423 réponses à ce sujet

[henesua]

And since we are talking about things that we can take action on, I would like to make some general proposals:

• Restart  CEP as an inclusive, community-wide initiative using for the time being the WIKI recently set up for documentation, and the BSN boards as our point of communication, and neverwintervault.org as our file host. (neverwintervault.org may naturally evolve as the primary place to do all of this since it seems to have all the functionality we need and will be the place where we host the files and I think that is fine.)
• CEP changes its focus from a single project (the latest CEP set of HAKs) to a mission, that being to organize and make accessible NWN custom content for the wider community of players and builders. Perhaps the language or the precise mission can be stated better or changed from what I have written, but please consider the idea that CEP has a mission rather than a single product.
• Allow all members of the community to participate in the intiative as they please rather than controlling membership. If you participate in the initiative, you are welcome to take part. Its that simple.
• The broad initiative contains and supports many projects and purposes to meet its mission: documenting CEP1 and CEP2 projects, curating the files for them, and so on. Curating all of the CEP1 and CEP2 project on neverwintervault.org for example would be a good task to take on, as would encouraging documentation of CEP on the WIKI.
• Specific project teams within CEP however have the right to manage membership of their specific team however they wish. Project teams would be groups of people that work together to produce CEP product. So a team for improving CEP 2 for example seems to already be forming with The Amethyst Dragon as the leader, adn that group will naturally operate as it needs to to get its project done. When the project is done members of the CEP initiative will help support the project, by curating the files, writing installation guides for NEWBs on the wiki and so on.

So thats my rough, general proposal for the time being. Make of it what you will. Its all entirely negotiable, but the core of the thing that I think would work well is that CEP becomes a broad initiative working to organize and make available NWN custom content. And by custom content I mean art assets etc... Not things like scripts, or prefabs or modules or any of that. But instead things like HAKs, overrides, portraits, music or any of these other "art" assets.

Should such an idea be ammenable to enough of the community to get it rolling, and should we have the blessing of Amethyst Dragon I'd like to start talking about projects that happen within this initiative.

• Obviously the first project is to improve CEP 2.  lot to say here, but TAD has it covered. Talk to him about it.
• A minor project would be to provide minimal support for CEP 1. - Create a project page for CEP 1 on neverwintervault.org. Upload all of the CEP 1 content. Advertise this as the official location so that everyone can find it. Migrate existing documentaion of CEP 1 to our WIKI (or whereever we decide is the best long term location for CEP documentation). And other related tasks so that people can find CEP 1, understand how to use it, and perhaps even have a list of prominent modules and related legacy projects that make use of or work with it, or any other similar task in support of CEP 1 so that it doesn't feel like some lost useless thing.
• A project I would liek to see and work on: the CEP Facelift Project - (unless a better name is found). One goal of the project would be to compile a Patch HAK of facelifts of default content. Another goal would be to advocate for a separation of custom content into optional and required content when playing a module, and to try to get projects like CEP 2 to work with us on this, and cull overriding from their HAKs so as to lean them up and enable players to decide what overrides they use. Again all of this is negotiable, but my goal is to provide support for non-technical players that want a facelift package for the game wihtout having to compile one for themself. And considering that tastes are different I could see this project producing themed facelifts. The goal of the project however would be to organize this content and package it, rather than create stuff specifically for it.
  

Anyhow that is a lot to digest, and I do have a PW to build. So its time I stop talking about things, and get to doing them. All the above are things that I would like to see happen and to participate in. I anyone is interested in this as well, and the broader community agrees that its a good idea, I'd like to get to work on it.

[Mecheon]

meaglyn wrote...

Tarot Redhand wrote...
CEP 3 - A New Hope

Eveyone knows it's "CEP 4 - A New Hope" 

I think you mean

CEP 4 - The One with the Whales

(I can't resist that joke. Ever)

I am liking the look of Hen's ideas there, and give me a bell when some of the revamping comes along. I've been eying that Vorlon for a while and wondering the best way to get into something nicer looking...

Modifié par Mecheon, 15 janvier 2014 - 12:45 .

[Tarot Redhand]

AD does this mean that you'll be moving on from being in charge of the ccc? (No I do not want the job thank you very much). It's the 15th and last month's hasn't been released to the screaming hoards yet.

TR 

[The Amethyst Dragon]

I didn't plan on abandoning the CCC.

I could have sworn one more thing was coming in for Dark Sun. I'll check the list today. If there's actually nothing missing, then I'll upload the stuff tomorrow.

I'll be mostly offline all day today...I need to finish converting NPC stats for the Temple of Elemental Evil to 3rd edition for an evening D&D session with my older kids.

[leo_x]

MerricksDad wrote...

This is of course all hypothetical since I have not yet finished the GFF/TLK/2DA overlord, and I don't see one currently available, especially one that would take external to-do lists.

But imagine the power...

There are at least a handful of open source libraries that can modify all these formats already: Elven's nwn-lib (Ruby), Skywings NWN2 data library (C++), kivinen's tools (Perl), Neveredit (Python, but needs some updating), PyNWN (originally my port of nwn-lib to Python2.7, without the DSLs and with GFFs abstracted away, docs), and probably in Dragonsong's stuff (Delphi). There is also a NWN2 dll that exposes all these file formats (not sure it can be redistributed).

Sorry if it's off topic at this point but it's sad to see a lot of work (potentially) falling by the wayside.

[Pstemarie]

Mecheon wrote...

meaglyn wrote...

Tarot Redhand wrote...
CEP 3 - A New Hope

Eveyone knows it's "CEP 4 - A New Hope" 

I think you mean

CEP 4 - The One with the Whales

(I can't resist that joke. Ever)

<Chortles...>

I just got these two references...

[Nevercallmebyname]

Wait, If i'm understanding this correctly, The CEP is going to become an Omnihak consisted of every smaller hak?

yey

I have a suggestion regarding creatures if that is the case.

[henesua]

I simply posted a suggestion for what I think CEP should become, but so far I am hearing crickets. So I do not know what will come of my proposal above.

So far TAD is the only one that appears to be doing anything. I however am interested in putting together a facelift compilation.

[Bluebomber4evr]

I like the idea of fixing/improving CEP 2. There's a lot of broken stuff in there, or things that would be almost usable if not for glaring bugs.

The giant slugs with the mile-high wire-frame box/hitbox/whatever you call it:
...is just one example.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Ok, I had typed up a really long reply for this thread, but decided it was too much, would be taken wrongly anyway, and likely would not accomplish much.

From a previous "manager" of a cc team for NWN, I can tell you flat out that a BIG project, most especially one aimed at fixing OTHER folks bugs, will never survive. Too much heartache, too many folks want to create NEW not fix that old stuff.

If you decide that you think you can repair CEP 1.x, or 2.x or 3.x and maintain compatibility with each, you will never achieve it. It is just too big a project and folks always end up just moving on to create new stuff anyway.

Best bet, forget "adding" to cep or q or anything else. Simply create top haks of whatever content you wish to add and be done with it. You will of course inherit the huge bug list from whatever version of cep you choose to create a top hak for, but at least you will already have a huge set of 2da's that can be edited and added to to get whatever content you wish to add to work with the old stuff which every single PW owner insists on having.

Set your sites MUCH MUCH lower, you might actually get it completed.

Democratically vote on such and such, define that smaller goal, if, and that is a big if when dealing with volunteer cc folks, IF/when that smaller goal is accomplished then take on the next small project. Don't start with a huge list of bugs to fix, as no one will ever complete it, and 99% of your cc folks will just go back to creating NEW stuff anyway... that is where the fun is for cc folks.

You will need a real site to host your team though, attempting to do things here, where Bioware has already removed a great deal of previously available options and has stated that the entire "Projects" section is soon to be gone... you have no one to manage the forums, most specifically to create new sub-forums etc. A huge project requires a huge amount of communication, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth again... Bioware/EA won't let us do that here.

[Nevercallmebyname]

Instead of telling people to give up and go home, have you considered encouraging people to stick with their projects long enough to finish them?

[Mecheon]

The Amethyst Dragon wrote...

I didn't plan on abandoning the CCC.

I could have sworn one more thing was coming in for Dark Sun. I'll check the list today. If there's actually nothing missing, then I'll upload the stuff tomorrow.

I'll be mostly offline all day today...I need to finish converting NPC stats for the Temple of Elemental Evil to 3rd edition for an evening D&D session with my older kids.

Sorry, its been the hottest week down here for the last 109 years or thereabouts. My thoughts have been elsewhere

Check your emailbox

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Nevercallmebyname wrote...

Instead of telling people to give up and go home, have you considered encouraging people to stick with their projects long enough to finish them?

I never said nor implied "Give up and go home".

What I said was to REDUCE your expectations, take it in smaller chunks.

I managed the Community Tileset Project for about 5 years or so.  That group started with a very easy to state, yet impossible to accomplish goal of repairing, updating and releasing 40 tilesets for NWN.  Sounds simple enough doesn't it?  30,000 tiles later, we released a total of 11 full tilesets, and one reskin. 

What I AM stating is that if you set a goal of repairing everything in cep2.x, you will lose most of your cc folks long before the repairs are EVER finished.  CTP burned through 20 or so tile artists over the years... they all joined thinking that it would be easy to accomplish, and that it would give them time to also work on their own custom content.  The members that left early all left because they wished to spend their very valuable time and energy creating NEW content instead of fixing all the bugs that existed in the various Bioware tilesets and tilesets from the vault.

Here, everyone is discussing merging multiple projects into one supermerged combination of haks.  It is very unlikely that will be accomplished, just the merge alone will require multiple people to spend long, hard, hours/days/weeks/months of work just to get the 2da's to merge without causing game crashing bugs and without adding aditional bugs into the total.

I am a realist, the reality is that a huge project like what is being discussed needs to be

1) voted on by the individual contributors (the community vote doesn't matter as much as the votes of the folks doing the work, except that it gives a bit of clarity of what the community may wish for)  This will not be a single subject vote either.  But you have to start with the scope of what the project will be.
2) The actual work will have to be assigned and worked on by the members of said team.  Just look at how long it takes each release of the custom content challenge, few have been released within the following month of whatever month was being worked on.  These are typically small, individual custom contents created by various authors in whatever spare time they have.  If it takes them 2-3 months to get a small project out the door due to time constraints, just imagine how long it will take with a full project.
3) The team will need a set of forums to work with/behind however you wish to state it.  It can't be done here as no-one in the current community even has ban privaledges much less the ability to create new forums and sub-forums etc.  You can beg all you want, heck we tried for over 18months to get the admins at EA to assign new moderators here... none were ever assigned.  So, you need a host somewhere else.
4) The team will need a location to share files.  Someplace that is not really public, IE only team members can access to share the files in work, THEN you need a public site for hosting the results... fortunately there are places for that aspect now.
5) You need a list of actual bugs... and more importantly even that a simple list, is you need some way to track a reported bug all the way to it being squashed.

Heck, I am not going to re-type that original message I had here again, but the list of things to accomplish just to get this team started is huge enough.  Now, add whatever bugs that were, are, or will be found and assigned.  There are thousands of them in cep2.x alone, I haven't checked Project Q in a while, typically their releases are cleaner, however they are not fully compatible with cep which just adds another layer of complexity.

ALL of this can be accomplised, but it will NOT be accomplished if you start out with such a huge project/goal of making the entire world a better place.  Instead, start at your closest street corner, and help the elderly get across a busy street safely, before you start building and rebulding the entire US Highway system.

Oh, you can make the overall goal to be "Make all content work together", but that goal isn't even possible.  Some content can be modified to make it work with others, but sometimes it just will not work.

The more things you add to that list of what you want done, the sooner you will see how unlikely it is that any of it would ever actually get released.

So, again... take SMALLER STEPS.  There is not a single member of this community that can do everything, despite whatever their personal ego says.  Dreams are nice, but they only exist in whatever fantasy world thought them up.  Making them into something real takes time and effort, and if you already have your time split to take care of a family, work, take care of your dog/cat/fish/monkey, create some content that you personally wish to see added into NWN, there really is not much time left over to go find and fix the bugs that someone left behind when they got fed up with the nwn community and the nwnengine and walked away.

I know, I have tried it.  I have the scars to prove it, I have busted up backups of a huge portion of the CTP project, I have pieces of junk that must be kept around to play NWN because everysingle pw out there uses CEP so I am forced to waste space on my hd to accomodate stuff that never should have been added to begin with.

You also have to remember that cep2.x has already EXCEEDED the maximum number of uti's for the aurora engine.  You can NOT add more without overriding something else. (There goes backwards compatiblity) Fortunately, the engine allows you to organize things in a way that does NOT force items to be immediately followed by the next item in a given set etc, you can renumber and point to whatever location that item may be, or go the horrendous route of loading a fake item and then painting the correct one on top via the toolset.

Aurora is old, yes it can be pushed, the community has pushed it far beyond what Bioware thought was even possible.  However, it is a 16bit app, it does not recognize a 32bit processor, so it can't use the full power of our current 64bit, multi-core systems.  It crashes a lot. 

Anyway, I am NOT saying "don't do it", what I am saying is that you must take it in smaller chunks.  Maybe, just maybe, you could get something released in less that a year that way.  It will NOT be the lofty goals already stated in this thread. 

[Pstemarie]

Removed as it added nothing of value to the conversation - a nasty habit I seem to have gotten into lately. But now I've taken up cigars and all is good in the world!

Modifié par Pstemarie, 17 janvier 2014 - 10:57 .

[KlatchainCoffee]

Bannor Bloodfist wrote...

Anyway, I am NOT saying "don't do it", what I am saying is that you must take it in smaller chunks.  Maybe, just maybe, you could get something released in less that a year that way.  It will NOT be the lofty goals already stated in this thread. 

I don't think anyone here thinks it would be 'quick and easy'. But then again, CEP has been in limbo for a while and yes, even just cataloguing all the bugs is a huge job, let a lone fixing them.

In some ways this is like building a 'state of the art' PW  (and how many of those never got to launch point?) - if a large number of people get together and everyone (not just 1-2 people) maintains their presence and does their bit - it WILL happen.

So we seem to be heading back to the question - do we fix what we have or do we create something new that's backwards compatible (e.g. the modular setup, leaving the buggy/obsolete stuff in a 'legacy segment'). Do we really need to fix every single bug in CEP, expecially on sub-standard or unfinished components?

I believe it would be easier to decide what to do with this 'big pile of stuff' - which path to take on fixing or re-arranging it -  if we knew exactly what was in it and what state it was in.


Edit:

Bugs that I am aware of off the top of my head:

- owlbear has an enormous 'signt distance', which can and has caused serious problems as it turns it into an all-seeing terminator.

- some large crystal placeable appearences (ripped from a certain tileset, I blieve).

- I think everyone knows about the broken pigs appearences.

Also going through appearences, both placeable and creature, shows a lot of 'reserved for future use' slots.

Modifié par KlatchainCoffee, 16 janvier 2014 - 01:57 .

[Pstemarie]

Bluebomber4evr wrote...

I like the idea of fixing/improving CEP 2. There's a lot of broken stuff in there, or things that would be almost usable if not for glaring bugs.

The giant slugs with the mile-high wire-frame box/hitbox/whatever you call it:
...is just one example.

Stuff like that is caused by the point of origin being waaaaaaay off for the model. Easy to fix.

[Tarot Redhand]

Never mind cataloguing the bugs being a huge job, just cataloguing all the contents is the huge job that needs to be done so that you know what to call the things with the bugs in the first place.

TR

Modifié par Tarot Redhand, 16 janvier 2014 - 03:16 .

[Estelindis]

Exactly. I don't think Bannor is trying to discourage people, just sharing some personal experience in the hope that the project can have a realistic scope. No one who has been burned out on a big project wants others to suffer the same.

[Shadooow]

Henesua, I dont think a facelift is something that should be added to the cep. Same as new tilesets, classes, spells, scripts. Which some of those CEP2 already added :/ .

CEP was never "expansion" and cannot be imo. Any expansion must be much much smaller scope without changing original content (which NWEnhanced unfortunately did).

[Proleric]

@Henesua - I pretty much agree with your points 1-5 (too long to quote on my current device) but the rest of your post is too complex for a simple yes/no. TAD mentioned a series of polls - some simple binary questions would be easier to handle.

[henesua]

ShaDoOoW wrote...

Henesua, I dont think a facelift is something that should be added to the cep. Same as new tilesets, classes, spells, scripts. Which some of those CEP2 already added :/ .

CEP was never "expansion" and cannot be imo. Any expansion must be much much smaller scope without changing original content (which NWEnhanced unfortunately did).

ShaDoOoW, I'm not following your reasoning on this. Perhaps you got things reversed?

• The CEP packages have always been about expansion of custom content.
• And facelifts/overrides are never about expansion, but instead improve the game's base graphic assets (meaning the stuff that Bioware released).

So are you saying that since CEP has been about organizing graphic assets that extend the game, overrides/facelifts should not be part of it?

Given my proposals above - that CEP change from being about one product, to a group with the mission of organizing Custom Content for the wider community, and that CEP projects should be modular, and interoperable - I don't understand why you have a problem with putting the CEP brand on a Facelift package.

Perhaps I haven't been clear enough:
Any CEP project I work on will be a stand-alone project which will work with any other CEP project. Meaning that it would NOT be added on to a monolithic, all or nothing download like CEP 2 is. The CEP 2 all or nothing approach was a mistake which I do not want to repeat.


I do however agree with you on your side-point that rules changes, game behavior changes, and the like should never be part of a project like CEP 2. If the were optional add ons, I have no problem with it. But to make such things integral to a generic custom content compilation is idiotic. And thankfully CEP 2 - as far as I know - has precious little of this.

As far as whether ERFs of scripts to help builders use the CEP content should be made available, I think that if a CEP project team wanted to maintain such a thing, more power to them. But yes, no scripts should be included in HAKs. Thats a terrible decision that leads to headaches for a scripter.

[henesua]

Proleric1 wrote...

@Henesua - I pretty much agree with your points 1-5 (too long to quote on my current device) but the rest of your post is too complex for a simple yes/no. TAD mentioned a series of polls - some simple binary questions would be easier to handle.

Proleric, before any of my project proposals happen, we need a quorum of agreement on my points 1 -5.

Points 1 - 5 don't require anyone do any work, but they do require that a bunch of people who want to be part of a new CEP team get together with the understanding that CEP is now about a specific mission instead of one product, and is inclusive rather than exclusive of the community. Thats the basic gist. Its a significant change from the current setup, and we need enough people to support it and participate for it to happen.

As far as the projects I mentioned which could happen under such an organization, that really depends on what people want to do. If CEP was reorganized as I describe, people could simply break out into teams and start working on projects that they want to see happen. I think TAD is already on the CEP 2 bug fix project. And I created a wiki page to get started with identifying CEP2 stuff needing fixes. As far as I am concerned, anyone interested in that should talk with TAD. I don't think there is anything further to discuss about it in a general sense. That team needs to lay out some tasks and get to work.

As far as my desire to compile a facelift package goes, it won't happen under the CEP name if people generally disagree with Points 1 - 5.

As far as I am concerned silence is disagreement or lack of interest or simple uncomprhension. Anyone of those situations means "No" to me, and thats fine if it is the case. That said. I strongly think CEP needs a radical new direction, and think my proposal (Points 1 - 5) are the best to be put forth in this entire thread. Otherwise the vision is simply to double down on the status quo with the belief that more effort will solve the problem. I think more effort can get CEP2 fixed, but in the long run I don't see success as far as what CEP's default unspoken mission has been - to give users of NWN access to as much custom content as possible.

Modifié par henesua, 16 janvier 2014 - 06:12 .

[YeoldeFog]

I am a builder, I am definately not a creator of custom content, so this is from a builders point of view. Well, -my- point of view because I can't speak for all the builders out there.
I don't use CEP because I think it's cluttered with a lot of low quality content. It's an old project, so I can't really blame it. That is simply my main concern about CEP, and that there is too much broken stuff as mentioned above.
A fixed, updated CEP? Sure, but I must agree with Bannor Bloodfist. Will this be possible? First, all that content needs to be updated, and that sounds like a huge project, making it work with everything. Then, people shall use it. That is - building a brand new module with the brand new CEP. When is that going to happen? Will NWN still have all those players around when that module is finished, taking advantage of the brand new CEP?

I don't want to halt or discourage anything here. But as a builder, I would like something different, something else... and that is smaller specialized chunks of content (let me call it modules) that are compatible with each others. Every module should have it's own specialized content, and it can  be combined with any other module.

Let me explain what a module could be.

A module could for example be a set of quality content of trees (placeables). Search the vault, find the best tree placeables and put it in a hak. Make a 2DA with specified lines that easily could be merged with any other module. Or if trees seems to narrow and specific, make it "foliage" and add bushes and grass there aswell.
 
Then make another module called "Walls and Pillars". Search the vault for the best walls and pillars and put it in the hak, and make it compatible with "foliage". Same goes for head, cloaks, arms, legs, items, placeables tiles, orcs, swords and holdable items!

Now before someone screams that I have hijacked this thread - what I wanted to say was. Take one chunk from CEP at a time, as bloodfist suggested, and finish it before you move on to the next chunk. And inbetween every chunk of work, content creators could add some brand new trees, or brand new walls to make it fresh and living.

This is what I would like to see, and I think that is something I could use while I'm still around.

Modifié par YeoldeFog, 16 janvier 2014 - 06:59 .

[Pstemarie]

ShaDoOoW wrote...

Henesua, I dont think a facelift is something that should be added to the cep. Same as new tilesets, classes, spells, scripts. Which some of those CEP2 already added :/ .

CEP was never "expansion" and cannot be imo. Any expansion must be much much smaller scope without changing original content (which NWEnhanced unfortunately did).

Now we're going to drag NwnE into it? Really? Expansion means ADDING content. NWnE was always about adding content - I should know I designed it. CEP has always been about expansion. The only difference between the two was the type of assets we decided to expand upon. Sorry neither project fit your vision, but its time to move on.

Furthermore, your Community Patch changes all kinds of Bioware content and is every bit as monolithic in nature as the CEP. That's its greatest strength. So why on earth would you bash a project for doing the same thing you did?

Modifié par Pstemarie, 16 janvier 2014 - 07:06 .

[henesua]

YeoldeFog, you said a lot of stuff that I agree with.

However, the only thing I have heard as a definite plan is to fix CEP 2. All the rest is talk at this point.

I would prefer that otherwise people be allowed to talk about what they want.

If you aren't going to participate, your complaints about how much work is involved with any project is moot. Furthermore its counterproductive.

And most of all, organizing custom content is not hard if you know what you are doing. Most of the work is coordination with other people, and designing how it will all go together. I agree that those tasks are a gret deal of work. BUT once that is handled, the actual work of reindexing resources, and sticking stuff in HAKs is trivial if you know how to use computers as they were meant to be used - that is to automate repetitive tasks for you.

Fixing resources is work as well. It takes time due to all the testing you need to do. But if bugs are identified, and there is someone on the team that knows how to fix them, many bugs are trivial. An example is the bounding box around the slug above.

But the important take away message is that many of us know how to handle this stuff, and some of us can do this in our sleep. Nothing stated above is a collosal project. I've personally and single handedly organized, and reindexed custom content several times now for three different PWs, and the content has in each time exceeded the size of CEP 2. I learned how to do this on my own with hep on this forum. I am a new person on teh scene as far as this goes and its no big deal to me. We've got old hands at this participating in this thread whose abilities dwarf my skillset.

This ain't a big deal. It will be work, yes. But it can be done.