Solstice

Solstice is a scripting library and optionally a combat engine replacement plugin system for Neverwinter Nights (NWN). My main goal was to expand NWN from a platform for building adventures to also allow building new/different rulesets. The project also aims at a tight level of integration: where you could create a server with no NWN scripts, but also where you could add/replace a script without having to change a single line of NWN script.

This project is open source and licensed under the MIT License (any mentions of GPL v2 in the docs are wrong). Contributions, pull requests, feedback on API design, questions, bug reports (use the GitHub issues here) are welcome and appreciated.

Currently, this is used in production on my own server. Some things are geared towards it. You can get a sense of what I’ve done here. The code there is likewise MIT Licensed.

If you’re curious how everything comes together take a look at the Rules module, which is the core of the system. If you want to see the details of the combat engine replacement see examples/core_combat_engine.lua, just be aware that that code is atypical in that it’s written for the highest performance possible.

Status

  • Status: Very near beta.
  • Working on getting nicer docs.
  • No build instructions yet.

Dependencies

  • Linux
  • Luajit 2.0
  • luafilesystem
  • lualogging
  • nwnx_effects
  • nwnx_solstice

git

  • develop is the branch with ongoing development.
  • master will (hopefully) be stable releases.

Scripting

NWN scripts are mapped to functions in the global Lua namespace. There is no concept of void main() {...} or int StartingConditional() {...}. In the former case, in Lua it’s merely a function that returns no value; in the latter a function that returns a boolean. There is no concept of OBJECT_SELF, the object is passed explicitly.

Solstice is a more object oriented framework. e.g. rather than SendMessageToPC(pc, "Hello") in Solstice it would be pc:SendMessage("Hello").

Examples:

A normal ‘script’:

function hello_world(obj)
  obj:SendMessage('Hello, world!')
end

A ‘script’ that can be used in a conversation conditional:

function is_epic_char(obj)
  return obj:GetHitDice() > 20
end

This has a some side effects:

  • Lua function names that you’re using as ‘scripts’ are limited to 16 characters, like script file names.
  • Script editing needs to be done in external editor.
  • Scripts placed into events, like in the dialog editor, will not display their contents.
  • Many Lua functions can be placed into a single file.
  • None of these external Lua scripts count towards resource limits and if you build your module they will be consider ‘missing’.

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