What is the NWN Omnibus? It is an attempt to gather the majority of NWN reference material together in one place and allow very quick keyword searching against all of the documents at once. It includes reference documents as well as forum threads.
Who is going to get the most out of the NWN Omnibus? Any NWN Custom Content creator or NWScript writer who finds themselves frequently searching through the old BioWare forums using Google, the NWN Lexicon, or the BioWare "For Developers" documents for specific topics. Since so much raw information is available for searching, those who will get the very most out of the Omnibus are individuals who already have a decent working knowledge of how Custom Content and NWScript work but who often find themselves needing to look up specific keywords or topics to further advance their pursuits.
Is it complete? No! This release of the NWN Omnibus comes with a huge amount of information to search through but I still think there's more useful information which can be included in the future. Offline versions of the DLA Custom Content Wiki, a few more of the old archived BioWare forums, reference sheets for BioWare tileset textures...and so on, and so on. I encourage others to experiment with their own combination of reference materials, customizing the Omnibus so it is most useful for their needs.
What program drives the NWN Omnibus? The Omnibus is a customized version of a portable DocFetcher distribution. You can also find the Wiki for DocFetcher here.
What programs were used to make the NWN Omnibus? Since DocFetcher works best with html, most of the programs involved were tools which converted (whatever) to html. For PDF conversion, I used pdftohtml. For CHM, CHMDecoder. For downloading the BioWare forums, I used ForumD
Does having the NWN Omnibus mean I don't need to download all that other reference material, individually? Well...yes and no. It depends on how knowledgeable you are in the first place. For the most part, you shouldn't need to download the information separately. But because there is an enormous amount of material in the Omnibus and because the material has been converted to html from various other formats (like PDF or CHM) some of the material might not look as good as it does in its original form. Good examples of material which didn't convert as well as I would like are portions of Eligio Sacateca's Custom Content Guide and script snippets from the BioWare Scripting forum. In cases like that, the NWN Omnibus helps at least pinpoint whether a particular resource has information on the topic one is searching for. Remember, the NWN Omnibus is a powerful topic search tool. Trying to learn the basics of Custom Content from the NWN Omnibus' version of Custom Content Guide is going to be quite a bit more difficult than just reading through Eligio's guide directly.
Can I add my own information into the NWN Omnibus? Yes, DocFetcher is extremely flexible and allows adding or removing indices quite easily. Download the portable version and play around with making your own customized distributions. If you release DocFetcher-friendly modules to the Vault, just drop me a PM on the BioWare social site (or write me from my Vault profile) and I'll try to add a link to your entry.
How do I install and run it? Just unpack it to a folder on your hard drive with about 500 megabytes free and you're good to go! It should also work perfectly from a USB thumb drive. Just run DocFetcher.exe (or DocFetcher.sh for Linux, I believe)
What information does this release of the NWN Omnibus contain? 2DA 169 - All 575 .2DA files, current to the 1.69 release
3DS Max Export Scripts - BioWare 3DS Max export scripts documentation, which includes a good deal of information on NWN Custom Content in general. Downloadable separately here
BioWare For Developers - All 22 documents covering NWN file formats (and other things) from this page
BioWare Forums - Offline archives of the following forums from the old BioWare website, each thread in its own .HTML file. The following full forum archives from the old BioWare site are included in this release: NWN Custom Content (ARCHIVE), BioWare News Discussion, Custom Content, For Developers, Scripting, Server Admin & Toolset. Also Stickied threads for every forum were included.
Custom Content Guide 3.0 - The "Bible" of Custom Content. Downloadable separately here.
GMax & Maxscript Help - Help files for GMax (3DS Max 4) and Maxscript, downloadable separately here
Lexicon 169 - The "Bible" of NWScript (and many, many other things as well!), downloadable separately here
Tileset Construction - BioWare's NWN Tileset Construction Tutorial, downloadable separately here. I don't include any of the files, just index the information.
TXI - Every TXI officially released by BioWare as part of their content, segregated by the bif they were found in. Extremely useful for looking up how certain TXI commands were used by BioWare and whether other commands or setting were typically paired with them.
Posted by VitalRemains at 2012-02-11 14:11:03 Voted 10.00 on 02/11/12
I'm so damn pleased projects like this still exist, truly inspires me. 10 for helping this community when Bioware abandons us. _________________________ A returning builder of five years. Keep an eye on me if you miss richly built .MODs.
Posted by Steve_Savicki at 2012-02-06 18:24:24 Voted 10.00 on 02/06/12
Any little bit helps. _________________________ Steve's Characters - please don't forget to vote on them if you play them.
Thanks,
Steve
Posted by Pstemarie at 2012-01-07 12:42:12 Voted 10.00 on 01/07/12
Don't ever remember voting for this - rectified! _________________________ --
Pstemarie - Project Q Team Artist
Posted by Rolo Kipp at 2011-12-13 16:43:01 Voted 10.00 on 12/13/11
Posted by red teflon at 2011-11-01 13:59:10 Voted 10.00 on 11/01/11
Fantastic
Posted by Dagesh at 2011-10-28 08:08:09 Voted 10.00 on 10/28/11
Those old forums had so much information. I was at a loss when I could no longer search them for the wealth of info they had. This is immeasurably awesome.
Posted by Joern Preine at 2011-10-05 13:14:55 Voted 10.00 on 10/05/11
So much information, so little time to read it :p
Posted by Kato2200 at 2011-09-22 13:42:27 Voted 10.00 on 09/22/11
This is a must, thanks for the great job!!
Posted by molo67 at 2011-09-10 19:57:07 Voted 10.00 on 09/10/11
This is like finding a Tome of Preserved Knowledge - And I say it's worth a TON of XP!!! Thank you for saving and assembling all this! _________________________ NWN Shield Reskins Link New Small Shields Link
Posted by Borden Ha'elven at 2011-09-10 17:11:32 Voted 10.00 on 09/10/11
All that goodness in one place, should have a health warning... Thanks a million. _________________________ Stuff I've done.
Posted by _Genisys at 2011-09-03 07:27:03 Voted 10.00 on 09/03/11
Posted by Axe_Murderer at 2011-06-28 13:32:27 Voted 10.00 on 06/28/11
Well done and right on time to boot. Thanks for this.
Posted by FunkySwerve at 2011-06-16 22:05:50 Voted 10.00 on 06/16/11
Nice work. One of my players pointed out to me that one of my posts turned up accidentally in your intro video. :P
Posted by frudillao at 2011-06-16 08:02:29 Voted 10.00 on 06/16/11
Thank you for this. One more thing to keep this great game alive! _________________________
Posted by Vivienne at 2011-06-16 02:03:02 Voted 10.00 on 06/16/11
I must thank you for this!! I'm a newbie, who came late to the game and even later to the toolset, I was still searching for even the most basic things in the old bioware forums when, they just shut them down in my face!!
LOL, I know, I know, it's my fault for not paying attention; I was surprised though, because there are some very old games where the forums are archived but they're still up for viewing!
Posted by UrkOfGreyhawk at 2011-06-15 21:58:24 Voted 10.00 on 06/15/11
I deserve a keel hauling for waiting to vote until Bio shut down the old forums. You are truly a Godsend to the community. _________________________ If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Posted by Winterhawk99 at 2011-06-15 17:20:02 Voted 10.00 on 06/15/11
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, OTR. I would hug and kiss you for this but that would be rather awkward :P
Posted by The Amethyst Dragon at 2011-06-14 21:26:36 Voted 10.00 on 06/14/11
Thank you for saving the years of knowledge and information from oblivion. _________________________ World of Aenea (Hall of Fame PW and the origin of all my works)
Vault Entries: The Complete List (50+ entries, including 17 Hall of Fame awards)
Self-Promotional Honesty: If you have opinions on stuff I've made, or if you use any of it (as a player or builder), I like comments/votes/feedback...so do other content makers and builders. Keep us motivated. :)
Posted by Khuzadrepa at 2011-06-10 05:09:38 Voted 10.00 on 06/10/11
This is one of THE most useful tools to come along! Preserving that info and making it so much easier to search than the actual site... it's just priceless! Thank you so much for doing this, OldTimeRadio!
Posted by nicethugbert at 2011-05-18 06:29:41 Voted 10.00 on 05/18/11
Posted by jbaudrand at 2011-05-16 22:59:24 Voted 10.00 on 05/16/11
This is why nwn1 will still number 1 in my heart: best community member. _________________________ You want an intro for your mod? Link
Contact us: Link
Posted by adam_warlock at 2011-05-11 18:57:48 Voted 10.00 on 05/11/11
thank you for putting this out for the community. one of the best contributions IMO ever.
Posted by Darkvalley at 2011-04-24 09:08:19 Voted 10.00 on 04/24/11
One word=great!
Posted by Henesua at 2011-04-17 18:49:01 Voted 10.00 on 04/17/11
Posted by OldTimeRadio at 2011-04-17 07:54:16 Voted 10.00 on 04/17/11
Thank you all for the feedback and votes so far!
@crazedmages: Thank you for helping get this into more people's hands! Also, don't forget that DocFetcher makes it easy to add your own indices to search in, so if you use information sources not included in this release of the Omnibus, feel free to upload them and I will link to the submission!
@CTP_Team: For plaintext searches (i.e. 2DA files) this highlighting will be performed for you in the display window automatically. For HTML results, however, it doesn't appear to do this. However, while the display window is clicked on you can always hit CTRL-F and type in your search terms, which will then highlight in the display window. Or you can click on the "Open in external browser" button above the display window and launch it into your default browser and continue searching from there.
Posted by CTP_Team at 2011-04-16 13:38:32 Voted 9.50 on 04/16/11
Not quite a 10, but a definitely VERY useful product.
I would like to see some option of highlighting the searched for text in the results window. IE I search for a specific item, select one of the results in the left window, and would like to see that item highlighted in the resulting display field.
Regardless of that though, this is one AMAZING tool. I certainly wish it had been available years ago!
Posted by wmb1957 at 2011-04-16 07:02:13 Voted 10.00 on 04/16/11
Site
at 2012-02-11 14:11:03
at 2011-06-28 13:32:27
at 2011-04-16 13:38:32
