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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.