Sigil: City of Doors

Hey I'm not saying the server is doing bad. Cause to be honest it is alot more stable than some other servers that I won't name. Sigil has always been pretty stable since I started playing back in last year. Though recently, I suppose the influx of new folks may have a factor in this like you said.

I've notice lately, especially today, that server stabiltiy can be a problem. Today, as far as I am concerned, the server has crashed at least 6 times. Is this a normal thing? Can it be reduced?

When we ran our NwN1 server we did our best to reduce lag and crashes. We did this by eliminating heartbeat scripts, removing "hamster ball" spell visuals (and other visuals not required, toning down effects etc.

While slightly taking away from the visual experience it went a WHOLE long way in reducing both crashes and lag.

Is there something we, as a community, can do do reduce the chance of crashes (and possibly lag)?

Anything should be open to discussion here!

Thanks!

There are two types of crash here... a local crash and a server crash. Normally, you can tell the difference between them by what happens when you get back; if you show up in the OOC room, the server went down entirely. Otherwise, it was your machine.

A few things to help with local crashes, the links can be found elsewhere on these forums. On the NWvault is a set of "less obtrusive spell effects". Download these into your override folder, and you will not see the truly obnoxious effects. There is also an app that can be found on the Atari NWN2 forums called "client extension", which gives additional functionality to the client as well as cutting down on some crash issues.

As for lag, the primary culprit is flashy effects in large, busy areas... primarily in the Sigil bazaar area, but it has happenned before due to massed AOE spells in grinding areas.

All 6 (at least) crashes today have been server related. I am well versed in local vs server wide. As I said in my previous post we took extrordinary steps in our old server to reduce these occurances. What I'd like to know is if there is anything we can consider here. Anything we can "sacrifice" to increase stability. I know there are a ton of Visual effects on spells that are not needed. Anything should be considered to reduce/eliminate server crashes.

Visual effects are client side. And to tell the truth, usually we are more stable than that; I myself noticed quite a bit of lag up to around 10pm CST. I'm going to leave it to cryptc to figure out what might have caused this, however.

It's also worth pointing out that NWN2 is not nearly as stable as NWN1 was.

However, I do know that steps towards added stability are being taken in the upcoming "big update"... our HAKs are being streamlined, some areas are being "stacked" to cut down on transitions, and other things have been considered as well.

Not a normal thing and we'll be looking into it quite a bit. It is always curious thing in NWN 2 though, even though no changes are made, the crashes becomes much more frequent by time, I've made that kind of observation during the 3 years of playing/DMing/building NWN 2.

We know part of the issues is because of walkmesh at least, and nwnx team is looking to re-write those things which should reduce the crashes also quite a bit.

So, just bear with us for the time being.

Also I'd like to throw in there, we've been getting some mean lag spikes. Around one to three, my time. Which is EDT/EST. Had one tonight infact that lasted for about ten mins.

Crashes are most likely caused by pathfinding bug, which stands for most of our crashes that I've checked... increased traffic is probably reason it has crashed more... hopefully nwnx will make a fix for that (I know they are working on it)

Lag is most likely because the isp connection isn't the fastest... and I will upgrade this to a much faster one as soon as I get to it (is a bit of a hassle to do, so I can't be rushed into it)

my worse one is network errors during transitions. even with the client extension, the whole world goes splat and the log keeps spewing about invalid packets received and so on.

Thanks for the replies, and the information, guys. Makes things a little clearer.