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NWN Linux Client Delayed
An anonymous reader writes "Posted tonight on the Neverwinter Nights Linux client page: '[Dec 13 2002] There have been many questions as to why the Linux client is taking so long. The two big issues are sound and movies due to the fact that BINK and Miles are only available for Windows and Mac. BINK is the in-game movie player and Miles is the sound engine for Neverwinter Nights. We are having to find our own solution for Linux sound in Neverwinter Nights, and we are exploring possible movie options. Due to these factors, we are revising the estimated release date from Fall 2002 to Winter 2002 (Dec 22 2002 to March 21 2003), with January 2003 being the earliest date it could be out. Progress has been made on sound this week, and to re-iterate, the graphical side of the Linux client is looking excellent and is almost complete.'"
Why not using divx and mplayer (a downsized version, of course) to play the movies? mplayer can operate in a lot of ways (that's what I like on it) with various input and output systems, and I think it's nice as backend for playing videos in linux games. Sure, there is smpeg too, that was used by lokigames.
...apart from the cheesy opening sequence. The "cut-scenes" are more like static slide shows. Couldn't be too hard to write up a drop-in replacement for something like that?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Here's a sound engine.
Here's a movie player.
I want my client now, please!
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Gar, this is so frustrating! Been waiting for so long for the client. This was an opportunity that the Linux community had to be in at the start to help with the flow of mods.
Still, I must really thank bioware. The fact that BINK and Miles only run on windows will do a great service to Linux. This will draw attention to the fact that some companies (such as Bioware) are remaining committed to bringing the game to Linux. As a consequence, it will draw attention to all those people who think it is acceptable to produce products that run on windows only, or windows and linux. And yes, I am also thinking of all those web designers who think Internet Explorer is the only web browser being used, and everyone should just download it - after all its free.
So even though the difficulty of bringing out the client may be a downside, I think that Bioware's persistance could serve to aid us, along with putting to shame solutions like BINK and Miles.
I have friends waiting for me to get the Linux client. We could play before that, but once I have the client I am much more likely to get involved. Then we can get a campaign started. Until that time, even my windows friends who purchased the game are not doing much more in the meantime.
Not entirely. "Porting" a DirectX API means porting driver interaction, or drivers themselves. This has always been a selling point for Linux (hardware support), and new drivers could disrupt that reputation. We would see lots of buggy beta-stage things, as is expected with OSS, or on the other hand, the port would have to be more of a re-write.
Just my un-informed $0.02, and that's the Aussie dollar...
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
It's starting to sound the project wasn't intended to be multiplatform from the getgo. Wouldn't they have chosen other means of playing video and sound or written their own right away?
// ville
I think Bioware's biggest mistake in Linux port is being so hush-hush about what is happening with the port. It was always "It will be out real soon!" or "Just a few bugs stand in our way" or my personal favorite, "We dont have time to give updates"
At this stage I don't greatly care whether the movies work or not, and I don't care how bad the sound is. I want the game which I paid for working on my machine. I don't care if it's called a beta. But I want it now. Yes, I'd like it if there was a patch release available by March which had as good sound as the Windows version, but I think waiting the Linux client till March is a long time to ask loyal supporters to wait.
It has to be remembered that this isn't the first time they've put it off...
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Yo, so this is how I see it.
Anyone know what this Bink format is? Miles audio system I'm not to worreid about; they could have sound fixed, albeit not very positional, today, if they wanted to. As for Bink - you've got the problem of having these bigass movie files on the CD i assume. That leaves them 4 options:
1) delay the release
2) find an OpenSource or simple way to convert them to mpg, play them. Unlikely.
3) port the player. painful.
4) find an OpenSource player that's stable, common, and supports Bink. Unlikely. I doubt mplayer supports Bink, but even if it did, it's not necessarily stable, uniform, or common enough. Though a binary COULD be built and called by the game to play the movies. If it supported Bink, which I doubt.
5) offer it as download. Bandwidth costs money.
6) have a cheap hack to disable videos - definitely not cool.
I do not like having to wait even longer but I believe they are working hard on a project that deserves my support. If Linux users like myself, do not wait and buy it when it comes out then they will get no reward for their effort and may decide not to bother with any future Linux ports. The only way to get people like Boiware to support Linux is to buy their products when they do release them so that they see it as worthwhile.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
seems sort of lame, they could have a demo or something without it and i would be very happy. i'll take a static image of 'movie forthcoming' and 'ctrl-g' bell for sound ding ... ding.
if tons of people download and use the thing maybe it would help the prioritize it better. if not, then they can stall it if they want for good reason.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
If by 'lite sort of RPG' you mean 'incredibly in-depth and cutomisable D&D game which is the best one BioWare have done yet', then you'd be right.
- Chris
Just please read old Slashdot news about NWN client for Linux. All sane people know it won't happen soon. But there is another and another useless raport on news sites.
It was smart marketing to sell more copies of NWN. Thanks to promise of Linux client, authors get a lot of announces on Linux-related sites, and even not-so-Linux-related, because it was just a unusual event: "new game for Linux".
Now please look at news archive. Please read all this CRAP. How many people is working on Linux port? They realized then can't play movies or sounds NOW? So what they did all the time before? When they started work on Linux client? Maybe after first Windows release? Or maybe they still don't know which libraries use for it?
I know it will be probably moderated down, but I don't care. I am sick of all that commercials put on news-sites. When Carmack say "there will be Linux client" - he release it just with Windows and Mac one. And IMHO community will remember who was honest, and who was not.
This is like the DOS days when every vendor had to write their own printer/monitor/sound drivers.
The modern OS should have a standard. DirectX is works great, why not make thinks easy implement DirectX in Linux.
Is there a technical reason not to do so, or is it a philosophical one?
RAD Game Tools, the company who sells Miles is the same company that sells Bink, but since I have never used Bink, I don't know how easy it would be to port it to Linux. But as a general rule, it would be better to use effort to port APIs that many developers use rather than porting specific applications like NNN... Just my .02 Euros...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
First of all, does this not sound like a gread opportunity for RAD to make a chunk-of-change by providing a BINK decompressor for linux?
Secondly, the movies are not a big part of the game. There's only eleven of them in total, including such highmarks as "AtariLogo.bik", "WOTCLogo.bik" and "BiowareLogo.bik". The in-game movies are the intro and then one per chapter and the ending. The consist mostly of images fading together and a storyteller voice. Recreating this in code (change the movies to a series of pictures) and possibly extracting the voice and layering that on top should NOT be a big problem. Sure it won't be the _same_, but it'd work
But I must tell you, I'm disappointed with Bioware on this. I _urged_ them to use more open formats. I made numerous posts on the benefits to them of them going with Vorbis instead of mp3... and that all ended with one of their engineer saying words to the effect "Don't you worry, we'll have all our licensing ducks in a row".
Well goodie, but then why are we having this problem?
I've just got to wonder if the problem with bink isn't that they _can't_ reverse-engineer it (I'm sure it can be done, especially since there are free tools so you can compress whatever you want and analyze the output. The file structure is actually very simple and I already know the header and chunk format)... or maybe there's the legal implications of doing it.
Man, those licensing ducks sure lined up fine!
(the problems with the sound API sounds odd, I don't see of SDL_sound/OpenAL wouldn't be enough)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
"Is there a technical reason not to do so, or is it a philosophical one?"
DirectX is property of MSFT, enough said.
Anyway, I never understood why people would use DirectX unless they were certain they would never release the software for another platform than Windows. There are already a number of cross-platform solutions for audio, video, etc.
Examples include SDL, OpenGL, PortAudio and OpenSL.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
I can understand a granularity of 3 months before you start a project.
But they are already 6 months past their first promised release!
It defies belief that the best estimate they can still make has an error factor of 3 months.
I was one of the idiots that bought it shortly after release because of the claimed linux support soon, and since the linux server really was out soon they had us all fooled that the linux client really would be soon too.
It wasn't until a couple months after the windows release that they even deigned to tell us 'Fall 2002'.
More games should be coming out on Linux, since how to port it is already figured out. Well it may not be a massive number but it should be noticeable number. Then more and more programs should follow since marketing and management will finally figure out that there is a market for Linux. I'll be picking up the Linux Client when its finished and I hope it will work as well as Windows. BTW, why didn't they get Transgaming to port or is there some clause for them to do it?
but it looks like a lite sort of RPG
If you consider the entire 3rd Edition rule-set to be lite, then there is only one thing I have to say...
NERD ALERT!!! NERD ALERT!!!
OK, guys, maybe this is somewhere we can do something practical to help.
I am a good general purpose geek, and I expect a lot of the rest of us here are. I've never actually written a CODEC, and while i've reverese engineered file formats before I've never tackled a compressed video stream. However, it can't be impossible.
How many people would be up for setting up a sourceforge project for either an open source BINK player or an open source BINK2mpeg converter (actually both would use most of the same components). This way we could make an actual positive contribution to getting games onto Linux. We probably would not be finished quick enough to make a real difference for NWN - three months is damn tight for such a project - but it might help BioWare and other companies with future cross-platform games.
We've also all got sample BINK files to analyse, and a google search for 'bink file format' found me a useful text from someone (Mike Melanson) who has already started to analyse the format.
So, come on, who's in?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Don't feel bad. Most EA games I've played don't seem to have Windows support, either.
"That's not a bug....it's a feature."
I decided to just buy a Gamecube and Metroid. For Linux, I'm just picking up games from smaller development teams, like http://www.pompom.org.uk .
I loved MOH:AA when I used Windows, but that was probably the only game that kept me hanging on.
In the way of NWN- I don't really care anymore. I am, however, excited about some of LGP's new offerings. I definately plan top pick those up.
To all people saying Bioware is making a honest effort with this port and should be supported, please realize they are saying their movie player and sound system don't work six months after their announced release date. If the Linux gaming community wasn't too excited about getting this port to make a balanced analysis, nobody would believe in Bioware's good intentions anymore.
Like some person in The Linux Game Tome usually comments after these announcements, "I voted Never in the poll [about when would NWN Linux Client be available] and I stand by my choice".
Hopefully this will be a lesson to many gaming companies...hopefully they will release they should support and use API's/toolkits that are supported on many platforms. You can do this without taking any kind of feature hit. There are so many great tools for that support Linux/MacOS/Windows. Here is a list...and this list is in no way complete: 1) OpenGL: 2D and 3D graphics 2) SDL: 2D graphics, 3D rendering context's, sound, input management and more ;)
3) OpenAL: 3D positional audio or just stereo too!
With these three you can basically create any game you like
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Either they just don't know what they are doing on Linux, or they are using the prejudice that "Linux has no multimedia support" as a lame excuse for not delivering a client they didn't really care much about anyway.
> If you consider the entire 3rd Edition rule-set to be lite,
Of course. Real men play GURPS. With all the expansions.
Damn, this is really a big disappointment. I mean, Bioware basically had us believe that the Linux client would ship with the Win release. Now they have revised their plans continuously. I am starting to have second thoughts about my investment in NWN, which I bought because Bioware let us believe that we could play it under Linux a couple of months after the retail PC/Win release. Now I have a three useless NWN CDs that are only collecting dust.
How many game players are there out there who MIGHT buy this for Linux BUT haven't already bought (or "shared") it for their Windoze install?
Note that I very carefully specified "game players". Any serious game player - i.e. people with a machine good enough to play NWN and that are statistically likely to buy games - have a Windows install. Yes they do.
So, how many of them are there? I mention this because I bought the Windows version ages ago. I simply wasn't prepared to wait for the promised Never-ever Winter Nights on Linux.
Note to developers: if you actually want to sell Linux games, you have to release them at the same time as the Windows install. Otherwise you're just polishing your dev skills.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...we should let Radgametools know how profitable it would be for them to code for Linux. After all, the alternative is that their products aren't used at all, -or- someone enevitably hacks together an OSS version of Miles and Bink. Surely they don't want that!
Send Radgametools an email and let them know that there's interest in seeing their products on our favorite platform.
support@radgametools.com
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I consider 3rd Edition to be kind of middling. I consider Bioware's implimentation of 3rd Edition D&D (especially spellcasting) to be extremely "lite".
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
You'll be pleased to know that a Linux port is underway.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Are you sure that it isn't just a server port?
People have already bought the game.
They're trying to put a client together that will work with their existing data files. They don't want to repackage and reship the entire game for crissakes.
That means that they either A) Have to have a player in the linux client that will read the bink files, or B) they need to develop and ship a utility that's going to do an inplace conversion of the existing Bink files into something the linux client can use.
As much as it may be the company company milking the Linux chance, it may also be lack of knowledge. It is certainly feasable that this company wishes to be in the Linux space, but is having to undergo a training curve. This may be an opportnuity to start a company that contracts out Linux game coders.Or if your are one of the distro companies, then start snatching up Linux game coders and offer them around.Between contracts, they improve the architecture. Sounds familiar, doesn't it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Divx is a joke as far as commercial products go...
;-) you've seen has probably warez movies. If you encode DiVX (MPEG-4 actually) at high bitrates, the quality is astonishing and the size surprisingly small.
;-) would be one of those. It's optimized for animation? Yes, all video codecs are optimized for animation. That's kind of the whole point of a video codec. So Bink gives great quality at a range of bitrates? What the hell does that mean? So you have to be sure you use between 100Kb/sec-271.5Kb/sec or something otherwise it will look like shit? The bitrate of any media stream is directly proportional to its quality. More data, more detail. It's just that simple. You're talking like there's some secret magic to getting a well chosen bitrate and that only some codecs do it. As for why Bink is used for games -- only because it's marketed that way. Many companies clearly choose technologies without being clueful as to why they are choosing them. That's certainly the case here (read the story). There's no reason for them to have chosen Bink aside from someone saw an ad for it somewhere and immediately assumed it was the answer to their prayers.
Troll. The quality of a compressed video, using any codec is going to be shit if the encoder used an extremely low bitrate. The only DiVX
Don't knock technologies you clearly don't understand. DiVX would be great for commercial products!
Quicktime/sorenson is the only thing that even approaches an acceptable compromise for video in a game, due to its high quality at reasonable bitrate. On the other hand, it's pretty CPU heavy and it doesn't give you very fine control over the encoding process.
Wait a minute, you just reamed on DiVX -- which has very high quality and a very reasonable bitrate. Note that MPEG-4 decoding is not very CPU intensive, which makes it a better choice than QuickTime for games of all applications. Perhaps you want a video playing while something interactive is taking place. Furthermore, having a fine-controlled codec is hardly specific to QuickTime. You make no sense.
Bink is PC and mac compatible out of the box, it's optimized for animation, the encoding process is very tweakable, it gives great quality at a range of bitrates, and the SDK is very well developed with games as the primary application. So really, I can see why they would have chosen it - not to mention that it's basically been the standard for any game with cutscenes since PCs gained the ability to play video.
Bink works on N platforms, eh? Trust me, there are plenty of other video codecs that work on at least N + 1 platforms. For the uninformed (the parent), DiVX
You sir, are a troll. I cannot believe the moderators rewarded your clueless meanderings though the world of video encoding. You probably picked up a few sparsely scattered jargon terms in you day to day life and now fancy yourself an expert.
Why bother.
bye,
[L]
Actually, NWN already uses OpenGL for 3D, and the Linux dev folks were reportedly messing with OpenAL. In win32 DirectX is used for stuff like controllers.
How do I know? They specifically said it's OpenGL, and besides, my D3D8 setup is so screwed that if they had used D3D8, I'd be staring at "can't use 1024x768 @ 0 hz display mode" error message - but NWN works fine. =)
And now we are seeing another estimate change. Why? Sound and movies. Fair enough, the game should be quality and complete for any platform if we are to spend money on it, but don't you think it would have been at least half-ways intelligent to pick solutions for sound and movies in the game that weren't tied to any particular platform or at least have a solution in mind for Linux that they could have been working on?
The Linux port of this game is vaporware. I used to be really optimistic about it, supportive of BioWare's efforts, patient for its delayed release in the Fall. Now we're told Winter 2002, which actually means Q1 2003 or later. I feel like BioWare was lying outright when they sent out press releases bragging about simultaneous cross-platform development and release of the title. Did they even know what they were doing when they said that, or was it simply a statement made by some marketing drone without bothering to check to see if that was realistic? Whatever the reason, the "we don't have a solution that works for Linux" is garbage. If you didn't have a solution when it was being developed originally, supposedly simultaneously with Windows and Mac, then you should have just STFU about anything other than the platforms you could actually cope with. The Linux community would have been overjoyed to have the game released as a surprise, but instead you've set Linux gamers up for a huge dissapointment, one that is entirely your (BioWare) fault.
A general flame to Marketing weenies: never forget, you have no product to get fat commissions off without engineers to build it. BS empty promises based on a cocain-fueled press release writing frenzy do nothing but hurt the company you work for, your credibility, and the credibility of your industry.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I'll say it flatly--a character record in SWG is FAR larger than you think. There's a business reality to see here. We share fancy databases over multiple servers. Said fancy databases cost $X up to a certain size. Then they cost ten times that if you go over that limit by one byte because you have to buy the "next size up."
So basically they've invested in a database with a ridiculous pricing scheme and so this is the side effect. Damn shame for them that they didn't use PostgreSQL or MySQL.
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Now, looking at the legal reality, the fact is that the EULA disallows this. It disallows it in most of the games. Why? So that we can tell who actually did something bad. So that we are forming a legal contract via the EULA with one individual who is legally responsible.
It seems to me that the legal reality is that a 14 year old cannot be bound by the terms of a EULA because they are not an adult. Therfore, not having "Family" accounts run by a parent is actually opening them up to legal problems. If a child does something nasty and violates the snot out of the EULA, they have no recourse. If a child does so on a parents account, then they do.
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From the NWN Community board ( Great Linux Client Thread #18):
Posted: Saturday, 14 December 04:45PM
Miles problems solved!
I've ported Miles 6.5c over to Linux. It works flawlessly, including dynamically loading ASI, FLT, and M3D modules. I've submitted the code back to RadGameTools. NWN dev folks, please contact me for details: slouken@devolution.com
--Sam Lantinga, Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment
The fact is, if I want cable TV in another room, I have to pay for an additional cable outlet. If I want a phone for my daughter or heck, for myself in my office, I have to pay.
Actually, until the advent of the overpriced digital cable services, this wasn't true of cable. You would have one cable connection into your home and an infinite number of TV's connected for free as long as you ran your own cable. So until some company decided they could make more money by making people pay for multiple connections, it didn't work that way. Same thing here.
Now, I think the phone analogy makes more sense here and how they SHOULD do it. If I have multiple phones in my house, they can be used by multiple people, they just can't be used simultaneously. If they are wanting to make sure 20 people aren't sharing one copy, that's fine, just say that they cannot be logged in simultaneously. Or perhaps, not logged in simulatenously from more than one IP. This would provide the means for a family to share one account and all play at the same time, but would disallow the possibility of it being abused.
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Transgaming don't port! They use Wine (or Winex in their case) to make Windows games run on Linux. Its good for games that come from development houses that will not be doing a native port for the forseeable future. Originally Transgaming did say they would never get a game working that has a native port planned or in the works.
Bioware insisted that they do their own port, having a third party in this case would take away the experience needed for future ports I'd imagine.
StarTux
I've noticed that more and more games are using open standards for their file formats, going with mpeg 1 layer 2 or 3 audio files for example, for both music and effects. (You can always decompress to ram for frequently-used sounds.) This is a good thing. It's unfortunate that THESE developers didn't think to do the same thing with the various APIs needed to play sound and movies. When will people learn that proprietary standards are anything but?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
DirectX is works great, why not make thinks easy implement DirectX in Linux.
Ahaha, ahahaha....ahahaha.....bwahahaha. You just figure it out? I mean, it's only the exact same thing Bill did with DOS to marginalize apple/amiga. See many Amiga games in the store these days?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I was going to buy the game anyway, but I know some people who bought the game and still have it in the box, because they are waiting for a Linux client.
Bioware promised a simultaneous release for Linux, Mac, and Windows four years ago. At the time they even said that there was the possibility of a BeOS port as well. Just as a note, this promise was made during the "dot com" bubble. Bioware might have felt that they could have hired more people to work on the Linux and Mac versions at the time.
Up until right before the game was released, they were still promising this. Then, all of a sudden, they announced that only Windows would come out, with Linux and Mac to follow. Recall that at the beginning of the year, Bioware and Interplay had some sort of disagreement... and the game was in danger of not having a publisher. Then Infogames, the only other company with a lisence to D&D, picked it up.
Admittedly, they _did_ deliver on the Linux server fairly quickly. That is a good thing for me, but the client would be nice as well.
There are a few differing opinions on why the Linux client delay has occured.
My personal opinion is that the publisher of the game, Infogames, was holding Bioware to a June release date very strictly (probably so the game would release two weeks before Warcraft III). This explains the extremely short Beta period, as well as the relatively high amount of bugs (compared to previous Bioware releases).
I also believe that Infogames is still pushing Bioware to focus on adding new content to the game and begin work on expansions, rather than focus on getting the Linux client done, and that is why they only seem to have a few people on the Linux client. I personally believe that if Interplay were still the publisher, the game would have likely been pushed back to fall, and the simultaneous client release would have been a reality.
Some people believe that, from the beginning, the Linux client was just a marketing ploy to get more people to buy the game and to get the game advertised on Linux sites. I really question the validity of this accusation. Bioware has a history of making good RPGs, so it isn't as if they had to rely on a cheap marketing tactic to sell the game. Mentioning that this was from the "Makers of Baldur's Gate" is enough for most RPG enthusiasts to buy the game.
The third point of view is that Bioware really is trying their hardest to get the Linux client out, but these few problems are really causing them hell. Personally, I could care less if the movies don't work.
What I believe Bioware ought to do is release a "beta" of the client as it is. No matter how crappy the sound is, I believe that it would probably at least keep Linux folks happy that Bioware is working on it.
What really hurts the Linux client right now, in my eyes, is that Bioware has mentioned NOTHING about porting the two expansions they've announced to Linux.
On the bright side, people say they've gotten NWN to run Wine. I haven't tried it myself, but at this point, it looks like Wine will be the only way to play in Linux for at least a few more months.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Am I the only one here who remembers The 11th Hour? Getting that damned Bink player to run at *all* on any machine ever built was hard as hell. Best I could ever manage (with every combination of video cards and systems at my disposal at the time) was *black and white* video playback.
The reason no free players offer the performance of Bink is because the authors of those free players desired to release applications that can actually play videos :)
Read my stuff.
x86 is by far the most prominent platform for linux, and with good reason. It is the most widespread, accessible, and affordable platform that, hardware for hardware, is comparable or better than the other hardware out there. When people buy PPC, Sparc, PA-Risc or MIPS workstations, they are rarely ever buying for the sake of the hardware underneath, they are buying for the explicit purpose of running OSX, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, or Irix, not to put linux on it. For that they could get high quality x86 hardware cheaper and do the same thing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm a bit out of the loop, both waiting for the Linux release before buying and finding it too depressing to lurk around the bioware boards anymore.
What's the current situation with the toolkit? Have they made any official comment on a native toolkit for Linux since kylix added C++ support? Also, how well is the toolkit working under wine right now?
Everything will be taken away from you.
Dogun,
Have some pity on a noob who can't tell the difference between the X system and a Windowmanager. (If he used Gnome you'd be explaining what a desktop environment is.)
I mostly use Blackbox and TWM. I guess you could say I have no response problems. I also don't have full fledged clipboard, etc., etc., etc...
Quite frankly, I don't think someone groomed on windows would ever feel comfortable in Blackbox. There are simply some usability issues. Windows users have never experienced a computer that doesn't have some of the conveniences of a Win system. They'd be confused by the desktop, a lack of filemanager. (Ok, native fm....)
I have always found KDE to be painfully slow. On a 500MHz box with 256 Ram it was unusable for me. Windows has KDE hands down as far as I'm concerned. When you figure that KDE has emulated Windows to the point of even having the same inconsistancies and annoyances (the friggin' start/k menu...) The slightly improved speed and responsiveness of Win 98 or better is well worth it. Gnome is a productivity sink.
Linux certainly has shown that geeks know jack and crap about interfaces.
~Hammy
They wrote me back already:
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
The only reasonable answer to what Bioware is doing is, IMHO, this:
a) don't buy the game until the Linux port is there
b) do buy the game when it is
unless
c) they take so long that it doesn't matter anymore (e.g. shortly before the release of NWN2, which would mean you don't have anyone to play with)
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I have not been paying a particularly significant amount of attention to DivX's legal issues. However, my rough understanding was that the very first DivX release was a modified version of a leaked copy of MS's MPEG4 decoder implementation. I think the major change was allowing MPEG4 streams to be stored in .AVI files, not just .ASF. This was DivX version 3.11a.
Since then, Project Mayo (aka OpenDivx) was formed, and built an open source (legal, at least from a copyright infringement standpoint) DivX codec.
Project Mayo went closed source and became DivXNetworks, and a closed source DivX4 codec was released. They also did DivX5.
XviD is the open source fork of the Mayo codebase. The mplayer people are fanatical about XviD -- I've seen quite a bit of XviD pimping there.
So both the current DivXNetworks and XviD implementations should be kosher from a copyright point of view, and one is even open source.
It wouldn't surprise me if coders on one or both projects looked at disassembly from the original codec, so there could be argument about a lack of clean-room implementation (which is a *bitch* to do properly). However, in general, if XviD or DivXNetworks's implementations were used, I think that copyright infringement issues are not an issue.
That does, however, ignore the issue of patents. I'm not sure about the legal status of this code. I know that commercial implementations of MPEG4 (which DivX was originally based on) have some patent claims impacting them, so you can't run out and just make an MPEG4 implementation.
I'm not sure whether these still affect DivX. I would suspect that the DivX implementors at least gave it a thought, but given the fact that DivX is primarily used for pirated movies, they may not have dug too deeply.
If I were going to found a product based on DivX code, I'd want to be *damn* clear about the legal status of DivX as regards patents.
May we never see th
OpenAL is cool (the only way I know of to get 3d panning sound mixed in hardware on Linux), but nobody has the thing installed.
May not be an issue for commercial game vendors like Bioware, but it's a pain in the ass for open source types who would like to have its features available.
May we never see th
I can not justify spending double for a product that yeilds a diff less than 365kb
That's silly. If you were really so cash-strapped that this was an issue, why do you have a machine capable of *running* the "latest and greatest"?
Most of the time, I've seen people that trail releases by about 12 months are the happiest. They get the bug-fixed copies on *release* (i.e. no corrupted saved games 30 hrs into a game), good performance on a computer that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, better community support (fan websites are up, mods made, walkthroughs done, etc), and sometimes better prices.
May we never see th
This hits particularly close to home for me -- I developed a Linux game for a class this semester, and one thing I had to throw out was 3d audio, because there's piss-poor 3d audio support on Linux. Don't get me wrong -- I love Linux, and chose not to work on Windows -- but I had to throw out a feature that would have been relatively easy to do with DirectX.
.5 API instead of the .9 API. This is the best bet if you're willing to do some work -- xmms actually now has an ALSA plugin that *works*.
The entire state of Linux sound support is somewhere between "bad" and "pathetic". Let's take a look:
* Sound servers. Sound servers are essentially the currently accepted way to do sound mixing on the local host. They are, however, simply awful from a performance standpoint -- high latency, CPU overhead, and inability to take advantage of hardware mixing capabilities are pretty much showstoppers.
Esd is probably the best general-purpose Linux sound server. It has an ugly hack for "giving up" the sound device -- a simple time delay. It's very inefficient and blows CPU time, and adds latency. The quality of its resampling sucks. It has notoriously poorly written internals, and the author (and maintainer) has been out of the picture for years. The GNOME Project adopted esd, but has done very little work on it.
Artsd is, impressively, even worse than esd. It is *extremely* heavyweight in RAM and CPU usage. It's a pain to get it to give up the audio device. It's even slower, and as most distros I've seen don't nice it to a negative value, it's frequently the cause of audio breakups. One of the ugliest parts of KDE, and a very ugly wart to new Linux users.
The only legitimate reason to have sound servers is to do network-transparent sound. And while I frequently use network-transparent graphics, I and the vast majority of people simply do not care about network transparent sound (other than beeps, which X does nicely). You can't reasonably stream a decoded sound stream over the network with sane performance.
Sound servers should be *much* less common than they are now. They give Linux awful media performance, are confusing to new users, and have almost no utility to most users.
* OSS/Free
OSS/Free is, well, free. It's also fairly reliable and simple. That's about it. It has only supports common sound cards. It doesn't do cards that require NDA, supports essentially no advanced features (wavetable MIDI, hardware mixing, bass/treble/reverb/etc on the DSPs). It doesn't manage sound requests at *all* -- basically, if you've got the device, you've got it, and if you don't have the device, you don't have it. End of story. The vast majority of Linux installations are still using OSS/Free.
* OSS/Linux
Supports some less common sound cards, since it can use information released only under NDA. Costs money, so very very few people use it. Fixes some of the failures of OSS/Free (like a lack of hardware mixing), but the pricetag pretty much kills it as a general solution. If you're doing hardware mixing, but all the channels on the card are currently being used, this thing simply fails. There's no "software mixing" fallback that starts being used if all the existing hardware channels are being occupied.
* ALSA
This is The Future. It has good support for many modern features. *Still* does not support major features for which commercial documentation is available for -- no treble and no bass on my SB Live, for instance. More than a little complex to set up, though most distros have patched over the ugly installation process by giving you a GUI that autogenerates necessary files. Supports hardware mixing, but again has *no software fallback* (which the ALSA coders have specifically said they will not support). I can't have an 8 channel soundcard, play 8 sounds at once, and then have the next sound be mixed in hardware. Half of the software out there is written to the incompatible and obsolete version
* Linux kernel SB driver
If you have an SB-compatible soundcard, you can probably use this. It has somewhat less than convenient hardware mixing support -- the series of dsp devices, each of which can only have a single program attached, may be technically accurate, but is incredibly annoying to use -- you have to arrange your applications to share your DSPs (in my case, only two -- and I wanted to be able to play snes games, play mp3s, and still get ICQ sounds.
Creative Opensource drivers:
Not pre-installed, so essentially not acceptable for a newbie. Even though this is from Creative, incredibly enough, it does not do MIDI synth OR have bass/treble/reverb/etc support.
I've poked around with the sound system on my box for quite some time, and have worked with a number of sound cards -- at the moment I have multiple ones installed. I'm fairly disappointed with the piss-poor functionality that users can expect from their audio hardware under Linux.
May we never see th
We have just been informed by Rad Game Tools (http://www.radgametools.com) that they have Linux versions of both Bink and Miles, even though its not mentioned on their web site. We will be getting our hands on these tools on Monday and we should have further information for you then.
This solves the two outstanding issues with the Linux Client, and I bet we will have even more good news for you in the coming week in terms of future Betas or Demos of the Linux Client. We here at BioWare are thrilled with this development.
We would like to apologise for the confusion arising from the Dec 13th update where it seem like we were blaming Rad for the delay. This is entirely untrue. We were stating that, to the best of our knowledge, we would have to find our own solutions for movie and sound playing in the Linux Client. This is no longer the case and we look forward to using the Linux Rad Game Tools just like we are in the Windows and upcoming Mac version.
Rejoice (and I guess its time to upgrade the TNT2 video card in my Linux Box at home)!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Derek French
Producer, Live Team
Neverwinter Nights
I have both ports and they both mysteriously broke.
Much prefer getting native as do most gamers, but some game are just never going to get ported.
StarTux