A Land Far Away

Right. So. I'm in the happy position of watching an active server round the clock, which leads me to look forward to the next server. Before we can have that next server, though, we need to have the portaling system in place. Or do we?

I know that AL is too busy to take this on and would actively discourage him from doing so if he decided to throw his thesis under that bus anyhow. But let's start organizing the resources and needs for this, and discuss options if it proves undoable for the foreseeable future. Is there any reason besides convenience that we can't log off one server before logging onto the next directly if they share a vault? If so (and I wave my tech noobery before me proudly), what barriers stand between us and a working portaling system? Is it just a matter of time and manpower? Are there insurmountable bugs? Do we wait for Obsidian to fix it?

Discuss.

Currently, players that login to the wrong server are quarantined. This can be disabled in the absence of a portalling mechanism though.

ATM, just time and manpower stand in the way. I don't believe anyone has looked at portaling in NWN2 so it may or may not be buggy. Something we'll find out when we look at it. But, in theory, this should involve little more than setting up a portal script that updates the player's server location and activates the portal (while we maintain a central vault). We've wanted to investigate the possibility of getting away from a central vault but we can postpone this effort.

To clarify - we don't currently use a central vault for Live. The PC tinting requires direct writes on the bics which need to be in the right directory (/docs/neverwinternights2/servervault/) to be affected, and the write/read may have problems when combined with the vault lag uploading and downloading again. The problems we encountered with corrupted bics, vault directory caching, and such are still present with NWN2- so we need a better way of handling .bic transfer.

Note also- the custom skills system also requires local access to the .bic files for readjusting the base skill ranks, both immediately after character creation, and later after each leveling (to maintain the hidden ranks in Lore and Perform for hardcoded functionality).

There is no portaling at the moment. I believe it's being added in the next patch or the one after that.

RE: The portalling issue

It's not like we ever actually portaled in ALFA1. We just stepped onto the server transition, got the visa, logged out, then logged into the next server with the Visa.

I am more than willing to test the central vault with Webdrive.
I hope that it will work.
Could we try with the beta servers ?

The NWN2 vault is already there. We just need to try even if it just means the portaling PC ends up in quarantine.

Oh and about the NWN1 issues as described by Vendrin, the central database could very well be used to get the IP address and port number of the destination server and therefore it ought to work way better.

The problems with NWN1 were:
- using non standard server ports (ie not the 5121) which was mainly a big issue for dungeonserver servers because they changed port each time they were stopped and started again (not for restarts though).
- we lost the DNS system (the alfa001.alandfaraway.org name that would lead to WD e.g.) when we lost Barendd's computer and never managed to get it to work again.

I think I have a solution to the second problem but the central database can solve both at the same time (servers can send their IP and port to the database and it will be there for other servers) AND this can be automatic, I hope, so that hosters don't need to manually update IPs and ports when they do change.

I'm ready to work on this if needed but I need help for testing with 2 NWN2 servers.
I can host one temporarily if needed (e.g. with BG's mod if Ayergo is ok) but I need another one.

Hialmar wrote:I can host one temporarily if needed (e.g. with BG's mod if Ayergo is ok) but I need another one.

011 should be up on its host (thanks Xerxes) fairly soon. As 011 and BG are neighbours it would seem to be a good transition to test.

Nice.

PM me as soon as the server is up and we'll test this.

We will soon start testing that with Ayergo's BG and Teric's WHL.

I'll PM both of you real soon.

I have done some initial testing with webdrive and I think I've found a configuration that works quite good.

However I have had a CEB once. I solved it with a "touch" on the server (touch is a command that changes the date of a file to the current date and time).
I haven't managed to reproduce it though.

Further testing is very important.