Yorlik's blog

I'm going to completely change the Arcanima Site in the near future. It has become clear to me, that a such a project as I planned together with upholding the artistical and quality standards I wished is impossible to achieve in my situation. So its going to be recycled and something new is about to come.

The Site-Wide contact form has been fixed and should work now and send an email to the team: https://www.arcanima.org/contact

The public subversion repository is now set up at https://www.arcanima.org/svn/pub You can download stuff from there. Commits require appropriate rights. The repository will contain all the stuff we share. Especially the Zero Module for the Arcanima Server will be there for public download as a directory based NWN2 module in the future.

After a long time of outage for technical reasons and lack of time and other foul excuses, the developer wiki is now back.

I just realized there is a standalone script compiler for NWN2 Script now. This is the last piece of software needed to start complete distributed and versioned development of a NWN2 server.

I think its time to let you know again whats going on behind the scenes in the moment. I'm working on a tool, written in Python, under the codename "Datamonkey". The tool is about to become a generic *.erf and *.gff decoder for neverwinter nights 2, other file formats like 2da or others can easily be added. The *.erf decoding is almost finished, same with the *.gff. I'm now working on debugging and adding essential functionality, like decompiling *.erf and *.gff files, writing to and reading from a database, allow web based file editing.

Today I managed to change NWNX4 in a way that it works on Solaris/Wine without touching the original nwn2server.exe - unlike in my last approach.

I used Microsofts Detour SDK to achieve this.

Basically it does to the nwn2server.exe the same than I did before, but it does it to the image loaded in memory, so it is not necessary to touch the original file - this is obviously much better and slick.

For technically interested people of people who want to play with the sourcecode of NWNX4 (Its Open Sourced and GPLed): Heres a quick 'n dirty tutorial:

Today I just finished my first game of playing the NWN2 demo module for NWNX4 with the timer plugin as a testcase on a Solaris machine using wine. How did it work ? Each Windows PE executable has a header which lists the dependancies of the executable, e.g. imported system functions and own dlls. I used an external tool, a so-called PE header editor to change the header of the nwn2server.exe in a way, that it now requires the nwnx4_hook.dll to be loaded.

I compiled Wine (http://www.winehq.org), version 0.9.49 for the Solaris10 (http://www.sun.com) operating system and started the NWN2 Dedicated Server on it.

I thought I'd give a little summary about what is going on behind the scenes these days on Arcanima, since I'm a bit delayed with my sequel "The story of Krahn". In the moment I'm busy with setting up the server machine, where this website later will reside on, and where the NWN2 gameserver will live. The hardware is fully assembled now, as described in the last blog entry, now the operating system is to be installed.

Just a small intermediate message: I bought the missing SCSI Disk for our Server today. Server Specs are: Dual Athlon MP 2400+ Mainboard: Tyan Thunder K7X 2 Gigs RAM (Will add another 2 Gigs to have 4) 2 x 74 GB SCSI Disks (RAID 0) for system and database 2 x 200 GB IDE Disks (RAID 1) for rescue system, data and internal backup (Database) The server will host the webserver and the NWN2 Server - each on a different VMWare machine using the free VMWare Server. Cheers :)

The map is not yet finished, but this is a fairly good sneek peek at the concept.

To day I created an automated documentation for each NWN2 module and the scripts file from /data in the original campaign. 287 Megabytes of html and png files so far. Its a great help for development - it helps understand code I haven't written myself.

Today I set up the Doxygen automated code documentation system. It works well for Neverwinter Nights scripts as can be seen at the example pages. The true code documentation, of course is not public in the moment. The example here consists of the scripts taken from the NWNX4 example module for their mysql plugin.

Today, after some days of head banging and scratching I finally managed to install Subversion and to allow authentication for Subversion against our Drupal userbase. The key was to get, compile and install an incredible apache module (mod_auth_mysql) which allows connecting to MySQL.

Today I managed to use NWN2 together with NWNX4 and MySQL as a database backend:

I started the story of Krahn today to give visitors an imagination about what is happening behind the curtain on a regular base. The storyteller is talking to an imaginary vistor and explaining things about Arcanima. http://arcanima.org/book/krahn Apart from that I did some minor website tweaking and some bugfixing - especially the loading times are still a problem.

Seems chasing bugs is my first adventure in this world ;) Some minor login and database update problems I could fix. Some remain. /me hopes for the module authors ...

I did some more updates on the website, partially design partially function. On the Wiki, you will se a change in the left handed menu, assumed you ar using the monobook skin. I hacked it a little, to offer a backlink to the main page when clicking on the site logo. There are also lonks in t he forst m,enu to the forums and the gallery module. The Wiki Main page can still be accessed with a link in the menu below. Same crosslinks have been provided to the forums. The Arcanima Logo always links to the main Site now.

Just made this snake eye for Heitira today:

And this is how I changed Elongs image:

Playing with my nerw Wacom Graphics tablet I made a portrait of my Avlis PC Fraudoc today:

Just made this sketch of the monastery inside the anvil of the gods crater today:

This one reflects the proportions better - a really huge crater ...