Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition

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Irongron
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Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition

Post by Irongron » Tue Nov 21, 2017 1:39 am

Extremely important news on our homepage!

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Irongron
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Re: Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition

Post by Irongron » Tue Nov 21, 2017 10:25 pm

So, as promised I'm making a more detailed announcement after the stream, given I am now legally able to do so!

So, as was revealed we at Arelith had some hand in the final testing and feedback, and as a result I have been preparing for this for some time. I am extremely enthusastic right now, and despite the advance warning still feeling quite daunted. Whatever one's feelings towards Beamdog or level of enthusiasm for NWN EE this represents a huge change for Arelith.

For some time we have been the world's number one server for NWN, not least due to the outstand efforts of our staff. As a result of this we are as well prepared as we could hope to be, and hope to be seeing a great many new players.

The impact of extra players on our RP environment, culture, stability and overal level of enjoyment would be a very long topic in itself, but I can say I am deeply optimistic about what lies ahead.

So, to the facts then, so people know what we will be doing:

Arelith should be launching its EE server in the next few hours. This is an entirely new low-level server we have been working on in preparation for launch. When the game is formally released, and we migrate the main servers to EE this will be merged into our world. Characters both new and old will be able to continue playing, on what will be 3 Arelith servers.

This puts us at a limit of just below 300 players. It is very hard to judge just what kind of traffic we can expect, but if needs be we will then once again separate Cordor from Andunor, lifting our limit to 400.

With the new server we have 4 starting locations, so space to play should not be a problem.

As far as migration to EE is concerned, we will only do this when we are confident that we are ready to do so, and that as many of our existing players as possible have had the opportunity to purchase the game.

Now we've all been working hard on this, naturally, and I'm really pleased to announce the news, but my post wouldn't be complete without one further point.

For myself, and other team members our role in the developemnt of EE was limited to testing and filing bug reports/making suggestions. With one notable exception...

Some of you may have heard during the Beamdog Stream a shout out they made to our very own Scholar Midnight. In addition to doing so much for us these last 2 years, she has also been working closely with Beamdog for some time. I am aware that some of our players had thought her to be innactive, so I am setting the record straight right now.

We owe her an enourmous debt of thanks, not only for what she has done for us (for were it not for her we would not have been involved in this process at all) but for what she has done, and is doing for NWN in general. With the release of EE, and in preparation for it, she has outgrown us at Arelith, and as far as I am concerned now belongs to NWN itself.

So all the best for the future of our server, but also to her, and the great many other servers we may now see come to life. One of NWN's greatest qualities is that it can be so many things to so many people, and while I've been very glad of Arelth's success, the resurgence of NWN development by members of the larger community will benefit us all.

I'll invite Scholar and Dunshine to reply here also, when they get the chance.

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Liareth
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Re: Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition

Post by Liareth » Tue Nov 21, 2017 11:18 pm

I'll keep this fairly short. Now you all know what I've been up to over the last year - rewriting NWNX and then working directly on NWN:EE. With the game's announcement finally here, I have an announcement of my own to make: as Irongron alluded to in his message above, I'm going to be stepping away from module development. I'll be focusing my efforts on maintaining and developing NWNX and supporting NWN's development community. Nothing will change in the server's day-to-day because I haven't really been an active staff member here for a long while now, but I thought I should make it official anyway. Have a great evening everyone!

(also, ninja name change, to match my 'everywhere other than Arelith' name)

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Dunshine
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Re: Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition

Post by Dunshine » Wed Nov 22, 2017 9:19 am

It's great to be finally able to talk about this now in the open, I'm absolutely thrilled by the release of NWN:EE and what it will mean for NWN in general and Arelith specifically!

This will be an exciting and demanding time for us all! The devs/admins to arrange that our module runs smoothly on EE sometime soon. Our DMs/forum moderators, who will have a hugely increased workload with new players coming in. And also all you players, who will be tutoring a lot of new players into the ins and outs of Arelith and RP in general.

I think it's important to mention here, like Irongron did above, that a HUGE shout-out should go to Liareth (Scholar Midnight) here, for all the hard work done for not only Arelith, but NWN:EE and NWNX. She is an exceptionally skilled individual and we should be honored and very glad she's been on our team! Beamdog chose wisely to get her on board!

And while I'm at it, not every Arelith staff member is working on things that end up in the announcement thread, to be kudosed and cheered at. Which the ones that do, totally deserve ofcourse, spending their free time making great things for us all. But do realise there are others on the team that are working more behind the scenes, and therefor have less exposure, but also deserve our gratitude for the very same reason.

So ever since we were aware of the upcoming NNW:EE release, we've been working behind the scenes to prepare Arelith for it, and I'd like to thank the following people for helping out with that, in no particular order.

- Liareth (duh, see above)
- Beamdog Crew (for inviting us to the beta, and being very friendly and responsive to all our questions, we now have a very direct line to the core NWN team, which is fantastic)
- ActionReplay (for stripping our codebase of all nwnx stuff, so we were able to launch a test module for the beta-testing)
- Mithreas (for handling the Linux infrastructure on our server for NWN:EE, and helping getting modules ready for beta-testing, and just yesterday to get a temporary EE demo module up for Arelith, even though he's less visible, he's still very much helping us out here!)
- Sherincall (none Arelith, nwnx guru, who has been kindly helping out porting a LOT of nwnx functions from NWN 1.69 to NWN:EE, allowing us to keep our codebase mostly intact)
- (DM) Symphony, who turns out to be a jack of all trades NWN, and has been helping out where he can, be it as a DM on the test module, or in helping out the beta test team with graphic tech stuff I have no clue about, and he's a NWN ambassador in general reaching out to a lot of people in the community)
- Irongron (ofcourse, for pushing himself to the limits, to get new areas finished in time for the launch of EE).

I'm totally honored to be part of Arelith's fine crew and hope we have a bright and exciting future ahead of us with NWN:EE's arrival!

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Dunshine
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Re: Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition

Post by Dunshine » Wed Feb 21, 2018 6:49 pm

Like to add Glorwinger to this list above here, he's been helping not only us, but the entire NWN community with his Docker images and a new compiler for nss scripts.
And doubling up on Sherincall, who just keeps being a great help with any technical issues we encounter.

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Re: Neverwinter Nights - Enhanced Edition

Post by Dunshine » Fri Mar 30, 2018 2:09 pm

Now the migration is done, time to complete the list above of people helping out with it all.

Morderon - For handling a TON of script changes to fix things that no longer worked on EE.
DM Apollo - For creating an entirely new portal page
Cih - For helping DM Apollo creating an entirely new portal page
Liareth - Yes already mentioned above, but should get an extra mention for setting up our new servers and handling a lot of the tech side of things
And everyone else that helped out testing things along they way.

We're good to go now for another 15 years or so. ;-) Have fun everyone!

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