Update: September 20, 2011

It's been awhile since we've updated this site with what we've been doing. Sea of Dragons has added a lot of new content in the past few months to improve the server. While much of this is not visible, it does help streamline everything, decrease lag, and make the server more efficient overall. This is due to scripting overhauls that eliminate bugs and fix redundencies. But we do have some new things in that our players really enjoy. We've added a few new haks, Xp Craft (an in-game appearance changer with toolset versatility), new spells, a new base class, and a number of new PRCs. Come on in and check it out.

We also have a lot of new content in the works, as well as some content by third party modders that hopefully we'll be adding soon. This includes:

• A custom crafting system with 21 trades. Players will be able to mind, forage, smith armor, and numerous other things.
• New scripts which will make objects on the server interactive, such as coffins, tombs, and random things like piles of leaves and old stumps. What happens is randomized, so you never know what to expect!
• Some new areas that are underwater (Northkeep). These will make use of new creatures, new spells, and scripts.
• Rideable horses! These are third party development, but we've been watching and they are nearly finished. Adding these will mean doing something in NWN2 that people previously thought impossible.
• Persistent storage. Having crafting without this wouldn't be good, so we'll work on integrating this to the server.

A New and Improved Server

Sea of Dragons is happy to announce that it has a new server up and running. While not everything has been transferred and there are a few functions that still have to be set up, it is working for testing. More information on testing it can be found on our forums.

This new server is a positive for SoD in many ways. For one, we're confident that it should be able to handle the ever-increasing load of players better than our old server. Secondly, it has a MySQL database which should allow us to do so much more on the server than what we could in the past. And third, expenses are going to be much, much lower than before.

New Additions

Sea of Dragons has been steadily increasing in player population these past few weeks, with around ten new players in one week alone. We now have players logged on pretty much throughout the day and getting busier all the time. We're pretty sure that trend will continue and we'll be welcoming many more new players to our server shortly.

Along with our rapidly-expanding population, we've also added some members to the team. We now have two members devoted solely to creating custom items for our server, whether those are weapons and loot to be found when dungeon-crawling, or more options for the appearance changer. And also, we have just recently obtained an excellent new scripter in the past day. We expect to be able to accomplish a lot more custom systems and integrate them into our server in the future with his assistance.

If you haven't stopped in to check out Sea of Dragons, please visit our forums to see what else is in the works or just log on and become involved with the dedicated role-players who already enjoy what our server has to offer.

Update: 05/12/10

We've been hard at making new content and fixing bugs the past few months here at SoD. Below is a short list of what's been going on development side.

NEW CONTENT:

Character creation:Character creation:

• 3 new heads for halfling females and 4 for the males.
• 4 new female human heads and 3 males.
• 2 new heads for male and female Aasimars
• 1 new female tiefling head.
• 1 new female half-elf head and 1 new male.
• 1 new female head for all the elves.
• 2 new dwarven heads from the Dwarven Long Beards Pack.
• Male half elves can use the tiefling heads not, minus the horns.
• Female halflings will now have most of the hair options available to the big races plus additional options.
• Kaycei's Hair and Tribal Hair have been added.

Tilesets:

• Deep Halls Anniversary Edition.

Other:

• 36 New NPC's.
• 7 New quests.
• 6 New areas
• Many new monster spawns.
• The new NWN1 style familiars are now on the server. The catch is that they are not available during character creation. Since NWN2 would not allow me to code proper alignment restrictions I have decided to disable them for the creation menu. Instead, the new familiars will likely be obtainable during the course of gameplay. The exact manner of their implementation is not set in stone but will be announced in the future.

Armor:

• One new chain armor is available for females of all races.
• Some altered textures for armor.

Stores:

• Tanner.
• Meat merchant.
• Potion merchant.
• Arcane merchant.

Items:

• Over 2000 new items are on the server now. This includes basic weaponry, armor, wands, magic staffs, and much more.

TWEAKED CONTENT:

• Perform is available as a cross-class skill for all the base classes.
• The appearance changer has been updated with many items.
• The entire pricing system has been overhauled.
• Many of the spawns have been tweaked.

SCRIPTS:

• * A script to improve AI reaction towards player actions is mostly functional now. Players can expect to encounter it in various places in the future.
• * An armor and racial speed modifier scripts have been added. Players will start to notice a small decrease in speed as they increase the weight of their armor. Scale and hide armor now have uses as they do not weigh as much as other, more protective types.
• * Some spawns have been given special scripts to improve their AI.

Update: 03/08/10

We've been quite busy the past month on Sea of Dragons and there is a lot of new content available now along with numerous bug fixes and changes. Here is a list of what has been done:

NPCs:

• Nine NPCs
• Six Updated NPCs
• Jesadale now spawns at night

Quests:

• Four quests. Two have custom scripts.

Areas:

• Two new areas.
• The Trolling Gnoll now has a store with commonly needed adventuring supplies.
• The temple in Elmwood now has a nearly complete stock of potions.
• Map notes are now in place for Elmwood, Mulmaster, and several other areas. Be aware that not all items of interest have map notes, just the basic stores and major outdoor transition points.
• Fixed a walkmesh error in the bandit caves.
• The issue with water in the Lis Path Ruins map has been fixed.

(NEW!) Custom Appearance Changer:

• Allows swapping of item properties between any two items of the same type (such as two longswords). However, it will only work with items that were custom made for Sea of Dragons.
• A merchant sells non-magical gear with custom appearances that can be used with the property swapper to give current gear a new look.
• The same merchant has models available that will display the gear appearances for the benefit of players before they make a purchase.
• With the property swapper, players can now submit a custom appearance to a DM so they can receive it ingame. Once the player has the item, the appearance can be transferred to new items at will any number of times.
• We now have armor templates that will be made available to those players who wish to design a custom suit of armor for their character.
• The +1 armors in the stores are now compatible with the appearance changer.

Gameplay:

• The random loot spawns are now fully implemented. It will be possible to find crates, chests, household items and corpses with loot on them.
• XP has been upped slightly.
• Catching fish is now easier.
• The timer for creatures that can be field dressed has been doubled. That allows players a full minute to harvest pelts and meat before the creature disappears.

Character Creation:

• Drow now have expanded color options in the character creation menu.
• Players can now have longer first and last names along with character descriptions that are twice as long as the default.
• New characters will now start out with 250 gold and 1000 XP along with 10 light healing potions. This should help players survive better at the start.

Bug Fixes and Tweaks:

• Drow, duergar, deep gnomes and gray orcs should now go back to their starting location after death.
• The issue that caused players to port to an off-limits area is now resolved.
• Doors now have auto close scripts.
• Issue with areas not de-spawning after all players had left has been fixed.
• Doors that should have been locked but weren't should now be locked.
• The first portion of a fix for a bug with player skins has been implemented. The second half of the fix is not so urgent but will be addressed in due time.
• Subdued weapon vfx files are now in the haks. This will reduce the size and intensity of the special effects attached to weapons that deal out some kind of elemental or magical damge by approximately one third.

Miscellaneous:

• A special hidden trigger was placed somewhere within the PW as a result of a DM event that took place a couple days ago. If it gets activated, the player will know.
• With the loot system working pretty well, we went ahead and removed vigor potions as players should be able to afford the other potions now. Lesser vigor is still available.

Update: 02/12/10

Today we just launched open beta for Sea of Dragons!

The server is running 24/7 and you can join it by either going to Join Internet Game and finding it in the Roleplay lobby, or you can direct connect at: 74.63.54.11.5121.

Please read our rules, notices, and custom changes BEFORE logging into the server as they are very important!

We hope that you enjoy playing on our server. Please keep in mind that this is the very first version of open beta and that we still have a long way to go adding more content and improving this game world. Player input, suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism are all welcomed to help make this place better and better.

Update: 01/30/10

It's been awhile since we've done an update here, so we now have a fair amount of new content.

New Content:

• 1 new area
• 5 new NPCs
• 1 Quest NPC
• 1 new store

Modified Content:

• Weapon tlks now reflect the changes
• XP script
• Class changes (these will be listed soon)

Besides these already-made changes, we almost have an arrow recovery script ready to go. What it does is allow archers to recover some arrows from creatures they killed in ranged combat. The script also detects which kind of arrows were being used and returns the same type. This system uses skills to base success on the amount of ammunition retrieved plus the amount used.

We do hope to go with open beta soon, but exactly how soon, we can't say. It depends upon how things go this coming week. We'll do our best to have all the necessities in by next weekend, however.

Update: 01/10/10

It's time for a major update here. We've gotten any number of new or revised content here at Sea of Dragons.

We now have five new or modified scripts that will prove very helpful to us.

• First is an ambush system, which is extracted and adapted from Kaldor Silvershield's King's Festival Rest System. Resting outside of inns is now something to ponder. Does the party need rest so badly to risk camping in a cave full of bandits? Well, we'll certainly not stop you if you want to do that, but if you get surrounded by a band of thugs, that's not our fault. Okay, technically, it is, but you get the meaning.


• Next we have a script that allows us to set skill attributes to objects before they can be usable, or even highlighted. This script will allow us to do a number of things, including puzzles in dungeons and the like.


• Third, we have a modification to the spawn script that permits us to change the creatures that appear according to the time. In the day you might run across a few rabbits and other wildlife. At night? Do you hear the wolves howling? Or are those worgs? Thanks to Binary for supplying this!


• And the fourth script is new. It enhances our ability to spawn groups of monsters efficiently.


• And finally, we now have a persistency script in place which allows us to make NPCs speak only to a PC once. There are other uses for the script as well.

We have included several new NPCs with our latest update and continue to work on more. Some of them contain quests, of course.

Just the other day, our resident handyman overhauled the entire XP system. It should give more appropriate rewards for killing creatures now.

We also have a new home for our forums. If you're reading this post, then obviously you've found the new site already, but just for the sake of announcing it, the new link is: http://www.seaofdragons.com/forum.

And last, but not least, our pleas for help. Okay, they aren't exactly pleas, but we are willing to take on some more staff members if there are any that are interested in joining us. Currently we are seeking a modeler and a quest writer. Potential team members have to be able to work within a system and also be dedicated to the goals we have set.

Update: 01/02/10

It's a new year and we've started it right by getting the Auto-downloader going yesterday, along with some testing. Since then we've made some more bug fixes and added in a new quest NPC. We are going to have the test server up and running again tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon (CST, GMT -6) and run it for the rest of day. Please be sure to make it if you are a closed beta tester!

Update: 12/31/09

This update is a little late in coming due to the staff being rather busy around Christmas, but I'm finally getting around to posting. Over the past couple weeks, besides doing some bug fixes and tweaks, we've added:

• Ten NPCs, including dialogue that changes based on race, stats, and other things
• Seven stores offering general items to weaponry
• NWN DM's Masterwork Shields and Armor
• Drinks of Faerun (updated with HCR2's alcohol system)

Tomorrow (1/1/10) we should have the Auto Downloader available and then we will go ahead and launch closed beta testing. Stay tuned. We should be testing in the early evening CST (GMT -6).

Update: 12/20/09

This past week we have not done much for adding new areas or creatures, but we have made some major progress on the PW. First, we have already run a test FTP server, so the auto-downloader should be ready to go very soon. This means that anyone who wishes to join in on closed beta testing is welcome to sign up for it.

Secondly, we have implemented much new custom content from the vault. Here is a list of haks from which we have taken content for the latest update:

• BTH shields
• The Dark Armory
• M4C Weapon Pack
• DMFI
• Heeds PC Tools
• Escrimator's clubs
• Adonnay's Elven Weaponry
• Shtoss' Dagger Pack
• Sun Silk Shields
• Zpirit's Shield Pack
• Re-textured Cloaks
• Re-textured Cloaks With Deity Symbols
• Wild Bill's Elven Cloaks
• Arsan's Hood
• Daggerknight's Elven Armor
• Schazzwozzer's Samurai Armor
• Yeoman of the Greenwood
• Hatsplosion
• Acme Full Metal Packet
• MONK Gear
• ACME Assault and Hattery
• Reduced Spell Buffs
• No Skins Buffs
• Elven Plate
• High Heeled Boots
• Tintable Clothing Pack
• Tintable Red Wizard's Robe

And of course, some things edited by the team:

• Toned down Shades Self spell VFX
• Removed the VFX for Battletide

Update: 12/12/09

This past weekend we implemented a few more areas into the server. We now have the road leading from Elmwood to Mulmaster complete. This was our first major goal to accomplish and we succeeded in a very short amount of time. We will now be moving on to working on fleshing out the areas that we already have and adding more content to them.

As said before, at our current rate we hope to have an open beta in the coming month.

Update: 12/5/09

We here at Sea of Dragons have been steadily progressing in the construction of the PW. In a matter of a few weeks, we have built and fleshed out over twenty-five areas and implemented many custom haks and scripts. We're very pleased with the speed and quality with which we are working, considering that we have only been laboring on SoD since late October. Current progress has been done by four very active and dedicated team members. At our current rate, we hope to be able to have an open beta sometime in January of the coming year.

Some very recent additions:

• Hunting
• Fishing
• Three new areas
• About a dozen new creature blueprints
• Creature Distance Tweaks
• RWS tilesets
• Modifed base stats on formerly inferior weaponry
• Purchasable explosives for the pyromaniacs