Pro's and Con's of the CEP

Discuss any general matters related to CoPaP here!
Orleron
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Pro's and Con's of the CEP

Post by Orleron »

CEP = Community Expansion Pack

I wanted to put this to the players of CoPaP first, as a hypothetical question, not a serious one. Would CoPaP benefit from using the CEP?


Pro's:

* There's a ton of new monsters in there that we could all use.

* Same as above for placeables, holy symbols, instruments, clothes, and items

* Sticking to a standard like that would make it easier for more worlds to join CoPaP.

* We would effectively have the CEP Team working for US as they go to add to the CEP and make it better. That's less work we need to do with finding more stuff to put in our hakpaks, and at least with these guys we know we will be getting quality stuff.



Con's:

* Our current hakpaks would have to be adjusted AGAIN, and this would certainly not happen until at least after all of us have gone to HoTU

* Downloading the CEP *PLUS* our own unique hakpaks would be a *GI-HUGE-IC* download.... we're talking BIG. For all the players we may get from using this, we'd probably lose just as many because of the download size, and we'd have to think about some serious ways to make the download easier.

* Chances are there is a lot of stuff in there that might not get used, and certainly not on every world. For example, shields or holy symbols with FR god symbols on them would not be native to Avlis.




I'm curious to know your thoughts on this, the players.
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Post by vergilius »

Its a nice thought, but not one I'm prepared to entertain until some other major events come through, in particular the conversion to HOTU.

As an idea, I think its a good one, something to look forward to, that would probably do more good than harm for sure.

Unfortunately, given the other constraints, its something to put on the back-burner, perhaps sometime in May---July.
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Post by Orleron »

Granted. I'm still talking hypothetically here, and yes, the number 1 thing to do right now is get HoTU up on all CoPaP servers. That hasn't changed, and will not change. Hypothetically, I'm talking about AFTER this stuff is past.
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Post by JollyOrc »

well, as I'm a 2Mbit DSL bastard, I would immediately download this.

Now: I have no clue how big this would be. What file size are we talking ? 100 MB ? 500 MB ?

I think anything up to 100 MB could be in theory handled.

Anything beyond that: We need an easy way to get the pack to low-bandwith folks. One way would be to break the package down into smaller chunks. Another one would be to organise a CD-burning service.

Perhaps a list of folks in each country who are willing to do this occasionally ? I would burn up to 10 CD's per month and send them to anyone inside germany if those who receive it promise a 5 $ donation to copap / Avlis / Travellers.

The concept of CEP rocks. The content I've seen so far rocks as well. On the plus side: I think that the copap and Avlis hakpaks might get significantly smaller, as much of what is in CEP seems to be in there already.
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Orleron
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Post by Orleron »

Avlis still sells merchandise on cafepress.com. We have thought about putting our hakpaks on CD up there for people to buy cheaply. The problem with that is the rate at which the hakpak changes. I've been waiting for a stable, virtually mistake-free, hakpak to be able to do that with. However, we may just have to bite the bullet and put whatever we've got up there and let people download the corrections as needed.
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Post by markschouten »

I would love to see the CEP , but well.. if you have 56k you would be screwed. That cd service might work , although i don't know if you can ask money for it.
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Post by Sindol »

The problem is not integrating CEP with our haks now, no matter how intensive that would be. I think the effort will be well worth it if it enhances the world and I suspect most players will also feel that.

The biggest problem for me is justifying blowing the haks up to jumbo size, while not utilising everything in it.
I'm one of the "long downloads is what happens to other people" bastards as well, so I'll just download whatever is necessary to play, but I think a number of people will just drop if it gets too download intensive.
As a member of the Avlis team I am pretty concerned by that. Players are the lifeblood of any PW and I don't want to scare people away like that, especially if we're only going to use part of the CEP.

An alternative may be to plunder the CEP and add only the bits that we will 100% for sure use in the very near future to our haks. A disadvantage to that is that we might look back a month later and say: "we should have also taken that". I can see it happening already. :roll:

What's the best course will probably depend on a number of factors:
- Which percentage of the CEP will be definitely used?
- How big will the haks end up if CEP is added?
- How many players will drop if we blow up the haks to jumbo size?

At this point all estimates, but those three things might be worth some research among the playerbase.
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Post by Sarmanos »

In this case maybe a poll on one or both the Avlis or CoPaP site would be a good idea just to see how many people would be willing or unwilling to download the CEP and also public discussion about it. In my opinion it would be the best way to get a good idea about whether implementing the CEP in the future would be a good idea or not.
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Post by Orleron »

- Which percentage of the CEP will be definitely used?
A LARGE percentage. There are a ton of GREAT monsters and items in there. For one thing, just about every demon and devil you can think of is in there, and I think we can all agree that those are needed everywhere, even on Avlis. In addition to the monsters there are tons of new item models and weapon types, which EVERYONE will want to use sooner or later.... instruments, holy symbols, nunchakos and other weapons, etc. The placeables also should come in handy as well.

This expansion has NO tilesets. It's just items and things that players can use or look at to make their experience more varied. An example.... there are dogs in the current NWN creature list... one dog to be precise. The CEP's got dalmations, pit bulls, and like 5 other breeds of dogs. Crucial? No. Will it improve the monotony of our monsters? Hell yeah.




Sindol wrote: - How big will the haks end up if CEP is added?
Your question is answered with a little math. First the CEP team says:

[CEP Team]: That depends on which version you install. At present, the last RAR compressed version of the complete Beta was about 131 megabytes. That will be a little larger with the self-installer because it is zip-compressed, but we don't anticipate breaking 200 megs even for the largest version.

UniversalHak for CoPaP is roughly 25 megs. The custom content installer that installs everything is 185 megs. Figure that between that and the CEP there will be some overlap, but looking through it, I can tell you there won't be much.

Worst case scenario: 185 megs + 200 megs = 385 megs
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"My name is Orleron...a dungeonmaster...two years ago I got shot through a game client...I'm in a distant part of the internet aboard these servers of escaped mental patients...my players. I've made enemies, stupid, and annoying...now all I want to do is make CoPaP a reality, to warn Earth...Look inward(to your monitor) and share the newbies I've seen..."
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Post by Orleron »

Sindol wrote: - How many players will drop if we blow up the haks to jumbo size?

This is my biggest fear, but like anything else, it's all about how people perceive it. The proper question to ask is: Will this be something that all players in general will download anyway?

The way that Bioware is playing this is that it's like an expansion pack, but it's done by the community. They are spinning this thing to look like it's a good idea for EVERYONE to download this no matter what they are playing. Good move. If it succeeds, pretty much everyone will have this thing anyway, just like everyone pretty much has SoU and HoTU.

The best thing to do would be to make this modular, as far as CoPaP is concerned. Ideally, we want people to just be able to plug in their CEP without any modifications and then plug in their CoPaP haks without any modifications and go.

Luckily the CEP people are really smart. They are laying this thing out the same way we lay out our haks. they have separate haks for models and 2da's. This means that players WILL be able to just plug in their CEP and then download our 2da hak and go.
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"My name is Orleron...a dungeonmaster...two years ago I got shot through a game client...I'm in a distant part of the internet aboard these servers of escaped mental patients...my players. I've made enemies, stupid, and annoying...now all I want to do is make CoPaP a reality, to warn Earth...Look inward(to your monitor) and share the newbies I've seen..."
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Post by Themicles »

Guys, another Con is that we'd still have to edit our 2das per world. Theres still unique content that will have to be updated.

So, lets say a BioWare patch changes 2das.
CEP changes theirs.
We change ours.
Do we wait for CEP to change theirs and change those after? Or do we just do it ourselves? I honestly believe we're better off integrating the individual haks used in the CEP, rather than the CEP as a whole...

If ALL we used was the CEP and NOTHING else... it'd be a nice thought... But we complicated beyond that now...

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Post by Orleron »

Wait a sec, Themi. Think about it this way. In every case you mentioned above, we would only be changing 2da files, which we're going to be doing every so often anyway.

We probably AREN'T going to use their exact 2da hak. We will probably integrate their 2da hak into ours. Their models and such will all be kept in separate haks which we can use by simply pluging them in. So I don't see where the extra work would be involved.

If Bioware changes 2da's, we have to change them accordingly no matter what. So that's not relevant.

If CEP changes 2da's, we have a choice whether or not to apply that change or not, so we can think about it when we come to it.

If we change our 2da's, we'll have a coordinated way in which to make sure the CEP changes don't get screwed up.


I don't see your post as presenting any problems or con's.
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"My name is Orleron...a dungeonmaster...two years ago I got shot through a game client...I'm in a distant part of the internet aboard these servers of escaped mental patients...my players. I've made enemies, stupid, and annoying...now all I want to do is make CoPaP a reality, to warn Earth...Look inward(to your monitor) and share the newbies I've seen..."
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Post by Strangg1 »

I think the CEP already has most of what we have in our haks, so i dont' think it wil eb as big as we think. Personally i liek the CEP that si coming out, lots of good stuff in it. Big ass download tho, not sure how it will be done, but i intend to go to my friends and download on broadband and burn it to CD...


As to messing with 2da's when CEP changes i woudln't worry about it, if we use CEP we won't have to mess with CEP's 2da's we integrate their stuff into ours, once we have their initial release we wont' have to mess with re-downloading anything. And there won't be any "updates" per se to the CEP, other than updating the 2da every patch, which we have to do anyway. The way i understand it is the CEP will be just like a normal expansion, menaing there really wont' be any updates, there may be a CEP II or somthing howver. I coudl be wrog tho.



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Post by Themicles »

Orleron wrote: We probably AREN'T going to use their exact 2da hak. We will probably integrate their 2da hak into ours. Their models and such will all be kept in separate haks which we can use by simply pluging them in. So I don't see where the extra work would be involved.
Which is exactly why I think we'd be better off taking the parts we want and going from there.

The only *real* advantange to the CEP besides the fact that they already compiled it for us, would be that they update their 2das.
Since we'd be doing that ourselves anyway, why not pick and choose? It'll cut down on the overall size.

Remember that some have said that they wont play if they have to download anything over what they currently do... Using the entire CEP outright, would be massive, and many people wouldn't do it.

-Themicles
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Post by Themicles »

And one more thing...
Everyone who keeps saying not to worry about the 2da changes...
Remember who does them now, and you'll better understand my position. :P

-Themicles
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Post by mueller »

i cant think of anyone who doesnt have access to high speed internet, whether at their house, their school, or their friends house. I know last night I downloaded 3 650 Mb files. If your FTP can send stuff out at 200-500 Kb/s, the majority of avlis would download it without a problem.
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Post by lafferty »

There still are a lot of people with dial up connections.

So i think it might be a good idea to wait for the CEP to be released and stabilized first. Then we can run a poll after a few weeks how many people actually have the cep installed, how many haven't but are willing to do so and how many say its too big for them and can't or won't get it.

After that we see more.

One of the problems i've been working on since january is the distribution and updating of content like haks and tlks in an automatic way. I think this could solve a lot of the problems with the content being permanently updated.

To the quality of the hak. I have seen a lot of nice stuff from the screenshots and i must say i like a lot of it but the inventory icons are horrible.
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Post by Alexandru Stanicu »

Rar has the ability to break an archive in to smaller parts. Infact it will break the archive into parts thats will each fit on a floppy disk.
Dial up folks can get it one part at a time, while surfing and doing other stuff, and then rar will put it all back together.

Another thought is, dont include the full hak in our hak. Just put the things that are changed in ours, (ie 2da's, talks etc) and let them get the community hak from NWvault etc.
Also if I am correct, this hak has all of the Stuff that is in Lisa's clothes hak that we have added to our haks, so we could strip that out of our haks, decreasing the size ofour hak. :)

Just thinking
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Post by Arcsylver »

ok silly question here.

Are the CoPaP haks really needed all that much if we switch to the CEP?

Seems like a lot of the stufff we already use or better versions of it are in this already
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Post by Orleron »

A lot of the stuff is redundant between CoPaP Hak and CEP, as you say, and yes, that stuff would have to all be consolidated. I am still curious as to how much consolidation would actually occur. Sure we use a lot of the same clothing models and a few of the same creature models, but the CEP has a TON of creatures and items that we do no have. I think it would make the CoPaP Hak a lot smaller, but not completely gone.
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Post by Themicles »

Keep in mind that if we replaced certain things, it may break existing items in game.

Example:
If we replace all our clothes from Lisa with the same ones in the CEP, they might be on different lines. The whole thing about the CEP isn't just that they are putting these things in a single hak, but they have to pad the 2das and make everything agree just like we do. If certain things end up on different line #s, we could run into a lot of problems... And what about the things that are on lines that we already use?

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Post by Orleron »

That is true, and it is something that would have to be looked at and evaluated to see if it was feasible. Currently we don't know what line numbers they use and if the numbers interfere with anything.
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Post by JollyOrc »

If we replace all our clothes from Lisa with the same ones in the CEP, they might be on different lines

I know this is just an example, but the CEP team stated that they made an effort NOT to move Lisas thingies, as they are very widespread and popular.

So at least the clothes will stay unbroken. :-)
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Post by Corbett »

Just a thought, why not use the model/texture hak paks of CEP and update the CoPaP 2da hak to reflect the new items offered. That way there will be no need to change the items in your modules that are there now and you still get the benefits of CEP.

Since we will be supporting our own 2da hak anyway it what I plan to do with Storm Haven…
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Post by Themicles »

JollyOrc wrote:
If we replace all our clothes from Lisa with the same ones in the CEP, they might be on different lines

I know this is just an example, but the CEP team stated that they made an effort NOT to move Lisas thingies, as they are very widespread and popular.

So at least the clothes will stay unbroken. :-)
But we may have....

-Themicles
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