Mason
NWN Content Management System

Mason enables a team of developers to coordinate their plans, ideas, and module components. It is based on PHP and MySQL and it also uses a simple template system to allow you to reskin the UI for your project.

As a team management tool, Mason helps you recruit and organize your members. You can expose public applications to recruit new developers and approve or reject them. Each developer can be assigned to a group with unique priviledges and responsibilities. Their profiles can be reviewed and their skillset sorted.

As a project management tool, Mason helps you define tasks, track their progress and assign them to developers. Depending on a developer’s pirivledges they will see their tasks organized into groups and may select from an open to-do list or may be assinged a task from a supervisor.

As a document management tool, Mason helps you organize lists of ideas, formatted text documents, binary documents, feature requests, and bugs. Each can be categorized and cross-referenced according to the components of your game and the relevant chapter and section. Users, which are resposible for a particular part of your game (a chapter, an area, an NPC), will be able to see these entries in a manner similar to the task entries.

As a development tool, Mason correlates tasks to contributed ERFs and unique databased content. Your game world is defined by a series of components. Some are defined via Bioware’s toolkit, while others may be defined in an external database, accessible via NWNX2. When a task is complete an associated ERF may be uploaded. This will allow the responsible developer to merge all the contributed files into the final module.

As a database management tool, Mason helps you manage data driven content used by NWNX2 game worlds. It can be extended with custom panels that provide a database-driven task request panel, a view panel, and an editing panel for the data driven content. This allows developers to manage virtually any type of custom data-driven content, from databased books, potions, portals, in-game events, and conversations.

As a persistant world management tool, Mason helps you track the status of a running game, allowing data to be shuttled from a Linux server to a remote Mason database. Data-driven content can be developed on mason and can be published to a running game server automatically or in batches. Mason can create “outgoing” tables dedicated to a specific server. This allows persistant world developers to create a public server and a beta server that can independently upgrade their database content.