[MUD-Dev] Persistent worlds in NWN (was: Retention without Addiction?)

[Valerio Santinelli]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Matthew Dobervich wrote:
>> Sean Kelly wrote:

>>> There's been mention of some sort of DB support planned.  I've
>>> been pushing for just giving users the ability to add new
>>> functionality via dynamic libraries.  In the long run, BioWare
>>> is better off let users solve as many of their own problems as
>>> possible, and just giving them the facilities to do so.  But it
>>> remains to be seen what will be decided.

>> In essence the server's save game is it's database.  We don't
>> need Bioware to do this for us.  There is a large project
>> underway to create tools for direct database/savegame
>> manipulation.

> As Valerio Santinelli said, the best way to get data out of NWN at
> this point is a logfile dump.  And the only way to get data in
> requires taking down the server, patching something into the
> module file, and reloading the server.  This is a far cry from
> dynamic save/load capability.  If someone has hacked the engine to
> the point where they have addressed this problem, I'm all ears.
> But I personally won't be satisfied until I can transport live
> data in and out of a module without taking the module offline.

What you're looking for is the chance to connect to an external
database and save/retrieve data from there, or maybe be able to add
a custom DLL to NWN itself in order to do whatever you want with
your server. Although this is somethin that I would take into
consideration if I were at Bioware, they are not going to do
anything similar. At least not until they decide to write a new
engine from scratch. Have a look at NWN's postmortem at Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20021204/greig_01.htm And read the
posts made by the programmers at Bioware on their forums. They are
simply overwhelmed with other things and are striving to fix all the
bugs and make their game stay alive for more than a few hours. I do
not expect Bioware devs to do anything to help people make PWs. They
always said that NWN was not meant to be used to run PWs. It's been
that way from the beginning, even before they started working on the
product.

> This has other benifits as well.  Assuming we also are given an
> option to change descriptive text on items within the scripting
> language (another thing I'm pushing for), things like books could
> be created and altered while the game is in progress also.  Heck,
> custom items could be generated entirely in process.

This is something I would love to see. What I am asking is access to
any kind of external I/O. But I think that it would be much more
useful to debug NWN's server and hack their executable in order to d
such things than to wait for Bioware to do it for us. (I know that
disassembling other people's code is not legal, I'm only
exaggerating).

--
c'ya!

Valerio Santinelli
tanis at mediacom.it
HateSeed Gaming Magazine http://www.hateseed.com/
My Lab http://tanis.hateseed.com/
In Flames Italia http://www.inflames.it/
One Man Crew http://www.onemancrew.org/



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