Showing some big continued dedication to Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, Beamdog have put up another huge Beta version with some pretty major additions. Development Build 8193.21 is available to try out on Steam (other platforms when stable), and it can be used along with any servers for multiplayer with the .20.1 release as normal so it's easy to test out in your favourites.
What's new? A lot!
Some of the highlights include:
- A new game launcher UI that also includes a curated content repository, free for everyone (see below)
- Full TTF font support throughout the game, for clearer and more adaptive text rendering
- Fractional/floating-point UI scaling
- Better UI skinning
- Game/renderer performance improvements
- Renderer: soft particle support, blending with fog
- Water: Screen-space refractions and reflections
- Pathfinding improvements
- Visual Object Transform Lerping (smooth transitions)
- New advanced script commands
- Three new portraits sourced from the community portrait contest
- Hundreds of fixes and smaller features
Pictured - the new single-player launcher on Linux
This new launcher should make getting into new stories a lot easier, and a bit fancier than before. Beamdog mentioned they're reaching out to creators of popular modules to get them integrated into Beamdog's curated repository. However, to keep things open anyone can host a third-party repository.
Really great work from Beamdog all around here, especially the fractional scaling options enabling players to tweak the UI and text to their liking. I wish more games had that.
Full Beta patch notes are here.
You can pick up Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition from GOG and Steam.
See more from me