Apologies all for not announcing ahead of time-- I was expecting our work today to manifest as a handful of resets instead of any persistent downtime.
Today we're working on upgrading the ACR-- there are very few end-user-facing changes in here (though I did finally set up the autodownloader to give the tlk updates we did back in... April... to people actually playing, so a few spells missing descriptions should actually have descriptions on them). Defense quests have another potential line of feedback (for if you fail the quest-- needed a little new work, as most ACR quests assume that "failure" is either "death or no change"), and also really really for real this time provide feedback to the person who starts a defense quest, instead of just their party mates.
The big piece of work that we've done/ we are doing is removing the Linux VM layer that we were previously using to connect to the vault and database. Under the new structure, the ACR will manage its own* database connection and its own** vault connect. As of this post, TSM, BG, and WHL are entirely on the new structure. MS is on the new vault, but is still using a VM for database access (we got ambushed by some differences between Win8+ and Win7, which we'll need to iron out and have another rollout to address).
For (potential) hosts, this means significantly simpler setup. No more sshfs, no more samba, no more Linux, no more copy/pasting code into your host. There's a new piece of setup to connect to the database (you'll still need to generate a public/private key pair for our central server, and then tell NWNx4 where to find the private key-- this is configured in DatabaseConnector.ini), and then the information about connecting to the vault is on the database, and your server will gather that up when it starts.
Huge thanks to Basilica here. He did all of the fancy development. We other folk on tech were just testing and deployment.
* actually, we're making the connection with PuTTy, but the ACR monitors that connection itself and re-establishes it if it fails, so that hosts no longer have to mange this themselves.
** as above, but Azure this time.
ACR / Infrastructure Update
Moderator: ALFA Administrators
Re: ACR / Infrastructure Update
Yay awesome! Thank you!
*Grand Master of Cheese*
[causk] ((play games over the internet?)) yea, wouldnt recommend that. internet is for porn and weird people.
[DarkHin] There is always a tenth spot for evil.
[causk] ((play games over the internet?)) yea, wouldnt recommend that. internet is for porn and weird people.
[DarkHin] There is always a tenth spot for evil.
Re: ACR / Infrastructure Update
Thanks everyone, this is huge (not exaggerating, anyone who has hosted our modules in the past knows what PITA it could be).
On playing together: http://www.giantitp.com/articles/tll307 ... 6efFP.html
Useful resource: http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
On bad governance: "I intend to bring democracy to this nation, and if anybody stands in my way I will crush him and his family."
You're All a Bunch of Damn Hippies
Useful resource: http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
On bad governance: "I intend to bring democracy to this nation, and if anybody stands in my way I will crush him and his family."
You're All a Bunch of Damn Hippies
Re: ACR / Infrastructure Update
Followup update released today, also mostly in the database/infrastructure side of things.
Portals are a race condition, which we've hopefully solved (the problem being when the passport gets onto the database slower than you get through the conversation-- the 'timing out' thing is total lies; it once served a purpose, but is vestigial now; generally speaking, portals need to be rewritten and are suffering from significant code rot), and we've generally started to migrate away from the NWNx4 xp_mysql plugin and onto a CLRScript-based solution. We'll continue to keep the plugins on our servers for server-specific scripts that may be using them, though we think the ACR is entirely onto a CLRScript solution.
Also fixed the swimming animations, which have been broken for roughly forever.
Portals are a race condition, which we've hopefully solved (the problem being when the passport gets onto the database slower than you get through the conversation-- the 'timing out' thing is total lies; it once served a purpose, but is vestigial now; generally speaking, portals need to be rewritten and are suffering from significant code rot), and we've generally started to migrate away from the NWNx4 xp_mysql plugin and onto a CLRScript-based solution. We'll continue to keep the plugins on our servers for server-specific scripts that may be using them, though we think the ACR is entirely onto a CLRScript solution.
Also fixed the swimming animations, which have been broken for roughly forever.