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Neverwinter Nights Tidbits
WWWWolf writes "The fine folks at Bioware have opened a new For Developers section, aimed for people who make external tools for the game. At the moment they have a forum and description of one of the crucial file formats, used for packaging data in the game, with more coming." This looks pretty cool. It's been several months since I loaded up the Aurora Toolset. I might have to get back into it again. In related news, Apostata writes "It seems there's even more steam under the lid of the NWN Linux community now: the Linux client won't be shipping with any ability to play the narrative cutaway movies between chapters, due to licensing/porting problems with Bink. Many are outraged, as this obviously makes for an incomprehensible game." Apostata also notes that the Aurora toolset also won't be ported.
I understood the lack of the toolset. I understood the beta being so late. However, I am extremely hacked off at the fact that the client is still incomplete. Movie playback is missing because of their choice to use Bink instead of a non-proprietary format, and they don't have the guts to port Bink themselves or pay someone like icculus to do it.
I really want to know how Bioware could possibly claim they were going to provide a native Linux port, when it's very obvious they were using non-portable libraries like Miles and Bink. How did they expect things to work at all? Were they just hyping things hoping that community good will would help sell their game better because they were going to have a Linux port? Bah.
The point is, I demand a full client. They said it was going to be there, and it's very close, but it's not quite there. They have done so well, and it's absolutely shameful that they've decided to do this.
As it is, they might as well call the Linux port the "Neverwinter Nights Multiplayer Special Edition", since it doesn't include a toolset, and without movie playback the Single Player experience has been greatly diminished.
Well, I guess that has kind of fallen through... Guess I'll be trying out some RPG's on my PS2 instead.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Again I say that making an attempt at a port is a step in the right direction. You've got a right to be pissed, however. Maybe they'll learn their lesson when they release their shitty port to lackluster sales--and try to do it better next time.
Um...NO! I just have to say that as a single player game, NWN was very impressive, However on the multiplayer side it sucked big time. However it did get us to restart an old D&D pen and paper group around here...
Jainith
"Many are outraged, as this obviously makes for an incomprehensible game"
Sure, there's a places for cut-scenes, storylines and cinematics. But, believe it or not, some of us don't care about the story line; we'd rent a DVD if we wanted that.
Some of us have always enjoyed exploring interesting dungeons, killing cool monsters, collecting useful treasures, going on challenging quests and upgrading our characters without pondering the deeper meaning of *why* our character does this.
I mean, does anyone really read the storybooks that come with the game? I'd be surprised if 10% of gamers even bothered.
Plus, it's interesting for D&D fans to see the 3rd Edition rules engine applied to a video game format.
Considering how popular Nethack is, I don't think a game-only version of NWN for Linux would have any problems with popularity.
Please quit your bitching for one minute -- NWN is a top-flight game and now Linux users can enjoy it.
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
I just can't figure out why they're locked in. Surely OpenDivx doesn't have licensing fees and is patent unencumbered? They have the masters of the movies, unless they purchased a license with the artists only to use the movies in a particular format...which seems fairly unlikely.
It seems like they could just compress the things into Divx format and ship 'em. I think most folks could live without extensive Q&A, especially when the alternative is no movies. Just add an option to disable cinematics to the game, and you're gold.
Or MPEG2, even if it's lower quality, and use smpeg, which Loki used for its movies.
I mean, I do think that Bioware is going to catch *some* undeserved flak for this, but OTOH, the decision to use Bink or nothing for the Linux client seems just plain *dumb*. There aren't any phenomonal features that Bink provides that another format can't provide, and using something like SMPEG can't possibly be more than a week of development time for a single developer.
May we never see th