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

[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

[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.

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

[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?

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

[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).

Good old Bioware

[d3faultus3r]

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

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.

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!

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: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:You can play games on a mac

[someguy456]

How do you frag anyone with just one mouse button?

Simple: morse code.

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: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.

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!

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.

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.