A bit of good news
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The Dev team has a lot of projects in the works. This is not the news - we always do.
Some add new systems, some new items, some new critters - this is also not news.
Any custom NWN module like Narfell uses a large number of custom scripts to create specific systems and NPC behaviors. Those scripts are written using the functions available from the scripting language available in the Toolset, known as NWScript.
Bioware, when it created NWN, used many functions that were not made available in NWScript, so even though scripters can do a great deal in terms of customizing a module and creating new systems, there are some things to which we have had no access.
Narfell uses a system called NWNX (NeverWinter Nights eXtender) that gives us a lot of capability beyond what the base game allows. One of the goals of NWNX has been making functions available to scripters that allow us to access more of the game engine than NWScript originally allowed.
For some years, most NWNX development has been taking place in Linux, with occasional ports to Windows of some of the work. It is for this reason that I am working on putting together a Linux server, with the idea of eventually moving Narfell from Windows to Linux (note that the OS run by the server will have no effect on what is required to play the game - people running Windows, Mac, and Linux will still be able to connect regardless).
In March, a coder over at NWNX began porting a body of linux NWNX work to Windows, called nwnx_funcs.
Version 0.0.1 resulted in a few new functions being available. The current version 0.0.62 has made over 80 new scripting functions available to Windows servers. These functions allow us access to portions of the game that we were previously locked out of.
I'm still working on the linux server, as there are some functions that cannot be ported to Windows (among which is one that would allow us to have a true disguise system with dynamic player names)… but the ones that have been ported so far give us new tools to work with.
So... there will be a lot of new things coming over the next few months that weren't possible before.
