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How To install Neverwinter Nights on Linux 243

Posted by Hemos from the much-time dept.
Joe Barr writes " As soon as I saw the news that BioWare released a beta of a Linux client for its popular and successful Neverwinter Nights title, I downloaded the beta (registration required) and went shopping for the prerequisite retail Windows version of the game. Before I proceed, let me offer this brief warning: Neverwinter Nights is the mother of all timesinks. Do not follow my path unless you have nothing important you want to get done for the next week or so."
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How To install Neverwinter Nights on Linux More

How To install Neverwinter Nights on Linux

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  • Finally.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by shoptroll ( 544006 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:26PM (#5642213)
    Finally... Not a post regarding the new RFC and IP stuff. Thank god 4/1 is over! (And this could be 1st post, i doubt it though)
    • Have to agree there... April 1st is a pain in the ass. I mean sure, post one story (the whitespace one was cool), but to post them all day, and ostensibly the same idea? Sad.

      Anyhoo, on topic, given how long the poor saps who bought NWN (because of it's promised Linux support down the line) have waited, for Bio to provide NO kind of installer or, by the looks of things, no information either... The word "afterthought" comes to mind.
      • Well, it is still beta..

        But given that there is still a lot of life left in the engine [ie: the next XP's, and games from bioware will probably use it], it looks promising for linux!

  • I'm scared (Score:5, Funny)

    by forgetmenot ( 467513 ) <atsjewell.gmail@com> on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:26PM (#5642216) Homepage
    I'm scared to read the article. Is April fool's over yet?
    • depends where you live. It's still that accursed day for me.

    • Re:I'm scared (Score:3, Insightful)

      by t0ny ( 590331 )
      Why BioWare can't provide an installer is evidently something they choose not to discuss beyond a vague mention of legal restrictions. The word on the street -- unconfirmed by any primary party -- is that the license between InstallShield and BioWare prevents BioWare from providing another installation tool. That may or may not be the case, but I note that InstallShield offers a multiplatform version of its installer and that it runs on Linux. Perhaps that is what BioWare will use when it offers the retail

  • jesus h. christ, just run windows (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    seriously

    how far are you willing to go to avoid "big bad M$"?

    • Just run Windows! Do it now! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:49PM (#5642326) Homepage Journal
      You're right! Just roll over. Give in. Do what they tell you. Don't try for something better. Give your money to monopolists. Vote with your dollars! Tell the world that it's OK to just become one with the Borg!

    • It's not just cuz everyone's an MS hater. Personally, I don't really mind MS, with the exception that it's a pain in the ass to get infected with Code Red, Nimda, etc etc.

      I run Linux on my laptop and Windows at home. Why? Because it's different, it's interesting, mainly. And because I have a higher control over my system and as a Computer Scientist, I can actually see some of the things we talk about in those stupid classes in action. As I watch the kernel compile, I see mutex functions and remember the op
      • I watch NT go to blue, and it reminds me of that time the dog threw up in the front seat of my Rambler.

        Watching Linux boot makes me think of that time my girlfriend slowly....uuummmneeever mind.
    • I take the whole "Windows vs Linux" debate very seriously, both professionally and personally. I can't bring myself to buy a Microsoft product. I know what kind of company they are, I know their history, and I have seen the competition. If the only downside to not using Windows is the ability to play every game upon release, then I can live with that.

      It is more important to me not fund an arguably evil monopoly, pay idioticly high prices, get locked into licensing schemes, be subject to a myriad of viruse

      • I hate to troll a bit. I'm not one to defend MS, heck I bash them every chance I get. But what you said there was plain stupid. Sure more powerful hardware, yes you gotta have it or else it won't run properly. I just gotta point out that my leet celeron 266 is running just fine on XP for me to play NWN :)

        But the fact implicated you have to buy a firewall software, or anti virus, or purchase office apps, or image manipulation tools, web dev tools and database software shows your ignorance to the subject. Ju
    • I've played the game on both. It has nothing to do with "avoiding" Windows or MS software. It does have to do with not rebooting my machine and having to restart all my apps when I come back to linux.

      I simply get more done under linux; Windows is for playing games (for me).

      I haven't tried loading a Linux saved game under Windows. Anyone know if this works? (The reverse does).

    • How much does MS's latest piece of crap cost? $80 for WinXP Home? And NWN costs $35? No game is worth $115, plus shutting down background processes, rebooting, partitioning my harddrive to accomodate Windows and it's proprietary filesystem is totally unreasonable.

  • Best April Fool's joke yet (Score:5, Funny)

    by XaXXon ( 202882 ) <xaxxon&gmail,com> on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:27PM (#5642219) Homepage
    Haha. Like the Never Winter Nights Linux client will ever come out.

    What's next? How to install Duke Nukem Forever on Linux?

  • Really? (Score:5, Funny)

    by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:28PM (#5642226) Journal
    Neverwinter Nights is the mother of all timesinks.

    You're kidding right? You're posting to slashdot claiming that some game is the mother of all timesinks? Hah!

  • Timesink is right (Score:5, Informative)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:30PM (#5642235) Homepage
    This is very true. Even if you're not a D&D type guy (and really, who on /. isn't), the game will eat away at all available free time you might have. Couple that with the near-infinite replayability of the thing and you've got something worth getting (even if you gotta buy the Windows CD for the data).

    A quick check of the NWN modules [bioware.com] section on Bioware's site shows over 2000 player created ones. Carry on then. I don't anticipate I will be seeing you around here much from now on. :)

    • and really, who on /. isn't
      >>>>>>>
      Me. As a result, I hate pretty much every PC RPG out there. I keep trying the occasional one, and I still hate them. Call me a lamer, but I like console RPGs a lot more. If I wanted to crunch mind numbing stats all day, I'd get into sports :) That said, I still found NWN pretty amusing. That says a lot about how Bioware was able to reach out to a broader audience with NWN than your traditional D&D fan.

  • Yeah... (Score:2, Funny)

    by phrogeeb ( 621296 )
    I believed "President Bush's War on Iraq is incredible hoax culminating on April 1st with a Soldier's Ball open to Americans and Iraqis in Baghdad hosted at the Jewish Community Center" before this one.
  • Sorry for that but I just got my first Gentoo install up and running and -- now I understand why their users jump into every distribution/packaging/Joe Barr-tediously-explaining-how-to-install-something article to proselytize.

    I'm trying to fight the impulse but suspect I'll be one of them very soon...

    • On Gentoo, it's exactly the same as any other distro. Debian and Gentoo both have great package management systems, but for applications that can't be packaged, they're useless.

      • Gentoo can even wrap "impossible" programs (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @11:48PM (#5642501) Journal
        .rpm, .deb, and .ebuild (gentoo) are AFAIK all script-based, or at least have scripting capabilities, so there's no such thing as an "application that can't be packaged". If the app couldn't be packaged, then you couldn't install it by hand, either. (Debian even supports asking the user for input as part of the install process.) .rpm and .deb, by convention more then anything else, are supposed to be binary-only packages. There's nothing technically stopping them from compiling source code (except perhaps that you aren't supposed to need a compiler on such systems).

        Ebuilds, on the other hand, embrace compiling source to the near exclusion of all else, so for those packages that can't be wrapped into a nice binary that will work for everyone, an ebuild can still be created. In fact it is common practice to make such wrappers, and ebuilds for other uncommon situations as well.

        For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with .rpm and .deb, if not essentially impossible.

        Ebuilds are a superset of binary packages, such that they can package anything you could install by hand, simply because they are a higher level. (This is where the sandbox support comes in real handy, since you don't have to specify what files were installed and what files to uninstall; the sandbox picks it up automatically and I expect all packaging systems to pick that up eventually.) Of course, there's a price to pay for that in compile time, since virtually by definition it's impossible to have this flexibility and still distribute binaries*, so it's not like it's a absolutely superior method in all cases. Tradeoffs just like anything else.

        *: People keep talking about having a "package repository" for Gentoo which would function as a giant multi-person cache of Gentoo compiled packages, which you could then grab instead of compiling. Nobody AFAIK has made any progress beyond suggesting it, because even with just the obvious configurations (the four or five main processor types, the three or four good optimization settings from conservative to ultra-aggresive, the three or four obvious USE settings from conservative to everything) mulitplied by 10 or 20 gigabytes for a pure install means that nobody can afford to host it, and people would still find it too limiting.

        • For instance, Sun no longer allows automatic downloads of its Java distribution, so Gentoo has an ebuild that asks you to download the Sun-provided tarball and put it in a particular place, then proceeds to open the tarball and put it in the correct place, also allowing you to have full packaging system support for uninstalling it. This is harder to do with .rpm and .deb, if not essentially impossible.

          When you're done plugging Gentoo, do some actual research on Debian. :) This is exactly how a number of

  • In the words of the Duke: Not Hardly! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:35PM (#5642261)
    If you think NWN is a huge timesink, then you've obviously never played the original Baldur's Gate. We're talking about a magnitude scale of at least 4 here.

    At the end of Baldur's Gate, after having thuroughly explored every nook and cranny of the world, I'd accumilated 212 game days of play. That's approximately 2 hours per game day: 424 hours. (If I recall the conversion properly.) That's 17 and 2/3rd days, straight. Now, consider your average person sleeps 8 hours a night, it equals roughly 26.5 days of gameplay, not taking into account things like bathing, eating, and work.

    And that statistic doesn't even begin to take into account the many hours spent saving, loading, and replaying sections of the game that are all but impossible to perform well. I'd say that, realistically, you can easily double or triple my figures.

    In contrast, it took me less than a week to beat NWN while going about school, sleeping, eating, and other various activities.
    • Nice calculation, but you're probably quite off: the number of game days includes the time your characters spend resting. IIRC, the minimum time your party sleeps is 8 hours, and more, if your healing capacity requires it. How much of your total time is spent resting I couldn't say, but chances are it's a significant amount. For me, it is.
      Of course, there's no doubt the original Baldur's Gate was an incredible time sink. I played it daily for two months, too. Same goes for BG2, I think. Took me one or two w

    • In contrast, it took me less than a week to beat NWN while going about school, sleeping, eating, and other various activities.

      You played all 2000 community-created modules in less than a week? You iron man!

    • The single player campaign in NWN is just the beginning. There are hundreds of servers to play on, thousands of modules to download, and a full-featured toolset to create your own game if you want.
    • Yet another person who missed what NWN is all about; The single player is not the main part of the game, unlike Baldur's gate (really great game too)...And I managed to also finish the Official Campaign within a week, but something I found:

      http://www.neverwinterconnections.com

      And then

      http://www.layonara.com

      There are some amazing modules and even semi persistant worlds available, even with different rules and game items/monsters.

      Yes the Official Campaign is kind of short, but still very good. Would be n
    • not taking into account things like bathing, eating, and work

      Given the average slashdotter is either a

      1) Student that doesnt bathe, eats at his computer, and doesnt work until 2 weeks before finals
      2) Sysadmin that doesnt bathe, eats at his computer, and babysits a server with no need to do anything

      that's not really relavent
    • Hmm, the game has been out for aprox 10 months, during which I have averaged 2 hours a day either playing or module building, so that comes out to over 600 hours (this is being very conservative, since I have been unemployed for 3 months now I have probably put in more hours than that just this year). The fact is NWN is a basic game engine around which you can build just about any RPG you want. Look at the vast amount of modules out there, throw in all the Persistant worlds, and you have as many hours of ga
    • bla bla bla ...while going about school, sleeping, eating, and other various activities.

      Thou hast a far greater willpower than I.

  • isn't this kind of stupid to post instructions for how to install a game on /.? aren't we supposed to be nerds capable of such?

  • Where to play (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:46PM (#5642311) Homepage
    Having played NWN to death on the Wintel platform, just a helpful hint to some. Playing multiplayer on public servers which allow client-side characters to be imported, I find, is utterly boring and pointless. It's WAY more fun to go old school and get you and a group of your buddies with the software together on your own server and play. For best results, obviously you'll want to come up with your own maps and adventures, something the packaged toolset is absofuckinglutely fantastic at doing.

    The reason I speak out against these kinds of public servers is that, first and foremost, you'll be playing against the biggest most idiotic cheaters ever. That and nine times out of ten it's just the servers admin fucking around and killing everyone because he's made his character into a dragon. So play with your buddies, you'll have a more enjoyable experience and it's easier to track a cheater down and punch him in the face.

    Just my 2 gp.

    • I ran/run a server for a while (opened to the public) that only allowed server side characters.

      The module was a remake of the classic Bard's Tale and it was/is more than half way done. (more info) [jacefuse.com]

      Interest in it has died down since the PC players seem to have grown tired of it (it is, after all, about a year old). But those that did play were limited to the types of items available within the Bard's Tale universe.

      This created two types of players, those that got pissed because they couldn't find insanel
    • Where to play?

      City of Arabel [nwncityofarabel.com].

      That's where my time goes.
    • Or, play on a server with server vault. Local vault is horrible, and SOME server vault games are still bad, but there is at least some hope for them.
      • Yes of course server vault's the better of the two, but at least if you run the server yourselves you're not at the mercy of some kiddie somewhere in the world who'll just pull the plug on the server and your characters disappear. That's about my only issue with online play.
    • You know, I'm not sure I'd want to play a game with anyone who would punch *anyone* in the face over something in a game at all.
    • I agree. The only times I've played on random servers with people I don't know, they've all imported characters with GLOWING FISTS OF DOOM +2 or something and totally rape everything in sight (Including village NPCs). No fun if you're actually looking to build your character from scratch with others.

      And just like most game servers out there, the admins log in about three hours into game play and slay everyone for no reason.

      I don't mean this as a generalization for every server. There are some run by reall

    • Re:Where to play (Score:3, Interesting)

      by startled ( 144833 )
      I agree with everything you said, except about coming up with your own adventures. The high-rated modules at planetneverwinter (or bioware links to them and, um, someone else-- nwnvault?) are great, and much better than what you're likely to make your first few times out.

      Aside from that, yeah. Private servers all the way-- the pubs are only for when your buddies aren't around.
      • Heh, I agree there are lots of really good mods to download and play. The toolet has a hefty learning curve, that's for sure. My first few attempts were (lets not sugar coat it) pathetic. After playing around with the toolset and looking at some downloaded mods seeing what they've done, you can get pretty good at coming up with the basic framework of a fun adventure. Besides which, using the GM tools, if your map looks a little boring you can just ambush the party with a bunch of nasties. :)

  • Very pleased with nwn (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vicegrip ( 82853 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @10:49PM (#5642329) Journal
    Installed flawlessly and took me about 15-20 minutes to copy stuff around. I've already logged countless hours playing my dwarf and monk....

    I wonder how hard it would be to re-write their game editor in qt..

    Thanks Bioware! My rebooting time has been drastically reduced.
  • Aribeth's 'jiggly bits'. Wheeeeeeeeeee!
    • ...were added to distract you from her absolutely terrible voice acting. Apart from a couple of voices (ex., Linu), the acting in NwN is pretty bad (with Arwen at the bottom of the list). And, following Bioware tradition, they make you listen to the same lines over and over and over again. If I hear Tomi say "Aww, I can pick that open easy!" again, I'll grab a baseball bat +5 and pay Bioware a visit. How hard would it be to have 5 or 6 versions of each line?

      BTW, if you don't have the game and are looking f
      • Umm you are wrong on almost every point, if you want to be forced to eat food to keep up stamina just look for a server running the HCR or hardcore ruleset, this set of community created scripts has an option to require rations. Dialogs and quests are as complex and deep as the module creator would like to make them, there are scripts out there that allow things like a lamp lighter to make his rounds and return home when done, kids playing tag etc. If you want to make custom architecture or objects you just
        • > NWN is not so much a game as it is a game engine

          My point exactly. When I buy a RPG, I expect a good SP campaign, not just the possibility that someone, some day, might use the same engine to make one (in which case I'd prefer to pay the person that makes it, not the people who made the engine - and the very poor original campaign).

          Regarding the tools: yes, now there are some tools available (as long as you happen to have 3dsmax, which luckily I do, because I work in post-production). When the game w

  • Not an April Fools Joke! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Colin Walsh ( 1032 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @11:08PM (#5642385)
    Unfortunately this had to be posted today of all days...

    Anyways, the Linux Client really exists [bioware.com] (you can even check the packets coming from Bioware, the 'evil bit' is set to 0! :) and the game is a blast. It's also good to see that news of the installer is getting out, as there are many people who don't know about it.

    -Colin

  • Strait to the point (Score:3, Informative)

    by dark-br ( 473115 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @11:09PM (#5642388) Homepage
    As the article fails miserably to do that...

    Where to download the Linux NWN instaler:

    Here [eongames.com] or here [project404.org] or here. [imyourhandiman.com]

    MD5SUM for the files: b72d9ec2b9c43e7e3cd39bec22afbe7c

    You will need to download these extra file to play in your language:

    French [bioware.com]
    German [bioware.com]
    Italian [bioware.com]
    Spanish [bioware.com]

    Unzip into your nwn directory and move the files to their correct case. ie.

    mv dialog.TLK dialog.tlk
    mv dialogF.TLK dialogf.tlk

    Notes:

    This installs the 1.29 English version by default. See above to play in your language.
    The beta2 binaries are included.

    CDROM Mount Point

    If your cdrom mount point is not listed below, you will have to set an environment variable first.
    These are the mount points: /mnt /mnt/cdrecorder /mnt/cdrom /mnt/dvd /media/cdrecorder /media/cdrom /media/dvd

    If your mount point is not listed here, before you run the installer, from a shell, type export SETUP_CDROM=/path/to/cdrom/mountpoint.
    Replace /path/to/cdrom/mountpoint with where your cdrom gets mounted.

    Temp Directory

    This installer uses close to 1GB of space in /tmp during installation.
    If you have limited space in /tmp, change your temp directory to somewhere where you have more than 1GB free.
    eg. from a shell, type export TMPDIR=/home//

    If any of these apply to you, do them otherwise Neverwinter Nights will not install.
    If any of these do not apply to you, then you can just run the installer.

  • Bah! Timesink? (Score:4, Funny)

    by carambola5 ( 456983 ) on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @11:17PM (#5642406) Homepage
    Try minesweeper.

    "I almost got it last time. It was down to one or the other!"
    • Mine sweeper tourmants where big a a certian bank I used to work at.
      IT was pretty funny, every time a new record was set, I maged to beat it by 1 second. hehe, they eventually wised up to the .ini files. then I created my own minsweepr, it had only 2 buttons. I called it the "Cut to the chase" minesweeper.

  • See I told TSR this would happen (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Tuesday April 01, 2003 @11:56PM (#5642521) Homepage Journal
    Let non humans be paladins, and they crumble at the first temptation. Stupid traitor Aribeth... ;)
  • did you see this screenshot [bioware.com] of the game,

    they have stolen those hands and coming out of the wall from zelda 1 [mobygames.com] on the nes :-)
  • I am a Mac user, and for the time being am stuck without NWN. I have never had a linux system as my home system so my understanding of linux and its various distros is limited. Here is my theory:

    Would it be possible for me to install yellow dog linux or linux PPC onto a partition on my G4, and boot to that partition, buy NWN for windows, and then install the linux client on my powerPC? Or would the client only work for linux running on x86 systems? If it would work, it is a very tempting reason to instal

  • This guy obviously has never played EverQuest before.
  • I downloaded the Linux client beta (all 3 of them so far) and they just installed and worked. No problem.

    Granted, there's no installer (yet - actually - there is a port of the Loki installer available - look in the fora) but if you're comfortable with your Linux PC and know how to create, copy and change permissions on directories, it's pretty painless. Runs like a top. Better framerate too :)

    JB
  • Could someone please reply with *actual* hardware requirements? I have a somewhat aging AMD Duron 800 machine with 384MiB of RAM and a Matrox G450 video card in my Linux box.
  • For anyone wanting to install easilly, when the final version is released, Tux Games will be selling a fully functional Linux version that includes the boxed product plus an installer CD that does all the work for you.
    Here [tuxgames.com] is the product details link.

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