Springy Situations | 04.17.15



Warm Time Ahead!



I am the worst blogger! Good thing these trickled updates aren't on Facebook, otherwise it would be even worse - there wouldn't be any.

I've been helping a lot over at http://neverwintervault.org/ and it picked up over the winter as Rolo Kipp moved to a new state, and is on his way to getting married! Congratulations my good fellow!

There are a bunch of us who maintain the site, review new accounts, migrate content and otherwise keep it up to date, clean and safe from spam.

Actually, too much of my time was spent knocking off spam accounts, running them through IP filters to check if they were blacklisted for posting spam, and deleting accounts through the entire user base. Instead of posting, bots were inputting spam links in their Bio field, and it was a constant battle. Another admin, Akin, who has Drupal experience, was able to install bot catchers and honeypots, which helped greatly.

With the migration of data from the old Neverwinter Nights Vault to the new one, I just realized the links to Almraiven and Shadewood on the blog are bad. For those stumbling here who attempt to direct themselves to the modules via the old links, the new location can be found by clicking on the module image below.







I am sorry for the lack of updates too. My intentions are good, but I'm not sure how many more times I can continue to show the same old areas while testing with your characters, or mention I've knocked out another area and marked it as complete.

If there is an update to give, I should say, the 16k issue was resolved by not including the uncompiled .nss scripts into the module. So, when I do need to modify an old script, I simply copy it back into the module/temp0 directory, make the changes, and return it to a backup directory. That alone, saved lots of space! I am bad when it comes to scripts because when I started to learn how to build, I never understood the shortcuts one can make use of, such as variables on placeables, or on NPCs, or using the TAG of an NPC + "q1" to set a variable that the player has asked that specific NPC question one in a list of conversation choices.

So over time, all these little scripts that do exactly the same thing, are created, but with different names. If one NPC has seven conversation choices a player can ask, that's seven individual scripts, and across a number of NPCs in-game, well, that's a lot of little scripts. Unpack Shadewood or Almraiven in the toolset, migrate to the modules/temp0 directory and see for yourself all the .nss scripts there are.

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