NWN1 ALFA Servers

[Heero]

Haha. I'm pretty sure we don't have the VoLV mod but if we do and the ghost of Elorn does return then just let me handle it -- that guy (or girl?) and me were nemesii (I think).

[Khazar Stoneblood]

I might end up a full-time NWN player if that happens (once I have a working gaming PC again).

Why?

Smokeable pipes. 'nuff said.


I vote Waterdeep. The true "metropolis" server is the one thing that ALFA2 really misses in my opinion, and that server was extremely well done.

[Ithildur]

Officially +1 to WD

TLR sounds better than I remember it; to be fair I didn't get to play extensively on it.

If I were totally going for nostalgia I'd say SD would be fun, but I get the feeling SD the module had some issues. It was for a good stretch the most popular server in ALFA1; I think I remember us actually hitting the cap of number of players allowed a few times? But it was probably as much or more about the players/dm's/plot/setting than the server/module itself.

[Zelknolf]

So... I might sound totally bananas to say this, but do we actually need to commit to two servers being the ones that we have up?


There's a lot of ALFA1 out there; why not set down one civilized/central/relatively-metropolitan area, where people may play whenever they have the itch to do so, and one "whatever thing is the flavor of current large-scale events" one?

[Adanu]

Don't care for nwn1, so good luck with this.

[Castano]

So... I might sound totally bananas to say this, but do we actually need to commit to two servers being the ones that we have up?


There's a lot of ALFA1 out there; why not set down one civilized/central/relatively-metropolitan area, where people may play whenever they have the itch to do so, and one "whatever thing is the flavor of current large-scale events" one?

Cool, because rotation of servers is definitely one of the ideas I tossed around with Heegz. Waterdeep IMO is the hub and we can branch off to other servers on a rotating basis say quarterly. I've been meaning to post more of our discussion and ideas here, just still collecting my thoughts. I'm told one box can host 2 servers, that opens some nice possibilities.

[Zelknolf]

I'm told one box can host 2 servers, that opens some nice possibilities.

Depending on the box. But most modern machines can run multiple instances of NWN1, yeah. Even NWN2 if we're willing to whiddle modules down so that more than one of them can fit in memory-- and there's some reduced overhead in that if all of ALFA is on one machine, because then you don't need a remote/central vault (though you will need backups, that's something that the running servers don't have to wait on, and can still be automated).

[HEEGZ]

Zelknolf tells me that the only servers that were up to date to the final releases were Waterdeep, North Cormyr, Arabel, Shadowdale, and Sembia. That said, the haks are no longer to be found on the FTP. I checked my old backups and found most of the haks, music, portraits etc, but they only date back to the end of 2006.

Does anyone have copies of the haks for when we took down NWN1 in 2008?

Zelk, can you correct me on the dates or filenames we need please?

[Swift]

I know myself and Veilan both have copies of the haks. Additionally, I am 100% certain BG worked with them, though seeing as we have BG, that is not really going to be one of the choices

Edit: Arabel was put into the Northern Cormyr mod when they did their rebuild. It stopped being a separate server maybe a year before shut down.

[Castano]

Swift or Veilan if one of you could FTP those onto the DM FTP that would be great. We should be keeping a set of them for mothballing purposes anyways.

[Ronan]

I've run multiple NWN2 BGs on my machine, though not successfully with NWNx4 (so while the mods were loaded, you couldn't log in). The 32-bit pointer memory limit should be on process address space, not physical ram usage. I briefly hosted two NWN1 ALFA servers on a single-core Athlon 64 running Gentoo. It wasn't great, but was playable. The Core2 Duo machine I have gathering dust should be able to handle two well enough.

Are we definitely moving forward with this? You guys don't need to decide on a server for me to start setting the host up.

[HEEGZ]

Based on stuff said by Hialmar and Zelknolf, we would need someone to write the authentication stuff. I would like if we could get this set up and test it out.

I've spent the last couple of days looking into the different servers to choose from and I am really interested in Cormyr at the moment. If it is not much more work to put both NC and WD up, then I'd like to try those two for starters.

Need to follow up with Castano... Um, I have this nagging feeling like I'm forgetting something important but I can't recollect.

[kid]

I don't mind any of this.
I mean who am I to stand in the way of nostalgia.
However, I don't have nwn1, and the thought of having even less players on ALFA2 kinda sucks.

[Brokenbone]

Do we have the old vault as well? I miss Foxmantle. Lure Brimsar back for Vastiani...

[Swift]

There is a vault backup from the 26th of October, 2006 on the FTP. That seems...a little older than when we shut the servers down.

Edit: To clarify, the vault.rar file has a last modified date of 13th of September, 2009, but all the files within it have a last modified date of 26th of October, 2006.