OAS Discussion Continued

[Ronan]

CD, I was told the OAS people would much rather have a stand-alone server and that MS would remain open regardless. If not they can scrap my work; I don't really care. It didn't take long. I was mostly curious as to how two modules would behave on the same host.

Converting RM actually went rather quickly. As suspected it doesn't use many of ALFA's graphical haks, so removing them only required the fixing of one tile, one texture, and some of the module's more esoteric blueprints. I got a Blue Screen of Death while saving the blueprint fixes, which naturally corrupted them... Thank god for version control, but I'll need to re-do that. Anyway, as it is now its not obviously broken, and the ADL size is pretty small (23mb; its only the smaller haks plus a special OAS override hak, and evidently all that stuff compresses really well).

The hard part seems to be getting two mods to run on one server. It "just works" until you throw MySQL into the mix. Afterwords it "just breaks", even with multiple NWNx4 installs. I haven't yet tried two distinct NWN2 installs because my windows/gaming partition is tiny; I'll reformat an external drive and give it a go at some point.

[Brokenbone]

A stand alone server for OAS almost sounds like guaranteed loneliness for anyone who logged in. Letting someone peek around a live server... well, those are still pretty lonely absent something being organized but there is a better chance of bumping into people, PCs or DMs.

[Ronan]

Yeah, I actually think the old OAS partially worked as well as it did because of the 1-PC rule. You'd always find ALFAns on it, so noobs had people to interact with. Still the ADL size is a barrier, and if there are people on the OAS (noobs or not) you're vastly more likely to actually encounter them vs. a live server. I'm not sure how MS's statics are structured, but BG would be an awful OAS. Noob logs in and finds 5 PCs on! But all delivering mail.

If lonely in ALFA, Rivermoot is the place to be. It definitely has the best low-level static content we've got, packed into one exterior. I'm not sure NWN2 has enough "walk-in" traffic for it to matter though. Guess we'll find out?