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Bioware Releases Neverwinter Nights Linux Client Beta
valedaemon writes "Well, I thought that the world would end before this day dawned, but Bioware has finally made good on its promise of a Linux client for Neverwinter Nights. You still need a Windows installation in order to copy the game data, but the good news is that the downloadable is only 4.4 MB. I could write more, but why? Go play!"
Server browsing and chat are disabled in this beta.
Now I never have to boot Windows again!!!
if you dont want to login to their site. download direct from here
You still need a Windows installation in order to copy the game data, but the good news is that the downloadable is only 4.4 MB
This begs the point, why even bother with a linux version at all? Its nice that Bioware did make the game playable on Linux, but shelling out for a copy of windows to be able to play it seems counter-productive. Second, why didn't Bioware make a linux installer for the game files. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to have a hard-drive based installer that looks to the CD for the data.
At any rate, Bioware did make good on their promise to support Linux and Linux gamers should be grateful.
First of all, good work Bioware on finally get something into our hands. I hope that what they have gone through can serve as a lesson to others planning to release a game accross multiple platforms. Be sure that the tools you are using exist on each platform. *One* of the longest delays was due to the Video and Sound engine (I believe it was the Miles engine) not be supported in Linux (but then it finally was...it is a long story). This is why we need API's like OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL and the likes. It makes things a lot easier to release on a multiple platforms.
I also hope Bioware has learned to keep their mouth shut if they don't know when something will be done. They lied to the community more than once about the state of the Linux client and that made many very mad...so...wise up!
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You still need a Windows installation in order to copy the game data, but the good news is that the downloadable is only 4.4 MB.
Do you actually need to have windows installed, or can you just copy the files from some other installation, or maybe from the game CD? I no longer use unlicensed software, and I refuse to pay for Windows. That does limit my options somewhat.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
Spending Friday night, Saturday morning and afternoon trying to get OpenGL hardware acceleration working. And all Sunday calling around to my Windows using friends begging for a copy of NWN :)
if u dont have a windows install, u can extract the data from ur cds with these toolz: http://icculus.org/~ravage/nwn/nwn_linux_installer .run
http://members.cox.net/monteslu/nwn_data_installer .run
their may be issues since the stuff extracted from the cds arent patched up to 1.29, but i cant say for sure. reply with info and/or tips if u have any
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
Step 1. Install the windoze version on a windoze box.
/path/to/mounted/nwn/directory
step 2. Update the windoze version to 1.29. 18meg download - and it's ssssllllloooowwwww.
step 3. Copy a pile of files over to your linux box. It would have been nice for them to include a script to do this for me.
e.g. 'getnwn
I'll write my own. Hmm, maybe I can just install the Linux client into the mounted windows directory and save me the trouble.
step 4. Install SDL if you don't already have it.
step 5. Install the NWN Linux client.
step 6. Profit!
Started this message when the update to 1.29 was at 8%. Finished this message at 58%. Damn slow.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Anyone have any benchmarks comparing the frame rate to the windows version? or even a it feels faster / slower?
ROFLMAO!
... @80KBps
... @65KBps
... @40KBps
... @10KBps
I entered the cave.
*use lantern*
The lantern lights a path and you see linuxNWN.tar.gz
*download linuxNWN.tar.gz*
You hath established connection and are downloading linuxNWN.tar.gz at 88KBps
*wistle dixie*
10%
*wistles*
35%
*wistles faster*
52%
*curse thy slashdot*
You have cursed at the slashdot administrators.
*grin*
A firey elementa of CowboyNeal appears before you.
*grovel*
CowboyNeal demands, "Why hath though cursed me through these halls, lest though die from thy vile dead?"
*kiss feet, explain the echoing of words on slashdot as being construed by the kobolds, trolls, and gnomes in the walls of this dungeon, and the stress from the occasional double post*
CowboyNeal forgives, leaving warning: "You hath finish thy download at a mere 10KBps, and henceforth I will shut up further seeds from download of thy file by SLASHDOT AFFECT!"
*praise cowboyneal for sparring thy download*
99.999999%
*shake off tarantulas, swap file with *NULL, run through hall, jump over chasm, run away from ball*
Phew, you are panting. You arrive at a lake; a strange man is sitting on a hydrofoil plane and is fishing...
*play game*
You die of a poison dart
From the client download page (get the link from head post): You will need to get the Neverwinter Nights game resouces from an existing Windows installation of the 1.29 build of Neverwinter Nights. Why must it be this way, you ask? It is because there is no feasable way to get the game resources from the InstallShield cabinet files on the Windows version CDs.
What a bunch of idiots... These retards take almost a full year after the release to come up with the Linux client (that they told everyone would be ready for shipping with the cds), and then this. Why should anyone put money in such a half-assed effort like this? Guess what, in the end few Linux users will buy this crap, and those morons will go: "told ya, shouldn't have invested time in the Linux market, Linux is not there yet."
*sigh* bastards....
They told the same lie as every other game company, namely that the game was finished when they shipped it. I stopped believing that one a few years ago, and "the Linux client is almost done" didn't sound much different to me.
From the Bioware page:
You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.
Heh. Think they know who thier audience is, or what?
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Seems to work for me. I just followed the instructions and copied the files from my NTFS partition, extracted the tarball, ran the "fixnwn" script, and the dang thing works! Loaded my save game and everything.
Neverwinter Nights works with:
[X] Debian Woody 3.0
Clickety Click
Epic Games deserves tons of props for making a Linux client for UT2003 available on the same disk set as the Windows version. Supposedly it installs pretty easily. By comparison, Bioware didn't do much for us at all. This requires a major hack to install. Not worth celebrating.
Oh yeah, Doom III will be coming out Windows/Linux cross-platform. Two words: Carmack rules.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Baldur's Gate etc was not that great for modding. Hey if you just got NwN for the "smallish stock module" then you are missing out. There are thousands of new modules made by aspiring Dungeon Masters out there now, and this is just the start. Not happy with the stock, well make your own! I agree that BG I / ToTSC / II / ToB are really great, but NwN is a rather ambitious undertaking in that you can make your own adventures, and even DM them if you want. Even still, I like the stock module. I like zooming in and watching my warrior hack those monsters to bits in full OpenGL splendor, and be sure to enable "Special Violence Mode" for extra fun!
Clickety Click
Actually, no, .cab files used by InstallShield are not -microsoft- .cab files, so cabextract will not work.
.cab with the same settings) and I'll whip a native linux installer up for you :)
That said, I could probably whip up an extractor for it pretty quickly. Except I don't own a copy of NWN, and have no idea what InstallShield version/settings they are using.
There is absolutely no reason that this can't be done. Hey BioWare, send me a copy (heck, send me a sample
You need the data files for Neverwinter Nights. Windows itself is not needed, but getting those files without Windows might be tricky. The easiest source is to copy the files from an existing installation of the Windows version. You can try to get them off the game CD, but they're in proprietary InstallShield cab files. There are tools that claim to be able to extract from those files, but I don't know how well they'll work in this case. Wine might be willing to run the installer.
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I made one a few days ago in preparation for this: http://members.cox.net/monteslu/nwn_data_installer .html
ravage also made one :
http://icculus.org/~ravage/nwn
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Looks like there's no difference between Linux and Windows users after all.
Out of all my NWN gaming friends, about half will use the Linux version (ie, about 2-3 of them :) ). Still, even though they use windows now, an increasing number of gamers are looking to install Linux. Thanks to WineX (I still think this is good, but they shouldn't advertise games with native ports) and NWN Linux version, one of them is going to be interested in completing the wipe of Windows.
It's exactly these ports that will create a new market. Obviously a gaming company wouldn't be interested in having a 50/50 split between Linux and Windows, because then they have to develop two ports. But Bioware has been nice to give us a native port, which later on may result in it being a necessity rather than a kind gesture.
Oh, and by the way, I don't wine about "Dirty evil EA how dare they not give us a native client!" I know why they don't. Instead it's much closer to "Could you please make a Linux client? We would really, really, love that".
...we've never had such fun with NWN. We tried it. Played into the second chapter.. and it was just so incredibly boring.
If you base what NWN is by playing just the OC then your missing the point of NWN. Try fireing up the toolset and seeing what it can do. Or failing that, download some of the modules that have been made with it.
While you can play the OC multiplayer, that is not what it is designed for. A well made MP module is far superior to the OC, and when you add a live DM (or several), then you reall begin to understand what NWN can be about. Of course if you have allready made up your mind then don't bother. But suffice to say that many in the RPG community find that NWN allows much more than the orignal poster gives it credit for.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Played NWN and Baldurs Gate...And I am not sure why someone chose to mod up this opinion. NWN is nothing like D2, sure Chapter 1 kinda sucks, but then it really takes off.
:). Although thats as far as I got with my Pally.
:). But it wasn't as close to pen and paper D&D...Nor was it 3rd edition as far as I recall.
Although with these types of games save/load tends to help a lot in single player. Did like the Green Griffon challenge quite a bit though
Where this is likely to shine the most is with Multiplayer, the above poster obviously has not found a good DM to be with. NWN actually allows too for hack'n slash, but depending on DM and module it does allow for the closest RPG experience there is.
Baldurs Gate; Great Single player games, no doubting that
StarTux
Actually, no, it's not meaningless to release it in Binary with no source. Yes, Open Sourcing the game would be cool, but it's a commercial product and they have reasons for keeping a reign on the client software. There are known compatibility issues between clients and servers of different revs. Open source would make that issue alone a nightmare. Never mind the potential for cheating.
Nope. Sorry. While there's a coolness factor in playing with the source, it won't make the game better for the majority of players.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
My guess is that they were waiting for some tools from Borland on the linux side.
Bioware's engine was written with Borland C++ Builder on Windows and they needed to use Kylix 3 which allows them to compile C/C++ code as well as Delphi.
Disclaimer: I worked on the first couple of versions of Kylix when I used to work at Borland. That said, I just want to say it really is a great development environment and you should check it out if you haven't yet. They have an Enterprise Trial and an Open Edition which can be downloaded here.
--
Karma: Positive --- Seems I haven't screwed up yet!
Bet this
But seriously, wow, I've been waiting almost a year for this (okay, maybe more like 9 months or so). I'm pretty happy that it's here now, since this expands the number of games I can play in Linux without having to reboot back into Windows. w00t! Although, honestly, is there even a reason I should play it in Linux rather than Windows (other than me being too lazy to reboot)? Since it's a beta it's rather crippled, and at this rate, I'm not sure it'll EVER run "as well" as the Windows version. I'm not too convinced with my Linux Q3A and RtCW (Punkbuster and performance are not up to par in Linux compared to Windows). We shall see.
Lots of people are complaining that this is too late, and that they should have released a linux client with the box, and so on, and so forth..
But the fact is, the game wasn't done when it came out. You can hardly blame them for not having a linux client ready when nothing else was, either. It was very obviously pushed out the door incomplete.
For instance, the HUGE faction bug was just fixed, last week. I bought the game the day it came out, and have barely played it due to this bug. Now that it's fixed (along with a host of other problems, and new content, like rats, that should have been in there from the beginning) the game is where it should have been when it was released.
I'm not blaming the developers, of course, as that's the state of the industry. Games are pushed out before they're ready all the time. This is just another instance of that, and it's admirable that they're still working hard on a Linux client that they will probably see very few sales as a result of (most people who are going to play it on Linux probably already own it).
-palp
I applaud Bioware for their effort. They have given an ok first showing. They could have and really should have done a lot better, but the incompetance I've seen there isn't any worse than I've seen anywhere else. I think both the bosses and the programmers at Bioware need to be forced to read and pass a comprehension test on The Mythical Man Month, since it appears that they made every classic mistake the book warns about, of course so does virtually every other company that has someone write software for any reason, so I can't condemn them too much.
We want to play nice with anyone that tries to bring games to Linux. After all, it's a risk for them. Their marketers are telling them that Linux just doesn't have that much market share, so there's little reason to support it. If other companies are watching this, and believe me they are, whether or not they decide to support Linux will be determined by what happens to those that have gone before. If the expierence is negative, they will be less likely to support Linux in the long run.
[1] It is handy to be able to export a display etc, but doesn't that add a whole lot ov overhead? It seems to me that it would give much better performance to have a local only X server, for the average desktop machine. Of course include the regular one, but why waste those system resoruces.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
First off, there are features missing. Some will be enabled in future builds, as this is beta1. Don't sweat those.
Second, you don't actually need windows installed, all you need is access to the game resources.
From the instructions here
2. Copy the following files from a Windows installation of Neverwinter Nights (updated to 1.29) into a directory called, for example, 'nwn':
ambient/*
[snip long list of directories]
dialog.tlk
dialogF.tlk (French, German, Italian, and Spanish)
If you are using ftp to transfer the files, be sure to transfer them in binary mode.
Note the last statment in step 2. You don't need NWN installed on the windows partition of the machine you're using. It only needs to be installed on a machine you can get to. For that matter, I would bet that that machine doesn't even need to be anywhere near up to the task of running NWN. Install it, update it, and use ftp. Bioware is actually suggesting that you get them from another machine.
Other options would include:
Grabbing the files from someone who has them and a burner. You might have to get creative and use several cd's as well as creative use of zip, and then be careful to put things where they're supposed to be, but there is no reason it wouldn't work.
Even an old machine with win95osr1 should be able to handle the install, and update scripts. The game doesn't actually have to work on that machine, it only has to install and update.
Third, this is still a beta. From the old Linux update page (Before the beta client was released):
Neverwinter Nights Linux Client Installation:
There are 2 things you will need for the Neverwinter Nights Linux Client, aside from the Linux Client executable:
- the game resources
- a CD-Key
You will need to get the Neverwinter Nights game resouces from one of two locations. You can either get them from an existing Windows installation of the English 1.27 build of Neverwinter Nights, or from a Neverwinter Nights Linux Game Resource download that will be available from several mirror sites. Either way, instructions will be provided with the downloads. Why must it be this way, you ask? It is because there is no feasable way to get the game resources from the InstallShield cabinet files on the Windows version CDs.
Read that carefully. There apparently will be resource files for download, they just don't appear to be ready yet. It does make me wonder though, if the Stand alone server can work for getting the resources. I tend to doubt it.
This all said, it would be better to have some sort of installer. As others have posted that such things are possible, and some have claimed to have done it, I suspect that some of the legal issues may have surrounded this specifically, and the necessity to create a click through EULA that can't be bypassed, which would be nearly impossible to do given the nature of the tools available to Linux. Such things give IP Lawyers a terrific case of the vapors, and yes I know that such things are legally ambiguious at best. Don't tell me, tell the lawyer.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns