EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

OOC General Discussion

Moderators: Forum Moderators, Active DMs

How do you feel about Enhanced Edition and the Arelith's Migration?

I am unhappy with EE and want Arelith to return to 1.69.
8
4%
I am unhappy with EE and want Arelith to stay on EE.
47
26%
I am of neutral outlook towards EE and want Arelith to return to 1.69.
2
1%
I am of neutral outlook towards EE and want Arelith to stay on EE.
39
22%
I am happy with EE and want Arelith to stay on EE.
85
47%
 
Total votes: 181

Aelryn Bloodmoon
Arelith Supporter
Arelith Supporter
Posts: 2028
Joined: Thu Sep 11, 2014 4:57 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Aelryn Bloodmoon » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:15 pm

Bryce Silver-Wind wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 8:34 pm
I think what people need to remember, is that EE is only 6 months old. The game itself is older, but had just as many if not more hiccups very early on as EE does now, it requires patience and diligence and letting the Devs at Beamdog have the chance to make it work. I do think we jumped onboard a bit too early in personal ideals, but at the same time, I can understand why we did.
This sums up my feelings nicely. I've been having problems off and on getting NWN to run in a stable fashion throughout the years as I've upgraded machines, and as of my newest machine last year my game-play is much more stable with EE- less crashes, no FPS issues at all. The only thing that's gotten a little worse for me is my lag over time, which appears to involve something like 2-6% packet loss depending on the time of day. But I would occasionally have that issue before EE, as well, it's just a more permanent fixture in my life now.

As a silver lining, I've gotten very good at guessing what targets are going to do in the six seconds when the game "pauses," before "unpausing" and catching up in a flurry, and the server still seems to take commands during this hiccup.

These things said, I am not willing to hold Beamdog responsible for a lag issue that existed before EE.

There is more work to be done, but overall I am happy that people can now turn their game on and find Arelith to come interact with us again. To me, a centralized server list that people didn't have to go out and look for on google by itself was worth the 20 dollars (and that service itself costs Beamdog money to maintain, which is why 1.69 no longer had support for it).

Does this mean I don't want disguise fixed? Of course not, but for what I've gotten out of my 20 dollars so far, already well worth it.
Bane's tyranny is known throughout the continent, and his is the image most seen as the face of evil.
-Faiths and Pantheons (c)2002

User avatar
Vincent
Posts: 73
Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2018 10:04 pm
Location: Vault 13

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Vincent » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:19 pm

Aelryn Bloodmoon wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:15 pm
These things said, I am not willing to hold Beamdog responsible for a lag issue that existed before EE.
This issue never existed for me and many others pre-EE (referring to FPS issues in particular areas).

User avatar
Liareth
General Admin
General Admin
Posts: 1167
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:25 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Liareth » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:23 pm

The enhanced edition doesn't add much value for players outside of the initial install experience - which has been objectively improved, to their credit, making it seamless to download on Steam and start playing with a working master server and a client that has been modernised. Features like the seamless window resize are super convenient and I use them all the time. Some people don't like the new full screen effects, but I do - I think they make the game look very pretty, especially once you replace the high contrast shader with Symphony's tweaked version.

They rewrote the renderer, and in doing so broke performance in certain scenes and introduced game crashes on Intel hardware. I think the Intel crashes are BD's biggest sin. It is unacceptable that these crashes have persisted since launch. I appreciate the technical complexity in finding and implementing a fix, and I don't have all the details, but from the perspective of a consumer, and -especially- one of a product that has been sold as an enhanced version of an older game with improved compatibility for modern hardware, this is really an unacceptable state of affairs.

I thought the rewritten renderer was a good idea - after all, it exposed custom shaders to developers in a way that was natively supported by the game, which was a massive step towards modernising it. Visual effects that were otherwise impossible to accomplish could now be. Unfortunately, the feature was left half-baked, with first class scripting support unfulfilled and developer adoption (outside of our lovely Symphony) non-existent at this stage. I really hope this changes in the future, with BD expanding the feature and developers adopting it. It could be a game changer.

I don't blame BD for the disguise feature breaking on Arelith because it's not their fault. The functionality that enabled it was a NWNX feature in 1.69. It's unreasonable to expect BD to add everything that NWNX added into the base game - when Skyrim was released, did you expect Bethesda to officially implement every single mod the community had made in Oblivion? It's not the NWNX team's fault, either, because that team (disclaimer: I'm in charge of it) are volunteers who aren't on BD's payroll. The Arelith team can fix it themselves right now if they wanted to - they would need to write a very simple NWNX plugin to do so, but the team possesses the technical aptitude to do it. The Arelith team doesn't want to invest the time into a fix, the NWNX team isn't willing to commit to updating the Names plugin every patch, and BD are taking their time in accepting my change to add it to the base game. It's just one of those things that unfortunately has hit Arelith particularly hard.

The buggy state of each release is particularly disconcerting. Managing testing as a small kinda-indie studio must be challenging, especially for a game like this with such a swath of content to cover. I am sympathetic to the difficulties of doing this right. But I think they've clearly focused testing in the wrong areas - nobody, literally not one single person, should care about the OC - it's rubbish, everybody knows that. It's my opinion that people play NWN because of the multiplayer scene, and naturally that's where I think they should focus their testing. Host a module, play it a bit, do player things - open the toolset, do a bit of modding, make a new area - that's the best way to test, and doing that way would avoid these issues. In reality, I suspect they just do a full play-through of the OC each time.

Some features are excellent for PWs - nwsync (hak autodownloader for those who are unaware) will be another game changer when it lands, and its potential is truly staggering. Other features are useless. 64-bit support, for example, won't bring any real benefit to the consumer - it's a marketing buzz-phrase that is a requirement on android platforms. I have no doubt that is eating a lot of development time up - as is android support, which I personally believe to be a useless gimmick, but then again, I've always found mobile games to be shallow and uninteresting. Imagine if they'd instead invested all that time into additional functionality for developers, or QoL fixes for players.

In terms of the impact that EE has had on Arelith, I think moving as early as we did was an excellent decision. We had to fight through the teething issues - but we had direct support from BD while doing so, and we benefited directly from the switch - our player numbers increased between 30% and 50% from the migration. Switching over necessitated a new infrastructure setup, including hosting and continuous integration - which was not a product of the switch but a side effect that has improved server performance further and reduced the number of bugs that get through to the live servers.

I don't think BD are malicious, and I admonish people who cry "cash grab" as ignorant and short-sighted. But at the same time, I can't praise BD for how they have handled this launch. I think their heart is in the right place. Certainly they have done some good - they are trying to do the right thing, and have expressed an unmatched level of loyalty to the modding community, trusting a number of community developers - myself included - with access to the game's source code, as well as maintaining an active presence in most major Discord servers and offering direct one to one support to anyone who needs it. Some of their developers are incredibly dedicated and talented.

I think the problem is that BD are -disconnected-. They don't understand why people play NWN, and they are focusing their efforts in the wrong place because of it. There might be more to it - I don't have an inside view on BD's financials, but I suspect NWN was not particularly profitable for them. The lack of focus on things that we care about might be a business consequence of this. If there's no money to fix things, then money must be made before the things are fixed.

Either way, this is alienating the PW community - it makes us feel like we are unimportant and that we're being abandoned. It's not good. I hope BD realise this and take steps to improve it. It's my opinion that NWN isn't a game worth playing without the PW scene - it's a mediocre RPG, stuck in an awkward transition between old CRPG rules and modern action-based combat.

I think the thing that hurts me the most is the wasted potential. They could have taken this game and run with it from the get-go - truly innovating and improving, fixing old bugs without introducing new, even worse ones - if you'll excuse the Trump meme, they could have Made NWN Great Again. A lack of concrete focus and dedication to a core vision has hurt them. Jumping from one feature to the next and leaving a trail of bugs as they go has squandered what little loyalty they had in this community and bolstered the naysayers who proclaimed this all to be before it ever was. There's still time to fix it, but it'll take a renewed focus and some hard work.

tl;dr: I'm not very happy with EE's current state. I think BD are working on the wrong things and ignoring the right ones. They've done some cool stuff, but the implementation and presentation of that stuff has been lackluster, and consistently eclipsed by other issues introduced at the same time. A shift of focus onto real issues that hurt the day-to-day players would be welcome. The situation is salvageable if they put in the work.

Aelryn Bloodmoon
Arelith Supporter
Arelith Supporter
Posts: 2028
Joined: Thu Sep 11, 2014 4:57 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Aelryn Bloodmoon » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:32 pm

Vincent wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:19 pm
Aelryn Bloodmoon wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:15 pm
These things said, I am not willing to hold Beamdog responsible for a lag issue that existed before EE.
This issue never existed for me and many others pre-EE (referring to FPS issues in particular areas).
You are discussing a different issue from me- an FPS issue is choppy graphics, and is not the sort of lag I'm speaking of. I'm talking about the kind of lag involved with ping between player and host, where when packet loss occurs, information isn't sent from the host to the player so nothing happens on the screen at all until the connection picks back up- then suddenly everything happens at once and you hope you made the right clicks while nothing was happening.
Bane's tyranny is known throughout the continent, and his is the image most seen as the face of evil.
-Faiths and Pantheons (c)2002

User avatar
Vincent
Posts: 73
Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2018 10:04 pm
Location: Vault 13

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Vincent » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:39 pm

Aelryn Bloodmoon wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:32 pm
You are discussing a different issue from me- an FPS issue is choppy graphics, and is not the sort of lag I'm speaking of. I'm talking about the kind of lag involved with ping between player and host, where when packet loss occurs, information isn't sent from the host to the player so nothing happens on the screen at all until the connection picks back up- then suddenly everything happens at once and you hope you made the right clicks while nothing was happening.
Alright, well, if I am not mistaken this is simple server lag we've always experienced. Maybe I missed something earlier on but I don't think anyone is blaming Beamdog for that. The FPS problem appears to stem entirely from this Enhanced Edition release however.

User avatar
Mr_Rieper
Posts: 785
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 9:01 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Mr_Rieper » Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:10 pm

Liareth wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:23 pm
... tl;dr: I'm not very happy with EE's current state. I think BD are working on the wrong things and ignoring the right ones. They've done some cool stuff, but the implementation and presentation of that stuff has been lackluster, and consistently eclipsed by other issues introduced at the same time. A shift of focus onto real issues that hurt the day-to-day players would be welcome. The situation is salvageable if they put in the work.
What I'm most interested in, as a player, is what the tech wizards think is a reasonable time frame for all of this to get sorted out? Do you think we'll be waiting a year? Two years?

Two years might seem like a long time but I'll probably still be playing the game then.

Still, a guesstimate on how long it might take for EE to be mostly stable would probably relieve some of the tension. We can bellyache about slow progress but I think it's the act of staring into the development abyss that is making quite a few players worried. Giving a guess would be enough to fix that.
CosmicOrderV wrote:
Sat May 11, 2019 4:55 pm
Be the change you want to see, and shape the server because of it. Players can absolutely help keep their fellow players accountable.

strong yeet
Posts: 292
Joined: Wed May 02, 2018 9:09 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by strong yeet » Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:17 pm

I think Scholar/Liareth/rednamewhitedog really hit the money with her post, there's nothing she said that I disagree with.

1.69 was starting to show its age; disappearing robes, compatibility mode, all kinds of Annoying Little Technical Issues that for the most part don't exist anymore. The bad thing is that there are now a bunch more of annoying little technical issues, and nothing's been un-hardcoded like they said it would be, and the weirdly slow rate of patching -- prior to the last patch, the latest new version of the game was released in early July.

EE was absolutely a thing that needed to happen but the way in which it was done was pretty abysmal.

Brandon Steel
Posts: 147
Joined: Thu May 04, 2017 8:51 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Brandon Steel » Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:17 pm

The new players are really the only positive thing I can say about EE from my point of view. It’s completely unplayable on my laptop now and extremely laggy for god knows what reason on my desktop, then of course the amount of stuff that got busted when it switched over (some still being broken). I keep hearing the DM’s have better tools to work with so that’s cool I guess but I hear that quite a few also crash consistently so even that’s really an “eh”.

I just stated this in the other topic but I’ll say it again, I can’t believe that intel users are still mostly screwed out of playing the majority of the game after this long. The fact it was even released with intel cards being incompatible was ridiculous, six months later the majority of them still being incompatible is unacceptable.

I’m still hopeful that EE will be what we were all hoping it would be in the long run but wow Beamdog has not been delivering much so far. As Liareth stated they’re pretty much focused on all the wrong things in my opinion.

Regardless of my personal distaste for the EE reverting at this point would likely be horrible. As many others stated most of us have already shelled the 20 bucks and we’re “settled in”, even if it’s a painful seat.

User avatar
WanderingPoet
Posts: 759
Joined: Sat Apr 22, 2017 5:51 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by WanderingPoet » Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:39 pm

I'm glad we made the switch - we have a lot of great new players, Skal is a quite enjoyable starting zone (and just place to explore), we have per part colouring, eventual hak downloader(apparently?), fixes to quite a few bugs and issues, easy access to mods and overall a game that promises to be really improved.

Of course, this annoyingly comes at the sacrifice of disguise, being able to easily transition servers (though I don't even notice this anymore), and some people getting lots of lag or being unable to play (which is really unfortunate) - and a couple extra bugs that crop up from now and then. I'm disappointed that the game did generally take a step back, but the it's great to have all this new blood and new content - and the promise for more.
Path_of_Play wrote:Fear, intimidation, anger - All these, the tyrant's tools.
Laughter, encouragement, play - not simply just for fools.
These tools reveal,
More is learned,
From another in an hour of play,
Than in a year of contention.

User avatar
Irongron
Server Owner/Creative Lead
Server Owner/Creative Lead
Posts: 4666
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2014 7:13 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Irongron » Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:44 pm

Mr_Rieper wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:10 pm

What I'm most interested in, as a player, is what the tech wizards think is a reasonable time frame for all of this to get sorted out? Do you think we'll be waiting a year? Two years?

Two years might seem like a long time but I'll probably still be playing the game then.

Still, a guesstimate on how long it might take for EE to be mostly stable would probably relieve some of the tension. We can bellyache about slow progress but I think it's the act of staring into the development abyss that is making quite a few players worried. Giving a guess would be enough to fix that.
I think this is less about how much time something takes to code, but rather about what is appropriate in terms of cost & reward. A corporate entity whose very survival depends on calculating that effectively, and I think we can too easily forget that they operate in a very different place to volunteer enthusiasts. I'm not about to blame Beamdog for being a business, or chasing the dollars, and I'm in no position to judge what is their best strategy for growth.

Commercial and professional support for NWN is something a couple of years ago I would never have expected in my wildest dreams. Despite all our development efforts we knew that it was a battle against entropy. The potential future of Neverwinter Nights is now something very tangible -even now I still can't quite believe it actually happened.

The question for me isn't about whether Beamdog can do more, but to what extent we attempt we build around these issues.

With the 250 player cap we could revert a single server, mitigating many of the problems that come with crashing via transitions. We can pinpoint those areas that cause intel crashes or FPS drops and remake them to something that does work reliably. We can rethink disguise. We can take advantage of the placeable rescaling to make new landscapes and features in game. Most importantly we can continue to be discovered by those wishing to find a place such as Arelith.

Even if Beamdog were to drop their development support for NWN tomorrow (which they'd have every right to do) they have already opened up a host of new possibilites for NWN. The community has always done their best to build within the limitations of NWN, and while these limitations are now different I do not feel they are in any way more restrictive.

User avatar
Mr_Rieper
Posts: 785
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 9:01 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Mr_Rieper » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:03 am

Irongron wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:44 pm
... Even if Beamdog were to drop their development support for NWN tomorrow (which they'd have every right to do) they have already opened up a host of new possibilites for NWN. The community has always done their best to build within the limitations of NWN, and while these limitations are now different I do not feel they are in any way more restrictive.
Then I think the decision to upgrade to EE was a wise one. And staying on EE would be an even wiser one.

It was an uncomfortable decision and will be uncomfortable for some time yet, but I'm glad we have posts like these to acknowledge it and still remain realistically optimistic. Reflecting on things like this doesn't sound cheesy at all and has a calming effect on the anxious community.

The best we can do right now is probably to create some sort of survey or petition across all of the PW communities, and try to get Beamdog's attention on the most gamebreaking bugs, like the Intel problem. With Discord, it should be doable. If the PW admins and communities banded together to give strong feedback on the worst issues, we might see some shift in priorities. It's worth a shot.
CosmicOrderV wrote:
Sat May 11, 2019 4:55 pm
Be the change you want to see, and shape the server because of it. Players can absolutely help keep their fellow players accountable.

User avatar
Marsi
Posts: 549
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 11:34 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Marsi » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:07 am

Liareth wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:23 pm
The Arelith team can fix it themselves right now if they wanted to - they would need to write a very simple NWNX plugin to do so, but the team possesses the technical aptitude to do it. The Arelith team doesn't want to invest the time into a fix, the NWNX team isn't willing to commit to updating the Names plugin every patch, and BD are taking their time in accepting my change to add it to the base game. It's just one of those things that unfortunately has hit Arelith particularly hard.
It would be great if there was more information on contributing to Arelith. I have no idea how to contribute code to Arelith, and the process of becoming a contributor seems like a matter of being tapped on the shoulder. From what I can find, there's no public documentation of the infrastructure, skills required, best practices, opened issues, etc. What does Arelith need?

Why should the great bell of Beaulieu toll when the shadows were neither short nor long?


User avatar
Party in the forest at midnight
Posts: 1384
Joined: Thu Mar 29, 2018 4:55 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Party in the forest at midnight » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:11 am

I voted happy with EE, although happy might be a strong word. Base NWN doesn't run on my computer that well at all, it was extremely crashy and unreliable to play. I do crash with EE and get weird bugs, but it's nowhere near as horrible as it was playing base NWN. It was to the point where I had to play it on a laptop because that was the only way I could guarantee it wouldn't crash.

I haven't looked at the dev tools, I've heard they're good though. And I like that limitations of the base game are being lifted so the dev team has more open to them. I think that's the most exciting prospect. Like others said, I like what it represents and opportunities available. NWN's strength has always been its community.

My hopes are that they'll continue fixing things. I'm disappointed the disguise fix didn't go in this patch, ESPECIALLY considering they said "Oh yeah half hour fix it'll be in the next patch." But hopefully they'll get around to it, and fix all of the other EE bugs before they abandon the project and move onto something else.

User avatar
Liareth
General Admin
General Admin
Posts: 1167
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:25 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Liareth » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:23 am

Marsi wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:07 am
Liareth wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:23 pm
The Arelith team can fix it themselves right now if they wanted to - they would need to write a very simple NWNX plugin to do so, but the team possesses the technical aptitude to do it. The Arelith team doesn't want to invest the time into a fix, the NWNX team isn't willing to commit to updating the Names plugin every patch, and BD are taking their time in accepting my change to add it to the base game. It's just one of those things that unfortunately has hit Arelith particularly hard.
It would be great if there was more information on contributing to Arelith. I have no idea how to contribute code to Arelith, and the process of becoming a contributor seems like a matter of being tapped on the shoulder. From what I can find, there's no public documentation of the infrastructure, skills required, best practices, opened issues, etc. What does Arelith need?
Probably best to talk to Irongron about it. You need to be able to write nwscript, and if you want to get disguise working specifically, you'll also need to be able to write C++.
Party in the forest at midnight wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:11 am
My hopes are that they'll continue fixing things. I'm disappointed the disguise fix didn't go in this patch, ESPECIALLY considering they said "Oh yeah half hour fix it'll be in the next patch." But hopefully they'll get around to it, and fix all of the other EE bugs before they abandon the project and move onto something else.
They didn't say that, I did. The change got lost in limbo between patches because I submitted my change to them and then went on a bit of a WoW bender for a month, while they needed some further testing from me before I could merge it. We thought we were waiting for each other, and long story short, by the time I figured out it wasn't going in, it was too late to get it in for this patch.

User avatar
Party in the forest at midnight
Posts: 1384
Joined: Thu Mar 29, 2018 4:55 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Party in the forest at midnight » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:33 am

Liareth wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:23 am
Party in the forest at midnight wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:11 am
My hopes are that they'll continue fixing things. I'm disappointed the disguise fix didn't go in this patch, ESPECIALLY considering they said "Oh yeah half hour fix it'll be in the next patch." But hopefully they'll get around to it, and fix all of the other EE bugs before they abandon the project and move onto something else.
They didn't say that, I did. The change got lost in limbo between patches because I submitted my change to them and then went on a bit of a WoW bender for a month, while they needed some further testing from me before I could merge it. We thought we were waiting for each other, and long story short, by the time I figured out it wasn't going in, it was too late to get it in for this patch.
Ahhhhh, thank you very much! This means a lot, thank you for the communication. I'll pass it along to friends who are waiting on the fix as well.

User avatar
Irongron
Server Owner/Creative Lead
Server Owner/Creative Lead
Posts: 4666
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2014 7:13 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Irongron » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:53 am

The Intel thing, to me, looks like something we can fix on our end, though its not ideal.

We have about a dozen areas being frequently reported for this issue, and many of these share a common theme, all but one I have seen reported is using the 1.69 Castle Rural Tileset where many buildings are present, or they are using many 1.69 placables (namely the balconies) also part of Castle Rural buildings.

Remaking all of those areas in a different tileset, or stripping away resources/lights until they do achieve stability wouldn't be a fun use of a month, but is definitely achievable.

FPS drops can also be pinpointed, and accounted for.

Its really not ideal, but its interesting to consider that the issue here may not be Beamdog's upgrade as such, but due to further problems with the community content introduced in 1.69 being exposed.

This is something that from our side we've been aware of since long before Beamdog came along, and had to work around. Horses would cause massive FPS drops, 1.69 placeables would not properly align, and perhaps most interestingly a ballista was included that if placed in an area would cause servers to repeatedly crash. I have to not only ensure no contributor ever uses this object, but also that no DM attempts to use one as part of an event.

The OC doesn't use any of these resources, and is by accounts perfectly stable on EE. These bugs only began being reported to Beamdog in earnest once players were attempting to play on server using the 1.69 content.

Just because they caused less of an issue on 1.69 doesn't mean they weren't possibly broken to begin with. It may well be by simply improving the game - those resources that weren't broken, they highlighted those that were.

This is all really complex stuff, something that even a studio the size of Bioware had to abandon. The good news is that I am largely certain we can fix this, and in doing so isolate the root of the problem. I'd just really rather not....

User avatar
Irongron
Server Owner/Creative Lead
Server Owner/Creative Lead
Posts: 4666
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2014 7:13 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Irongron » Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:03 am

To be clear on the proposed changes to mitigate the reported problems, I'd need to do something like this:

Entirely replace Cordor Farmlands & The Cordor Outskirts, using the old 1.69 rural tilest.

Strip out all 1.69 placeables from the Cultural, Government District and Earthkin Village.

Remove the Temple of Bane from the Minmir Hills.

Remove/heavily curtail mist effects in a variety of areas.

Merge Arelith into a single server (perhaps 2)

Track down the location any further reported crash/performance issues and adjust them accordingly.

User avatar
Mithreas
Emeritus Admin
Emeritus Admin
Posts: 2555
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2014 3:09 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Mithreas » Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:20 am

You could revert to an older Cordor pretty quickly, if it's causing significant ongoing pain for people right now. Main thing to check would be that any new quarters and shops are ported back into the old areas.

As a first step, though, facilitating reporting of graphics issues might be helpful? If people can "tag" problem areas with a -lowfps command or something, so we can see which areas get reported? Or do you feel we already know where the problems are?
xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a screen resolution of 1024x1.For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.

User avatar
Hunter548
Posts: 1869
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 5:40 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Hunter548 » Wed Oct 10, 2018 2:38 am

Sencliff's exterior also has issues akin to the Cordor Outskirts.
UilliamNebel wrote:
Wed Feb 12, 2020 10:24 pm
You're right. Participating in the forums was a mistake. Won't do this again.
Anime Sword Fighter wrote: I have seen far too many miniskirt anime slave girls.

Dr_Hazard89
Posts: 901
Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2014 9:06 am
Location: Australia

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Dr_Hazard89 » Wed Oct 10, 2018 3:33 am

Extending the life of the game (if true) and eventually the haks are what would keep me playing EE over 1.69.
Characters: Xun'sali (ACTIVE), Tianae Tymeaneldth (Rolled), Sylali (Rolled), Magpie (Rolled), Ker'uanna Tymeaneldth (Rolled), Lepota Poklona (Rolled), Andariel Bloodletter (Shelved), Tahl'tril Cyredrretyn (Rolled), L'omithiel (Shelved).

good man of god
Arelith Silver Supporter
Arelith Silver Supporter
Posts: 175
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2015 12:26 pm
Location: United Kingdom

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by good man of god » Wed Oct 10, 2018 11:49 am

I am personally unhappy with EE, its crashes, and general downgrade from 1.69

That said, I want Arelith to remain on EE, we as a community can weather the storm, like we did with 1.69.

It is clear Beamdog aren't doing much here to assist, and as its said, we've bit the bullet now.

Yes, I am disgruntled, annoyed, but EE CAN do great things for us. So let's make it.

Previous:
Tornius Daressin
Matthew Daressin-Gravelle
Asvusha (Blake Lynk)
Sebastian Webster

Current:
Inkwell Thornwhisper


Nulstarius
Posts: 144
Joined: Sun Sep 21, 2014 8:07 pm
Location: Denmark, Copenhagen.

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Nulstarius » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:25 pm

I like custom content. Arelith always had the best. So this line of what Irongron wrote is my biggest overall concern.
The chief difference for the server, the staff, and myself, is that where in the past we could work alone to improve, develop and maintain Arelith on Neverwinter Nights, we are now increasingly reliant upon a third party. Rather than fix bugs and improve performance ourselves, we now must to make requests for that to be done on our behalf, and are no longer able to make any guarantees to our community. For their part Beamdog have been helpful and enthusiastic about Arelith and the relationship, I feel, is worthwhile.
The update thread has been so quiet lately, and it seems we have people willing and able, but any change presently needs beamdog. This simply brings me down, and I can not approve of how the ability for individuals to make their own custom world stuff have been severely limited.

I don't have any connection problems or the like, in fact my game runs better, fewer crashes and such, so I do very much like the support side of EE, and would not want to go back. I am however, very worried that a lot of people, (how many I wonder? half of us? less? more?) can't access certain maps, and likely just will stop playing cause it can ruin their experience and their story. "Yay, I'm an arcane tower mage, or a cordor guard, but I always crash here, I'll just stop playing". This is a major issue.. What's the point of so many new players if their first impression is, "woah, this is unplayable".. They are not likely to stick around or return.

But I hate that our benevolent overlords can't just fix the bugs and performance issues themselves anymore. I have to say that is just absolute nonsense, and makes me loathe beamdog quite a bit. Why would they even do that, makes no sense, unless they plan to spit out more horrible expensions with more thigns they then have to fix. I really do not like how Arelith can't fix its own problems anymore. This is detrimental to the server.

Is there any hope this will return to how it used to be? that this power can be restored to the creators? Because if we are forever stuck waiting for beamdog to fix -everything-, I'm not sure I can stomach that.

As for disguise, it works, even if no floating names, I've not had trouble with it at all. Sure you might have to friendly remind people ooc now and then. But it does work.

Uh and all those mists presently on the shadowplane are a bit overkill, I always angle my camera so I'm below the highest mists, or you can barely see anything. Could definitely try a few less there :)
Last edited by Nulstarius on Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Albert Einstein.

User avatar
Dalek Caan
Arelith Supporter
Arelith Supporter
Posts: 313
Joined: Mon Sep 22, 2014 1:20 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Dalek Caan » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:26 pm

There are a few things that annoy me with EE (for example that I have a beastly PC which still drops to 15-20fps in some places), but generally, it's cool.

There have been rough patches over the years:

The server being filled to the brim and lagging so hard that you would have to wait around 10 seconds or more for a crafting dialogue to open.

Laggfest-horses of doom.

Server-splits, and a major load of other things.

To me, the game has improved generally, fps drops usually only happen in crowded or very elaborate areas with a many lights and audio-sources (Arcane Tower comes to mind). Fortunately enough, these are all areas I can live with having low fps, since they're non-hostile for the most part. Having at least 40fps in pvp would be nice, but it's not, by any measure, a dealbreaker to me.

I just really, really hope for the hak-autodownloader to happen sooner than later. I really wanna model custom stuff and do custom audio and... But I digress.

@Liareth, doesn't a 64-bit structure massively help the servers since they can access more data blocks at once? Maybe I misunderstood the concept ^^

User avatar
Liareth
General Admin
General Admin
Posts: 1167
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:25 am

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Liareth » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:55 pm

Dalek Caan wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:26 pm
@Liareth, doesn't a 64-bit structure massively help the servers since they can access more data blocks at once? Maybe I misunderstood the concept ^^
That you think it will help servers is proof that the marketing is working! :)

64-bit support allows the client to use more than 2GB of RAM. The client doesn't even use a third of that right now so the change won't make any difference. There are a few technical details about the switch - 64-bit has more registers available so complex things can be computed more efficiently, but the pointer size doubles from 4 bytes to 8 which can hurt the cache and inflate memory usage. On a tightly optimized mathematical application I might expect to see a 15% performance increase. A 64-bit Neverwinter Nights will probably use more memory and have the same performance.

User avatar
Dalek Caan
Arelith Supporter
Arelith Supporter
Posts: 313
Joined: Mon Sep 22, 2014 1:20 pm

Re: EE and the Arelith Migration - 6 months in.

Post by Dalek Caan » Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:06 pm

Liareth wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:55 pm
Dalek Caan wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:26 pm
@Liareth, doesn't a 64-bit structure massively help the servers since they can access more data blocks at once? Maybe I misunderstood the concept ^^
That you think it will help servers is proof that the marketing is working! :)

64-bit support allows the client to use more than 2GB of RAM. The client doesn't even use a third of that right now so the change won't make any difference. There are a few technical details about the switch - 64-bit has more registers available so complex things can be computed more efficiently, but the pointer size doubles from 4 bytes to 8 which can hurt the cache and inflate memory usage. On a tightly optimized mathematical application I might expect to see a 15% performance increase. A 64-bit Neverwinter Nights will probably use more memory and have the same performance.
Got it, thanks :-) I was wondering, could the graphics engine of NWN:EE be rebuilt or replaced, theoretically?

Because... pretty graphics and good fps. <3

Post Reply