rollnw

rollNW

rollNW is an homage to Neverwinter Nights in C++ and Python. See the docs and tests for more info, or open an IDE in browser in the quickstart section below.

This library is a work-in-progress. There will be serious refactoring and until there is a real release, it should be assumed the library is a work-in-progress.

Features

• The beginnings of a novel Rules System designed for easily adding, overriding, expanding, or removing any rule and reasonable performance
• A combat engine built on the above that's nearing being able to simulate melee battles.
• Objects (i.e. Creatures, Waypoints, etc) are implemented at a toolset level. Or in other words their features cover blueprints, area instances, with support for effects and item properties. Loading objects from resman or the filesystem is whether in GFF or JSON format is transparent.
• A recursive decent NWScript Parser
• Implementations of pretty much every NWN File Format
• An Model Parser. See the arclight project for some model viewing.
• A Resource Manager that can load all NWN containers (e.g. erf, key, nwsync) and also Zip files.
• An implementation of NWN's Localization System focused on utf8 everywhere.

Goals

• aims to implement an RPG engine inspired by NWN, excluding graphics and networking.
• focuses on usage, instead of doing things the Aurora Engine Way.
• follows utf8 everywhere.
• hews as close to C++ Core Guidelines as possible.
• aims to be as easily bindable as possible to other languages. I.e. only library specific or STL types at API boundaries.

Building / Installing

The library uses CMakePresets.json as its build system. The naming convention for non-ci presets is {platform}-dev[-{build tool}][-python][-debug]. In debug presets, build files are written to build-debug, otherwise build. In the python presets, python bindings will be built, otherwise only tests and benchmarks are built. On macOS and Linux, ninja is always to the build tool of choice so it is omitted. On windows the default build tool is Visual Studio 2022.

Examples:

$ cmake --preset=linux-dev-python
$ cmake --preset=macos-dev-debug
$ cmake --preset=windows-dev-vs2019-debug
$ cmake --preset=windows-dev-ninja-python
$ cmake --preset=windows-dev

Once your configuration is done, everything is the same between platforms. To build:

$ cmake --build --preset=default
$ cmake --build --preset=debug

To install all binaries and test data to local bin dir (build or build-debug):

$ cmake --install build --prefix=.
$ cd bin
$ ./rollnw_benchmark

To run ctest:

$ ctest --preset=default

History

A lot of what's here was written in the 2011-2015 range as part of personal minimalist toolset, modernized and with new EE stuff added. In some sense, it's a work of historical fiction -- it's what I'd have suggested at the start of NWN:EE: get the game and the community on the same set of libraries. Similarly to an older project that asked "what if Bioware had stuck with Lua?". The answer to that was pretty positive: a decade ahead, at least, of nwscript.

Credits

• Bioware, Beamdog - The game itself
• abseil - Foundational
• GoogleTest - Testing
• glm - Mathematics
• loguru, fmt - Logging
• stbi_image, NWNExplorer, SOIL2 - Image/Texture loading.
• inih - INI, SET parsing
• nholmann_json - JSON
• libiconv, boost::nowide - i18n, string conversion
• doxygen, sphinx, breathe - documentation