Tiggerlicker

I've redone and streamlined (kinda) the install guide for the server:

http://arcanummagika...n/v9/start.html


Some changes are more noticable like the change from MySQL 4.0.23 to 4.1.10a and I've consolidated the parts that are related together (like the NWNX and plugins).  

If anyone sees anything that looks odd or gives problems let me know and I'll update/change as necessary.

Well I finally got everything working like it should and I have managed to get a few NWN players here at work to help test on a internal server. Server-side no problems but the 4 players all reported the same thing to me (quotes taken from e-mails sent to me):

I spend 3 minutes creating my character through the NWN character creator then spend 45+ minutes to create a character with the PRC dialog.  By the time I wait for things to load in the PRC I am already bored and don't want to play anymore.

What is up with the hour character creation process?  I've drunk more tea than my body can handle and I'm tired of watching the 0%...0%...0%...0%...0%...0%...0%...0%...1%...1%...1%...1%...1%...1%...1%...  Will the game ever finish the character creation process or have I gone to purgatory to wait out the end of my life?

Is there a way to ditch the prc stuff?  I've read up on NWVault about the various parts of prc and while it seems cool the load times are killer.  If I have to spend more time creating my character than to get them from level 1 to level 2 then there is something wrong.

Can you create a character any faster or bypass that character speech stuff when you enter the module?  I waited a long time and didn't even get past the feats and spells section before I closed out of the NWN game.

The test server I'm running in-house (on our LAN...not accessable to the Internet) is a P4/3.2GHz with a 800MHz front-side bus, 1GB RAM, Win2K server, RAID5 160GB array (using 10000rpm drives), on a gigabit network. The client PCs are all P4/1.8GHz, 512MB RAM, WinXP, 40GB, connecting to the server with gigabit NICs. This is even using the SQL exports to speed up the table creation process

Is character creation taking others this long or is it something else that I should look at? My hopes were that the long character-create process was due to NWN having to build all of the needed tables at runtime and the SQL export should make that time much, much shorter. But from the guniea pigs I'm using they seem to have a pretty strong voice that they would stop the character create and go do something else if it takes a long time to just create a character.

Not a slam on anything...just evaluating how to handle things...