Neverwinter Nights Forum News (Oct. 11, 04)

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Here are today's Neverwinter Nights forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

Server stability issues with 1.64?

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We are also getting the frequent crashes when logging clerics. Additionally, Shifters are causing a major problem crashing the server when logging. We are running Iznoghoud's shifter script. Anyone else using this and having issues? We are on NWNX2 in Windows.

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I doubt that script will work well with 1.64, since some of the core shifter functionality changed (i.e. direct shifting).

CRITICAL ISSUE - 1.64 and NWNx incompatibility on Linux

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Instead, the final was released, and even though it didn't seem to affect the official software, it did disrupt servers of your clients.

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No, it disrupted NWNX2, not the server software. If you hadn't used a software that reads and writes into NWN's memory space directly, this would not have been a problem, and as such this "problem" is totally uninteresting for us as the makers of NWN. We have 2.0+ million default installations to worry about, if we started worrying what hacks break with each of our updates, we wouldn't be releasing updates at all anymore.

NWNX2 is a third party tool (granted, a pretty cool one) and, by all love for server admin, we will NEVER include in our tests and it would NEVER delay a patch release.

To be clear, even if we had known that NWNX2 for Linux specifically breaks, we would still have released this patch. Our beta, as mentioned already, is to help us find problems that our QA /Atari QA could not find - but third party programs breaking is not considered a problem for us.

And now that we have cleared up why we run beta tests (read: NOT to find out whether or not third party apps break) I hope this matter is clear now, so the next time we patch and some third party program breaks, people know that they need to stay on the older version until they tested all their third party programs for compatibility.

As for the mozilla, gnome projects, theese are non profit open source projects with "unlimited" (in the traditional sense) manpower available - not a game development company patching a more than 2 year old game.

Short: Third party apps will never be considered in our patch process and the purpose of the beta is NOT to give server admins an idea if we break compatibility with a third party app.

All clear now?

I know this sounds a bit harsh, but I feel it is necessary to make this very clear for the future, as some people already started to spread misconceptions about BioWare officially supporting NWNX2 or Leto or the purpose of our beta program.

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Admittedly, in this particular case, PlasmaJohn guesses the problem wasn't due to any code change but compilation (compiler directives changed?)

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Exactly.

1.64 Memory Issues

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For all us Admins who are running truly dedicated Neverwitner Servers, is it safe to assume we can set the memory caching to reserve most of the RAM on the machine? Minus what it takes to run the OS and everything of course, plus a little extra for a buffer.

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I'd stay below 1/2 of RAM, should leave enough memory for things that might cause your system to swap and slowdown otherwise. As Craig already said, after a certain point, the benefits of caching do not scale up with the amount of RAM you dedicate to the cache, and if you take too much, it will actually decrease your performance (by making the OS use the disk to swap memory from other processes that get chocked by NWN).

Did 1.64 change the "bow bug"?

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I was thinking of the 'bow bug' as the bug that gives players with bows equipped the ability to see invisible creatures and other players.

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It was, indirectly. Equiping a bow increased the players ability to spot hidden things by a successful listen check to the bow's range (5 tiles or so).

1.64 Beta Testing

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As for "Did't PWs run the beta?", well yes we did. But only the third one (beta 1+2 were not produced for linux). And some of the issues with 164 final did not exist in the beta.

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Let's put it this way - it is recommended you run a server "beta" after the patch is out to see how your systems adapt, as we can not guarantee that the last beta is identical to the release patch.

We still appreciate if people run our beta to give us feedback on potential issues, but this process should not be understood as a "beta" to determine the compatibility with third party software.

In most cases it is, but just switching to a new compiler or different compiler settings has the potential of breaking things like NWNX2, and since putting out a beta has it's cost (in both $$$ and manpower), we will not issue betas for every change that is made.

The purpose of our Beta program is to identify problems that internal and external QA might have missed or that happen due to hardware not available to us for testing - it is NOT to give people the chance to see if their third party apps are still running - that's a side effect and should never be relied on.

Like any other software company, BioWare can not and will not take non licensed 3rd party apps into account when it comes to determining if a patch is good to go or not

I think I wrote these lines a lot this weekend, and every time do it I'm not really happy about them as they sound kind of harsh and a bit like "we don't care" - that's not the case - we DO care if your server runs smoothly when we issue a new patch, what we CAN NOT care about it apps like NWNX2 - because, as cool as they are, they are about as hacktastic as it can get and if we started to worry about those, the chances that you would see another patch would be really slim.

My recommendation for the next patch for PW admins like yourself would be

a) run our beta and report problems to prevent them from slipping into release.
b) tell your players to hold off on the patch until you updated (as usual) the server.
c) run a beta on your server to find out if things like NWNX2 keep running.
d) get your updated version of NWNX2.
e) open server for business.

That said, 1.64 has more changes than any previous patch (excluding XPs) and in the light of this, the chances for some problems to slip through were pretty good, especially since we can't put a full time 20 man QA team on NWN patches anymore - so some quirks are definitly expected (i.e. the GetHasSpell thing) and they will be fixed.

GetHasSpell crash hotfix
++ This post is concerning patch 1.64 only ++ >I did some tests and it looks like this fixes the problem some people were experiencing under certain condititons using the GetHasSpells scripting functions in loops. I would suggest only to use this fix if you experience crashes related to scripts that use this function. I can't remember any instance in NWN where GetHasSpell is used with one of the few spells affected, so I think this problem is confined to special OnEnter/OnRest scripts used on some servers to reset spell use history on relogging players.


Short term fix:

Download this modified version of spells.2da:
http://files.gulbsoft.de/nwn/spells.2DA (URL case sensitive!)

and save as spells.2da into your servers override directory. This is a server only fix, clients do not NEED, actually should not, do this. Note that if you are running a hakpak overridding your spells.2da, easiest way to fix is to: - extract spells.2da from the hakpak
- copy and paste this version over the first 804 rows, leaving the rest as it is right now.
- reinserting the spells.2da into the hakpak

this fix is server side only, you do NOT need to redistribute your hakpak to the players. If you are unsure whether or not a certain resource is overridden, you can use the toolset's hakpak management page to find out. I haven't done a lot of testing on this, so use at your own risk. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused and thanks to everyone who helped to track this down!

1.65 Wishlists
Whohoo, return of the generic wishlist threads I see some good ideas in here, but I suggest posting those as individual threads so they can be discussed rather than getting lost in a stream of other ideas

PRC and 1.64

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They only have to bring us a patch to restore only the special abiltyes on pcs.

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This will not happen. There is a reason for this change and it can be worked around, the PRC people already figured out how.

Let me put this straight: Any functionality that is reliant on a third party program such as Leto is not considered by our patch process and can never be. If you read and write files from outside the game we can and will not guarantee that this still works with a new patch. If we would support this, we would rob ourself of the ability to make low level changes to address problems. Your option is to adapt or not to patch, there is no third option that involves BioWare ensuring compatibility with third party programs and there will never be. As cool as things like PRC are, they are operating far outside everything that NWN was created to be, so they have to expect a rough time with some of their stuff. Especially when using methods that have not been used by BioWare Design (such as the SpecAbilityList), you are walking on very thin ice. We may discuss the possibility to add some functionality to make things like the PRC stuff easier to implement in the future - we will see. Phew, I think I posted this about 30 times this weekend...

 

Could it be..... no, impossible.... would they have... I can hardly imagine... yes, this must mean.... they actually fixed the fact the morphed in item bonusses now stay when you directly shift from shape to shape. Woohoo, all rejoice for this splendid news, if this means actually that. Memo for self: should go check the list of the changes brought by the new patch.