Customer Reviews

Versus Books Official Neverwinter Nights World Builder's Perfect Guide

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

After creating a couple of modules and reading the book twice, my appraisal of this Versus World Guide book is that it leaves a lot to be desired.

Chapter 1 is great -- the introduction to the Toolset (and the sample module you create during that introduction) gives you a great overview, explains most of the gotchas, has good general advice, is clear and concise and well-illustrated.

Chapter 2 is fine as a general set of advice about how to plan a module.

Chapter 3 and the rest of the chapters are not nearly as good. They go through the rest of the toolset in a haphazard manner, with too many script examples that aren't explained well at all, and the book doesn't have any coherent overall plan of how to explain how things work. Individual sections, like on how the Journal works, are fine. But typically the book brushes over each option without enough detail to be useful.

The Monster appendix is fine.

The C Language introduction appendix is atrocious. I know scripting, and I've been programming since 1980, but I couldn't follow at all the structure of what they were trying to show. They were far too stuck on using unexplained NWN module concepts for their examples rather than showing you the nuts and bolts of the language and how a While loop or an If statement works (I was just looking for how NWN-C was different than normal C, and it wasn't helpful for that purpose at all). If I didn't already understand variables and control structures, this book would not have helped at all.

But by far its biggest crime is that it lacks an index. As an introduction it's tolerable. For a reference, it's useless.

Neverwinter Nights has a lot of promise as a "next generation" of online RPGs because it enables people to build their own worlds and allow others to play in them. With great promise comes great heartaches, one of them being the trade-off between making this world building exercise easy or powerful. BioWare decided on going the harder route by exposing a massive amount of tools to the world builder. Unfortunately, this means that potential world builders face a learning curve on the order of learning how to program C. In fact, if there's one thing you learn at a quick glance through this book, it's that if programming computers sends you into a fit, you shouldn't be thinking of this at all.

For someone who isn't scared of learning to program but hasn't yet, this book fails to make that easy for it doesn't talk about basic structures. The authors assume a fair amount of knowledge (what declaring variables means, if-then statements, case statements). For world builders who are experienced programmers, this book is annoying because it is written as a tutorial rather than a reference manual (the reference pages in the back are simply a list of monsters, not a list of the possible programming commands and where they apply). Which means the book is really for the intermediate programmer--the one who has played with coding, but who doesn't live and breath it. For that person, this book will assist them through several of the early hurdles, as this book is a good "tutorial" for the world creation process.

My guess is that programming reference book will be available someday. I sure hope so.

This book is very poorly written. I am not exactly who their target audience is but I do not think it will help a novice or experience builder. There is much better resources available on the NWN site from Bioware as well at the NWN Vault on the internet for free. There are lots of tutorials that you can download to read or activate and view a module being built right over the internet.

For those of you with little time, here's the short version: Do Not Buy.

The content is badly-organised, the layout is amateurish, and all the information one might *really* want (function references etc) is just not present.

The book walks you through the creation of a module, but it is hardly more elaborate than the built-in Tutorial you get in the Toolkit.

My advice is, do Bioware's tutorial to get the basics of the Toolkit, and then read the many fine controbutions on the official Neverwinter Nights web site - there are also plenty of links there to sites that contain well-written, advanced tutorials and reference materials, and which are all FREE.

Then, take your [money]you just saved and order in some pizza, because you won't be going out again in a hurry once you get into the Toolkit properly. ;)

This book was terribly written and poorly organized. It's difficult to follow, the tips come in the wrong order, and the examples often don't work. In addition, the book doesn't go into enough detail explaining terms and how and why things work. If you're not already a programmer, the book won't help you to learn anything about module creation. As a tool for getting started creating modules (which it purports to be), it's an utter failure. The authors often refer to their own module that they created, which you can allegedly download and use as an example, but as of December 2002, it still was unavailable. The section on monsters at the end is pointless filler that belonged in the adventure book if anywhere (even the tips the books gives are geared toward fighting the monsters, not using them in your adventures)...This book was a terrible waste of money...

If your looking for a guide to building new modules for Neverwinter Nights this book is definately not for you. The book is so disjointed and unorganized that it lacks any real cohesive instructional value whatsoever. The beginning module builder would be much better off using BioWares excellent online tutorials both for building and scripting. The only value that this book has for the aspiring builder is the small Monster reference section but even these materials are available in the toolset.

When I read about Bioware's (Baldur's Gate) new game, Neverwinter Nights, I couldn't help but be a little skeptical. I thought the BG series was only passable, and much preferred the old-skool style of Icewind Dale. I was going to buy Icewind 2, but when it was delayed another month, I needed some kind of RPG to take up my free time. Enter NWN. I discovered that, not only was NWN supposed to be a decent game, it came with a feature I'd been hoping for ever since playing around with the Bard's Tale Construction Set so many years ago (I hope that doesn't date me too much).

NWN has an extremely powerful editing tool built in, basically allowing the intrepid person with enough time and creative energy to create a game of infinite length using the NWN engine. This is an unprecedented achievement for gamers. Sure, mods like Counter-Strike for Half-Life made money and gathered hundreds of thousands of players, but to create those levels and make those modifications you had to be a pretty mean programmer, an elite 3-D designer, or both.

With NWN, you need none of that. You only need this guide, and the Aurora toolset.

On my own, I was able to make a room where I could walk around and put a few monsters to fight, in a weekend. With this book, I had four rooms, conversations, a boss, and lots of cool effects, in about an hour. I know little about C programming save the theory (I know PASCAL, but again, that's gonna date me), and most of the game's groovy modifications run through C scripts, but with this guidebook in hand those scripts are no longer a problem. There are examples for literally hundreds of different things to do, and from there it's a simple matter to extrapolate and change where necessary to fit your design.

Since Bioware has released little information regarding Aurora and their messageboards are a crowded, muddled mess, this book is essential for people who are pretty clueless about implementing scripts and such. It's laid out logically, so you can learn important concepts in order, and has enough illustrations to show the most hopeless illiterate how to make a great module. The only complaint, and it's a minor one, is that the writing can be a little spazzy at times, making it difficult to follow. But it happens rarely enough that it isn't a concern.

If you want to design modules for NWN, you NEED a copy of this book.

Final Grade: A

As I understand it this book was built before the toolset for NWN was even completed. It is dated and far from helpful. My advice is to go to nwvault, there are plenty of free scripting and worldbuilding tutorials put out by the community that are far better than this paperweight.

This book is poorly organized, filled with typographical and programing errors, but they have world builders over a barrel here. This is the only reference guide and it does at least provide *some* insight into how to use the powerful scripting tools provided in the toolset.
The scripting basics provided in this book at least help you to ask the right questions when you visit the various NWN communities so you can learn more.
Can I recommend the book! No.
Am I glad I bought the book? A reluctant yes.
Don't expect it to answer all your questions... or most of your questions... or even a decent percentage of your questions. But if it helps ou ask the right questions, it's a start.
Good luck!

This book is simply not worth buying.

First of all, outside of the scripting engine, the Neverwinter Nights Toolset is very easy to use. Play with it for a few hours, and you'll start to get the hang of it. A few days of work, and you'll understand it quite well.

As for learning the scripting language, there are at least a half-dozen books out there that explain C programming in a better format. This book has no index, the so-called "Table of Contents" has exactly seven entries in it, sometimes covering 50-75 different topics. Unless you relish the idea of reading through the entire book every time you need to find a specific section, avoid this book like the plague it is.