Bugger the Kraken, Apathy is a greater threat

Well after much thought and watching Aeon PW slowly die as players lost interest, I decided to close the world. Makes me sad but also a sense of release, as trying to nurse a body when the soul is gone is rather draining.

I have found that players lost interest, builders were not dependable and DM's well did the best they can before they imploded. Apathy ran riot and ruled at the end, regardless of the engery thrown into Aeon.

I learnt a lot about myself, people and how to run a PW effectively. I made a lot of mistakes and learnt from them as well.

So what next? I am not sure, I do enjoy building in NWN1 and I rather enjoy roleplaying. Perhaps I shall fiddle and see if I can get the Kraken chopped up and served to some unsuspecting people, not really sure.

For now, I shall move forward and fiddle, hacking areas and code together, so that my mind remains engaged, until something comes along that catches my eye in the PW arena.

Aeon, goodbye and thankyou for all the joy and tears.

Sporaxis

Compiling Errors Twice as fast!

An interesting week since my last post on the status of Aeon and awakening the Kraken or better known as Identifier List Full error. This error occurs when the number of functions in an #include exceed the compiling capabilities of the NWN game engine, resulting in an out of memory error. The system I have been integrating in Aeon is the Shayan Subrace Engine (SSE), which funny enough has nearly 400 functions in one include (made up of other includes). When added to a mature world well it crashes out the tool set in a rather dramatic way with the memory error.

Now I better digress a bit on this and share the joy I currently have in having built myself a new PC, to build, game and do a lot of photographic processing, photography being my new hobby. The specs of the machine were put together by one of my best mates BarryTheHatchet for his own machine and after some research I ran with what he had.

• Intel I7 8608GB Ram, generic stuff but not over clocking
• 2 x 1TB WD Caviar Black Drives
• ASUS P57pP55-DE motherboard (sweetness in a board and it glows blue too)
• Generic ATI 5770 PCI Express Graphics card
• Blue Ray Reader/DVD burner
• Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit OEM
• Antek case and 650W power supply

So what does this all mean in regards to NWN, no much except that now I can get the out of memory error twice as fast and with a nice eerie blue light emanating from the case.

OK enough with the digression about my crashing my machine rapidly instead of slowly. The solution according to one of the designers of SSE is to "Be a high end oracle/unix person, recompile the code replaying constants and integers with Macros and"... Well ummm Iwish but I crossed checked my resume and realised I am a geologist working for an Oil Company in Risk management and the closest I come to UNIX is when I audit someone.

Not giving up easy and overwhelmed by the response, I decided to just break up the mega include, which funny enough works, until that is it wants to touch nw_i0_spells and apps_include, former bioware spells and the latter is part of the Fast French data base system. Screw with either and well the Kraken awakes, wraps my machine, glowing with a nice blue light, in it's code based tentacles and sucks it down into the deep ocean.

So I am at an impasse and being a stubborn person I am not willing to give up, especially when I can sense that I am close to turning the Kraken into Squid Rings, big ones though.

Right, time to go get a harpoon and go hunting!

Release the Kraken

Been a while, well a long while, since I last posted in my blog. So much has changed and evolved in my life that the passion I felt for building had slipped away and real life took it's rightful place. NWN2 and the subsequent let down of Dragon Age occupied me for a moment, for that moment I was truly excited, then I realised that the magic I felt building in NWN was not there.

I have turned my back on these pale shadows of multiplayer worlds and returned to my joy of NWN. Yes the graphics are dated now and the players are slowly fading away but there is something true and pure about building in it.

I have been working part time on my PW Aeon and adding content and enriching the world as I go. At times I respond to user needs and spend many thankless hours working on content for them, mostly content that is not used. Now I am more focussed on my needs and find that building stuff in NWN that makes me happy is the way to go and seems to also get implemented so much faster in Aeon.

My Current Joy in NWN is adding Shayans Subrace Engine (SSE) so that I can have all the various races present in Aeon and then I can build legacies on top of them with all the plusses and negatives of a race/legacy. The joy does fade a bit when I realise that choices made in building Aeon aroudn the scripting side have created a some form of a slumbering beast in the code. This Kraken is in the include statements and having too many of them called at once. Adding in SSE was like Hades in "Clash of the Titans" releasing the Kraken, a monster from deep and one hard to quell.
Still this is a joy and I dream about vanquishing the mutiple include error mesages through trial and error and perhaps I shall succeed

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battering upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
by Lord Alfred Tennyson