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:Will this really be viable?

[lpp]

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

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: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.