to be much more reliable than the previous solution.
• The chat window will not capture mouse clicks anymore, only scroll events. This means you can once again click through it to action the game world.

Server Changes

Fixes:

• Greater Sanctuary interacting incorrectly with True Seeing has been fixed.
• A rare server hang when a relayed player suddenly regains direct connectivity has been fixed.
• A bug in RetrieveCampaignObject has been fixed that resulted in a double free issue, crashing the game. This was another 1.69 issue that was unearthed by us switching to VS2017 for the Windows build.

November 16 Livestream Recap

“We want to drop the curator hat. I want to make new fun.” ~ Trent

During today’s livestream Beamdog CEO Trent Oster and Producer Luke Rideout shared the latest news on the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, NWN:EE Android Beta, and Infinity Engine Enhanced Editions. They discussed the latest changes on the Roadmap Trello for NWN:EE and provided an update on the upcoming 2.6 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition.

Missed the stream? It's on YouTube and Twitch! Here's a quick summary of the highlights:

• Spend this weekend in Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition! NWN:EE and all its DLC are 50% off on Beamdog.com!
• Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is also 50% off on Steam! Dive into robust Dungeons & Dragons multiplayer on dozens of persistent worlds!
• The Android Beta of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition launched this week. Thanks to everyone taking part in the Beta. The feedback you provide on Google Play, the Beamdog forums, and our new tracker on Jira Service Desk is incredibly useful.
• We’ve seen over 1000 Beta players so far! Purchasing Beta access includes the release version of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, so if you have a phone or a tablet, go try the Beta out!
• Make sure to sign up for our newsletter to be first to know about Beamdog news, patches, beta updates, contests, and more!
• We’re still hiring! If you’re a Web Developer, Programmer, Quality Assurance Tester, Technical Artist, or Network System Admin apply!

“With new content, there’s so much potential!” ~ Trent

• The 2.6 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is moving forward according to plan.
• 2.6 will be released along with the Dice, Camera, Action! Voice and Portrait Pack. We’re just finishing up the DCA! portraits, and the community won portraits are on the to-do list. It takes quite a while to make a good quality portrait, and we want to respect the quality of the original games.
• The 3.1.4 patch for Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition which would bring the Czech localization of PST:EE to GOG, Beamdog, Google Play, the App Store, and the Mac App Store is not ready yet, but it’s coming. According to Luke, it’s all about the manpower right now, as our QA resources are mostly on the Android Beta of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.

“For NWN:EE, the order of operations is the following: ship the Android version, then 64bit, and then the iOS version!” ~ Luke

• We shipped two Development Builds for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition this week. Check out the patch notes here and here.
• If all goes well, Development Build 8186 will become a new stable build for NWN:EE next week.
• We also plan to roll out an update to the Android Beta of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition next week. The PC version of NWN:EE will be cross-play compatible with Android very soon.
• We’re looking into the viability of installing Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition for Android on an external SD card.
• Infinite Dungeons, Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, Pirates of the Sword Coast, and Darkness over Daggerford Premium modules for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition will be purchasable on Android through the in-game store. If you have them on your PC version, you will be able to connect your Android device to your PC and transfer the modules to your mobile. You will be able to move any mods and custom content, not only the Premium modules, because the file system on Android is structured the same way as on PC.
• Regarding changing old content in Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, we don’t want to go back for a number of reasons. Neverwinter Nights scripts are very fragile. If you tweak something in the wrong way, it can break a lot of things in the game. According to Trent, ultimately Beamdog wants to focus on the future and step away from our current role as curators.
• There are a lot of exciting features planned for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Cameron continues to work on a rendering system rewrite. Some additional work may need to be done on updated character models once the renderer is completed as we don’t want to break compatibility with existing work.
• 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.
• We moved a few new cards to the Roadmap Trello board this week. Features such as allowing custom classes and spellbooks, or introducing the spell buff effect timer, are now on the Roadmap. Check out all the changes here!
• Achievements for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition are coming soon. They will first be released on mobile with the live full version of NWN:EE for Android. Steam achievements will follow shortly. There are 48 achievements overall, and the achievements will be the same across Android and Steam.

Excited for what’s next? Come and join the next livestream next Friday!

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition NWSync Early Look + Beamdog.com DLCs

Exciting news for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition fans waiting for NWSync!

We merged in experimental support for NWSync in the recently released Development Build 8182. The first implementation of this allows transparent multiplayer server content downloads, and requires special setup by the server admin to make functional.

The preliminary manual, including instructions and system details, can be read here.

Note that if you are from The Future, then this URL might have changed or disappeared. Please check the official documentation in lang/en/docs instead.

Again, this is experimental, and we are shipping this to the development branch early so persistent world admins and interested parties can test it. This is a very complex technical feature and we fully expect that we will have to ship more development patches to address found issues. Please let us know any feedback you have regarding this feature in the Beamdog forums!

Speaking of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, on Beamdog.com we’ve broken out the Digital Deluxe package into individual DLCs! Now owners of NWN:EE can purchase Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, Infinite Dungeons, and the rest as they like. You can still get a deal by buying everything in a single bundle.

Next week, we’ll be removing the current NWN:EE Digital Deluxe bundle from sale. All Beamdog.com NWN:EE Digital Deluxe owners have had the base game and individual DLCs added to their accounts.

If we’ve missed your account, please let our customer support team know via support@beamdog.com and we’ll make sure a correction is made.