CEP/PRC etc

[Dorn]

Hi,

Just reading about what happened with ALFA1 and the ability to adopt community haks.

Could there be, or are there, there any impediments in our PW/system design that would prevent us from adoption CEP or PRC (player resource consortium) type haks and content in the future?

(aside, of course, from balance review or other justified 'policy' type things)

[Veilan]

Yes - we'd basically have to redo everything due to resource conflicts with our own custom content.

We can still pick out single parts, number them for us and fit them in, but options are limited and the process is tedious. Sadly, we did not adopt CEP early.

[Dorn]

Sorry i'm talking about NWN2/ALFA2 to clarify

[Veilan]

I guess your mentioning of ALFA 1 kind of made me think about that .

[Dorn]

It's ok

I forgive you

[Kest]

Maybe this sort of thing is why Ayergo is using mostly vanilla stuff for BG?

[AcadiusLost]

It's complicated; as I understand it, the CEP didn't even start until long after we'd been building and running (beta?) servers for NWN1-ALFA. If you're starting a PW from scratch and you have an option of whether to use something like the CEP or not, that's not a difficult decision. If the question is whether to hold on building until something like the CEP is "ready", that makes less sense.

From a technical standpoint, the servers will only ever read from a single set of 2da files to reference all server content; which makes adding various community content a challenge- we basically have to merge each additional resource we want to include into our existing files. Projects like the CEP try to do this merging on the behalf of their users, but this doesn't always come with the same level of quality control, or involve choices on what to include that reflect the interests of a "special interest" persistent world like ALFA. Trying to retrofit something like the CEP on top of existing haks is a real mess, introducing a pile of conflicts for resources like textures, tiles, models, etc.

We have taken many lessons from the NWN1-ALFA hak experience for NWN2-ALFA, in order to keep the haks easier to maintain and support in the future, but there isn't really a good way to "future proof" them, other than ignoring all the community content that the builders and players are asking for, and sticking to building only with the base game resources. The community content offerings for NWN2 are still pretty limited despite the fact that the game has been out for a long time now, so I would still say that maintaining our own haks was the correct decision for NWN2-ALFA.

We have kept good internal documentation on content added to our haks, what 2da rows they occupy, what version the content is, padded rows generously to avoid breakage from expansion content, and tried to maintain 2da rows from the builders where possible. This allows us to add content selectively and quickly as it comes out, and does not make us dependent on dubiously-supported "community organizations" for the future. As I understand it, CEP for NWN1 turned out to be a pretty good one in the end, but they have been more the exception than the rule.

[Zelknolf]

Well, if we're talking about just CEP, take ALFA's haks, nuke the tilesets/ruleset changes, add JenX (minus the nudity) and organize the bejeezuhs out of it. You'll end up with something durn close to CEP. Couple robe models, handful of placeables, and a couple horses of difference (mostly quality control stuff on our end. Crap we looked at and said "Wait, what?")

Just looking at community content in general, WoRMs and CTP beat ALFA exteriors like a redheaded stepchild, and there're models that we've just been short on skilled people with motivation to integrate. The bother, of course, is that there's no way around mass quantities of building to bring that in at this stage. Similarly, every version of CEP involved mass renumberings of placeables, which means editing every area. While keeping up with that might've been a clever idea for other (smaller) worlds, one thing that makes ALFA distinct is the sheer size of its servers. Our little NWN1 servers were 500 areas (the sort of number that other PWs wave about and exclaim "We're huge!" with.) Which, of course, would mean crushing workloads whenever the community's content updated, if we relied on it.

Given that there's a sort of "finished" CEP for NWN1, it might be reasonable to nudge toward that if people cared enough to do the building for it. I'm thinking that the copiously large padding is the best route for NWN2 (I think 2das can handle 65,000 lines, anyway? I don't think any of NWN1's haks even hit the 10k mark.) Gives ease in ganking others' content and gives a stable base to let ALFA build up to its accustomed hugeness from.

[HATEFACE]

Wow. It's good to know that you're taking lessons learned from ALFA's NWN one hak management and applying them to two. I think obsidian is planning on having a downloadable hak system in place with up coming patches so I was wondering if there will be a switch from worldgate to obsidians autodownload system or am I just askin to early?

[AcadiusLost]

We'll have to see how Obsidian's content downloader works when/if it's released; naturally if we can get it to do what we need it to do, I'd prefer to use something that comes with the game via an official patch, makes getting new and returning members set up far easier. However, if it isn't smart enough to update individual changed sub-parts of a PWC file or hak to get players updated, it might not be worth it. Imagine having it conveniently set up a fresh 1.1 gigabyte download for you (TSM PWC file) every time someone makes a minor walkmesh fix in one area of the module... yikes.