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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."
putting nwn on all three major operating systems. I hope this will start a trend for Bioware.
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Will this really be viable? There are some serious man-hours spent on this port, is it reasonable to expect this project to be profitable?
Probably not. However, it appears Bioware are pressing ahead (and doing it inhouse) because they are a games company that wants to be around in the long run, and stay one step ahead of its competitors. Writing portable code isn't something that comes as second nature to most Windows coders, least of all games coders, but they clearly think (correctly) that Linux is going to be a force in the long run on the desktop.
By teaching themselves the ins and outs of porting games, they've learned (the hard way it seems) that portability has to be a concern from the beginning. Using SDL isn't hard, but it makes porting so much easier it's untrue. Make sure any 3rd party engines you use will run on other platforms or are easily made portable. And so on.
I think it's telling they outsourced the porting of the Mac client, but kept the Linux port in house. They could have easily hired LGP for instance to port it, or done what was done for Unreal Tournament and get a freelancer in, but they didn't. That makes me think they value the experience and want to keep it internal to the company. Assuming BioWare stick around, I'd expect to see more Linux ports in future.
One and a half sentence about NWN.
Four and a half sentences about BT.
I think the heading should have read "OS X NWN Demo Available via BitTorrent".
How does that have anything to do with cutting edge technology? Its just the model under which the client was designed. Its a download app not a p2p client in the same sense as most pieces of software out there. You can chose which software you want to continue to share and which to not.
Unfortunately this results in some things becoming virtually unobtainable once people are no longer interested in a file, but there's usually at least a few people still seeding and leeching files even with somethings that are months old.
I always wonder when they use the term "Tech" demo. Is this thing playable? Or is it just some pretty graphics?
Should be interesting to see how the Mac platform manages to incorporate intensive 3D graphics...
Probably about the same way as it did a couple of years ago when the first public test of Quake III Arena was released for it (a week before the PC version).
Actually Macs have had very good support for 3D for quite a while.
MacOS X has very good OpenGL support - so the interesting question is whether games will start targeting it on Windows as well for added portability.
Considering that a 3D game targetting OpenGL can easily be portable (graphics-wise) enough to run on current graphics hardware on PCs running Windows, Linux or FreeBSD as well as Macs running MacOS X, that should be worth the effort.
Of course considering that a number of games target the proprietary graphics subsystem of the PS2, market share seems to be the only issue determining what effort a game port is worth...
Yes, the transfer of the files should be alleviated by using BT as opposed to the server having to serve the files. However, BT still relies on a single point of failure per download, that being the tracker.
For each person that wants to connect, they have to connect to the same tracker, which needs to manage telling each client where the peers are, mananging the throttle, etc. While not as bandwidth intensive as serving the actual files, under a good slashdotting, the tracker itself will get overloaded, and as a result, become ineffective for people.
The logical conclusion would be for /. to run a tracker, because it's obvious from their traffic that they could probably handle it. Maybe even make that a subscriber perk? Taco, are you listening?
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Submitters, enthralled with the idea of having their story ran on Slashdot, dread the inevitable bandwith-monster that in some cases renders the story near-useless (the poor server someone uses to blog melts before the story hits ~70 comments). Therefore, never being able to trust Slashdot with their bandwith and at the same time wanting their news to reach as many as possible, the submitters are starting to make the preperations we all wish the editors cared about.
With a file this size the Bittorrent may be the only feasible way for their news to reach the whole Slashdot community - resulting in the Bittorrent being more important (it decides the fate of the story regardless of content).
I imagine we're going to see this more and more unless Slashdot ever decides some sort of bandwith management (caching, Bittorrent, early-warning) of the stories is profitable, because by this point the editors are clearly not going to do it out of the goodness of their heart (in part because the community will mirror or Bittorrent on its own).
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