A Land Far Away

Attention builders:

I am becoming increasingly concerned about inexplicable stability problems associated with the extra rows of skills.2da - At this point I would advise all builders to avoid use of the recent alfa_2da.hak until such time as the matter can be addressed (potentially by a future NWN2 patch).

Through extensive testing with 003 and a clean, trim basemodule (and the help of a number of dedicated testers including Darren, Magonushi, Ithildur, Loulabelle, and others), it's become clear that the extended skills.2da is associated with unexplained and very frequent nwn2server.exe crashes - often associated with the following triggers:
-PC entering a module
-PC leaving a module
-PC activating tracking or stealth mode
-PC entering an area transition
-PC exiting an area transition

The frequency of these crashes was about the same using:
1) a 30-meg base testing module
2) an 800-meg pared-down version of 003-TSM

The problems were completely absent when loading the same modules with a hak lacking the extended skills.2da.

Needless to say, this comes as a serious blow after countless (easily 80+ hours spent developing and testing a /working/ custom skill framework.

What is worse, those of you with modules that have been opened in the toolset using the new alfa_acr.hak, may find that placed instances or blueprints of creature in your mods now give errors while trying to open in the toolset, if you switch to an older, base-length skills.2da - the best strategy is to return to older backups, and move new material back into them carefully after removing creatures (using the builder skills.2da in override while opening the compromised modules /ONLY/).

I recommend using the 1.21 version alfa_2da.hak for now, linked here:
http://www.alandfaraway.org/downloads/N ... fa_2da.rar

My deepest apologies to anyone who lost valuable work in the toolset due to this, I'll do what I can to help recover resources stuck in modules that have been exposed to the more recent skills.2da-containing alfa_2da.hak.

Thanks AL. Good catch. Many thanks to the testers also.

And I'm really sorry about your work. Those sorts of hours lost are a burn that doesn't heal quickly.

Now go and concentrate on your real life for a while. You've got important things to be thinking about besides us

Unfortunate but quite understandable.

With any luck we'll be able to make some progress with this system later on (as much as it would be nice to have it ready from day 1).

It's very clever work (from my uneducated pov) and hopefully the lessons learned can be applied elsewhere.

If we, at some point, want to try counting down the number of line edits and re-testing, I'm sure that we can find one or two volunteers to do the heavy labour. I'm poking around the community at large to see if there is any replication by another party.

Thanks for the time you put in nonetheless AL. It may not come as any consolation but your feasibility analysis does provide valuable feedback into our decision making process.

I've still got all the scripts, 2das, and dialog in case the next or a subsequent NWN2 patch resolves the difficulties- this is one of those things that worked fine in NWN1, so no reason to believe it will never be a possibility in NWN2.

It was only this last full patch that they went to a dynamically-built UI for skill display and selection on levelup and the character sheet- so with any luck this will have "exposed" the stability problems for many PWs trying the same sort of thing- custom skills do seem to be on their radar, so to speak, at least.

I'll see about revising the sourceforge resources committed that tie into this system as well, though I may not get to that before my trip out of town this week.

If it can't be done currently then it can't be done. Better to know sooner rather than Live(er). I know how hard you worked on this and I'm sure all that work will come in useful later if/when the developers fix the skills issue.

Incidentally, I saw a post on this very subject on NWN2 forums:

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/vi ... da%20crash

I'm not sure if you've explored the relationships between skills and feat 2das (or perhaps others) as a possible source of the crashing but it's a [hopefully useful] thought.

p.s. Another interesting thread:

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/vi ... da%20crash

I can work on feat.2da editting if we think the effort may bear some fruit.

The connection with feats.2da is a potentially intriguing one, though I'll readily admit I have no clue what the "CosmopolitanFeat" column is for in skills.2da - only a small subset of NWN2 1.11.1153's skills even have entries in the column. Is is supposed to reflect the corresponding skill focus feats, or background feats that apply bonuses to the skill in question?

The NWN2 forum posts that mention this reference internal mismatches between the base skills.2da and the constants defined in nwscript.nss as well - not sure if those are connected to CosmopolitanFeat or are a separate concern.

In any case, we should keep all skills work carefully separated from working modules until the concerns are resolved. I've updated the worldgate with safe versions of the alfa_2da.hak and alfa_acr.hak files.

I've converted all areas affected by the corruption (turned out there were 4 or 5 with placed mobs) and added them to a new mod, which is working fine.