Avlis NWN EE news! (Countdown to Sat, Oct 01)

[Ronan]

Avlis players! We have an announcement! This year, NWN Avlis marks its 20th anniversary....
We are pleased to let you know that we are almost ready to transfer to Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Our goal is to transfer fully to Enhanced Edition by late July in October.

What does this mean?
> You will need NWN: EE to play once we've swapped over. All of our Avlis modules (areas) will be transferred.
> You may continue to play on our current servers until the swap!
> We will benefit from all of the things EE has to offer, including an easier ability to implement certain custom content, and less crash-likely modules.
> We are working hard to make sure your characters and their custom races/AMS/etc. will transfer, but we may have to transfer characters one by one due to database items.
> We will hold special launch events after transfer!
> Although we would like to re-connect to CoPaP when a method is identified and other CoPaP servers are transferred, we will have to temporarily shut down the portals when we do the transfer.
> We will have a beta EE server coming up once it's ready! This will be an OOC area; more details will be available on this once we have it ready for you.

Please watch for more announcements in the coming months.

Our thanks to Gorgon for his fundamental role in realizing the Avlis EE project.

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[Katroine]

Wow, that is great news!
And a lot of work, well done!

[tindertwiggy]

[tindertwiggy]

Woohoo!

[scaylz]

That's tremendous!
Hats off to everyone who has been putting in the huge amounts of work to see this happen. Really looking forward to seeing how EE impacts the customizability of our content as well as our possible access to a larger playerbase.
Awesome!

[Rudiki]

...crap.

[Hamlet]

While specifics are still up in the air, by all means post general questions/concerns in the Ask the Team forum. It could well be something we haven't thought about!

Special thanks to:

Gorgon - For paving the EE path

krackq - For toiling away

Buddha - For all the haks

& to every Avlis player who contributes through Paypal donations. We literally cannot do this without you.

[PlasmaJohn]

Congrats!

[downsystem]

I had a feeling Gorgon was working on it in a not-so stealth mode due to some of the Discord chats I had with him.

[Darkfire]

[Jedisniper]

Wooohoooo!!!

[Darkfire]

I've had a couple questions "What is NWN:EE?" and "Why is this good?"

What does this mean?
> We will benefit from all of the things EE has to offer, including an easier ability to implement certain custom content, and less crash-likely modules.

For starters this is NOT a new game. NWN:EE is not like say, NWN2 was. NWN:EE is a remastered version of NWN. They took the as-we-know-it NWN, fixed a ton of issues, updated the graphics to work better with modern computers, and unlocked a lot of things that were previously "hardcoded" (things in dev land that mean "we literally can't customize it because it's how the game is coded".) A lot of those hardcoded things are now opened up to custom content creators creating virtually endless possibilities vs what we had access to. Limited really to our creativity.

Some of the biggest things to me as a dev is a functional toolset on top of all the other cool stuff. It takes 10x as long to do basic tasks simply because the toolset is old and it does not function well in new operating systems like Windows 10. A project that should take only 5-10 minutes (create, save, test, modify, save, test) could take 30 minutes to an hour right now. That is extremely valuable IRL time that I and other devs don't have. We end up spending time waiting instead of creating wastes time and leads to burn out.

Think of it like NWN is the original Wizard of Oz on VHS in black and white and NWN:EE is the DVD/Blue-ray remastered version in color. It's still the same movie.

[Buddha]

Think of it like NWN is the original Wizard of Oz on VHS in black and white and NWN:EE is the DVD/Blue-ray remastered version in color. It's still the same movie.

This is our NWN, on steroids. One small example is all of the base game staves (staffs) redone by the community (by creator Miqail) using all the material options now available for models in EE:

[Katroine]

Those staves...

[Gorgon]

This is our NWN, on steroids.

That's a great example of EE changes that players may not see for a while, but are pretty amazing.

When Avlis switches, there won't be a lot of differences right away. The game itself will install and run better on newer hardware and operating systems, and there are some nice improvements here and there, but nothing will really wow you at first. I'm looking forward to the auto-downloader (nwsync), which will mean no more haks for players and things updated all the time without hassle. It may or may not be available right away, but It'll be nice when it is added.

The real nice stuff is what builders, scripters, and custom content creators can do now with the game. Those redone staffs are just one example of what is possible. Even the game interface (UI) itself can be changed, and new windows and things can be added for whatever people need.

All of that new stuff needs people to do the custom work though. Finding some new tileset or set of models on the vault doesn't get those things used in-game without someone making areas or adding the encounters. Sounds like a perfect time to apply to help Avlis!

[Nighthawk4]

Does NWSync allow for overrides and custom portraits?

Does it remove old stuff as well as add new?

[Gorgon]

Yes, you can override the files in nwsync. This has the custom content order list, and the portraits folder and development folder are both higher than nwsync content.
NWN:EE Content Load Order

I'm not an expert on how nwsync works, but I'm assuming it compares file hashes to see if you have the same version used by a server, and updates as necessary. I'm not sure when it would remove any files, since you may use them on any world. Maybe it keeps track of where they are used and cleans up any that are not used at all, but that's just me guessing, so don't trust it. I'll know more after setting it up here for my own testing, if I have time.

There are also some client settings you can tweak, but I've not messed with them yet either. The few times we've used it when connecting elsewhere it just did its thing and we played (which is how it should be).

[Nighthawk4]

Thanks Gorgon.

Interestingly, some of those are different than we use currently. Still, plenty of useful reading matter whilst we wait, patiently, pacing up and down, wearing a groove in the carpet, etc.

Edit - NWSync files limited to 15MB? That might be fun. It refers to hak and tlk files, not mod

[Hamlet]

Best start "how do I EE" question threads in NWN General Discussion forum, as needed.

[Nighthawk4]

Best start "how do I EE" question threads in NWN General Discussion forum, as needed.

Good idea

[Buddha]

This is our NWN, on steroids.

That's a great example of EE changes that players may not see for a while, but are pretty amazing.

Truth. Get the current incarnation working. That's the task right now. Once it's all up, running, and smooth, and once nwsync is working, things like those staves can just start to POP in with a quick update when you log in. That's when I'm gonna be in hog heaven.

[downsystem]

Think of it like NWN is the original Wizard of Oz on VHS in black and white and NWN:EE is the DVD/Blue-ray remastered version in color. It's still the same movie.

This is our NWN, on steroids. One small example is all of the base game staves (staffs) redone by the community (by creator Miqail) using all the material options now available for models in EE:

Talk about some increasing Casters intimidation factor. Do they get a bonus to intimidation with the new staves? lol

[Caydo]

Hi folks,

I wanted to share an FAQ page that Beam Dog (the company that made NWN: EE) put together some time ago regarding NWN 1.69 (the version everyone currently plays Avlis with) and EE. It can be found here:

https://store.beamdog.com/nwn_faq

It's not necessarily going to be exhaustive to everything that is an unknown at the moment. However, it should shed some light on various particulars that may be encountered. One section of note is the "Persistent World FAQ" bit.

Note that things are still in the works, so having this handy as a bookmark or to give a general perusal of to be more in the know, is fine.

TL;DR
No action is needed on your part, just sharing a link to an FAQ that might be useful for everybody for the eventual NWN: EE switch.

[downsystem]

Was wondering if Avlis planned on using NWsync?

"NWSync is a custom content loader for persistent worlds that runs Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition server. It allows players who want to play on a server that relies on custom content (content that is not part of the official distribution of the game) to download the content directly while connecting to the server from the game.

Before NWSync, custom content had to be distributed manually, requiring players to download .hak and custom .tlk files and putting them into the game folder.

Beside simplifying the process of downloading the content, NWSync also solves the problem of redundant content that player used to download when playing on different servers that however partly use the same custom content files. If one of the servers already requires a file X, this file will not be downloaded when attempting to connect to a different server that uses the same file."

https://nwn.wiki/display/NWN1/NWSync

I didn't get the impression that was the plan, but I thought it interesting since I know Avlis has a lot of custom content.

[Darkfire]

Was wondering if Avlis planned on using NWsync?

"NWSync is a custom content loader for persistent worlds that runs Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition server. It allows players who want to play on a server that relies on custom content (content that is not part of the official distribution of the game) to download the content directly while connecting to the server from the game.

Before NWSync, custom content had to be distributed manually, requiring players to download .hak and custom .tlk files and putting them into the game folder.

Beside simplifying the process of downloading the content, NWSync also solves the problem of redundant content that player used to download when playing on different servers that however partly use the same custom content files. If one of the servers already requires a file X, this file will not be downloaded when attempting to connect to a different server that uses the same file."

https://nwn.wiki/display/NWN1/NWSync

I didn't get the impression that was the plan, but I thought it interesting since I know Avlis has a lot of custom content.

Not sure where you got that impression from (it's talked about in the thread) but yes, there are plans to use it.