Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition News

Same week, new patch! 8186 contains another update preparing for the next stable release.

We'd like to thank the online PW community for their help in testing NWSync. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful in making NWSync a reality!

With the Android beta now released, we're looking to keep feature parity by pushing a new release on both platforms; leading to a stable release for desktop that is cross-play compatible with Android.

• You can now configure in nwn.ini the number of concurrent connections used to download NWSync data from server repositories. The default has been bumped to 20 (up from 5). This increases performance significantly.
  
• The major version has been bumped to 1.78 in preparation for releasing this as stable. Unless major issues crop up, this is the next stable build.
  
• NWSync documentation is being rewritten to be easier to read and include more needed detail.
  

New week, new patch. 8185 contains stabilization fixes for a upcoming stable release.

As always, we appreciate your support in testing development patches. With the upcoming Android beta, we are looking to keep feature parity by pushing a stable release soon.

• The chat window will not capture mouse clicks anymore, only scroll events. This means you can once again click through it to action the game world.
  
• Greater Sanctuary interacting incorrectly with True Seeing has been fixed.
  
• A rare server hang when a relayed player suddenly regains direct connectivity has been fixed.
  
• A bug in RetrieveCampaignObject has been fixed that resulted in a double free issue, crashing the game. This was another 1.69 issue that was unearthed by us switching to VS2017 for the Windows build.
  
• NWSync has been sped up by avoiding yet more memory copying.
  
• Minor shader update to remove light specularity components, as they are handled by the light diffuse uniforms.
  

• We have not yet been able to work on documentation and use-cases with HOWTOs. This has not been forgotten and will be done.
  
• Greater Sanctuary may not sync properly to clients after they re/connect.
  
• There is a known issue where static tile lighting sometimes does not update in the toolset, and even rarer, in the game. We are looking into this as we work on the renderer.
  
• The NWSync client part is still lacking a way to remove manifest data or expire old manifests in a more fine-grained fashion.
  

We're sending Dev patch 8184 your way!

This patch refactors the NWSync client-side storage concept in a major way. Data is now sharded out to multiple databases, to support Android file systems on MicroSD cards, where files cannot grow larger than 2GB, give or take.

As part of this refactor, the game will both save and load faster as de/compression, reading and writing can be done in parallel (on multi-core systems with fast SSDs at least). Additionally, this change will make it much easier on the system to vacuum deleted data in the background, and free up disk space.

Unfortunately, part of this change means that previously-downloaded data will be left sitting in your userhome/nwsync/ directory, as it is not migrated automatically. You can delete the file "nwsync.sqlite3" if you still have it from testing previous dev patches. To backfill this data, a re-download will be required.

• NWSync client-side storage is sharded out to many databases in a round-robin fashion, as described above.
  
• We bumped the default maximum texture memory to 256MB. Previous settings of 64MB are rewritten to this value. The new minimum is 96MB. The bigger-by-default texture memory should improve stability in some situations.
  

• We fixed a regression we introduced (when porting platform-specific code to C++14) where CodeBase database files ("Bioware Campaign Database") were written out corrupted on Linux and Mac, resulting in crashes. Unfortunately, the only way to revert from this is to manually delete the affected database files (in userhome/database/).
  
• The base shaders have been fixed to once again correctly render UI elements on older/obscure hardware.
  

• There was no time yet to address the question of documentation and use-cases with HOWTOs. This has not been forgotten, and will be done before the next patch.
  
• Specifically, things left to do before NWSync can hit the Stable branch include (Warning, technical stuff!): Handling out of space errors gracefully; Improvements to the serverside repository format and download process to use fewer, bigger files and range requests; Potentially automatically expiring and removing deprecated persistent world data when their data set updates; Providing tools for players to manually remove data inside NWSync they don't want anymore.
  

Happy Hallowinter Nights!

This is patch 8183 for the Development branch of NWN:EE!

This patch is a quick iteration on the previous Development patch. Build 8182 introduced NWSync, a feature allowing clients to download needed gameplay data from servers without having to manually hunt down HAK and TLK files.

• We fixed a performance issue indexing/reading NWSync manifests on Windows. Data should now load at least as fast as it would with HAKs.
  

• Gamma functionality is back: You can type `Gamma x` in the console, where x is a floating point value larger than 0. The default is 2.2. This value is persisted to nwn.ini (under a new configuration key). Gamma only affects the rendered ingame scenery, not menus or UI, as it is applied through a FBO shader, not GL/system-wide gamma correction. There is no slider yet, sorry.
  
• NWSync memory management was refactored to be as zero-copy as possible, eventually paving the way for streaming compression (to deliver, e.g., full movies). Right now, the suggested optimal file size for individually synced files is under 20MB.
  
• All shaders have seen revision to be more efficient and future-proofed for extensions like Roughness and Glow Maps.
  
• The game now writes out all Aliases to nwn.ini even if the file already existed.
  

• NWSync now has an Alias entry in nwn.ini, which allows moving data to a more suitable place if so desired.
  
• Downloading the initial manifest now shows progress, instead of letting the user guess. This is relevant for big manifests, which may grow to megabytes in size for servers using the CEP and more.
  
• The multiplayer server browser now shows a progress window when downloading the server list. It also switched over to libcurl, which should prove to be much more reliable than the previous solution.
  

• There will be a utility to introspect and prune the client-side storage.
  
• There will be a utility to (pre-)download manifest/server data without the game running.
  
• We're aware the NWSync documentation is very bare bones right now, and aimed at the technical user. It will see a lot of improvement before a stable release, including example use-cases and HOWTOs for each. Current work-in-progress documentation can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eYRTd6vzk7OrLpr2zlwnUk7mgUsyiZzLoR6k54njBVI.
  
• Server-side repository management utilities are exhibiting some issues on Windows. We're looking into the problem
  

We'd like to thank all the volunteers who have spent time testing the previous patch! We're not quite at the required stable feature list yet as far as NWSync goes, but we're getting there! Any testing, feedback, and criticism you provide is invaluable.

Thanks!

NWN:EE Development Update 8182 is being rolled out.

This patch contains a major new feature: NWSync, a mechanism to transparently and automatically download user content when joining a multiplayer server.

The first development release now exists to serve as an invitation to test for the community.

• The game now supports normal DDS textures without having to mangle the header.
  
• The game now supports KTX texture containers.
  
• We added a new console variable that enables a over-time FPS display. Type "fpstrace 1" into the game console to enable.
  

• We added a (off-by-default) experimental toggle that prevents needless texture switching. It should yield about 10-20% more FPS depending on the scene rendered. You can toggle it, to see the difference, via the console variable glCacheTextureBinds 0/1.
  

• We fixed lighting uniforms not assigning properly on some GPU drivers. This should address some flickering and maybe improve stability.
  
• Premium Modules don't show in "Other Modules" anymore.
  
• Yet another crash for creature appearances with PERSPACE=0 has been addressed.
  

We merged in experimental support for NWSync. The first implementation of this allows transparent multiplayer server content downloads, and requires special setup by the server admin to make functional.

The preliminary manual, including instructions and system details, can be read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eYRTd6vzk7OrLpr2zlwnUk7mgUsyiZzLoR6k54njBVI

Note that if you are from The Future, then this URL might have changed or disappeared. Please check the official documentation in lang/en/docs instead.

Again, this is experimental, and we are shipping this to the development branch early so persistent world admins and interested parties can test it. This is a very complex technical feature and we fully expect that we will have to ship more development patches to address found issues.

Ultimately, this feature can only grow into what it should be with feedback and guidance from those that will be heavily employing it.