Lucky Day
Daywatch
Rob McGinnis, the very active community rep for OE has recently responded to a number of requests on the PWC file including my own.
and on my suggestion
This opens up new issues methinks. If they are planning a PWC overhaul at the time of release of MotB does that mean the release date will be pushed back.
Clearly Rob and company are seeing a problem with the lack of multiplayer for NWN2. There are very few mods already for NWN2 but the PWC requirement is just killing NWN2 even more than Hak requirements. There were always servers (like my own) that ran without haks for NWN1 but every server needs a PWC for NWN2.
Multiplayer priorities
PWC files will probably never go away. So, with that in mind, the problem then becomes how to get the PWC files to the player in the easiest and least intrusive manner.
There are many ways to approach this and, of course, the most preferable ways are also the most complicated ways and would require a lot of big changes to the client.
and on my suggestion
Multiplayer priorities
someone said they manage to compress PWC files to something amazingly small with .rar.
Could OE use some sort of compression like 7zip on the server end and only send the PWC's to the clients on a per area basis as needed (and then cache them on the client)?
Then the client would decompress them once they are received.
As well, and I'm not sure how the PWC file is formatted, could the PWC file be reduced by not having all of it sent? Just the changes or differences from a set, flat floor at 0.0 on the z axis?
thanks
We are looking at a ton of different options still - including the possibility of making a huge overhaul to the way the engine handles PWC files. we will probably be bringing a few extra programmers on for a couple months to iron out some of the PWC and PWC download issues to be timed with when the expansion is released, but not limited to the expansion.
This opens up new issues methinks. If they are planning a PWC overhaul at the time of release of MotB does that mean the release date will be pushed back.
Clearly Rob and company are seeing a problem with the lack of multiplayer for NWN2. There are very few mods already for NWN2 but the PWC requirement is just killing NWN2 even more than Hak requirements. There were always servers (like my own) that ran without haks for NWN1 but every server needs a PWC for NWN2.