Yesterday we had the chat session with the finalists of the NWN1 Golden Dragon awards. It was a great session with around 30 people joining, including many of the nominees. Tybae held the whip this time, keeping folks in line as we ran through a whole range of community questions to the nominees…

Luckily, if you missed it, we have the whole log here, including a bit of the after-chat free-for-all which continued on for several hours…

We have also posted up AME, a look under the hood part V, which answers some more of the questions asked of AME by community members here on our forums.

Today we caught up with Fester Pot, and asked him about how he felt about being a double Golden Dragon winner. He talks about his module Almraiven, and the sequel, which enters beta testing this week. Check it out!

For fun, we also posted a poll on your favourite 2006 Golden Dragon module. See if everyone else agrees with your choice too!

We have an interview with John ‘Gestalt’ Bye, who won the NWN1 Golden Dragon Award for the Best Multiplayer module in 2006, with his innovative RTS module Good vs Evil II. Read the interview here to find out about the ‘other’ cancelled Premium Module and to find out why we have this picture:

In other news, congratulations to Qk on getting one of his video tutorials into the Vault’s NWN2 Hall of Fame. There’s not many tutorials that make it, and apparently these tutorials are great – though none of us understand the language!

The 2007 nominations for the Module Categories of NWN1 have now been announced:

For the full listing of nominations, go here.

To comment on this year’s nominations, go here.

Congratulations to all the nominees who made it to the finals. Still to come: The recognition and Custom Content awards, plus the remaining sound/music nominations.

Video by Qkrch & Andarian.

The Community Contribution award is perhaps one of the most sought after of the Golden Dragon awards, perhaps because it is one of the hardest to win, but also because it covers such a diversity of content. In order to make the rules clearer, we have added an additional guideline so that you can tell if you are elligible for this category, based on whether you have provided a tool or a service to the community.

What is the qualifying date for a submission:

A hard submission date for a single tool. This will be the upload date to the Vault. Such submissions include tutorials, plugins, tools, utilities, etc

An ongoing eligibility for a service. The service must be continually kept up to date. Such submissions include websites and other community services.

Note that module authors are not eligible for this award for their module contributions, as the Veteran and Debut Author awards cover them.

Today we have an interview with David John, who won the Golden Dragon for Best Sound/Music for NWN for 2006. He talks about his inspirations, how he got into NWN, how he composes work and the Mysteries of Westgate adventure pack…

You can read and discuss the interview here.

Today we have an interview with Eric “Berra” Karlsson, whose module Surviving Horror 2 won the Golden Dragon Most Replayable Module Award for 2006. We learn a bit more about his ‘horrific’ tastes, as well as what he’s up to now…

Read and discuss it here.

Aristan, Golden Dragon winner for Best Roleplaying Module category for 2006, gives some insights into what’s happening with the sequel, thoughts on the Golden Dragons and other work in progress…

You can read the full interview and comment here…

In one of our longest and most heated debates, we finally resolved what to do with work that has been sitting in beta for a long time. Some time ago we published an announcement that all work in the 2007 cycle needs to be out of beta by the 31st of January 2008 in order to be considered for the 2007 awards.

All well and good, but what do we do with work that was left in beta? Originally it was our intention to roll this over to the following year, but this presented us with two problems; i) how to track it down and ii) we actually wanted to discourage ‘endless betas’. Nevertheless, we still want to award the best, so we wanted to allow room to ensure we could, without setting unreasonable restrictions that cut into testing time once a submission went public.

So the final solution we decided upon was: all submissions released in year 1 that are still in beta when the year 1 award cycle starts, will be viable for year 2 but no longer. In year 2, they will be considered as final even if they are unfinished.

Whilst it is unlikely that a submission in this state would get nominated, it is possible, so we wanted to make it clear how it would be handled.