How To install Neverwinter Nights on Linux

Joe Barr writes " As soon as I saw the news that BioWare released a beta of a Linux client for its popular and successful Neverwinter Nights title, I downloaded the beta (registration required) and went shopping for the prerequisite retail Windows version of the game. Before I proceed, let me offer this brief warning: Neverwinter Nights is the mother of all timesinks. Do not follow my path unless you have nothing important you want to get done for the next week or so."

Comments

In the words of the Duke: Not Hardly!

[CAIMLAS]

If you think NWN is a huge timesink, then you've obviously never played the original Baldur's Gate. We're talking about a magnitude scale of at least 4 here.

At the end of Baldur's Gate, after having thuroughly explored every nook and cranny of the world, I'd accumilated 212 game days of play. That's approximately 2 hours per game day: 424 hours. (If I recall the conversion properly.) That's 17 and 2/3rd days, straight. Now, consider your average person sleeps 8 hours a night, it equals roughly 26.5 days of gameplay, not taking into account things like bathing, eating, and work.

And that statistic doesn't even begin to take into account the many hours spent saving, loading, and replaying sections of the game that are all but impossible to perform well. I'd say that, realistically, you can easily double or triple my figures.

In contrast, it took me less than a week to beat NWN while going about school, sleeping, eating, and other various activities.

Re:In the words of the Duke: Not Hardly!

[moonbender]

Nice calculation, but you're probably quite off: the number of game days includes the time your characters spend resting. IIRC, the minimum time your party sleeps is 8 hours, and more, if your healing capacity requires it. How much of your total time is spent resting I couldn't say, but chances are it's a significant amount. For me, it is.
Of course, there's no doubt the original Baldur's Gate was an incredible time sink. I played it daily for two months, too. Same goes for BG2, I think. Took me one or two weeks to play through NWN with a friend. However, I have not yet touched on any of the expansion modules, although I intend to: many are considered to be better than the original campaign, which was already good but did not come close to BG's drama.

(On a sidenote, neither of these games is the ultimate timesink. If I was to name one, I'd name EverQuest - or any other MMRPG for that matter. We're talking months of actual in-game time here - not me though.)

Just run Windows! Do it now!

[Infonaut]

You're right! Just roll over. Give in. Do what they tell you. Don't try for something better. Give your money to monopolists. Vote with your dollars! Tell the world that it's OK to just become one with the Borg!

Gentoo one step ahead

[doktr thunder]

*just in case you were wondering, portage already has an ebuild for NWN server, for all those people getting their nwn running in lin

Gentoo can even wrap "impossible" programs

[Jerf]

.rpm, .deb, and .ebuild (gentoo) are AFAIK all script-based, or at least have scripting capabilities, so there's no such thing as an "application that can't be packaged". If the app couldn't be packaged, then you couldn't install it by hand, either. (Debian even supports asking the user for input as part of the install process.) .rpm and .deb, by convention more then anything else, are supposed to be binary-only packages. There's nothing technically stopping them from compiling source code (except perhaps that you aren't supposed to need a compiler on such systems).

Ebuilds, on the other hand, embrace compiling source to the near exclusion of all else, so for those packages that can't be wrapped into a nice binary that will work for everyone, an ebuild can still be created. In fact it is common practice to make such wrappers, and ebuilds for other uncommon situations as well.

For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with .rpm and .deb, if not essentially impossible.

Ebuilds are a superset of binary packages, such that they can package anything you could install by hand, simply because they are a higher level. (This is where the sandbox support comes in real handy, since you don't have to specify what files were installed and what files to uninstall; the sandbox picks it up automatically and I expect all packaging systems to pick that up eventually.) Of course, there's a price to pay for that in compile time, since virtually by definition it's impossible to have this flexibility and still distribute binaries*, so it's not like it's a absolutely superior method in all cases. Tradeoffs just like anything else.

*: People keep talking about having a "package repository" for Gentoo which would function as a giant multi-person cache of Gentoo compiled packages, which you could then grab instead of compiling. Nobody AFAIK has made any progress beyond suggesting it, because even with just the obvious configurations (the four or five main processor types, the three or four good optimization settings from conservative to ultra-aggresive, the three or four obvious USE settings from conservative to everything) mulitplied by 10 or 20 gigabytes for a pure install means that nobody can afford to host it, and people would still find it too limiting.

You know, there are other reasons to run Linux...

[jobeus]

It's not just cuz everyone's an MS hater. Personally, I don't really mind MS, with the exception that it's a pain in the ass to get infected with Code Red, Nimda, etc etc.

I run Linux on my laptop and Windows at home. Why? Because it's different, it's interesting, mainly. And because I have a higher control over my system and as a Computer Scientist, I can actually see some of the things we talk about in those stupid classes in action. As I watch the kernel compile, I see mutex functions and remember the operating system course I took 2 years ago. I see gcc compile and I remember that class I took on assembler.

It's also kind of neat to have a fully customizable desktop, with weather conditions and wireless network link quality displayed in the 'panel'. Litestep with Windows used to be neat for this kind of thing, but for me, it never quite seemed as stable as explorer was.

Also, what happens when you've used Windows for 10 years straight and you get a job at some company that uses some form of Linux? I'd think it'd be nice to be able to sit down and get to work without having to complain to IT you don't know how to use this non-Windows crap.

So geez, get a grip. We're not all MS-avoiders. :)

Re:Where to play

[startled]

I agree with everything you said, except about coming up with your own adventures. The high-rated modules at planetneverwinter (or bioware links to them and, um, someone else-- nwnvault?) are great, and much better than what you're likely to make your first few times out.

Aside from that, yeah. Private servers all the way-- the pubs are only for when your buddies aren't around.

Re:Timesinks

[motorsabbath]

Multiplayer between the Windows, Linux and (vaporware) Mac versions should work fine. Several have already gotten it working in the fora. I was able to connect to a friend's win32 NWN server but didn't have time to hang out and beat on it.