For its latest Dungeons & Dragons title, BioWare decided it was time to retire the Infinity engine, the workhorse behind the Baldur's Gate franchise. Upon working on the initial design for Neverwinter Nights, the developer team came to the conclusion that neither Infinity nor the Omen engine used by MDK2 would work. "After examining our list of functionality requirements, we decided that we would be spending more time modifying the existing code than if we started over from scratch," says Scott Grieg, lead programmer of Neverwinter Nights. However, he adds, "This isn't as bad as it sounds. We were able to examine the various subsystems of the Infinity and Omen engines and reimplement the good parts and rewrite the parts that in hindsight could have been done better."

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The main thing is that BioWare wanted to design the game's architecture around the needs of the multiplayer environment, and this became one of the toughest things to pull off. "In the Infinity engine games, we had to worry about only a maximum of 6 players. In Neverwinter Nights, we wanted the number of players to scale up with the available hardware," says Grieg. "This required an entirely new approach to the system. In Baldur's Gate, players had the entire set of game data on their machines. That meant that each machine didn't need to be told all of the details of each creature or area. In Neverwinter Nights, the players will be creating their own content. In this case, every piece of information needs to be sent from the server to all of the player clients. A lot of effort must be expended to ensure that this information is as small as possible without limiting the design of the game."

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To ramp up the AI, BioWare designed a C-based and Java-based scripting language to expand the number of events that can trigger a script, thereby allowing for the simulation of more complex behaviors. These improvements, for example, easily let the game designers direct a nonplayer character to walk to a distant druid's grove from the heart of the deepest dungeon--the Aurora engine handles all the actual details of that journey.

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BioWare isn't going to simply release basic in-house tools; the company plans to test, document, and optimize the toolset programs so that players can use them easily without having to figure out on their own how all these tools work. Grieg says that with the Neverwinter Toolset, "a cool-looking module, complete with waterfalls and a small village, [can be] painted in less than five minutes and then loaded into the game." During a company meeting, when the Neverwinter Nights team demonstrated these game-making tools, "everyone in the room recognized how revolutionary that kind of power was going to be and what a profound impact it would have on our development process," says Grieg. "And it's precisely that revolution that we'll be turning over to our end users."