320 réponses à ce sujet

[Kaldor Silverwand]

Dark0ne- wrote...

Yes, we're platform agnostic. We also support the 96% of our visitors who are Windows users (2% are Mac users, for your information) with an additional program to make modding easier for them. It doesn't mean Mac users can't use the site as well, they just can't use NMM.
...
We have two download methods; automatic through NMM, and manual download as you would download off the Vault. If I were to make a site to support NWN it wouldn't have NMM support for a long time, so you'd be downloading and installing your mods the same way anyway.

Statistics don't mean too much. Of course there are a larger number of PC's being used to play games. That is after all what PC's are good for, playing games. But there are certainly a decent number of Mac players out there who are likely using Windows to access your site, possibly because they are running Windows games in BootCamp by necessity not choice. If all you provide are Windows specific tools then you arent going to attract Mac users or you are going to force them to run Windows when accessing your site, further skewing your statistics.

I've already seen game sites that allow you to purchase and download digital games uring a Mac, but then they require you to download and run their Windows specific exe.  Platform specific tools should be optional, not required. The web should be platform agnostic. It sounds like your tool is optional and direct downloads can still be done, so I'm fine with that.

I would consider uploading my content, of which I have quite a bit.

Regards

[MokahTGS]

 I think the biggest thing to understand is the difference between the modding being done for NWN 1&2 and that of other games.  For games like TES, or DA you see a lot of modding being done that add to the core game and not a lot of modding that add new adventures that are separate from the original SP games.

With the NWN series of games, the modding community took the opposite approch and spent the lion share of their time modding with new, separate adventures that do not depend on the original campaign.  Most of the custom content created for the NWN games was created, not for use in the original campaigns, but for use in new, user made adventures.

The main affect of this is you have a large, thriving PW community, as well as several enormous SP module projects in progress.  These generally take longer so you see lesser file traffic, but this does not mean that there isn't anything going on.

As far as community, these boards, and the IRC chat are it as far as discussion boards, which is pretty much the fault of the game companies that produced the NWN games.  Bioware got absorbed by EA and then they wrecked the community forums, so a ton of the community jumped ship and never found their way here.  The NWVault forums have always been a haven for spammers and trolls and no real community effort surfaced there.

A nexus site for NWN 1&2 would be a great boon for the community and would allow people to see what is really going on...which is a lot for such an old game series.

[painofdungeoneternal]

The other thing is your NMM development, you really have no idea what this community can do.

Darkone, can i get info on how to download the latest source of NMM, might be able to review it and basically include such features into my own program, or put my features into your program, or get it running via mono. Might mean we don't have NMM but another compatible program which is more tailored towards our community.

[casadechrisso]

... which would be awesome, pain!

[woofgirl]

May I politely suggest that people go to the Nexus site and endorse the request that they open a NWN2 forum? The thread is under "Feedback, suggestions and questions", can't miss it. I joined their forum (under a different name) just to do that. I'm not asking that we clog their forum with requests (probably aren't that many of us) but just to show that there are people besides modders who think this is a good idea. I've been with this game since the start (under a different name) and am tired of feeling like an orphan. The community needs a real home.

[Dark0ne-]

You can grab the NMM source code from our Source Forge page here. NMM is completely open source (under GPL) because I think it's a bit hypocritical to support modding communities and the open sharing of files and resources, and then come up with a resource that you won't share with others..! So feel free to take a look.

NMM has not been developed with just Bethesda games in mind, at all. We have every intention of supporting all the games that we host mods for, just right now we're spread really thin trying to fix bugs (and Bethesda keep presenting us with more problems by changing things). I'm told that getting Dragon Age support in to NMM, for example, wouldn't be difficult at all for someone who knows that they're doing. So there's no reason that the same wouldn't apply to NWN.

If you want to talk about getting NWN in to NMM then let me know. Obviously, from my perspective, getting NWN supported in NMM is way more beneficial to me than a custom solution outside of NMM. It'd also mean the integration with the site and one-click download ability would work. I could incentivise such a project with a bit of money as well.

----------

I was aware that the NWN modding community was more focused on PW world and large module stuff, but I guess I was just niave to the fact that extremely large works, like the IWD converstion were still being cranked out even now. So, I knew what the community was about, I just didn't know how active it still was.

Modifié par Dark0ne-, 05 mars 2012 - 11:08 .

[painofdungeoneternal]

Dark0ne- wrote...

If you want to talk about getting NWN in to NMM then let me know. Obviously, from my perspective, getting NWN supported in NMM is way more beneficial to me than a custom solution outside of NMM. It'd also mean the integration with the site and one-click download ability would work. I could incentivise such a project with a bit of money as well.

Yes that is kind of what i am thinking about as one avenue, but don't know a lot about how your NMM works, and I'd really want to figure out a way to support both linux and mac - and both NWN1 and NWN2 ( and features would also work with games derived from those engines too ). Regardless of how i did it, i'm thinking it could communicate with your server in the exact same manner and perform the same tasks.

If i ( or someone in this community ) were to develop that, well it would solve some problems for me and my mods as well since while i know they work, they happen to be a bit too complex for end users to install properly without generating lots of tech support questions. We have some merging projects which are more akin to coordinating things, and quite a few PW's are using content i have prepared already, and really my goal would be a central source where users can install everything at once ( assuming it's different things ) and the tool would effectively merge it.

Here is the question, if i got that set up, would it be worth it for you to do a site for NWN2 and NWN1 even though it might not be comparable to the popularity of skyrim or dragon age, nor would it really compete with the vault.

[MokahTGS]

We're stealthy that way...

[casadechrisso]

painofdungeoneternal wrote...

Yes that is kind of what i am thinking about as one avenue, but don't know a lot about how your NMM works, and I'd really want to figure out a way to support both linux and mac - and both NWN1 and NWN2 ( and features would also work with games derived from those engines too ). Regardless of how i did it, i'm thinking it could communicate with your server in the exact same manner and perform the same tasks.

If i ( or someone in this community ) were to develop that, well it would solve some problems for me and my mods as well since while i know they work, they happen to be a bit too complex for end users to install properly without generating lots of tech support questions. We have some merging projects which are more akin to coordinating things, and quite a few PW's are using content i have prepared already, and really my goal would be a central source where users can install everything at once ( assuming it's different things ) and the tool would effectively merge it.

Here is the question, if i got that set up, would it be worth it for you to do a site for NWN2 and NWN1 even though it might not be comparable to the popularity of skyrim or dragon age, nor would it really compete with the vault.

Actually, not exactly related to your post, but another argument why I think a Nexus site would be great for advertising things: I've never been aware of how far you got already with your launcher until yesterday, when I found this thread. I'm actually quite excited about what you did there (the window could use a more modern look but that's nitpicking!). Anyway, the simple reason is I never look into the plugins forum anymore, either because I'm mainly interested in haks or toolset or because I think I have all the toolset plugins I need... anyway, just saying, this stuff gets developed, there is community activity, but it's really hard to find it sometimes even for a regular player like me. Stuff like that or Skywing's work (I'm actually aware of that at least!) could really use a bit more attention and advertising.

As for the integration of your launcher, I'm wondering how it could be merged into NMM, not only from the technical side (I'm no progrmmer but I know .NET isn't cross plattform), but also by design. The only thing I could think of is running it like some kind of plugin, using NMM mainly as the launcher for it?
The basic layout of NMM is of course made for the Bethesda games that have completrely different features and ways to handle the mods, I wonder how NWN could be integrated into that design... the plugin idea is also mainly for the integratioin of other systems, people who play in Windows could launch the NWN launcher via the NMM, while Linux and Mac use it as a standalone application. Just brainstorming here, don't mind me if I'm talking rubbish.

[Kaldor Silverwand]

Ironically, and only slightly off-topic, Yahoo! has announced that they are dropping supports for the Yahoo! Widget Engine (Konfabulator) and will be dropping the Widget gallery effective April 12. For those who don't know, Konfabulator is a product first developed on the Mac and then ported to Windows that allowed easy development of cross-platform HTML/Javascript based widgets that run on your desktop. Yahoo! bought the shareware product from the developer (and hired the developer) and released it for free. Over 6000 widgets were developed by the community, most of whom were just individuals wanting to contribute. This got the attention of Apple, Microsoft, and Google and they all developed their own copycat but platform-specific solutions. Yahoo! provided a gallery so that authors could upload in one place and users could download in one place. They built in functionality so that when a widget was downloaded it would automatically install and make it very easy for the users. Using the gallery meant you could keep count of downloads and have comments and ratings. It was all good. And on April 12 it will be all gone.

Mark Twain wrote that the man who said you should not put all your eggs in one basket was a fool. Instead, I paraphrase, you should put all your eggs in one basket... and WATCH THE BASKET! (his emphasis).

Yahoo! provided a basket for widget developers, but now the basket will be gone and all 6000+ eggs along with it, and probably the forums with years of knowledge as well.

Bioware provided a basket for NWN2 knowledge that included years of content and that is gone.

The Vault provides a basket for NWN and NWN2 mods. If it dies, as some are suggesting it will, then what happens to all of that content? Does it just vanish like the Widget Gallery and the Bioware forums into smoke?

Nexus may provide a basket. If they do, then great. But since it is a basket we would not own, then perhaps we, as modders, should demand something from them to protect our content and our community in the event of its demise or changing interests. I don't know what that would be. Perhaps tools that would allow us to retrieve content and comments in some automated way. Imagine if Bioware had provided a means for their forum content to be downloaded en masse and then imported into the new forums or made available as a standalone resource.

Right now though, with the news of the demise of Yahoo! Widgets, yet another developer community I contributed to biting the dust in a self-destructive fashion, I am hesitant to put my eggs in yet another basket, no matter how appealing it might sound, without some assurance that my efforts will not be in vain and that something will be salvaged when the inevitable dark day comes.

Regards

[casadechrisso]

Kaldor Silverwand wrote...

Nexus may provide a basket. If they do, then great. But since it is a basket we would not own, then perhaps we, as modders, should demand something from them to protect our content and our community in the event of its demise or changing interests. I don't know what that would be. Perhaps tools that would allow us to retrieve content and comments in some automated way. Imagine if Bioware had provided a means for their forum content to be downloaded en masse and then imported into the new forums or made available as a standalone resource.

I honestly don't believe that we as the NWN community are in any position to demand something from the Nexus at all. This is a chance for this community that might or might not be given to us, and it's on us to make the best of it if we get it. The Nexus sites can live long and prosper without caring in any way at all about the NWN folks, and they owe us nothing. Also, it's not meant to be an immediate complete replacement for everything. This forum will still exist, the Vault will probably not go offline within the next weeks. We might have the chance to get some sort of empty building set that is a Nexus subsite and would operate like all the other Nexus subsites. If we get the chance to have this, it's on us to make something out of it, and it would be Dark0ne helping us out, not the opposite. Do also keep in mind that the Nexus is not a commercial site owned by a big company, it's Dark0ne's home and entirely for (and driven by) the game communities. I think befiore we start nitpicking here and tell Dark0ne what he should do for us, we should rather think about what we can make out of what we'd get.

[M. Rieder]

I think that the only way to guarantee that we have a "vault" is if the community puts up the cash and operators and we do it ourselves. Until we have that, we must rely on either commercial companies or people who are interested in supporting gaming. I think that we would really be pushing things to "demand" anything unless we are doing it ourselves.

[painofdungeoneternal]

Its all going to be dust eventually, just because a lot of tech has gone into history does not mean we should just give up and not engage in new things. I can guarantee you that the vault won't be around forever, nor will the nexus, and all of us will move on at some point. The best defense is diversity, and for each author to also maintain their content backed up, and for users to back up things they care deeply about.

However this seems like it might be a good idea, but like ANYTHING in this community, it is only as good as we in the community makes it. This games success had nothing to do with Atari, a bit to do with bioware and obsidian, but even they were minor compared to what the community did.

[Tchos]

Dark0ne- wrote...
I don't want to be doing this alone, though. I'm not an "insider", I haven't been in this community and I don't expect to be accepted as knowledgeable in the NWN field, because I'm not. It would be great if we could discuss how we could get the word out on mods a bit more. Perhaps an informal reviewers guild who could write reviews of mods as news posts? Something to ensure a flow of new information, even if it's about old mods?

Ah, I see what you're asking for.  You want people to contribute news posts for the Nexus front page to spotlight mods.  I can contribute to that.  I've already written illustrated reviews for perhaps a dozen NWN and NWN2 mods in the past few months, and I continue to write more as I play them.

Modifié par Tchos, 06 mars 2012 - 07:05 .

[Kaldor Silverwand]

painofdungeoneternal wrote...

Its all going to be dust eventually, just because a lot of tech has gone into history does not mean we should just give up and not engage in new things.

I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that before we as a community decide to embrace something and abandon something else (and that is really what we are talking about because over time the modders are not going to post content in both places regularly and users aren't going to look in both places regularly), the people who run the thing we embrace should provide some information about what the exit strategy is. If there is no documented exit strategy then we should know that up front and request one as early in this process as possible. It could be as simple a thing as a feature that allows authors to extract their content and accompanying comments/replies in a standard format like XML so that there is at least a possibility of migrating.  I don't see this as nitpicking because the end is inevitable. Maybe Nexus already has such a tool for modders. I'd like to know.

Regards

[Tchos]

Speaking for myself, I am going to post my content in both places, and I am going to continue to look in both places for new content, as I do with Dragon Age: Origins.  There's no reason not to.  There is different content at the two places, due to a difference in policies and other factors.

[Arkalezth]

And what's the Vault's "exit strategy"?

[Fezzik1]

Howdy folks,

I  just bought the game recently. As someone new to the game, I wanted to share how cool it is to see all this content and the support that still exists for this game. I've been pulling stuff of the nexus (er ... nwn2 vault) and there's a lot of good stuff there, but it's sometimes hard for a newbie to know what's what when the postings under a given mod are several years old. The reason I spoke up is ... it really makes the game much more attractive to me to have all this great content right there waiting and to know there are still folks around who can (and more importantly WILL) help out. Easier and/or more access to NWN community stuff is big plus for those of us just starting out.

Fezzik (soon to be "Lost in Translation")

Modifié par Fezzik1, 06 mars 2012 - 10:38 .

[MokahTGS]

 Just some reality checking here so we keep things on a level headed plane:

• No one said the Vault is going anywhere.  The Vault will most likely be around as a source for NWN 1&2 content for many many years.  That is not the issue.  The Vault is unable (read Maximus) to add NEW content/features to the site because of budget/company constraints.  This is not up to us to fix.
• Neverwinter Nights 1&2 as a building medium is not going anywhere anytime soon.  It offers too much in one package that no other game can compare too.  Debate as you will, but you know I'm right.
• The Vault is currently having issues with accounts and content not uploading correctly.  This is being worked on, but it is only being worked on by one person with limited time.
• No one from the NWN 1&2 community is demanding anything from anyone.  We are exploring options, based on troubles with community features for the NWN games.  This is not just related to the Vault files.  It also includes the disappearance of the old forums, and the broken nature of the current voting system.  The community has suffered greatly because of a lack luster community hub.  This is the issue.
• The current NWN community does not have the capability of creating the needed systems to support itself and possibly grow (yes, I said grow.)  Hosting, forums, community linking, advertisment of projects, all is very complex and I believe beyond what we as a community of builders can supply without an outside source.
• The Nexus sites offer everything this community needs to opperate and thrive, all in one place.
• There is a perception that there is not a NWN community, because we are spread over many locations and the work tends to be different then other moddable games.  This is proven wrong by a little research.  DarkOne himself did not realize how active we were until he did a little digging.

I've been a member of the NWN community since before day one.  I was a beta tester for both games, and an avid builder for both.  Hell, I made the first graphic logo for Lilac Soul's script generator, just to show my support.  I founded the AME.  I've been the solution too, and the cause of, many of the controversies in this group.  I know this community.  

I know how building works and how others activity inspires more building.  If we aren't seen, then nothing happens.  New players often don't even know the Vault exists.  How many threads have there been of newbies asking if there was this or that available in the community?  Quite often we are quick to point them in the right direction, but the Vault is not the best tool sometimes for finding material...especially older material.

We aren't demanding anything from DarkOne.  We are asking for help, becuase in my ever so humble strumpet opinion, we would be better suited with it than without it.

[Kaldor Silverwand]

Withdrawing my concerns. I'm sure it will all work out for the best.

[Shaun the Crazy One]

Thank you Mokah, you are absolute right in every way shape and form. The quantity of content between what is uploaded to the vault and the number of PWs that are still active only line is unmatched, but the community is fragmented. I also like the idea of resurrecting our reviewer's guild. I for one volunteer.

[NWN DM]

I lack resources outside of some available funding within reason, and am interested in helping.

[casadechrisso]

Just for the record, I'm interested in helping where I can - I'm just not playing many SP-modules, so reviews of those are not my speciality - I devoted most of my NWN time into multiplayer. Also, my time for this varies much. I'm still intrerested in helping where I can - spread the word, make an ad, uh... upload my two haks, review some CC... I could also be persuaded into becoming a premium member for a while (can't afford much luxury, but as a thank you for some time I could manage)

[Dark0ne-]

Worked on the design today. Don't bother trying to use any of the functionality as it won't work.

Let me know what you think.

[slowdive.fan]

Wow...this really may happen...that is awesome...i have a few modules ready for uploading including IWD NWN2 ;-)