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

I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess all the downloads I was doing at bytemonsoon.com will have to wait for a couple of days... the server will be melting down now.

Why don't the /. guys run their own torrent tracker?

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[Jungle guy]

Isn't Bit Torrent designed precisely to prevent the slashdot effect, and to distribute the load among people that are downloading the file? I have never ran a torrent on a website, but according to the author, you can even pull the original file from your server, as long as enough people have left their clients open after the download (in torrent terms, the seed is alive).

Should be Interesting

[GotSpider]

Should be interesting to see how the Mac platform manages to incorporate intensive 3D graphics, especially now since they have radeons and nvidia chipsets in most of their newer/higher end computers. Enter the complaints about one-button mouse commments, but keep in mind that most of these RPG's have a ridiculous amount of required buttons and commands... when the "Quick Guide" has 10 pages, you're spending too much time learning how to play, instead of actually just playing.

Re:Should be Interesting

[Arker]

It's real interesting how ignorant posts about Macs get modded up like this.

My little tibook runs Wolfenstein 3d better than my PC with 3 times the mhz rating (both have 64mb Radeons too.) Remember, mghz does not reflect performance when you're comparing two different architectures, the PPC is a lot more efficient. Macs deal with graphics just fine, thanks.

And yes, you can use any USB mouse you like on your Mac, you're not limited to one button. Macs are designed so that you can use a one button and do everything you need to on regular desktop stuff, but they work just as well as anything else when you give them more.

Re:Should be Interesting

[Arker]

Not all "64M Radeons" are equal. Your PC might have a completely different chip than the Mobility Radeon 9000 in your laptop. Perhaps it has a Radeon 7500. I don't know.

Nonetheless, they're comparable, and if all this hype about Macs being so 'underpowered' was true you'd certainly expect the AMD with 3 times the clock speed and a comparable videocard to toast the poor little TiBook. In fact, it doesn't, and that's my point.

OK, MHZ is not an viable measure of performance.

Exactly.

Saying that Macs are underpowered because the clock speeds are lower is just as ignorant as saying that my 3/4 ton Ford pickup is underpowered because the engine red lines at a lower rpm than your Chevette does.

But the PPC isn't any more efficent than a PIII (unless what you are doing is Altivec optimized). At least not according to most benchmarks. So a 1Ghz PPC G4 should perform like a 1.5Ghz P3 (after some Altivec optimization), which is roughly equivilent to a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP, which is roughly equivelent to a Pentium 4 at 2Ghz. Which is fine to run most games.

Actually the 1ghz G4 performs about like a 1.5ghz PIII (which is actually better than a PIV at the same clock speed, remember) on pure integer benchmarks IIRC. That means no Altivec. And my experience is that in practice the whole systems tend to perform significantly better than you'd expect if you just look at the CPU benchmark.

I'm not claiming Apple has anything that will beat the top of the line Intel/AMD stuff on benchmarks, bear in mind. But their best stuff gets a lot closer than people seem to think, and the importance of system design shouldn't be underestimated either.

And, tada: Linux installer/binaries in SoU Expack.

[2Flower]

It was announced yesterday that the Shadows of Urentide expansion pack which goes on sale tomorrow comes on disk with a linux version.

Yes, it's way the hell after the announced simultaneous three platform release, but at least it's here and if you're not too busy playing Tux Racer and complaining about lack of instant gaming support, it's the most extensible and community supported RPG system to date. Have fun and remember, the campaign the game ships with ain't nothing compared to some of the great stuff the community has produced, so don't limit yourself. (Although the story in SoU's single player campaign looks pretty good in its own right.)/p

Re:Keep it open?

[Jhan]

How does that have anything to do with cutting edge technology?

I'd guess it's an attempt at satire, since the most intuitive and logical thing to do (yep, I got the file, now I can close the window), is also the most wrong thing you can do.

Its just the model under which the client was designed.

Yeah, it works for what it was designed to do, but it's awful as a general P2P system, which is what much of the SD crowd is elevating it to.... As you yourself say, it's worthless for anything but new files, essentialy a broadcast system. But it's really good at that!

Re:Will this really be viable?

[artur9]

If you know how to do it it's easy. I was once responsible for a system supported on SunOS 2, VM/SP (IBM mainframe), and VMS.

When the decided to port it to Windows NT after about 3 years they did it in 2 weeks.

BTW, it was code that did data marshalling/marshalling across TCP/IP.

At last!

[swelling]

I have been waiting for this for quite a while and it is definitely worth it!

I am running a 17" iMac (800Mhz G4/256MB/Ge4 32MB) and the action is excellent, not choppy at all. I was worried that the performance of the game would leave people without a high-end machine in the dust, but everything seems pretty good so far.

Nice job Bioware and MacSoft!