NWN2 - Designer Diary #5 @ Gamespot

Gamespot has another Designer Diary from Tony Evans, senior designer with Obsidian Entertainment. In this article, he gives his top ten list of features included in the new Electron Toolset:

2. Conversation Editor - There are enough cool things in the conversation editor that it could easily fill a developer diary of its own, so I will briefly describe a few or the more revolutionary things:

You can specify parameters on action and condition scripts. This means that many users can avoid having to write custom scripts of their own and can instead take advantage of the hundreds of multipurpose global scripts provided by Obsidian.

Instead of laboriously copying and pasting individual links in a conversation, you can use the "link to main question node" feature, which creates a set of several links that can be copied. The link will automatically update if you add or delete nodes in your conversation.

And if you need your NPCs to cycle through random lines of dialogue, you can use "make bark cycle" and it will automatically fill in the scripts for you.

1. Customizable Layout - If you don't like the way the toolset is laid out by default, you can change it however you like. Almost all of the windows in the toolset are mode-less, which means that you can, for example, have an area (or two or three), conversations, and scripts all open at the same time. Customizing your toolset is as simple as drag and drop. If you prefer a more streamlined appearance, you can easily hide window tabs and bring them back again with a single click.

Accompanying the article is a movie with Obsidian lead environmental artist, Tim Donley, who talks about the work that went into the environments - or you can dowload it from NW Vault who say "Scenes include dungeons, caves, castles and the docked boats which look really impressive."