NWN was an outstanding game on several levels when it shipped. The multiplayer was especially well received, and there are PW active to this day. NWN 2 flopped (mostly because the game was an absolute resource hog with poor graphics and more bugs than pond in Georgia).

I think the largest part of its success was the ability to host persistent worlds with 40 - 60 players and (eventually) database and .dll support for custom tools.

Is D:OS going to be similar to this? I understand it will be multiplayer, but most games now only allow 4 - 8 players and don't allow separate, server-side character files (opting instead for embedding them in the save file).

I think the world is waiting for another open and highly editable RPG to ship.

EDIT: After spending more time looking at the screen shots, it looks like you're using a version of the Electron engine. Is this true? Or are there just similar features that make it appear that way?

The co-op multiplayer mode in D:OS supports up to 4 players; Steamworks is used for online multiplayer, but not required for local games.

Larian has not mentioned any details yet about the game engine for D:OS and DC.


Welcome to the forum.

Really?

I could swear I heard somewhere that they created a new game engine just for D:OS. Not too sure about DC though.

Then again, I could be completely wrong.

Yes, I recall reading that not too long ago, as well, but didn't mention it, since I couldn't find it again (didn't look that hard, though).

DC was originally build on an updated version of the modified Gamebryo engine used for DKS, and then moved over to the same engine used for D:OS.

Haven't heard/read about Gamebryo before (which reveals how out of touch I am with these things these days). Thanks for the info, another game engine added to my watchlist beside Unity.

Gambryo is used for the Elder Scroll series.



Interesting. It looks a lot like the electron engine without 20 levels of shading. The toolset looks almost exactly the same (even the fire place in it!).

Huh?

This is a rough comparison. I might reinstall NWN 2 to show a better example of the two toolsets:

NWN 2


D:OS

Yeah, but this part kind of confused me:


I thought NWN uses Aurora engine?

Aurora = NWN 1
Electron = NWN 2

BTW in my case, the right hand column on the D:OS was what reminded me of the electron toolset.

No, it's not the electron engine so any similarity is probably some of the same things need to be done in both engines. DOS and DC for that matter are running in our own new engine (so not Gamebryo either)

As far as multiplayer is concerned, right now it's 4 players, but the server architecture is such that that can be extended. We'l see how the editor gets picked up by players and if there's demand for more players.

All the best for the success of the editor. Of course, the community has to be more tolerant and lenient.

I was actually afraid at one point with everyone here being critical and the debates and so forth. I hope that when the mods and custom campaigns come out, everyone will be more relaxed and tolerant.

People here will encounter mods that are outstanding, or mods that are a terrible waste of time. Of course the community has to grow and take into account that people who made terrible campaigns/mods have the potential to improve.

just my eh... 2 cents

Is this your own, original engine or rather modification of existing (like you did with gamebryo)

I read in an article: "(Swen Vincke) We began developping our own engine in 2010, we are limitting the additional middleware tot the absolute minimum, and we replaced Nvidia PhysX by Bullet."
So yes, it should be completely new. I wonder what it's called: 'Dragon Engine', 'Divine Engine', 'GameFoetus', 'E-engine', ...?

We had a thread on our internal forum about that. Unfortunately we didn't reach consensus. So for now it's just 'the engine'. You can always suggest a name

How about "Maxos Engine" or "Maxos Power Engine"?

Or what about
"Jetpack Egine"

Is the egine fast ?
Then it's worth this name, right ? ;-)

Side note :
As fast as a Dragon can fly
With a Jetpack on his back
So fast ....
... is Bradley Wiggings in
"Tour de France 2012"
Born in Belgium,
In the city of the Larians,
Gent !

Conclusion :
The 'Wiggo' egine

This child definitely needs a name.

bad, horrible, despicable, pathetic, jokes /on

"The ENGINEer"

bad, horrible, despicable, pathetic, jokes /off

You know, the two screenshots made me realize that the issue of interiors in NWN could have been so easily solved by static mesh walls and a floor board texture. Any time you entered a building in both games, it required an area transition, which was very wasteful (especially in NWN 2, where you could suffer transition crashes as the buffer didn't release fast enough).

Sorry, just some musing on a ~10 year old question that should have been so easy to answer.

Anyway, It's good that you're making your own engine. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the toolset can do, especially code wise. Do you have a custom scripting language, or are you using a full programming language like C#, C++ etc? Hopefully we get more than just a trigger assortment to work with