How The Game Is Played

Viewing Neverwinter Nights creatures in Netbeans 6

The past week I've been back to fairly heavy work on the Project Darkstar based MMO engine that I will be talking about at JavaOne and featuring in my upcoming book on writing Massively Mutliplayer games using Project Darkstar.

One of the early decisions I made was to use the NeverwinterNights data set because its is good quality, well thought out ,freely available and has some wonderful tools. However I also need to develop new tools for this projects. A second decision I made was to do all of my new data tools in Netbeans.

There was a not insubstantial learning curve to writing Netbeans plugins, but now that I'm starting to see the other side of that this decision is starting to pay off. I have a plugin now that lets me freely browse through the NWN meta-file structure and view files. The first file viewer/editor I wrote was for 2DA files. These are simple spread-sheet like files that NWN uses for tabular data.



The next one, that I just finished, was harder but is very rewarding. Using JMonkeyEngine (www.jmonkeyengine.com) it displays actual NWN 3D models right inside of Netbeans!

Posted at 04:22PM Apr 04, 2008 by gameguy in Java  |