Welp, I just completed Chapter One about thirty minutes ago, got my dorf fighter to level eight… woot! :-) The single player campaign has been hella fun so far, I’m playing the game on difficulty level 3 (hardcore) so it’s a bit more of a challenge than default but it’s definitely worth it… been in some battles that literally lasted 15 minutes solid. A part of it is point and click of course (like what game isn’t?) but there’s definitely an added element for tactical thought. Attacking the first group of monsters one may my be totally the wrong thing to do the next round, even if they’re the same type of monster. If you haven’t gotten this game yet, go get it now or at least order it, it’s a lot of fun and looks/sounds incredible.
On NWN server stuff – I’ve learned quite a bit about the dedicated server console over the past couple of days. I thought I had detected a slow memory leak with the server console executable but I may have spoken too soon… memory usage (and any leaks associated with it) appear to be more dependant on the module loaded than anything. Like before – the test server I have up was running Chapter Two of the single player campaign, which in hindsight was a bad idea… that very first room is FULL of NPC’s and that in turn with a lot of people joining just makes the game skip like crazy. As of today I’m running the first official custom module for NWN released by Bioware, called Contest of Champions, and it’s specifically geared for team-based PvP. You can grab the module here – http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/modules.html – just download it and unzip the files into your ..\nwn\modules folder, you’re good to go. I had fourteen people on at the same time with this module with eight that stays for a good amount of time… no memory leak (we had a lot of fun too, by the way). I also noticed that since this is a smaller module, the initial memory used by the NWN server console is less… and that goes against the norm as far as what I’ve experienced running CounterStrike and Quake3 servers. Another thing that I’m sure the rest of ya will be happy to hear about… I’ve recently setup the NWN server port to run as a service, and therefore it will restart itself in the event of a crash, and I also figured out how to get it to load up the right module during startup. Hands off is a good thing :-) So if you’re playing and the port crashes, just wait about five seconds and reconnect, done deal.
I’ll have my own PvP module up and running soon. Writing my first campaign will take some time I think, to do this right. I’m also gonna have to think about how to accommodate everyone that wants to play, because I obviously cant have everyone play the same campaign at the same time, or have them try and play ‘catch up’ with whatever becomes the main group. I got some ideas to make this work… I’ll fill ya all in on that later. That .asp calendar I coded into the site here may actually start getting some use… ;-) Just be sure to keep checkin’ back here often, I’ll let ya’ll know when things are gonna happen and how.
In closing – I got some more screenshots for ya to mull over, especially for those who haven’t gotten the game yet. Got some nice eye-candy for ya :-P Here ya go…
G’nite gang, see ya online.
K2