NWN Cloud

[antirelic]

Hello Everyone,

I'm a long time NWN player/builder/scripter, and have figured out a way to take NWN to another level utilizing commercial cloud providers.

Here are my goals:

- NWN Instantation via server snapshots that launch modules over NFS. Allows players to decide if they want to play with a private, or public party, and set their own passwords.

- NWN Server resource utilization reduction. Convert massive modules into sub modules that come online, on demand, with very small delays.

And more...

All of this is going to be driven by NWNX, which I have used for a few years now, but am catching up on. Depending on how much interest this project gets, I'll turn up the heat on development. I'm going to have to write a bunch of custom functions to speak with the Postgresql database, but all n all, this should only take a few months until we can have truly unending NWN universes (the end being the limit of financial resources. lol).

I guess I'll put some heat on the development depending on how much interest I get.

Regards,
Antirelic

[Baaleos]

I can certainly say - that yes - cloud providers such as amazon aws are able to run modules without major incident.
For nwnx - you cant use windows server 2008 or higher, as nwnx chat seems to have some issues with 2008 and onwards - crashes etc

I use windows server 2003 - no issues.


Now - you have to take into consideration some things around the feasibility of making this commercially viable for yourself and your customers.

I use amazon aws - so I can only comment on AWS.

1. Accountability - Amazon will directly bill you, and you will then be the one left with the bill; you will then have to chase your customers for payment. Its risky, if they refuse to pay, what are you going to do?

2. High Price to spec ratio - Being totally honest, if you go with On Demand (24 / 7) your going to be needing at least a m1.medium server: which is going to be at least 100-130 $ per month + Tax. This is just to get dual core / and enough computing power and Ram to cover your server for long durations.
eg: going with small or micro, will end up having your server running at 100% all the time, medium gets it about 70-80 % which gives you that extra room for extra computing power during busy gaming sessions.
If your server runs at 100% constantly, that means your server is thread locking - causing lag in your game server.

3. No Control mechanism: I don't think its currently possible to cap bandwidth per sever. This is a risk because your clients/customers could end up remoting into the server, installing utorrent, and then bam - they run the server as a game server AND a torrent seeder server. Which would be illegal, and its you who amazon or the authorities would chase. you need to cover yourself by getting your customers details, charge them via paypal, get their address, make sure they are paypal verified etc
Amazon also charges you per GB per month, its something like first 100GB per month is free, but then its like $0.10 per GB. Amazon does provide an API for controlling servers, but measuring incoming bandwidth and outgoing isn't easy.


With the above said - it is entirely feasible to make a game server provider website that allows you to

1. Let the customers register
2. They can then specify a start and end time of their server instance - they pay per hour
3. You can then upload your module, specify what hak packs are needed.
4. Your website can then use the amazon api to go and create the server, start it up, and copy the module into the directory.
5. Copy haks into the directory
6. Start nwnx or nwnserver
7. Kill Server , and amazon server at end of lease time.

[antirelic]

Thank you for the feedback.

I do not intend to act as a commercial NWN provider. It would probably be illegal to make money off NWN in any capacity (I'm sure its in the EULA).

The software I'm designing is meant to be controlled by the account owner, per instance of NWN Cloud. For example, a person coming into NWN Cloud would not be able to do anything but travel about in an NWN world, and attempt to access NWN instances. At that point, the NWN Cloud software would see an instance request, and then build the NWN Cloud server and load the NWN module, providing access to that module. Utilizing the "reload when empty" function, the server would be shutdown after a period of time after the last player leaves the instance.

This is more of an effort to help people carve up their modules and take advantage of modern cloud computing. Instances will be shutdown when no one is in it, and launched when someone tries to enter the module. I'm thinking if we work together as a community (most servers are empty 99% of the time), we can really cut down on our collective costs.

This is all Linux based (just an FYI).

[Baaleos]

I did an experiment a while ago, with a module i called 'the hub'

It was a PW Module that was able to query the online server list from nwn scry.
I was able to use nwnx to execute .net code that could perform web service calls etc to get that information and display in game.

Players could then walk through a doorway, and be portaled to that PW.

With extra work, it would be possible to have the PW Started via web service call etc.