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NWN Dedicated Server

Introduction


Never Winter Nights (NWN) is a RPG computer game created by BioWare Corp.. It was initaly released for Microsoft Windows platform but BioWare has since then also released both servers and clients for both GNU/Linux and Apple Macintoch systems.

NWN also allows you to create your own worlds and maps (called modules) so you can extend the experiance of the game.

I bought NWN since it is one of the few RPG style computer games that has support for GNU/Linux system and run it mostly on my desktop computer. Just out of curiosity I wanted to setup a dedicated NWN server. Here is a description on the steps I performed.

Preparing


Prerequisite


Computer Pentium II 233MHz with 256 MB, running Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger".

To use the script nwncmd below you also need to install the package since (it is in the universe repository).

Create a daemon user


adduser --system nwnd

Getting the software


Get NWN Dedicated Server.

Latest patch.

Installing

$ mkdir neverwinternights
$ cd neverwinternights/
$ unzip -x ../NWNDedicatedServer1.66.zip
...
$ tar xvzf linuxdedserver166.tar.gz
$ ./fixinstall
Checking for required files

PASSED: data directory exists
PASSED: nwm directory exists
PASSED: chitin.key exists
PASSED: dialog.tlk exists
PASSED: nwserver exists

Fixing case

data
...............................
dmvault
.
hak
.
localvault
.
override
.
portraits
.

Checking for problem files


Checking for permissions

PASSED: nwn.ini is writable
PASSED: nwnplayer.ini is writable
PASSED: saves is writable
PASSED: localvault is writable
PASSED: dmvault is writable
PASSED: /home/nwnd/neverwinternights is writable

You are ready to run Neverwinter Nights.
$

Get and install the latest patch even if it says that it is the same version that you just downloaded.

Startup script


Create the startup script:
#!/bin/bash
# startnwserver
# This file starts the nwserver as a backgound process.
#
NWNDIR=/home/nwnd/neverwinternights

NWNPIPE=$NWNDIR/nwserver.pipe
NWNLOGFILE=$NWNDIR/nwserver.log
MODULE="Chapter1"
SERVERNAME="Server Name"


if [ ! -d "$NWNDIR" ]; then
  echo "$NWNDIR is not a directory."
  exit 1
fi
cd $NWNDIR

if [ ! -p "$NWNPIPE" ]; then
  echo "$NWNPIPE does not exist.";
  mkfifo $NWNPIPE
fi

./nwserver -servername $SERVERNAME -module "$MODULE" < $NWNPIPE >> $NWNLOGFILE &
echo > $NWNPIPE

Helper applications


nwncmd


This is a simple script that executes a server command by echoing it to the input pipe and then list the end of the log.

#!/bin/bash
# nwncmd
#
#
NWNDIR=/home/nwnd/neverwinternights

NWNPIPE=$NWNDIR/nwserver.pipe
NWNLOGFILE=$NWNDIR/nwserver.log


if [ ! -d "$NWNDIR" ]; then
  echo "$NWNDIR is not a directory."
  exit 1
fi
cd $NWNDIR

if [ ! -p "$NWNPIPE" ]; then
  echo "$NWNPIPE does not exist.";
  exit 1
fi

echo $1 > $NWNPIPE
sleep 1
since $NWNLOGFILE