NW Shader, Neverwinter Nights

NW Shader

NW Shader is a wrapper for Neverwinter Nights 1 that gives you options for increased draw distance, depth of field, motion blur, normal maps, Bloom/HDR, SSAO etc. To put it simply, a wrapper is software that wraps around existing software in order to give you more options.

NW Shader Increase Draw Distance

With NW Shader you can increase the draw distance in NWN by disabling the fog. This is NW Shader's most notable feature that almost no one talks about, which I find bizarre. The NW Shader camhack is powerful and flexible. We can shoot at any angle with it. See NWN area design for examples.

NW Shader is one reason why I stick with Diamond over Enhanced: Diamond's modded cam and draw distance are FAR more useful than the visual enhancements and "keyholing" offered by Enhanced, and it is a joke to think otherwise. Have fun with your blurry and near-sighted viewports in 2023, though!

For my purposes, NW Shader is a more valuable enchancement to NWN than the entirety of EE, as it currently stands (2023).

Depth of Field NW Shader

Depth of field in NW Shader and NWN:EE looks like garbage. I can't believe some forum-goers (eg., subredditors) are proud of the blurry screencaps they post. They have no aesthetic taste and should stop flooding the internet with their trashy, low-effort screencaps.

It is not fidelity and special effects that make screencaps impressive: it is their composition, what they convey and what info they give the viewer that counts.

An 800x600px screencap is just as useful as a 4K one.

Also, learn to crop and compress images -- basic skills that computer users have employed since the mid-80s. See cRPG blog for some super-basic screencaps and infographics that are still 100x better than anything that has ever been posted on nwn and bg reddits.

cf. Computer-game infographics for some of the best computer-game examples on the internet.

NW Shader Installation Instructions

• Download this file (chronepsis_0.2.2.3) and extract it
• Then, place the contents of the extracted archive into your NWN root folder, so that the dlls share the same path as the exe
• Now, run NWShader GUI.exe to tweak the settings, or simply edit the ini the usual way with a text editor such as Notepad ++

cRPG Blog	Neverwinter Nights Modding Introduction
Neverwinter Nights 1	Neverwinter Nights Project Q
Neverwinter Nights Installation	Neverwinter Nights CEP
Neverwinter Nights Best Builds	Neverwinter Nights NW Shader
Neverwinter Nights Spells	Neverwinter Nights User Interface Mods
Neverwinter Nights Mods	Neverwinter Nights Overrides
Neverwinter Nights Modules	Neverwinter Nights Tileset Overrides