Mac OS X NWN Technology Demo Released

h0tblack writes "At long last the Mac OS X demo of Neverwinter Nights has been released. We now have a torrent running to get the demo distributed and take the load of off the official servers (macgamefiles should have the demo soon). Download the BitTorrent for Mac OS X client if you don't already have it. Then grab the torrent file for the tech-demo from bytemonsoon.com. After downloading the demo, PLEASE leave your BitTorrent window open, this will mean that the load is shared amongst us all and more people can download faster."

Comments

Mirror of the .torrent file

[Motherfucking Shit]

I've mirrored the .torrent file here. I removed the spaces from the filename, but it's otherwise identical to the copy from ByteMonsoon and I'm downloading from it now.

Any other mirrors? :)

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[Jucius Maximus]

"I know *nothing* about bittorrent, this is the first thing out there that makes me want to try it. So I installed the Windows client (I'm at work), but I keep getting the message: "Error, Problem connecting to tracker - 10060 - operation timed out".... is this common?"

Firstly, this is a demo for a mac game so you might not want to download it if you only have a windows machine.

Your office firewall might be blocking outbound connections on ports other than common ones (80,21, etc.) so you can't connect to the tracker.

Also, it could be that the tracker is overloaded. It's the bittorrent equivalent to a 404 error. (The tracker keeps track of what IPs are downloading so clients will know whom they should connect to in order to get parts of the file, and they also keep track of many transfer statistics. Bandwidth used by the tracker tends to be between 1/1,000th and 1/10,000th of the overall transfer used to upload and download the file. But with VERY popular files, even a tracker can get swamped just like a slashdotted site.)

Re:Will this really be viable?

[lpp]

FYI, BioWare did the Mac port themselves. MacSoft is only the publisher for the Mac version.

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[illuvata]

thats true, up to a limit. if too many people try to download from the same tracker, it will overload, and start dropping connection.
in this case, the whole of bytemonsoon will probably be down shortly.

also, there was a site for /. trackers. its down for maintenance right now, but i dont know for how long, so have a look:
http://torrents.slash0.org/

Re:ok, then

[Jucius Maximus]

" Sadly, I'm uploading faster then I'm downloading :("

To undertand this, you've gotta realise that clients will upload to YOU based on the upload rates they directly experience from you.

When you join the torrent swarm, you initally have no pieces so the download is slow at less than 5 K/s. Eventually you will have one chunk (about 1 MB) and then, in an effort to boost your node's 'ranking' with other nodes, it uploads furiously, making the upload rate faster than the download rate.

But then your node will rise in priority among other nodes because you are uploading, thus they will upload more data to you. In the long run, your upload and download rate will be equal unless you already start with a chunk of the file you got elsewhere that can be shared, or there are a lot of seeds (nodes with the complete file that are uploading only) and bandwidth to spare.

At the end, look at the count for data uploaded and downloaded. They should be quite similar.

Performance Notes on NWN Demo

[slycer9]

Hardware: 17" tiBook, 1GB RAM
Game Settings: All options MAXED, no anti-aliasing
Resolution: 1440

Pros: Runs flawlessly, no hitches, slow framerates or draggy performance.

Cons: No NPC voices. No speech during spellcasting. No shiny water. (tho I don't remember if my vid card supports it)

Very nice job, runs great. Now just gotta wait for the DM Client!

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[DFX]

actually, we're now getting slashdotted AND dos'd at the same time. now THAT's some good fun.

Re:ok, then

[Jucius Maximus]

"Of course, given the source is available, all you need to do is hack the source a bit to fool the system iunto *thinking* you hgave done loads of uploads, and you can then download full-speed and not bother wasting your bandwidth with pointless torrent uploads :-)"

Foolish AC ;-) Go back to your Kazaa Lite. Bram (Cohen, creator or bittorrent) already thought of this. Feel free to send outrageous upload statistics to the tracker. That information is not used to determine how much people upload to you. Other clients only consider the upload rates they experience directly. The ONLY way to get high download rates on bittorrent while not uploading is to connect to a swarm with high seed:leecher ratio.

NWN Performance notes :Edit:

[slycer9]

Just finished a discussion with some folks at Bioware.
Turns out a couple of the glitches aren't glitches at all.
1) Only 4 voicesets were included to compress the filesize for downloads.
2) Shiny water is not dependant upon your video card under OSX, because the current Mac implementation of OpenGL does not support it as of yet.

So, in review...neither of the glitches are bugs at all.
Game still runs flawlessly, smooth gameplay, excellent mouse response.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[lpp]

I hate to burst your bubble, but the Aurora Toolset is only available to those using the Windows platform. BioWare opted not to port the toolset to Linux when they discovered that Borland would not have a Linux capable C++ Builder version available in time for their major development push. Likewise for the Mac. In addition, MacSoft explored the possibility of farming out the toolset port to a third party Mac porting house (OmniGroup as I recall), but the time estimate was 1 year of development and thus the plan was scrapped.

The last I heard, BioWare still wasn't planning on porting the toolset even now with a C++ Builder Linux environment available from Borland, likely because it uses the CLX framework and the version BioWare used was likely only using VCL.