Arelith

Hello!

If I am not mistaken, Cavalry Sword has new textures. Before, they were similar to all other blades, and they even had some runes showing when you added an essence to them. The new look is a bit strange. Both blade and handle look less detailed, flimsier, and some models even have stains (plus the runes are gone).

Old:

New:

As you can tell, the old model looked much more clean, shiny, and real. Swords are meant to be clean, shiny, sharp, well mantained. The new texture looks dull, dirty, and it gives you the feeling that the blade will break at any given point. Plus, the handle colors might be lighter/not as saturated now which contributes to this issue of the weapon being a lot less interesting visually. (also the runes showing up when you had a VFX were badass)

I loved the runes... if they're gone, so is all of my desire to ever use one of these weapons again.

We keep pushing artistic overhauls of heads, weapons, and fixtures that feels like it could just have both old and new options retained and let players make a choice that suits them best. Instead, every time, we trash the old thing. I always ask why but never seem to get an answer -- is this some kind of limitation?

It seems like a downgrade, losing the old textures as well as the cool magic runes. Some characters would also maintain their weapon, so it's weird to force in the unpolished grunge knight vibes imo.

I understand removing the old options in the case of a clear, universally lauded upgrade that fixes something that was without detail, broken, or widely despised for its dumb appearance. But people liked how these looked before -- what inspired the sudden change?

So the vfx for the weapons still exist (when I casted blades of fire on my buddy's sword, it glowed up with the fire and rune vfx), but we're not able to enjoy the effort put in by the artist as much anymore because essences don't seem to apply vfx to weapons anymore like they used to. I do agree that the textures are overall a downgrade as well.

My impression of the cavalry sword before the update was that it was using original nwn textures for the weapon, or modified versions of them.

Aside of the cavalry sword, which looked excellent recently, and had almost obsidian black steel quality without looking flat, I noticed more today as well. Something has happened to textures over all. A few days ago, quarterstaff model was shiny sleek black and looking fine. Now...

There's been a downgrade in quality of textures within a week. Whatever is happening, is not improving how the game looks. This may sound like a very negative take, but nothing was broken with how weapon textures looked before, hence I see no reason why so drastic overhauls happened.

+1 save cav sword

We have been experimenting with the default textures recently and it somehow never got announced. Still fine tuning the end result so please bear with us.

The latest iteration is the original textures we had but scaled up to a better resolution. That is why the staff changed so drastically, the details suddenly became apparent even though it was like that the whole time. Not too sure what is going on with the swords though.

DM Starfish wrote: Tue Jun 04, 2024 11:08 pm

We have been experimenting with the default textures recently and it somehow never got announced. Still fine tuning the end result so please bear with us.

What keeps getting mentioned is that players would rather keep the old stuff. If things are being added then that’s fantastic, but please also keep the old version. Just add new versions without removing things.

DM Starfish wrote: Tue Jun 04, 2024 11:08 pm

We have been experimenting with the default textures recently and it somehow never got announced. Still fine tuning the end result so please bear with us.

The latest iteration is the original textures we had but scaled up to a better resolution. That is why the staff changed so drastically, the details suddenly became apparent even though it was like that the whole time. Not too sure what is going on with the swords though.

Can it get announced, for those that don't read this feedback thread?

I genuinely feel that the default textures work just fine for adhering to neverwinter nights' artistic fidelity. They're a good resolution which are not intensive for hardware, and they effectively represent metals without any extra bullshit.

The cavalry weapons are an awesome example of adherance to neverwinter night's aesthetics while making use of the game's base metal textures. They don't look too out of place from the other weapons within the base game if you put them side by side from one another. The effective use of the base textures also reinforced this. The shaders that come with enhanced edition complement these textures well, too.

This may be a longwinded way of me saying that I really don't think that the base metal textures need tinkering. They work fine and I think they look awesome especially if the models are cool.

This is what I expected from those silent changes from myself. Feedback from players would allow me to know what players want and what they don't.
More discussions will be brought to developers to determine what is best for the server...

Why slip it in silently? When announcements are made it alerts more people to look at whatever the change was. This will get you actual feedback instead of things that happen in response to seeing weird changes that don't seem to have been reviewed/tested? For all we know this could have been a bug or some unintended consequence of other changes.

Replacing old stuff silently is bad. Adding new stuff is appreciated by the players!

This is what I expected from those silent changes from myself. Feedback from players would allow me to know what players want and what they don't.
More discussions will be brought to developers to determine what is best for the server...

To be blunt, this sounds more like a justification after the fact after people pointed out silent changes.

As mentioned before, I think it's better to announce changes (even if they're 'minor') in order to let people know there was even a change so they can look out for them and provide feedback.

With this, it looks like people were confused about what happened to their textures - which could have stemmed from any number of things.

And as long as we're giving feedback, the old textures were better.

I'm personally not a fan of "let the players figure out whether this is a bug or intended behavior." IMO it's not helpful.

Not a fan of the new textures. Metals and hilts for short and longswords are a downgrade IMO. Bring back the classic textures.

I examined the game's original TGA files and they do not appeared to be upscaled at all. The textures used with the weapons appear to be brand new, the wood gain that appears on the quarterstaff in the prior screenshots looks nothing like the wood that appears in the default w_metal_tex file that the game uses to render weapons.

I think that changes made to ANYTHING on this server should always be announced no matter what they are, and the implication that devs are sneaking in changes without it being announced for feedback makes me lose a small level of faith in what is going on behind the scenes on the art team. Why are changes failing to go unannounced? Kroatius' comment as to these textures makes it sound like this was an intentional decision. What is the thought process going on as to deciding these changes? This change was unannounced for about two or three weeks (maybe longer) until this thread started when people noticed that their textures looked wrong.

I don't mean to sound inflammatory but I think it's healthy to critique this change in behaviour in order to hold the people in charge of these changes accountable so there can be more clarity about what is being added to the server we play on in the future.

Five Of Swords wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2024 2:21 am

This is what I expected from those silent changes from myself. Feedback from players would allow me to know what players want and what they don't.
More discussions will be brought to developers to determine what is best for the server...

To be blunt, this sounds more like a justification after the fact after people pointed out silent changes.

Agree and disagree.
You can say whatever. I have made many silent changes, there are things players should know and should not. But this was my wrong from the start. Things that impact players should be announced.

Once again like I said, this is a try.

Dreams wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2024 1:20 am

Why slip it in silently? When announcements are made it alerts more people to look at whatever the change was. This will get you actual feedback instead of things that happen in response to seeing weird changes that don't seem to have been reviewed/tested? For all we know this could have been a bug or some unintended consequence of other changes.

Replacing old stuff silently is bad. Adding new stuff is appreciated by the players!

I was testing if I could make more variants by using custom textures. The new w_metal_tex is great because it is upscaled and easily to be edit to make more variants like blue, dark red, purple, and green. I forgot the alpha channel and it made the texture not shiny.

We'll be reverting back to the original in a day or so.