NWVault must be modernized and BD must add support within the game to download hackse mods with more
HunterRayder93
Member Posts: 266
today I made a jump in NWValut, I wanted to look for something to add in NWN: EE to use but, navigation is always a drama for me, there is no way to save in a list the projects that you want to re-download every time , sometimes preview images are non-existent of the projects, many small things that make a little complicated navigation.
the NWValut is actually what remains of the true NWValut of IGN that had closed its doors and canceled so many projects, but thanks to a group of enthusiasts, the Evaluation got to work but ... since then it has not been much aesthetically updated nor rendered more simple in navigation.
What I ask is that BD and NWValut created a collaboration to improve the site, in order to modernize it and make it more modern and easy to use, maybe creating a way within the game to connect from NWValut and download new content ... a bit like Bethesda is doing now with her games, she has created a kind of Evaluation within the game in order to directly download the contents and be able to use them or play them immediately ... BD should do something similar to facilitate the installation of Hack and mods and the NWValut guys should update the site to facilitate navigation on the site for new users.
the NWValut is actually what remains of the true NWValut of IGN that had closed its doors and canceled so many projects, but thanks to a group of enthusiasts, the Evaluation got to work but ... since then it has not been much aesthetically updated nor rendered more simple in navigation.
What I ask is that BD and NWValut created a collaboration to improve the site, in order to modernize it and make it more modern and easy to use, maybe creating a way within the game to connect from NWValut and download new content ... a bit like Bethesda is doing now with her games, she has created a kind of Evaluation within the game in order to directly download the contents and be able to use them or play them immediately ... BD should do something similar to facilitate the installation of Hack and mods and the NWValut guys should update the site to facilitate navigation on the site for new users.
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If they add some connection to the vault in the game I think it would be a good idea if it's open and you need to put the address to a vault in an input form. Maybe a special type of website link, I think I've heard Second Life has something like that.
During that latter period there was a mad scramble to save and preserve what was obviously going to be lost. Thus nwvault.org was set-up. We managed to save the vast majority of stuff from the ign vault and make it available to download. Things that were missed have been re-uploaded by other users that just happened to still have them on their hard drives. So we now have a site that not only has most of what was on the old ign site but is still growing with new stuff being added. Not only that, while the ign vault only catered for user made stuff for 2 games (NwN & NwN 2) nwvault.org has stuff for 3 (NwN, NwN 2 & IceBlink (Android gamers are probably more familiar with this last)). So nwvault.org has in all probability more files. Remember this is a site that is user created, managed and funded via wholly voluntary donations.
Now did you notice that on all of those ign site views, there was no search facility? You had to actually select one of the file types (mod, hak, etc.) before you could actually do a search. Woe betide you if you couldn't remember just what you were looking for. I remember having to scroll through literally hundreds of items that matched my search terms and still not finding what I wanted (I did find some interesting things doing this but that's not the point). So lets look at what you get on the nwvault. Here is a picture (obtained by using a lovely built in tool to the Opera browser) of the top of the front page of the nwvault site -
Do you see that search box on the left? Forgive me but that does sort of hint that you can find things by using it. So why not use it? What's that? You only want to look for one type of item, you say? O.K. So once your initial search is done you click on the advanced search link that gives you this -
Admittedly you still get links to stuff for all three games by using that search facility. Fortunately there is another way. Look back at that first picture. Do you see that menu at the very top? Yes I know it doesn't say files anywhere on it. But whereas the ign vault had loads of entries under files that didn't actually have files to download (especially in the scripts section) nwvault is mostly about files that you can actually download. So let's think about this logically. What you are looking for is not an article (tutorials, editorials, etc.), nor media (pictures, movies, etc.), a patch, a forum or a chat channel and not a poll it must therefore be a project. So click on that and you will see this -
Choose the game that you want stuff for (e.g. Neverwinter Nights) gives you this -
Yes tags can be pretty useless. But if that's what comes with the free, open-source tools that are used to manage the content then that is what we have to use. There is an alternative but I'll come to that last.
So what if you want to search for all the content created by a single user? Yes you can do that too but you have to be a registered user and logged in to do so. So you've come across something by a particular creator (I'll use The Amethyst Dragon's Cloaks as an example here. Notice that their user name is also a link on that project page -
Clicking on their user name takes you to their profile page. At the top of this you will see -
If you click on projects at the top of their profile you will be presented with one or more pages of projects that they have uploaded.
Finally on the question of being able to search nwvault... If you still can't find what you are looking for you can always try using google to search just nwvault for what you are looking for. Look at this search I have set-up that illustrates how you would look for something with the word "compiler" on just the nwvault.
TR
However,
The Nexus has it's own rules and regulations. It's own admin team and it's own problems with corruption.
Much of the freedom NWN has enjoyed could easily be crushed by the Nexus structure and adjudication of appropriate content falls on the shoulders of some very sketchy global mods.
By making the move to the Nexus you can kiss 1/3rd of the single player mods goodbye for violating the erratically enforced Nexus terms of service. And the ability to repeal such banned content is practically non-existent because the Nexus is simply too big to handle the amount of data that passes through each day. Let alone appeals.
Moving NWN modding to the Nexus is a bad idea. The convenience in no way makes up for the loss of freedom and autonomy.
I also think that creating a link/portal that only serves up NWN1 content would be ideal. The mixture of the three games never made sense to me. I get that it's a vault for all 3 of these games, but honestly no player goes there and searches to find a mixture of the game he is wanting to find content for mixed in with two he doesn't.
Also, dark theme is just better, so I can at least agree that the NWVault in a purely design sense is a bit lackluster.
That being said, the people whom run the vault are great, and I hope they don't take this criticism too harshly, they are doing a fantastic job for a community run endeavour. A little labour of love for our beloved DND community.
We have a strong culture of ethical open content sharing (with exceptions) which the Nexus is vehemently opposed to (as some of us discovered during the short-lived Dragon Age modding era). There is no way that we are going to surrender control of our work to that authoritarian elite (or any other).
Commercial organisations have repeatedly let us down. I don't blame them for that - business can only thrive if it's profitable - but we've learned the hard way to manage our own affairs.
Of course, there's always room for improvement to the vault, and that's the way to go IMO.
I'm not exactly sure where the Nexus censors content, the only thing I can think of is highly pornographic stuff or things obviously made(acquired by shady means. I can think of no NWN mod that wouldn't make it to the Nexus site.
Anyway, I uploaded my simple little mod there, it was on the old vault, never made it to the new one simply because that one came too late and I didn't care anymore. Okay, rant over. :P
We don't need to feed [b]another[/b] modding community to the behemoth that is the Nexus. It has enough beneath it with its dominance over the Bethesda stuff after the Morrowind vault collapsed alongside the original NWN vault
(I just use it as an image dump for my weirder projects, mind. And to see if I can somehow trick it to giving me the hot files for the month)
For NWN, the Nexus is an epic fail, because we don't have the culture of obeying the boss and his cronies.
Sorry, but it's time to stop flogging that dead horse.
This whole vault thing reminds me of discussions about the autodownloader in NWN2 we had on our server. Dammendrech was really a wonderful piece of art, however always lacked the playerbase because it was almost inaccessible for new players. Before the autodownloader it used a homebrew system to download haks and PWCs that kinda worked but was buggy and unintuitive as hell. But our admin flatout refused to switch over to the player-friendly autodownloader with various reasons, like "our system is better", "it'll keep the riff-raff out" (on a server with 10 active players on a good day) and and and...
Finally, maybe a year or more later than everyone else we finally switched to the autodownloader as a last hope, way too late but we got a handful... and then Gamespy happened and it was basically over.
Anyway, this whole Vault thing reminds me of it, and seeing the same discussion again as in 2014 makes me rapidly loose hope in the whole thing. That said, maybe the NWN1 community didn't have it as bad as NWN2s with losing it's playerbase and can afford doing it's own thing, but for NWN2 it was surely the last nail in the coffin.
This is 244k files across all games. Mods that are packaged as multiple files figure in multiple times.
neverwintervault.org has ~21900 projects uploaded already. This includes only projects created after 2014, and projects hand picked from the IGN vault. The old IGN vault backup (also hosted at neverwintervault.org FTP) has some 35000-40000 projects. There's likely a 10k-15k duplication there, but that still puts us at 40k projects, conservative figure. If all projects were packaged as a single file, that'd put the current NWN content at 20% of all nexus content, second only to Skyrim at 55k files. In reality, there's at least 5x the projects in NWN than Skyrim.
Nexus just doesn't work well with so much stuff, and I'm not sure if they'd even want to host it all.
Of course there will always be the die-hards from the old days who know exactly where to go, but they're too few. I completely dropped all my building efforts at that time because I didn't know who to make it for anymore - the few dozen active people didn't try out new stuff anymore, hung around on their old same home PWs for years not willing to go througf the effort of trying out something new anymore, and new players didn't come in for various reasons (and I think this topics one of them).
Now it looks to me like there's one more chance to get new people in and do it right when NWN:EE comes out, and I really hope there will. I don't say Nexus or nothing, although I strongly believe it would've been the right step in the first place, but then at least the Vault needs a massive overhaul.
Edit: As I said, DarkOne offered it and the sites for NWN already exist, so there's no question they're willing to host. I'm not sure how many Skyrim or Fallout mods exist, but I'm willing to bet Skyrim at least outnumbers NWN by far, not to mention the mods are usually much larger.
Of course it's great that the NWVault has that massive archive, the one point I'm making is getting it to the people (new, interested players without years of NWN experience). But yeah, maybe I'm beating a dead horse here.
So, the Nexus being the only place to get NWN mods would be very bad for me.
but returning to the speech of NWValut, and clear that the site for me falls within the things that need to be revised, to be easier and more compliant with modern times ... as the saying goes "the old way the argo to the new" of course without too much forgetting the past.
Then...
... Yes to some improvements in browsing and downloading modds ...
... yes to being more open to new generations of players ...
... no to being tied to the past ...
... no all not asking small collaborations with BD to improve the site and download modd's and Hack's pack's.
This is what I ask for the rest as you wish.
Dark0ne is a fantastic guy who I will forever be indebted to. He designed my first ever website for my modding team and even hosted it out of nothing but kindness. He has been one of the most active and positive forces for community made content and without his enabling then we would not see the huge rise and popularity of user made content that we see today. Dark0ne is good people.
However, that does not make his admin team flawless.
When dealing with such a huge amount of user content you have to be a little ruthless as there is simply not enough human oversight possible to cover the vast amount of content being generated. I appreciate that and in no way hold that against the Nexus. However, that does not mean I want to give them the keys to the NWN kingdom. Quite the opposite.
As for NWN2. I appreciate your disappointment. I authored the "101 Things wrong with NWN2" and spent a year as a Community Representative for Obsidian Entertainment trying to fight tooth and claw for the needs of the general and modding community because NWN2 was so far below the needs of it's user base.
10 hours a day. 7 days a week. For a year.
So I get it. I really do.
But NWN2 had far deeper issues that drove away its community than which website was hosting what files.
To bring it back around. The Nexus is not the answer for NWN's hosting issues.
You would be surprised to know that "Social Servers" have the dubious distinction of providing much of the early code that made persistent worlds flourish back in the noughties. Much like how porn pushes the boundaries of technology today. Never underestimate human inventiveness when it comes to sex.
And while you may balk at the notion of adult content, kindly remember that had Game of Throne had been a NWN series of single player mods on the Nexus then it would have been taken down by The Vampire Dante for violating the Nexus terms of service and the author IP banned.
The blanket censorship of one of our more embarrassing but highly, highly inventive parts of our modding community would diminish us as a whole. Censor them and we are all made lessor because of it.
I am sorry the NWN2 community didn't follow your beckon call to the Nexus and you somehow feel that as a personal slight. However, The Nexus was not the answer then and it is not the answer for NWN:EE's needs either.
- Jamie Goulding
is not this the case for the multitude of adult content that is partially present in NWValut?
do not think that the modd's on Nexus skirym are pink and flowers are mostly strong motlo, I can confirm it because I played skyrim and I saw several modd on you tube that were very risqué so we are not hiding behind excuses and let's go things like they are, you do not want to have a check because you do not want to censor most of the work on the site.
There are also numerous prolific modders who were banned from the (to quote Dark0ne) "Judge Dredd style of moderating" who had nothing to do with adult content. People have been IP banned from the Nexus for all sorts of stupid reasons due to blanket moderation and to say it has gained a reputation would be an understatement.
There are scores of authors who refuse to post their work on The Nexus and thousands of high quality, non-adult content mods that will never be seen by people who exclusively use the Nexus.
The Nexus is not the be all and end all of file hosting. The convenience comes with a great many caveats and being on the Nexus does not magically confer success.
And at the risk of sounding harsh. People forget there are far more Nexus communities that are baron wastelands of potential like Dragon Age than there are Skyrims.
I agree there needs to be a better solution that is more convenient to new players. However, I would much prefer to see Beamdog and NWVault cooperating than see the NWN community in the hands of The Nexus.
- Jamie
1: Any module-specific hak pack. Nexus hates mod compilations without pure written evidence of all permissions, and given how old some of these are, those permissions are long gone
2: Work based on taking older work and bugfixing improving, such as the classic Beholder in a Box. See the case of Arthmoor's famous incident of Gategate, wherein he blew an absolute top because someone dared make an optional addon to his work to remove a non-lore fitting thing he slapped in despite people's complaints
3: Tileset improvements that improve on the original, such as the many, many, MANY forest tileset updates out there that utilise Yumi Chan's forest water tiles. Or city tilesets with the Alleys tiles. Once again, Arthmoor and him blowing his top over someone dare taking his Skyshards mod and adding a sound effect to it, because apparently crediting isn't good enough for the Nexus
4: Updates from uncontactable authors. Take for example the Drylands update that incorporates stuff from the Drylands tileset (Not touched since 2002 by the original author), builds off an update done in 2003, includes a whole bunch of other stuff just redone to support the Drylands. Most of the people involved cannot be contacted. We accepted it on the Vault. Over on the Nexus? Probably grounds for it being deleted at best, banning at worst
5: Other game ported stuff, such as Draygoth's mounts. That's been removed over in the Skyrim side of things unless its Witcher, and I know Draygoth used WC3 and WoW stuff
Honestly, I doubt you could get the CEP or Project Q on the Nexus without some overly trigger happy moderator banning the uploader and deleting it.
The Nexus just does not support modding the way we've done it in the NWN community. The Nexus is "ME ME ME ME ME", whereas the NWN stuff has been a community building on itself.
@HunterRayder93 are you by chance from the Czech Republic? It's just that you keep typing NWValut. Now in the Czech language valut means currency in English. What you should be typing is NWVault. In this context the English word vault translates to trezor in Czech.
TR
Anyway, I'm not saying "close the vault", rely only on the Nexus. I say get everything possible also to the Nexus so new players will easily find it, then in descriptions etc. the Vault can still be advertised for additional content. And yes, the Vault really needs a makeover I think.
- Does not allow updates or use of assets without detailed express permission in a 15 yr old community.
- Removes a large chuck of the adult modding community which has granted us many coding advances.
- Places the health and well being of our community into the hands of a 3rd party admin team that in their own words use "A Judge Dredd Style of Moderating."
- Fractures the modding community between the NWVault and The Nexus.
Exactly what part of the remaining NWN modding community do you expect to utilize the Nexus?It's established on NWVault. It's where people go to upload their work and where people go to download. It's fine as is. We don't need a change.
I do not and have never suggested that the NWVault should close and everyone should migrate. The Nexus sites for Neverwinter Nights already exist, I only propose to upload there too.
I honestly don't care much about a few dozen modders prefering to exchange their mods in some hidden corner of the internet, but if you actually want your mods to be seen outside that group I'd at least also upload it to the site everybody looks first. Maybe NWN1 is still healthy enough and doesn't need the publicity, but I remember a lot of whining and complaining on PWs and from mod authors about no new players dropping by and checking your stuff out.
You seem to have many personal reasons not to trust the Nexus, I know there's a lot of infighting in the modding community - like in every community, however I suggest at least using the Nexus as a second hub if anyone still cares about publicity and new players, it's called advertising. If your mod gets rejected by the Nexus staff, no harm done, it's still on the Vault or you can create NWNLoverslab or whatnot. I personally care most for PWs, both NWN1 and 2, because I've seen many great servers die that deserved much more and everyone's just hanging around on the five huge ones anymore.
As an example - I'm not sure, but on the Vault, the number behind the files, is that the downloads? If so, Compare, say, the Icewind Dale NWN2 campaign downloads on the Vault to the downloads at the Nexus: Vault about 2600, Nexus 55.130 (11.702 unique).
My own little hak has 300 downloads on the Vault, 9.822 on the Nexus.