So ... I used to build ...

[walpurgisknight]

I started on these little PWs, one on NWN1 called Folderol and another on NWN2 called KOW. I also did private games on neverwinterconnections.

And recently I got bored with all the other things I do during downtime and opened up the NWN1 toolset. I made some stuff and found my skills had improved once the rust fell off. So, I went to the NWN2 toolset. I then figured out things I hadnt gotten to yet, like how to set campaign variables and make stuff persistent. I can also like totally read all the scripts in the toolset and figure out what each line is doing with no problem. Woo. Too bad I hadnt gotten that far back in tha day.

But I'm having fun using stuff from my fictional setting material to build a world. I was wondering if other people knew crap about how to set up a cheap server and other junk. I can figure out the tech stuff, but Im not savvy on hosting. Just askin. Good way to not get too much cabin fever during January and Feburary.

Have a happy new year!

[Maecius]

Once you build the module, you need to decide whether you're going to host it locally (on your own server) or through a rented server.

We use a server farm to host BG:TSCC -- basically a company from which you rent a server for a monthly fee. We've found it convenient because it's low maintenance for us and it allows multiple people remote access to the server and its utility tools. Endelyon (my co-admin) is also able to call the company or open up a help ticket and ask them to do things like hard reset the server if there's a problem and, say, I'm at work or sleeping and I can't do it myself.

Hosting it yourself has its own benefits, though. For one thing it's usually cheaper once you cover the initial cost of purchasing the server. All you have to do is pay your electricity bill.

After you decide how you want to host it, you then start putting it together. I think this is probably a good starting point to give you some general starting information:

http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/PW_Admin_Roundtable_Library

Though if you have specific questions, Endelyon, Aspect of Sorrow, and a half dozen others here can probably help you answer them. This forum is a good place to post such questions: viewforum.php?f=22

[walpurgisknight]

Thanks! I just enjoy making the mod, its a stress reducer (yeah I know that sounds weird), helps me develop my fantasy setting bkgrd concepts, and is helping me brush back on the scripting logic. I'm aiming at getting proficient with blender/unity at some point, but I'm a creative jack of trades - so I discovered I'm better off going with the flow rather than rigid plans.

Ill check out that thread. Do you mind telling me how much the monthly fee or whatever it is to rent your host service?

[Maecius]

Our hosting costs:

Total Hosting Costs: $114.12/month
- Server Hosting Costs: $104/month
- Forum Hosting Costs: $10.12/month

We've also had to pay a little extra for DDOS protection, lately, but that's usually not an issue for a new server just starting out.

Server's can be much cheaper than $100 a month. Our server is big. Like GBs big. If you need less processing power than we need, you can probably shave quite a few dollars off the hosting costs.

You can also start with a free forum, of which there are dozens. But I'd recommend eventually going to a hosted forum. It provides you a lot more control and security.

[walpurgisknight]

Thanks for the information!

It'll take a while to make anything of note anyway. So that's down the road past the visible horizon, but its good to know.

I took these screenshots just because:

It just mellows me out to make this stuff. The links are from my steam profile so theyre safe.

DDOS attacks sux. That's why I had to have no internet for a few months. But it saved my laptop. Startup passwords ftw.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... DBDC7DE7B/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 8B60A50B4/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 09EF118A8/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 603AE911F/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... A865DB673/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 20F629267/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 416A31D9B/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 2EBA8DA70/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 1B6137D47/
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... 6F87F014F/

[Aspect of Sorrow]

Newer chipsets don't always mean better, the 4790K still reigns supreme in single core applications such as nwserver even at stock speeds (highest IPC), your TDP at load will still match all the others even if you were concerned with power efficiency metrics (~90W), the process benefiting better from desktop chipsets than it does Xeon class, which can help your dollar investment. That said, opt for an SSD (or M.2 if able) running the server in directory mode with the NWNX enhancements such as xp_fastboot and xp_bugfix, 8GB of RAM, and you should be good to go at a price point of around $600 of an initial investment. Ship the hardware to a colocation like Joe's Datacenter for $40/mo and enjoy.

Keep in mind, all the hardware in the world won't help if you author code that impacts performance significantly. Learn the fundamentals of ASM, hook a debugger, and you can self tune as you go.

[walpurgisknight]

Newer chipsets don't always mean better, the 4790K still reigns supreme in single core applications such as nwserver even at stock speeds (highest IPC), your TDP at load will still match all the others even if you were concerned with power efficiency metrics (~90W), the process benefiting better from desktop chipsets than it does Xeon class, which can help your dollar investment. That said, opt for an SSD (or M.2 if able) running the server in directory mode with the NWNX enhancements such as xp_fastboot and xp_bugfix, 8GB of RAM, and you should be good to go at a price point of around $600 of an initial investment. Ship the hardware to a colocation like Joe's Datacenter for $40/mo and enjoy.

Keep in mind, all the hardware in the world won't help if you author code that impacts performance significantly. Learn the fundamentals of ASM, hook a debugger, and you can self tune as you go.

Thanks! By 'fundamental of ASM', do you mean the basic concepts of how all codes are assembly languages? My actual first script language was BASIC when I was a teen. I self-educated to some degree back then too, especially with peek and poke. I also know that loops are things to minimize as they are the primary cause of 'memory leak'. I think that using delay commands also has the same impact, since any delay command is basically a looper. I'm guessing this might also be why big areas and areas with a lot of objects in them impact performance too, since the whole physics of redraw derived since games like DOOM are also loopers.