Discord
Changelog
10-20-2020, 10:09 PM
Firstly: I have opinions that I'm about to state like a lawyer trying to win a case. No intention to sound harsh - Love your work as you know <3
I'm not a fan of this as default. I feel like Hilites are the games way of passing information that would otherwise be readily available in-character, and default-removing them is forcing a player-perception hard mode based on whether a person has a nice big monitor resolution, or a high contrast display, or has good enough eyesight/attention to pixel-details on a rendered image.
My case for a reversion as follows:
1) It helps make clear what is just scenery vs a useable thing. In a dragons treasure trove, a person doesn't need to carefully scan the gold pile to determine which 'bit' of it they can loot from, and nor is it difficult to determine whether a particular column has some runes on it that are worth 'inspecting'. This is 'game-y' information being displayed in a game-y way, because the normal tools to know are missing.
2) It helps me tell at a glance whether any of a potentially vast number of creatures on-screen is friendly or hostile. This might not be exactly 'realistic' but nothing about nwn combat stands up to realism and we shouldn't start here.
3) Any genuinely 'hidden' object should be hidden from the character, not the player. We have access via nwnx to lots of visibility based code that can hide placeables or other interactables from specific players or all players or etc. until an appropriate perception is called for and, while it's clearly a lot more work to implement on those specific basis rather than this blanket approach, I feel like it more appropriately captures the intent of a hidden thing - That it is character based and not player based.
4) Players who seek this level of immersion or a reduced-christmas-tree-effect can enable their own preferences to the default Hilite colours in the game options menu. If overriden by script, the game-options can't do the inverse (override the script-override) to restore it for players that do want it.
5) NWN's been around 18 years now and I've been playing almost that long - I've got long-trained expectations about what a thing "not-glowing" means to me, and it means "this is just for decoration". Turning off the glow won't make me search for things painstakingly by sweeping my eyes/mouse carefully across everything - it just makes me disengage and stop interacting.
That said, I do generally encourage the use of some Hilite to show meaningful information. Maybe important NPCs can be gold (Zulkirs, tharchions, high priestesses), or particularly important placeables get idk purple or something. nwnx gives us access to per-player hilite too, so a player's own familiars/companions could be hilite'd just for them to be yellow or something.
I'm not a fan of this as default. I feel like Hilites are the games way of passing information that would otherwise be readily available in-character, and default-removing them is forcing a player-perception hard mode based on whether a person has a nice big monitor resolution, or a high contrast display, or has good enough eyesight/attention to pixel-details on a rendered image.
My case for a reversion as follows:
1) It helps make clear what is just scenery vs a useable thing. In a dragons treasure trove, a person doesn't need to carefully scan the gold pile to determine which 'bit' of it they can loot from, and nor is it difficult to determine whether a particular column has some runes on it that are worth 'inspecting'. This is 'game-y' information being displayed in a game-y way, because the normal tools to know are missing.
2) It helps me tell at a glance whether any of a potentially vast number of creatures on-screen is friendly or hostile. This might not be exactly 'realistic' but nothing about nwn combat stands up to realism and we shouldn't start here.
3) Any genuinely 'hidden' object should be hidden from the character, not the player. We have access via nwnx to lots of visibility based code that can hide placeables or other interactables from specific players or all players or etc. until an appropriate perception is called for and, while it's clearly a lot more work to implement on those specific basis rather than this blanket approach, I feel like it more appropriately captures the intent of a hidden thing - That it is character based and not player based.
4) Players who seek this level of immersion or a reduced-christmas-tree-effect can enable their own preferences to the default Hilite colours in the game options menu. If overriden by script, the game-options can't do the inverse (override the script-override) to restore it for players that do want it.
5) NWN's been around 18 years now and I've been playing almost that long - I've got long-trained expectations about what a thing "not-glowing" means to me, and it means "this is just for decoration". Turning off the glow won't make me search for things painstakingly by sweeping my eyes/mouse carefully across everything - it just makes me disengage and stop interacting.
That said, I do generally encourage the use of some Hilite to show meaningful information. Maybe important NPCs can be gold (Zulkirs, tharchions, high priestesses), or particularly important placeables get idk purple or something. nwnx gives us access to per-player hilite too, so a player's own familiars/companions could be hilite'd just for them to be yellow or something.