Removing Hak Packs

[perk31]

It has been brought to my attention that some people have expressed their reluctance to play on CA because of the hak packs.  I do not know if this is primarily because of the size or time required to download the executable or if people are just hesitant to run haks.

The purpose of this post is for everyone to discuss if the haks should be removed.

Removing the haks will require me to recreate many of the areas already in the game.  Many areas use the DOA city/rural combo hak which has proven to be a very nice hak.  The Greenwich swamp, Elven city, Dalair, and Caulderon Sewers all use hak pack tilesets.  Additionally, the city/rural combo and DLA forest tile sets have been used extensively in the open areas along with a combo city interior tileset.

Removing the haks will mostly impact those named areas like the Greenwich swamp and some areas like the swamp and elven city will most likely not be reproducible.  This will also impact many of the future areas planned and some of the area details that have yet to be placed in the mod.


The positives are that only Cep would be required and I think a vast majority of current online players will have cep installed already.  This would certainly open CA up to a wider audience and perhaps in the long run create a better world and community.  It would also make our port to NWN2 more streamlined next year as we won't be stuck with areas that we can not reproduce.

I do not mind having to recreate the areas in question and will happily follow the consensus of the rest of the staff and players.

[perk31]

Hak packs installed

Arnaden Base and Prime     347mb
Cave Ruins                           13mb
Doa City Rural Combo          27mb

[Drakaen]

Thanks perk for starting the post while i was fixing a my computer....


I was told by varuios players that because of the connection speed they were unable to download the hak paks

i was also told that some dont like adding anymore haks then CEP... after much research i decided to bring it up with everyone else


some of the top servers reqiure nothing more then CEP... the reason is because CEP adds alot, but the reason they are so popular when it comes to a player base is because a player who doesnt want to download anything more and is updated on there CEP will go for the one that is open to them rather restricted to those only with the hak paks...

It wont happen over night... and most areas can be reproduced/changed to fit a CEP only requirement... please voice your opinoin


Thanks,

Drake

Head DM/Moderator

[Podilarius]

I can understand the fustration or people using dialup, as I am on dialup, but the hak paks we have picked adds that extra visual touch to the game. I would hate to see them go away. The biggest we have is the Arnaden hak pak. I was under the impression that this is a popular hak pak. Perk31 has told me that Arnaden isn't supposed to work with CEP 1.5 and higher, some sort of conflict. HE also told me that development has stopped on the arnaden HP. I don't want to sacrifice the look and feel, but if it will get regular players on ... then it might be worth it. Once we get a larger player base then perhaps we can put a hak pak back on ...
I don't know what people's reservation is to putting on HP as it adds more look and feel to the game. I would think that RPers would enjoy that ... hack and slashers might not like that cause of the download.

Thanks,
Podilarius
Admin

[Drakaen]

well there is one alternitive and thats just to take the uber large hak out and see how it goes


*it takes on avg. 10 hr.s to download that exe via dial up*

*takes 2-3 hours via ADSL* (i was also surfing the net like crazy )

[perk31]

It takes much longer than that with dial up actually.  I don't mind burning a cd for new players but how much of an impact will that really have.

From a numbers standpoint, we've had nearly 80 unique players attach to the server over the last 2 months.  Unfortunately about 2/3 of those players have characters with 0xp.  My belief is that those are players who found CA by browsing through the gamespy list, created a character, and then were not allowed to play because they didn't have the haks installed at which point they simply moved on.  I've done this myself in the past.

Therefore removing the haks except for cep would have probably resulted in at least 60 or so one time players.

[Drakaen]

well i geussed on the dail up as i wont use it unless i have to...

[perk31]

I will remove the haks from a backup over the weekend and see how many problems it will cause for us.

[perk31]

I've removed the arnaden hak from my test mod and after removing each area  that no longer has a tileset associated with it the module loads.  For some reason it crashes when I try to enter Merchants Row in Churberg but the other areas seem to be ok.  My next step will be to remove merchants row from the mod and see if I can find other areas that will cause a crash.