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

ok, then

[SweetAndSourJesus]

see you all in about a month.

Re:ok, then

[krisp]

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

Re:ok, then

[mirko]

same problem with me : I guess the osx porter has hacked it to benefit its transfers first. ;)

Re:ok, then

[digitalsushi]

Well you must be a real blast at Christmas then!

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.

Re:ok, then

[eXtro]

Thanks, this is something I was always wondering about with .torrents. I usually watch it a bit when they first start and have always noticed that I'm uploading at at least a 5:1 ratio to my downloads. I've never watched it past this though.

Re:ok, then

[DrPascal]

This was covered in the interview with Bram himself... he said this is impossible because it is based on the other machine's count of what you have sent it, not what you report to be sending it.

Re:ok, then

[nullard]

Actually the auther debunks that myth here.

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.

Re:ok, then

[smallpaul]

You'd have a hard time strretching that demo out for a month!

Re:ok, then

[fiontan]

Maybe if you're a really bad player? :-)

That or a power-gamer (Some might say munchkin ;-)... I know I've spent several days doing something in a game that should only take hours or less.

Re:ok, then

[cei]

Too bad there's only about an hour of game play in the demo... Really, is it too much to ask for more gameplay with such a large download? Really a disappointment. When the final version is released, the demo will barely be a memory...

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).

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:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[mhesseltine]

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).

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?

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[astrashe]

Sites like bytemonsoon.com or torrentse.cx use a single tracker for hundreds of different torrent streams, so the fact that the tracker can't do all of that and then handle a really big demand generated by slashdot isn't as damning as it might seem at first.

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[mhesseltine]

Sites like bytemonsoon.com or torrentse.cx use a single tracker for hundreds of different torrent streams, so the fact that the tracker can't do all of that and then handle a really big demand generated by slashdot isn't as damning as it might seem at first.

Agreed, and I wasn't trying to condemn bytemonsoon or torrentse.cx for not being able to handle the load. Just pointing out that, while they aren't having to serve the entire files, they still suffer from having to make connections.

In other words, I don't think that it would matter if each file got it's own tracker, because bytemonsoon and others would still have to respond to all the incoming requests, regardless of how many trackers they run.

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:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[moonbender]

[quote]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?[/quote]Unlikely at best, for much the same reasons that Slashdot doesn't mirror linked articles. Of course, in this case the distribution of the file in question is expressly encouraged, so the FAQ section doesn't really apply. That's not typically the case though.

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[moonbender]

I'm not sure when linking to copyrighted material is considered unlawful and when it isn't. It certainly is not a clear cut issue. Many sites contain a disclaimer saying that the page authors are not responsible for any content on third-party web sites - however, if you're perfectly aware that this third-party website is hosting files in copyright violation, this disclaiming of responsibility probably does not work.

The second question is whether "linking" to files on P2P networks is considered equivalent to the "traditional" linking to other files, e.g. on other web or FTP servers. Technically, it isn't. But in the end the outcome is the same: the reader is acquiring copyrighted material. And in both cases the author's intent and the client user-interface is very much the same: click to download. So if you treat the technical implementation as a black box, P2P downloads and HTTP downloads are quite the same indeed.

(Sorry about the rant, I've spent some time wondering about this since it's quite a vital issue to sites like Sharereactor and all the torrent distribution pages.)

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[dimmu]

There is an alternative tracker available at

http://www.il.fontys.nl/~bart/NeverwinterNightsT ec hDemo.dmg.bz2.torrent

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[drunk_as_in_beer]

Isn't Bit Torrent designed precisely to prevent the slashdot effect, and to distribute the load among people that are downloading the file?

In any case it doesn't matter, this is software for the Mac, it's not going to get Slashdotted as most of the people on here are running Windows anyways and will ignore this story. It's a swarm of IE clients that are doing the Slashdotting. It doesn't help that IE is broken in such a way that it causes problems for non-ISS web servers.

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[andrewski]

To me, the logical conclusion is for somebody to invent a 'tracker-less' deriviative of Bittorrent.

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[Mantorp]

I was wondering the same thing about bytemonsoon's disclaimer.
Disclaimer: None of the files shown here are actually hosted on this server. The links are provided solely by this site's users. The administrator of this site (bytemonsoon.com) cannot be held responsible for what its users post, or any other actions of its users. You may not use this site to distribute or download any material when you do not have the legal rights to do so. It is your own responsibility to adhere to these terms.
Would it hold water if they were sued? Could slashdot be held responsible for in turn pointing thousands of downloaders in their direction? Then again, many sites showed the deCSS thing a while back and only one poor Norwegian guy got in trouble.

Re:I guess that's it for bytemonsoon

[ike6116]

Here here! BitTorrent is suppost to be our little remedy for /.-ing. /. could make a lot of money by making the torrent tracker available only to those with subscriptions, I'd buy one then in a heart beat.

Re:You can play games on a mac

[Anonymous Coward]

You click it! Duh!

Not bad...

[mahdi13]

Only one full year behind schedule! BioWare is suprising us all! Next thing you know they will get the FMV working in Linux!

Re:Not bad...

[Zzootnik]

Yeah, it is pretty funny...But as someone who waited a very long time for the Linux client, I gotta at least say "Better late than never". I'm actually quite happy with the game as is. Maybe next time the whole game will be built around something a bit more portable...but I'm not expecting miracles at this point.

It's a good game, and though it's probably not extremely profitable for Bioware (if at all---YET...), they're sticking to their original statements and following through. (So Thank you Bioware People!)

We have the linux client, and now we apparantly have the Mac Client. How many other game companies have been doing that? I get the feeling that lnux gaming is oddly a growing market...and I only see it getting bigger...Hopefully the big companies are finally starting to see it.

Re:Not bad...

[dalassa]

Blizzard ships Mac ports in box.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

especially now since they have radeons and nvidia chipsets in most of their newer/higher end computers.

Newer? My iBook was the bottom of the line 2 years ago, and it has a radeon in it.

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

It's a good thing I can hook up my 5 button MS mouse to my iBook.

Re:Should be Interesting

[Richard5mith]

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).

Re:Should be Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Should be Interesting

[SamTheButcher]

Many of the games I've seen for the Mac compensate for the lack of buttons by engineering the playing experience better. And if they don't, then they don't do well.

Also, many Mac game "Quick Guides" are much MUCH shorter than their Windows counterparts. Like, usually on a 1:4 ratio. I haven't seen this one, but we'll see if that holds true. I WILL be downloading this game.

Re:Should be Interesting

[JHelgie]

he probably should have specified which radeon, since it doesnt look like ATi intends on using any other product name for the forseeable future, though maybe now they will need to switch to letters, since Radeon 19764 doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Re:Should be Interesting

[JonathanBoyd]

I think you mean 1 year ago. My iBook was bottom of the line less than two years ago and has a Rage Mobility. The bottom of the line ones went to radeons in October of 2001 I think. But that's just me being pedantic. And bitter that I bought by 'book in late August.

Re:Should be Interesting

[moonbender]

(Months after a PC tech alpha was leaked.)

SCNR

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

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

1: 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.
2: OK, MHZ is not an viable measure of performance. 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.
3: Of course you can attach a USB mouse to your TiBook. But that's an extra perhiferal to lug around with your laptop (granted, you probably want a real mouse to play games anyway).

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.

Re:Should be Interesting

[Pius II.]

I bought mine in December, and it still has the Rage. They didn't change that until late March 2002.

Re:Should be Interesting

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"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"

This is extremely odd, as Macs have an awful memory subsystem (it's DDR but the because of the slow FSB it can't really get it to the processor). Athlons have a DDR 200Mhz FSB (for the new Barton 3200+) and a 166 or 133Mhz DDR (for the rest of the Bartons and thouroghbreds). P4s have a 100, 133 QDR or 200Mhz QDR FSB.

"AMD with 3 times the clock speed"

I call bullshit. Your PowerBook G4 with the Mobility Radeon 9000 only comes in 867Mhz and 1Ghz versions. That would mean that you have a 2601Mhz or 3000Mhz Athlon XP. The fastest clocked Athlon XP was the Athlon XP 2800+ Thoroughbred-B at 2250 Mhz, 2.6X the clock of your Mac. That's assuming that you have the fastest Atlhon and the 866Mhz Powerbook. What you likely meant is that you have an Athlon XP 2600+, which does not run at 2.6Ghz.

Unless you have a P4 of course.

I think this has more to do with poor ports than anything else. Photoshop is a Mac app, and it is designed for use with Altivec. When they moved it to the PC, they replaced the fast Altivec routines with slower integer routines. Had the program been written for use with SSE, it would likely be much faster.

"Nonetheless, they're comparable"

I'll have to take your word on that. But remember, the bottleneck here is likely the video card and not the system. The Radeon 9000 is hardely the fastest card on the block. The Apple system may be performing better simply because of more optimized code (which makes sense - the game developer may have added optimizations in the port) or drivers (ATI's drivers were crappy until recently). The fact is, a PC at half the Mhz might be able to have very similar results to your faster PC.

"the importance of system design shouldn't be underestimated either."

Yes, I like the design of Macs. The "system controller" is a goood idea - so good that NVIDIA used the same concept for their NForce chipset. The NForce uses HyperTransport (1.2GBytes per second) to connect the northbridge and southbridge, which is connected to the processor via the 3.2GByte/sec memory interface. The southbridge houses audio, Firewire, and ethernet so you aren't limited by the PCI bus. The idea of a L3 cache is also good, but it doesn't seem to have much of a performance impact (perhaps because it is little faster than main memory).

Re:Should be Interesting

[Arker]

Ahh good an interesting reply.

"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"

This is extremely odd, as Macs have an awful memory subsystem (it's DDR but the because of the slow FSB it can't really get it to the processor). Athlons have a DDR 200Mhz FSB (for the new Barton 3200+) and a 166 or 133Mhz DDR (for the rest of the Bartons and thouroghbreds). P4s have a 100, 133 QDR or 200Mhz QDR FSB.

That's true. And the FSB has to be important. So I can't wait to see a Mac with a better FSB.

"AMD with 3 times the clock speed" I call bullshit. Your PowerBook G4 with the Mobility Radeon 9000 only comes in 867Mhz and 1Ghz versions. That would mean that you have a 2601Mhz or 3000Mhz Athlon XP. The fastest clocked Athlon XP was the Athlon XP 2800+ Thoroughbred-B at 2250 Mhz, 2.6X the clock of your Mac. That's assuming that you have the fastest Atlhon and the 866Mhz Powerbook. What you likely meant is that you have an Athlon XP 2600+, which does not run at 2.6Ghz.

My powerbook is almost a year old, and has a 667mhz G4 - they don't sell them that slow anymore. But you're right, it's not actually a third of the clockspeed of the AMD, it's a third of it's 'rating' so it's a little more than a third of the clockspeed. But still way less than half. If the standard CPU benchmarks are to be believed, it should be around a third to a quarter slower - certainly noticeably so. But using it, it seems comparable, sometimes a little bit better, on the same tasks. Even with the extra load of a far more capable OS and a lot more eye-candy.

I think this has more to do with poor ports than anything else. Photoshop is a Mac app, and it is designed for use with Altivec. When they moved it to the PC, they replaced the fast Altivec routines with slower integer routines. Had the program been written for use with SSE, it would likely be much faster.

Ahh but I don't use photoshop. The only stuff I use that might be altivec optimised is the standard Apple stuff, itunes, imovie... mostly I use mozilla, emacs, and SPSS. And, of course, the games.

Yes, I like the design of Macs. The "system controller" is a goood idea - so good that NVIDIA used the same concept for their NForce chipset. The NForce uses HyperTransport (1.2GBytes per second) to connect the northbridge and southbridge, which is connected to the processor via the 3.2GByte/sec memory interface. The southbridge houses audio, Firewire, and ethernet so you aren't limited by the PCI bus. The idea of a L3 cache is also good, but it doesn't seem to have much of a performance impact (perhaps because it is little faster than main memory).

The whole thing with caching has always been that its affect varies drastically depending on what you're doing. It probably affects typical use negligeably, if any, for me. When I'm crunching DV into mpeg, however, I bet it has a substantial effect.

Re:Should be Interesting

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"If the standard CPU benchmarks are to be believed, it should be around a third to a quarter slower - certainly noticeably so. But using it, it seems comparable, sometimes a little bit better, on the same tasks. Even with the extra load of a far more capable OS and a lot more eye-candy."

Perhaps not. I do know that my Athlon XP 2000+ system running Windows XP (with all the graphical goodies turned on) is still way faster than any Mac I've ever used (at least in perceptual feal). I would recommend defragmenting your disk and killing startup programs and checking for spyware - it turned out that I had a bad virus infestation when my computer was running slowly.

"My powerbook is almost a year old, and has a 667mhz G4"

Huh? How do you have a Radeon 9000 64M in a 667mhz G4 Powerbook that's a year old? Such a system does not exist to my knowledge. Perhaps you have the PowerBook G4 with the Radeon 7500 32M, but the Radeon 9000 64M comes only on the 867/1Ghz variants.

"The whole thing with caching has always been that its affect varies drastically depending on what you're doing."

Caching helps you little when the L3 is only two megs and it's slower than the main memory of a new PC.

Good old Bioware

[d3faultus3r]

putting nwn on all three major operating systems. I hope this will start a trend for Bioware.

Re:Good old Bioware

[Junks Jerzey]

putting nwn on all three major operating systems

Windows, MacOS X, and PalmOS?

Re:Good old Bioware

[platipusrc]

putting nwn on all three major operating systems
Windows, MacOS X, and PalmOS?

I got the impression that he was talking about BSD, Plan9, and VMS.

Re:Good old Bioware

[YomikoReadman]

I thought that they meant Mandrake, Corel and Redhat.

Re:Good old Bioware

[frankie]

I hope this will start a trend for Bioware

Trend? No, this is not a trend. This is merely Bioware's partial answer to the claim they made three years ago.

âoeWe are planning a simultaneous PC/Macintosh/Linux release for Neverwinter Nights, with all three versions to be included in a single box.â

-- Bioware's official NWN FAQ, until it was changed late June 2002 (after the Windows version went gold)

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

Re:Good old Bioware

[Joe Tie.]

I think it's being somewhat overly kind to bioware to say they managed to get NWN on all three platforms. On Linux Neverwinter is lacking the toolkit, a pretty vital piece of the game in a lot of peoples opinion. It's also become likley that the engine will never be able to playback movies. And then of course on the mac front, there's the same problem with the toolkit. They've managed to get a lot of it working on Mac and Linux, but I wouldn't by any means qualify this as being the full game for anything but windows .

Re:Good old Bioware

[humina]

You are forgetting BeOS. It can handle it cause it's fast.

Re:Good old Bioware

[Jaysyn]

They originally planned a BeOS port of NWN.

Jaysyn

Re:Good old Bioware

[darc]

On Linux Neverwinter is lacking the toolkit, a pretty vital piece of the game in a lot of peoples opinion.

Ironically, for many radeon users, on the PC, we are lacking the toolkit too. It still crashes ridiculously often when doing varius things, and it's basically impossible to use unless you're using a Geforce card.

Yes, I understand that many people may not have issues with later radeons, but as a user on an earlier card, I'm mostly pissed off.

Will this really be viable?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[lpp]

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

Re:Will this really be viable?

[greenskyx]

I wonder if this makes them a target for Microsoft purchasing them... (anyone remember that post a few days about)?

Re:Will this really be viable?

[dthable]

Writing portable code isn't something that comes as second nature to most Windows coders...

Is it really second nature to any coder?

Re:Will this really be viable?

[mbourgon]

If nothing else, it makes the Aurora Toolset available to Mac-heads. Since there are a LOT of Mac-based graphics people out there, expect to see a lot more art assets made available over the next several months. This causes the game to last longer, enabling them to sell more Mac _and_ PC copies, and at a higher price point. Here we are, a year after the release, and Best Buy still carries it, and for $30. Heck, there are a lot of year-old games that go for $10.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[mbourgon]

And while I'm thinking about it....
Happy Birthday Neverwinter!
Tomorrow is the 1-year anniversary of the game coming out. Mac users get NWN, and PC users get Shadows of Undrentide. Life is good.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[JudgeFurious]

Interesting. I like Blizzard titles in general (they could have kept Warcrap 3 to themselves though IMO) but pretty much everything I've ever touched from Microsoft was about as much fun as a dog turd on a stick. "Microsoft" on the box gets an instant pass from me.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[Phantasmo]

I believe that they started the project with portability in mind. Of course, doing the Linux port probably brought them 90% of the way to having a Mac OS X port, too.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[travail_jgd]

I don't think the ports (Linux or OSX) will be profitable anytime soon. There's too much of a learning curve. But there's three good reasons to continue with the ports:

First, it makes the Aurora engine much more appealing to potential licensees, especially if they follow id's model (buy the engine, and get all platforms included). The Linux and Mac gaming markets are miniscule compared to those running Microsoft OS's, but having all versions available may give a 1%-2% increase in sales. It's still an advantage.

Second, everyone in IT has heard that Redmond wants to "secure" the Windows platform. At some point in the next 3-6 years, writing software for the Wintel platform is going to get more expensive -- either through "certifications" or by paying a percentage of revenues. Bioware may be trying to move all of their eggs out of the single basket. (Yes, I know that flaming Microsoft is in bad form. Mod appropriately.)

Third, with Linux and OSX support, the Aurora engine (and possibly the tools as well) isn't restricted to the x86 32-bit platform. Other developers are bumping into the limitations of the x86 architecture, so having x86-64 or PPC support may help Bioware in the near future.

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.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[drunk_as_in_beer]

"Writing portable code isn't something that comes as second nature to most Windows coders..."
Is it really second nature to any coder?

Java coders?

Re:Will this really be viable?

[Moonshadow]

That's like saying that it's second nature for Flash artists to create croww-browser flash movies.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[Titusdot Groan]

Probably, they've ported previous products like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate II -- so they obviously have a business plan.

Remember there are two parts to the system, the game and the engine. The game is already done for the PC version (and is probably MOST of the work) all they need to do is port the engine.

Finally, I'll buy it :-)

Re:Will this really be viable?

[LMariachi]

Except that the toolset is not being ported. You'd think the wisdom of porting content-creation tools would be obvious given the creative bent of Apple's demographic, but Mac users just keep on getting the shaft. So let's everyone lighten up on the "portable code" accolades.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[Jaysyn]

Mechwarrior 3, 4 & Mechcommander I & II were pretty good.

Jaysyn

Re:Will this really be viable?

[SideshowBob]

"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."

I wanted to respond to this even though its pretty late in the day and this topic is no longer near the top of the stack on Slashdot.

Writing portable code has benefits in and of itself, regardless of the economic factors of any particular platform. (I believe most games are profitable on the Mac however)

Portable code that has been run through multiple compilers, run in multiple environments, QA'ed by multiple testing teams, etc. is in my experience a damn sight more bug free than single platform code.

Just the differences in compilers can bring to light surprisingly subtle bugs in code.

Do yourself a favor and try to compile your projects with different compilers on different platforms. You may be surprised at the things that you find that would've slipped under your radar using only 1 toolchain on 1 platform. This does not mean GCC on Linux and BSD on x86. It means GCC on Linux/BSD for x86, GCC on Darwin/PPC, VC++ on Win32, and maybe another combo.

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.

Re:Will this really be viable?

[andrewski]

Yep. Depending on the environment, portablilty is either designed in or effortless (Smalltalk, specifically Squeak!).

Re:Will this really be viable?

[Surlyboi]

Well, a few of their friends as well as some of the
guys at Bioware themselves are Macheads. They did it
partially to shut us up. =)

Re:Will this really be viable?

[mbourgon]

Dammit!

My modem is blazing away!

[Anonymous Coward]

>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."

Right-o! As someone who is keen on the whole "distributed" part of the internet, I shall leave that window open as soon as my download is done. You will all have the benefit of the uplink of my 2400 baud modem! Torrent away!

Re:My modem is blazing away!

[Jucius Maximus]

"You will all have the benefit of the uplink of my 2400 baud modem! Torrent away!"

That's not so funny to me! I was actually seeding three torrents on a lame 28.8 connection last weekend!

My downloads (collectively about 500 MB) were between 86 and 96 percent done, transferring over a lovely cable connection. But I was planning to go to my parents' place on the weekend where the best internet available is 28.8 dialup due to the remoteness of the location and bad phone loops.

I was pretty annoyed when my ride arrived early and I had to close up these torrents that were seeded again for the first time in several days. (Note: Only seeded torrents can finish downloading.) So I grumbled and closed up everything.

But on the saturday, I opened up the laptop, started the torrents on the 28.8 connection shared over a 5 machine LAN and lo and behold, it worked! After about 4 hours the files completely finished and I actually seeded them for a while until my brother started grumbling about me hogging the connetion. Yes, the other downloaders had the benefit of the file being seeded over a 28.8 connection.

How does it compare?

[NickNiel]

Does anyone know how it compares to the Windows or Linux versions? I am extremely happy about the performance of the Linux client.

Also, does anyone know if they were able to leverage much of the Linux client code, since OS X is built on BSD? Just wondering...

Re:How does it compare?

[Dinosaur Jr.]

Well, it is playable on my iBook 700 and I only have 16meg vram. I am not sure how good it would be in a large battle... yet. Intitial impression: It looks/sounds good. Decent performance.

Don't even run OSX

[Xzzy]

But I'm letting a torrent run on my station at work just to be a nice guy. ;)

Not that I suspect bandwidth is going to be a problem, I peaked at 2030 kB/s downloading. But I've always felt bad for mac users getting shafted and wanted to help.

Just don't tell my employer.. not sure they would be too impressed watching me output the 1300 kB/s I'm doing atm..

Re:Don't even run OSX

[YomikoReadman]

Dood, you are really and truly a hero among mac users. Keep on Fighting the Good fight. I really, honestly mean this.

Re:Don't even run OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always felt bad for mac users getting shafted and wanted to help.

I've always wanted to shaft Mac users too.
Signed,
Bill

BitTorrent or NWN

[allenw]

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".

Re:BitTorrent or NWN

[Anonymous Coward]

How about "Something besides pr0n and pir8ted w4r3z available by BitTorrent!"

Well, I'm sure you can get the full version of NWN from BT.

Re:BitTorrent or NWN

[ketamine-bp]

umm,

One and a half sentence about NWN.
Four and a half sentences about BT.
One year sentence about posting the two sentence above
Death sentence for modding funny post as insightful

Re:Keep it open?

[PhoenixK7]

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.

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

[DarkAurora]

Sweet. Thanks. Their servers were already melted by the time i tried to get it.

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:Mirror of the .torrent file

[dissy]

I got that too at first, zonealarm was blocking the outgoing connection.
Maybe its possible they are blocking that port for outbound connections at work?

PS. If you simply uninstall zone alarm, it doesnt remove any of its firewall rules, only the application that asks if you want to let a program access the internet. Took me a while to make the connection of 'random programs not working' to those are the ones I didnt allow because i wanted to be asked (ahem, IE)

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[PunchMonkey]

Thanks Jucius, I do have a mac (my first! a powerbook 867... in for service at the moment though :-( Had a nasty case of the wobbles and some bad bad bad ram).

Thanks for the advice... I've tried plugging into my office's cable connection and now I get a '10061', connection refused error. I'm guessing the tracker you're mentioning is overloaded. Guess I'll just have to sit tight.

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[rkz]

10060 - connection reset by peer. Measn that the tracker has been slashdotted.

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[damiam]

The thing about bittorrent is that, even though the bandwidth is shared among all the downloaders, the site hosting the file (also known as the "tracker) still has to keep track of all the downloads going on. While most bittorrent sites don't need too much bandwidth, they often run out of CPU power at high loads (such as right after /. links to them). That's probably what you're seeing here. Wait a while and try again.

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[Jucius Maximus]

"BitTorrent defaults to using ports 6881-6889 for transfers. Forward ports 6881-6889 from your firewall to the machine that's downloading the torrent, and everything will be fine."

Note: This step is highly recommended for getting the best performance, although clients can still run when *incoming* connections cannot be accepted on these ports. But if you can't make outgoing and accept incoming connections, then you're hosed.

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[Giggles Of Doom]

Man, I wish I could get paid to download games at work.

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[UnknownSoldier]

> Man, I wish I could get paid to download games at work.

Find a job making them ;-)

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file

[Jaysyn]

There are a few benefits to working for a smaller company you know.

Jaysyn

Re:You can play games on a mac

[someguy456]

How do you frag anyone with just one mouse button?

Simple: morse code.

Hopefully

[BoomerSooner]

I'm buying a copy for myself and every friend that has a mac and will play it. I have a lot of unix savy friends that love OS X, me included. Games are generally an after thought when you work an average of 80 hours a week. I'm really looking forward to getting a 64bit laptop that doesn't kill the pocketbook (a la the tadpole ones with ultra sparcs). Hurry up with the 970 Powerbooks!

I have NWN for PC already and have downloaded the Linux files as well. I was disappointed that the mac/linux versions weren't gold at the same time, but the reality of the situation is 99% of gamers use the PC or a console.

Better late than never!

Re:Hopefully

[sebi]

I'm buying a copy for myself and every friend that has a mac and will play it.

If I make you my friend will you buy me a copy as well? I promise that I will play it.

confusing

[Boromir son of Faram]

Okay, so I guess I see what BitTorrent is. It seems to make sense. Now, what is "OS X", and can I get it for WinME? Thx.

Re:confusing

[Uart]

OS X? I think that comes with Photoshop...

Anyone with a mirror for the torrent file?

[DarkAurora]

Anyone with a mirror for the torrent file? Their server seems to have melted.

Re:Anyone with a mirror for the torrent file?

[dthable]

Try reading the comment threads. Someone posted it far before your post.

Re:Anyone with a mirror for the torrent file?

[dema]

try not being a prick. that mirror wouldnt work for me, maybe it didnt for him either.

Re:Anyone with a mirror for the torrent file?

[nexUK]

Another one:- http://www.blobweek.com/torrents/ [blobweek.com]

Re:Anyone with a mirror for the torrent file?

[dthable]

It's a tad hard to determine if there is a mirror problem or someone not reading the discussion when a new top level comment is made. A reply to the original thread stating it's not working and asking for another mirror is fine.

I'm just trying to save someone from -1 Redundant.

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

But is it playable?

[jkabbe]

I always wonder when they use the term "Tech" demo. Is this thing playable? Or is it just some pretty graphics?

Re:But is it playable?

[gerardrj]

It is playable.
You can create a character. Most all races, classes and skills seem tobe there.
You go through a short training class, then you start killing creatures, can create a small party, complete a few small quests.
They say the characters you build with this version will transfer to the full release version.

Mirror for the Torrent File

[nexUK]

http://www.blobweek.com/torrents/

Re:Mirror for the Torrent File

[dema]

http://www.blobweek.com/torrents/ is now leeting you download the file without using BitTorrent.

Re:Mirror for the Torrent File

[D3TH]

Your pipe is fat. I'm pulling the file down at > 550k/sec. One thousand thanks.

Re:Mirror for the Torrent File

[D3TH]

Peaked at 620k/sec downloaded the entire file in less than 7 minutes. Now seeding the torrent.... Thanks again.

Re:Mirror for the Torrent File

[nexUK]

I thought I'd host it in full as well as the .torrent

also

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Linux

The linux client is pretty impressive, too.

Re:also

[Feral Bueller]

Please realize that there are about 3 people outside of the UK that will get that joke.

Only one of us will think it's funny.

Not me.

Re:You can play games on a mac

[YomikoReadman]

You don't frag with just one button.. you go out and by a sw33t Logitech USB Cordless Mouse/Keyboard Combo, Map the apple keys, and frag with 8 mouse buttons, plus a scroll wheel to scroll thru your spells.

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!

We need a bittorrent for bittorrent/bytemonsoon

[stefanlasiewski]

Looks like bytemonsoon is getting DDoS'd into oblivion.

And then a healthy dose of Slashdotting on top of that.

Read their news blurb at the bottom, if you can get to the site:

http://www.bytemonsoon.com/

Re:They were being Dos'd as it is...

[fuzzywig]

hmmm, there i was wondering why all my torrents were suddenly giving me tracker errors, "ahh, it's just my crappy connection". Then I find they've all been /.ed, maybe bittorrent isn't so great for avoiding a /.ing after all? Though I suppose that if Bioware were hosting the tracker, it would ease the load compared to just hosting the file direct.

Re:Keep it open?

[athakur999]

If would be great if BitTorrent could use an HTTP link as a seed. For legal stuff like this, it'd be a great boon. The web server won't experience as large a load since eventually most people will be downloading from other peers. After a few weeks when interest as died down, the Torrent still works since it'll just pull directly from the web server.

Of course, this won't work for the, um, less legal things being served up via BitTorrent :)

Re:And, tada: Linux installer/binaries in SoU Expa

[mahdi13]

Amazing, considering that the NWN Linux Client is on Beta 6 and not yet official...

I do see a post on the forums stateing "Shadows of Unrentide will run fine in Linux"

I'm still waiting until the Linux client is official before I even consider NWN...major turn down for me is the lack of FMV, the movies might not be important but I'm a story driven person and missing parts of the story just to play the game doesn't fly with me, I'll wait for the "Directors Cut"

Re:They were being Dos'd as it is...

[YomikoReadman]

Actually Bittorrent is the ultimate answer to a good, oldfashioned /.ing, but it only really thrives off of it once it has been fully seeded, and then only if enough people who can seed it will get out and share a little with the rest of the deprived, slightly behind the times group of people like myself who wait to hop on to a file.

Re:Keep it open?

[tuffy]

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.

Of course, once virtually nobody is interested in the file any longer, the main "seed" machine should have no trouble fulfulling the entire request for the file itself since, by definition, there won't be any competition for it. And, should the file suddenly gain new popularity, the Torrent-ness will ramp right back up again to keep the bytes flowing smoothly.

At least in theory.

Re:And, tada: Linux installer/binaries in SoU Expa

[WWWWolf]

Amazing, considering that the NWN Linux Client is on Beta 6 and not yet official...

But they promised it would be "official" within, um, a week from last week? I suppose this is their way of getting two flies with one swat, er, a press release: SoU is out, and simultaneously Linux Client is officially out of Beta. And they can pay less for their press release writers. =)

- WWWWolf, greatly angered(tm) by the fact that here, the release date isn't 18th, it's goddamn 27th...

Re:They were being Dos'd as it is...

[dthable]

This is getting beyond a joke, slashdot needs to do something about the effect they have on these small sites, it's not going to get better by ignoring it CmdrTaco...

He did do something....subscribe so you can see the story before it goes live for the rest of the crowd. I don't agree with paying, but don't bitch about the /. effect on smaller sites.

.torrent needed for Mac?

[psoriac]

Don't tell me all nine of you hit up their 56k server and blew it up...

KIDDING! ;-)

Re:And, tada: Linux installer/binaries in SoU Expa

[swv3752]

I imagine tomorrow there will be an official release or when 1.30 comes out. The movies are very lame. If you really want to know, ask on the bioware boards and you will get a nice little one line summary for each movie.

NWN OSX Demo Available - Please Have Mercy

[philam3nt]

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).

Re:They were being Dos'd as it is...

[fuzzywig]

WEll, bittorrent is a good, maybe even best solution to a /.ing, but it's not the ultimate - case in point, bytemonsoon just went down (Problem connecting to tracker - timeout exceeded). It's useful becase it reduces the bandwidth load on a server, but it doesn't eliminate it. If your server is'nt up to the job, it'll still go down if the load is high enough. From the wording of the article it sounds like Bioware put the torrent on bytemonsoon themselves (kinda ambiguous though). If that's true, it was a bit strange of them to put it on what was obviously a primarily warez site, rather than hosting a tracker themselves (which would probably have stood up to the onslaught a bit better). I could be interpreting the wording wrong though.

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:Performance Notes on NWN Demo

[Phoukka]

Reply to cons:

Bioware slimmed down the download by not including the extra voice files. Apple's implementation of OpenGL doesn't support the calls necessary to create shiny water (sub-pixel shading, IIRC, though I probably don't... ;).

DM Client: In the Mac box...

Re:Performance Notes on NWN Demo

[slycer9]

Yeah, I posted an update to this below, after learning those two details...in retrospect, I probably should have just posted them here again.

As far as the DM Client goes...I was just trying to express my anticipation for the release. I've been doing far more DM'ing lately than playing.

Re:Performance Notes on NWN Demo

[Kupo]

The demo version for Windows didn't even have NPC voice overs or more than one voice set. The retail version has all of the above where the demos did not. Your vid card on the 17" probably doesn't support the shiny water AFAIK since it's just a GeForce4 Go440 (derivative of MX440, a souped up GF2MX almost) and has no pixel shaders, etc.

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file(responding to self)

[Jucius Maximus]

"Also, it could be that the tracker is overloaded. It's the bittorrent equivalent to a 404 error."

Actually this is not entirely true. My bad. A 404 error means that it can't be found, which is different from being overloaded.

So basically 'problem connection to tracker' can sometimes be the same as 404, but other times it can mean the same as 'server too busy' but I don't know if there's a surefire way to tell which one it is.

Re:Keep it open?

[jabbadabbadoo]

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

Because it's stupid having to "keep the window open" in 2003.

"Its just the model under which the client was designed."

I'd say the model is wrong...

Re:Keep it open?

[Zach978]

No it's not cutting edge. You are just downloading a 3 dimensional game from people all over the world by clicking on a link. What more do you want??! It amazes me when I really think about ALL that goes into the entire process.

Carrafix

[tayjo]

For people on a cable or DSL who want to limit their upload speed you can use carrafix (www.carrafix.com) just set it to limit ports 6881 through 6889

Alternative BitTorrent tracker

[bartc]

I've set up an alternative tracker. The torrent is at http://www.il.fontys.nl/~bart/NeverwinterNightsTec hDemo.dmg.bz2.torrent.

Re:Alternative BitTorrent tracker

[ZerothAngel]

Hey, thanks for setting this up. I applaud everyone else's effort to mirror the original torrent file, but it really does no good if the tracker is hosed too. :)

Re:Alternative BitTorrent tracker

[dimmu]

I have setup 2 torrent clients at E3 and 100BaseTX using this torrent file. So this one should give you some nice speeds.

Re:Ah, Mac games

[JudgeFurious]

Oh come on man. It's not that bad.

Sure if you're a game junkie who's got to play every game released every year then yeah, there aren't nearly enough Mac games to get you off.

On the other hand there aren't usually more than a handful of good games that show up in any given year in my humble opinion and most of them make it to the Mac.

Re:You can play games on a mac

[JudgeFurious]

Absolutely correct. I don't know anyone other than a few friends parents that use the mouse that their computer shipped with.

Linux version

[Kludge]

Has anyone seen the Linux version yet? And no, I don't mean the download-the-binary-and-use-the-Windows-disk version. I mean the actual Linux version.

I fear not

[feldsteins]

they clearly think (correctly) that Linux is going to be a force in the long run on the desktop.

I'm worried that what you're saying here won't prove true. Think about it. Every Linux user who is also a gamer is already dual-booting Windows. With me so far? So a game developer has to choose:

1. Don't spend the time/money to make a Linux version and sell 1 million units. To windows users. Including the Linux guys who'll just reboot to play.

2. Spend the time/money to make a LInux version and sell...1 million units. To Windows users and Linux users who will now not have to reboot.

Contrast this with the reasoning behind Macintosh versions:

1. Don't spend the time to make a Mac version. Sell 1 million units to Windows users.

2. Spend the time/money to make a Mac version. Sell 1.2 million units*. To Windows users and Mac users.

(*Who knows. The idea here is that it's a higher number. In the Linux scenario, it's not.)

Since Linux runs on the exact same hardware as Windows, I don't see how this situation will ever be remedied.

Re:I fear not

[Saidin]

Well, I'm a Linux user and a gamer, and while it is true that currently I have a windows partition, I am using it less and less as more games get ported natively and as WineX matures. For me, it is a big benefit to not have to reboot into Windows to play a game. Also, Windows98 SE is my last version of Windows. I'm not willing to upgrade to XP, I change my hardware too often to deal with the registration headaches. So, as soon as Win98 runs out of steam, I'm all Linux, and that is not too far down the road. So, while you are right that today everyone who plays games dual boots, it is certainly not true for me that I will be for a whole lot longer, and I imagine that a lot of other people are in the same position I am.

Re:I fear not

[catenos]

So, while you are right that today everyone who plays games dual boots, it is certainly not true for me that I will be for a whole lot longer, and I imagine that a lot of other people are in the same position I am.

I absolutely second that. There are only two games left, that I boot MS Windows 98 for. I did not have the itch and time to get WineX running with them (there are reports that they run), yet, but when I will, Win98 will be gone.

And I will not buy any game that won't run on Win98, because I am not willing to upgrade. I'd rather buy a game console (equally closed, but at least it's just plug-and-play).

I am convinced that games on Linux will become a market, and anyone starting with it now will have an advantage (and bigger share of the cake) then.

Re:I fear not

[Spellbinder]

games that are windows i play but don't buy
in the last half year there were only 3 games i used windows for CS, BF1942 and GTA Vice City
cs because my mates play it a lot at lans (even went to korea last year)
gta and bf1942 because it's fun
there is q3 with a shitload of funny mods, nwn, ut2003, rtcw and rtcw et
and most of the time its all i need

Re:I fear not

[Golias]

:I am convinced that games on Linux will become a market, and anyone starting with it now will have an advantage (and bigger share of the cake) then.

I gotta disagree. There is no loyalty to brand or developpers in the game market.

If you release a kick-ass game, even if your company had been regarded by gamers everywhere as "T3h 5uck," you will sell millions of copies. If you release a crappy game, even if you are one of the most beloved game developers of all time, it will fail miserably. *cough*Daikatana*cough*

There is no real financial advantage to establishing your brand in the game market until you release a game that's good enough (and popular enough) to start a sequel franchize with (i.e., Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, Warcraft, etc.) Even then, the sequel tie-in matters more than which company is releasing it. Would MechWarrior for the X-Box really have sold more if Activision was still doing it?

Re:w0r5t p05+

[slycer9]

Wow. Looks like I've struck a nerve here.
It's ok sir. Homosexualism is no longer the cultural stigmata it once was. It's ok for you to be comfortable with yourself. Really.

On another note, hooked on phonics is no longer as expensive as it once was. Maybe you should check it out.

ciao

Re:Not a bzip2 file?

[danlor]

>Is there something that I'm failing to do? Yes. download the file silly. You need to let the program go out and actually download the data. What you saw was the preallocation.

Holy tarballs!

[pensano]

It's great that they managed to make such a cool demo come in at only 240kB.

Oh, wait, nooooo...

Boy, that's one slow transfer.

[corporatemutantninja]

Doesn't this guy take potty breaks? Every time someone posts a Mac story he's STILL sitting there waiting for that 17 meg file to transfer. This has been going on for months. Somebody please give him a zip drive.

Re:Boy, that's one slow transfer.

[Mitchell Mebane]

Dude, and why is he using BBEdit Lite to write a post on Slashdot?

Re:OS X?

[Tumbleweed]

> It's the eight version after OS/2

No, this is hex we're talking about - OS/2, OS/3, etc, OS/A, OS/B, and so on. OS/X is _very_ mature! :)

Re:And, tada: Linux installer/binaries in SoU Expa

[Dimensio]

I still have a problem with a company promising multiplatform support all along (even with a promise of a simulatenous release up until a few months before the Windows release) yet using completely proprietary methods that cannot be translated to one fo the platforms that they're supposedly "officially" supporting.

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.

System requirements

[caffeine_monkey]

(via maccentral): "The Neverwinter Nights tech demo requires a G3/450MHz or faster CPU, 256MB RAM, 3D graphics chip with 32MB VRAM and 645MB hard disk space."

Re:Keep it open?

[jabbadabbadoo]

What about the download client beeing a p2p deamon?

this is weird

[commodoresloat]

I'm uploading faster than I'm downloading. I've uploaded 4.5 MiB but only downloaded 3.2. What's going on? Is my mac using HyperTransport to send data that doesn't exist yet?

Re:this is weird

[Jucius Maximus]

"I'm uploading faster than I'm downloading. I've uploaded 4.5 MiB but only downloaded 3.2. What's going on? Is my mac using HyperTransport to send data that doesn't exist yet?"

You can upload the same data to more than one peer in the swarm ;-) The lopsided transfers are only a temporary effect at the start of the download. See my explanation here.

Re:this is weird

[Surlyboi]

You can upload Men in Black???

Re:You've got to be kidding

[clf8]

Technically, it's Socialism. Ideally, after long enough time a centralized government (Communism) is no longer needed. Since the whatever server has already melted, if people are leaving BitTorrent open it's done what humans can't (cuz we're greedy little d!cks).

Re:w0r5t p05+

[slycer9]

Awwwww...I really DID hit a little close to home, didn't I? Poor little thing. I little therapy'd work WONDERS for your feelings of inadequacy and impotence.

Heh, you're a funny little fellow tho', quite creative with the 'leet' speak. That's very original.

Oh. I'm sorry. Not the response you'd wished? *clears throat*

Oh please don't call me queer again, it hurts so much coming from someone as obviously intelligent, and well spoken as yourself. *sobs* I don't know how I'll ever get on with my life after today.

Feel better now? Good, I hope so. I'll be praying for you.
ciao

Re:OS X?

[Happy Monkey]

I think you're probably thinkng base 36, not hex.

Gaming on the Mac... It's why I switched!

[XbainX]

Ok, I'm sure plenty of you have seen it, but for those of you that haven't check this (Quicktime format) out. If you weren't convinced that gaming on a Mac is totally awesome, you will be now!

Props to redvsblue.com and their work.

Re:OS X?

[Tumbleweed]

Oops, I think you're right. :)

What you're all forgetting, of course

[writertype]

...is that the game itself ain't all that hot. Or at least the single-player version of it. Very little story, and it pales in comparison to Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. Personally, I found it as much fun as compiling a Linux dis-... Oh.

You'll have a ball.

Re:Keep it open?

[Arker]

Keeping windows open is really a step backwards, I agree.

Fortunately mldonkey is working on the protocol, so soon Mac users will have a nice modern program that runs as a background process instead of a 'window' and can be run 24/7 without disturbing the GUI environment except when the user wants to check up on its progress.

Got BitTorrent_OSX_3.2.2a.dmg, now what?

[jc42]

My brand new Powerbook doesn't seem to know what to do with it. It's sitting there in my home directory, as shown by:

: file BitT*
BitTorrent_OSX_3.2.2a.dmg: VAX COFF executable not stripped - version 3277
:

VAX COFF? WFT? No mention that I can find of .dmg files anywhere in the online docs. The web site doesn't seem to point to any help or howto pages. Anyone got a pointer to an explanation for dummies like me? ;-)

Re:Got BitTorrent_OSX_3.2.2a.dmg, now what?

[coldguy]

open Disk Copy (it's in Applications/Utilities).

drag the file on to Disk Copy's window or the icon on the Dock.

or, just ctrl+click or right-click (depending on how many buttons your mouse has) on the file and go to Open With -> Disk Copy.

Re:Gaming on the Mac... It's why I switched!

[XbainX]

Because all I got was AC's who thought I was being serious, thought I would reply to my own post to clarify...

It's a JOKE! Watch the fucking video, or atleast go to the redvsblue site!

Re:hmm, higher price and missing the toolset

[slycer9]

Fallacy. No prices have yet to be announced from Macsoft. Nor have they announced a shipping date. The news of the missing Toolset, while not good, is not new.

The reason for the lack of a Toolset is because Borland was unable to ship a compatible compiler in time, and Omnigroup was unable to complete the port itself in time.

There is an open source consortium, OpenKnights, found at Sourceforge, working to build an open source version of the Toolset for both Mac and Linux users.

Re:Gaming on the Mac... It's why I switched!

[Dinosaur Jr.]

That video was funny, when I watched it last year.

Some of y'all might encounter...

[masada555]

...a problem with the NWN file. It may show up on your desktop as a document. Just Get Info and append the .dmg extension. Problem solved. Happy gaming!

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!

Re:They were being Dos'd as it is...

[Phil John]

The problem with a slashdotting is that often these sites get knocked off the face of the planet for a while by the great behemoth that is the slashdot community.

Often these sites are put on the internet by someone who spends a lot of their hard earned cash getting something they believe in online.

Do you think that these people deserve a slashdotting just because they post something informative or interesting?

I'm not coming from the perspective of not being able to see a site linked to from slashdot, I couldn't give a flying f**k, I'm actually doing something other than being monumentally selfish, I'm thinking about the poor guys who's bandwidth or hosting bill is gonna go through the roof, who's site is gonna get knocked off the internet.

So instead of sitting there flaming, try thinking about it from all perspectives.

Buy bye karma.

Re:They were being Dos'd as it is...

[dthable]

You make some very good points, but I don't know what can be done to stop the /. effect. Should /. cache a copy of the pages and use that instead of linking right to the content? Or should the articles appear in a time release fashion (which causes other questions about the comment system)?

Re:Not a bzip2 file?

[superspoon]

Yep. I have the same darn problem.

Re:Not a bzip2 file?

[superspoon]

I dunno about the person above, but I know for a fact that what I have on my desktop is not a preallocation. The torrent client told me so. It said "Download succeeded" after about 9 minutes of high-speed downloading.
Any other suggestions?

Re:And, tada: Linux installer/binaries in SoU Expa

[Dimensio]

Well...SoU is out...and the installer doesn't work! Two setup scripts are provided, but neither actually work! Whoops, someone screwed up bigtime.

Re:Mirror of the .torrent file(responding to self)

[bhtooefr]

But some HTTP and FTP servers report 404 when it really should be server too busy.