Getting the most out of Neverwinter Nights

[Algernon's Ghost]

I hope to post a number of tips that will help you use the features of the NWN player client to the fullest. Read on, you may already know some of this, but may learn something too.

[Algernon's Ghost]

You can set the client to write all of your chat (everything you speak and can hear in any channel) to a text file, which you can move to an archive after you exit the NWN client.

This is especially useful if you want to write a tale to post in the forum, or just want to remember what happened way back when. I have an archive of chat logs going back through 2003.

Here's how to enable chat logging:

• 1. Open your NWN installation folder.
  2. Find the file named "nwplayer.ini"
  3. Open this in a basic text editor such as Notepad.
  4. Below the heading labelled [Game options] find an entry named: ClientChatLogging.
  5. Set it to read: ClientChatLogging=1
  Note: If you don't find this entry, you can just add it under [Game options].
  6. Save your change and start up your game.
  7. Now you're logging chat. Look in your game installation folder again, and find the sub-folder named "logs". You'll see a text file named "nwclientLog1"; this is your log for the current game session.
  8. After you exit the game, rename your log file and move it to your archive if you wish.

Every time you start the client, the game will overwrite your log file unless you've renamed or moved it (or both), and it will be lost. I like to rename my logs with the date as yyyy-mm-dd, and include a short description so they show in chronological order and I can see something basic about them at a glance.

[Algernon's Ghost]

NWN allows you to set the amount of memory allocated to the NWN engine. A higher setting allows the game to keep more data in cache.

How to do it:

• 1. Open your Neverwinter/NWN directory (folder).
  2. Find the file named: nwnplayer.ini
  3. Open this in a basic text editor such as Notepad.
  4. Below the heading labelled [Game options] find an entry named: Max Memory Usage
  5. If you don't see it, you can add it anywhere under the [Game Options] section.
  5. Set it to read: Max Memory Usage=64
  6. Save your change and start up your game.

A quote from Brian Chung (of BioWare) where he's talking about client lag associated with horses helps to explain what this is all about:

"It's client side loading of 13+mb of horse animations. Since the NWN client by default only caches like 16mb in resources, so whenever a horse appears, it causes a momentary stutter as the client has to clear out the resource cache, then load the animation data off the HD. The standard humanoid animations cause no hiccup because you're almost always guaranteed to have it in memory being a PC so it's always loaded.

You can up the amount by changing the nwnplayer.ini setting under [Game Options] and adding "Max Memory Usage=32". Up to a max of 64mb, beyond that there wasn't much performance benefit according to some tests we did internally. So there might be a small initial pause on the first horse load, but afterwards it might not be as bad even if you transition areas."