To be fair to all servers, there are a lot of different variables that stack up to equal lag.
1) Your connection speed matters, so if you try to play NWN on say 56k your going to be overwhelmed with data, and that will cause a lot of lag for you alone. even if you have a 1 MB Connection, that doesn't guarantee you won't experience lag, if say, the Server is a T1 or has 1.5 MB / Second or greater and it's feeding you data faster than your Ethernet Adapter can read.
2) Your video card could be bottle necking in areas with high 3-D Graphics, cause you to be lagged out, in fact I once seen a DM Spawn in a bunch of simple VFXs and the lag became horrendous. Furthermore, some models are poorly rendered, therefore causing huge spikes in video lag.
3) The # of players on a server "Can" effect lag, as the more players, the more lag, therefore you would want to measure lag by the # of players on, for even if a server has a T1 or 1.5 MB/Second connection, if 20-60 players are on doing different things in different areas, there is going to be lag, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
4) Poor Coding as E_K suggest is also another serious cause of lag, and of course the use of some scripts, like the use of On-Hit Cast Spells for weapons are a horrendous cause of lag, then you have the issue of multiple heartbeat scripts firing on NPCs, placeables, or even the module itself, or combat AI which could be badly coded and cause significant lag for all. It could be cause by a wide array of things, a combination of things, or one thing in particular, it's tough to give you a straight answer without experiencing & looking at a module in the NWN Tool-Set and examining it closely. How you set up Monster's Factions can have a horrendous effect on lag due to scripting as well.
5) Then there is the actual area design of a module, you will notice on some modules that have large areas, lots of NPCs & Place-able objects in an area which you can interract with, and lots of doors, like you may find in a town area can cause some lag, how much though may be another debate altogether.
I remember one module I entered, in a town area, where the map was 15 X 15, there must have been 50 NPCs walking around, and there were placeable objects everwhere, the lag was so bad, I kept side-stepping. This was played on a 3.2 GHz DUal Core CPU with a good video card, so it wasn't the computer, but the module's design that effected gameplay significantly.
I hope this has answered your question some more, though there is really no one definite answer to the question, and we would all be speculating to try to answer your broad question, because many things can account for lag.
Modifié par Genisys, 14 septembre 2010 - 12:08 .
