A Land Far Away

Anyone have a guess or information as to which NWN2 server is next going to live status?

What is needed to assist the process?

I got into helping just a little with BG (flibble) a few months back, and though I am loathe to take on more work right now, I'd love to see another live server.

BG is closest to live right now, I believe.

Mick wrote:BG is closest to live right now, I believe.

Yup, BG first, then Skullport as soon as it gets a HDM and a beta test run.

Chult

Actually, I'd expect Teric's Western Heartlands would be the next likely server after Baldur's Gate, as he's had a solid module since before The Silver Marches went online (OAS2), he's just been expanding and refining it since then. Last I heard he was proceeding conservatively though, not wanting to go Live until the module was better prepared, and the playerbase looked ready for another server.

Skullport will likely need a fair bit of work to get it ready for a Live push, though if it were adopted by a dedicated team, that work might go more quickly than one would expect, who knows.

zicada wrote:Yup, BG first, then Skullport as soon as it gets a HDM that doesnt get knocked back for illogical reasons and a beta test run.

Fixed.

How are the multiple servers planned to be ran for NWN2 pertaining to characters? I have heard some NWN1 servers were bridgeable and characters could venture from server to server...

That is how it will work in NWN2 as well, how exactly they will "portal" I'm not sure, I seem to recall hearing some discussions about that as though it wasn't as simple as NWN1 or at least that it was a different system.

In NWN1 we use "Visa" tokens that control the PCs ability to move from server to server, so you can't just log into WaterDeep when the last place you logged out was in ShadowDale...you have to walk, take a caravan to the edge of the ShadowDale server to get to the next server and then keep going through all the servers that are up in order to reach your destination.

That is a very cool idea. I do notice that TSM does not implement an overland map system of travel, ala the NWN2 OC or BG1/2.

On the one hand, this facilitates the immersive feel of traveling a great distance between locals by actually walking. On the other hand, it detracts from the representation of space through a visual media and the inherit impression that something is just far away, a length that is often not possible to represent with road/path areas in a module.

I wonder if a system with an overland map of Faerun could be made, which shows one's current "region", the regions available (that have an actual server) and a dotted line representing the trade route, ship course etc. Obviously only routes branching from one's current node to the next would be available, whilst those which needed an intermediary server would be grayed out. Then one could get to server B from server A, then traverse the point B server, get to the waypoint and then select to travel from server B to C through yet another overland map.

Just as a general update you could pretty much play on WH now, but it would be rubbish. We have geography and stores and spawns but nothing much in the way of statics or plots. That's what's holding things up. Still working on it, but have been chomped by the RL monster for a couple of months. WH also uses an "overland" map a la SoZ campaign, BTW.

Vintenar wrote:I do notice that TSM does not implement an overland map system of travel...

We had one at an early stage of TSM development, but disabled it until we could work out some of the attendant bugs. I would expect it will return in the future; when we get the systems working in a satisfactory manner, I expect most of ALFA's NWN2 servers will want to use our scaled overland travel maps (work like a better version of SoZ's one).

Sounds interesting. I haven't seen SoZ yet but it should hold promise and I look forward to seeing ALFA's implementation.