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How the Game Looks

Wish I could tell ya! I really do! There's the screenshots but they're kind of old already, and the engine is being revamped at the moment - taken apart bit by bit, and replacing all the old with the new. BioWare will not be behind the technology curve when this baby ships (no set release date, though rumors are pegging it late 2000… *sigh*.) What do they have in store for us? Well… here's a brief low-down:

• 32 bit graphics, which you can scale down to 16 bit (*cough*Voodoo3*cough.)
• Name a standard resolution, and the game will run in it. 1600x1200? Sure. Would you like that with or without:
• Standard 512x512 textures… scaleable down to a smaller set, more manageable for (*hack, cough*Voodoo3*cough, hack*)
• Very highly detailed models. I mean, I was looking at a set of armor being made for a male human … and it was pretty astounding how many polygons they were putting on there. Overall, BioWare is conservatively aiming for 10,000 polygons per frame. This is the same that Quake 3 Arena has set as its target.
• Trying to squeeze in about 32MB of textures for higher detail levels, to take advantage of the higher end cards now, and lower end/mid-range cards that will be available when the game ships. With lower detail, you can go far less than 16MB, which will work perfectly on … you guessed it, Voodoo3 cards. :( I'm not knocking you V3 owners out there… I own one myself.
• Wow. GeForce 256 gets announced 2 days ago (as of this writing), and BioWare has hardware Transform and Lighting (the *big* thing in the GF256)? Actually, the OpenGL API has supported it for a very long time, so it isn't such a big hassle to include it since the Omen engine is OpenGL first and only.
• Getting into the OpenGL discussion, I asked Trent if perhaps the much-ballyhooed 3dfx miniGL would work with NWN. Unfortunately, no. The miniGL basically has everything that Quake II needs and nothing but. Until the TNT had stable OpenGL drivers, BioWare was actually doing development on 3Dlabs' Permedia 2, since it was the only card with a good ICD.
• Full AMD 3DNow! support and Intel SSE optimizations will be included.
• 64 players per server, maximum. People can setup their own servers, and at the moment no official BioWare or Interplay servers are planned.

How much else info could I glean from Trent? Well, the baseline system targetted at the moment is a Pentium II/266, 32MB of RAM and a Voodoo2 or TNT card. Naturally, with this setup you're not going to get all the bells and whistles, but graphics should be pretty impressive nonetheless.

The game will feature a singleplayer mode, though Trent utterly shocked me when he said that this will actually be more punishing on your computer than multiplayer or even running a server. Of course, in hindsight, given everything we talked about (lots of boring engine details), it makes sense… pretty weird though eh? For the more commonly available information, check out http://www.neverwinter.net