A Land Far Away

Have we had any new thoughts on portalling/quarantine systems? Seems like we've de-prioritized them since we're fast-tracking 003 towards Live- but presumably being "Live" would include at least some planning for having more than one server, and hence the need for a portalling system.

If we're all going with overland travel maps, we may be able to implement some kind of map-edge server-ATs, though it seems to me that would require some careful planning to manage properly. Special portals at the end of roads that would conceiveably connect would be a simpler early option, but would still require coding.

with regard to Vault- we really need a better solution than the present Netdrive mapping. The problems with refreshing directory caches, the lag associated with reading character vaults, and the potential for CEB/ .bic corruption are bad on their own- but we may well be looking at operations that need to modify the .bic on logout (tinting, skill mods, maxhp mods for non-max HP rolls after 3rd, etc)- in which case being able to operate on a local copy of the .bic is essential. I think we'd be best getting a NWNx4 port of Vaultster set up, but I've had little success finding the compiled code for such a thing (though it is rumored to exist). Would be preferable to be able to test this in a multiserver, pseudo-live Beta2/3 environment if at all possible- so we don't corrupt Live .bic files indadvertantly while trying to retrofit a system.

Chamu will test webdrive which should be a good replacement of netdrive for a cost (about $60).

I am very interested in trying other solutions though.

However, if vaulster works the same as the NWN1/NWNx2 one we'll still have the problem that we do not have a central location where all the bics are stored.
This can be a big problem if a server goes down for a long time or a hoster leaves ALFA without leaving us enough time to backup important data like the .bics (which already happened for NWN1 - for persistent storage only obviously).
I proposed some time ago to add to vaulster an application that would regularly upload the bics on a FTP server (which could be the DMFTP). It wouldn't be perfect but would still be better than nothing if we loose bics.

Now about the portalling ATs, we have experienced this in Toril along with vaulster with NWN1.
It worked very nicely but I think that for a player it would still be interesting to have some OOC information that they will switch servers if they cross an AT and the possibility not to do it (using a dialog window when they are about to leave or something like that).

I am pleased to say that Chamu's testing proved that webdrive works very well for NWN1 vault access.

We will need to test it with NWN2 but I think it will be a very good solution.

Thanks a lot to Chamu for the testing.

Thank you for the tests, Hialmar and Chamu.