Quoting: NeverthelessLinux wasn't ready at the time Valve announced Steam Machines and SteamOS. It stll isn't quite ready. AMD drivers need time, VR needs time, Vulkan still needs time.
I don't know why Valve came out with it prematurely, but I guess something had to be done at that time, to push Linux development and to slow down Microsoft closing down Windows. Microsoft is doing so now. They are clearly pushing UWP and Windows S-Mode and show the tendency to want to abandon Win32, which Steam needs to exist on Windows. According to his latest statements, at least G. Newell seems to see it that way. So in my opinion abandoning Linux would be an idiotic thing to do by Valve, and the only question is how they plan to push it, and when they think the time is right!

The main driver for Valve has always been the potential for a future Windows to only allow Microsoft signed applications to run, and for Midcosoft to only sign applications that are sold through, and conform to the policies of, the windows store ( copying the Apple iOS model ).

Almost all of the WIN32 API remains in Windows 10, and will continue to exist. WIN32 and COM are the key, lowest level, building blocks for all of Microsoft's other APIs, including UWP. The real issue isn't technical ( Valve could easily produce a UWP Steam Client ), but a matter of commercial control, as they would not get a signed UWP version of the Steam Client without agreeing to give Microsoft a percentage of any revenue gained through it.

As soon as MS restrict Windows 10+ to running only signed applications from the Windows store, Steam for Windows is toast, probably along with GOG, Humble and anyone else that acts as a store-front for Windows applications.

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Quoting: throghBesides the named problems with fullscreen-support: The game is not working really good using integrated graphic processors while the classic version does without problems. So much about those optimizations! Tested and rejected this really bad optimized version. :sick:

For me the performance on Ubuntu 16.04 with an R9 290 was also poor. After upgrading Ubuntu to the 18.04 beta, it works very well.
I don't know how much of this is down to mesa improvements, but clearly they can't guarantee performance over a wide range of hardware at different software maturity levels.

That said, I doubt there was much testing on Linux, as their community is probably not that large.

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Quoting: ViktualiusSuch a great game... I own a few copies of the original one nowadays... but instantly bought the EE yesterday on steam.
A few bugs should be mentioned for interested linuxers, though:

-Fullscreen has to be done by the window-manager (rightclick on the window-titlebar and choose fullscreen)
-moving the mouse to the edges of the window or screen doesn't rotate the camera, which sucks and is maybe linked to the fullscreen issue
-the mouse-offset for scaled UI is also bad if you want to use anything higher then 1920x1080 (its pretty unplayable with scaled ui... works normal with unscaled, if its big enough for you to read (menues are about half the height of my monitor which is 1920x1080))

(I know some of this is posted above... just wanted to summarise it...)
It seems Beamdog is traing to fix the issues afaik...
Anyone here, who doesn't have all of the above on linux?

Yes, same issues.

I have to admit that I'm disappointed they didn't sort out the poor Linux behaviour of the original client. Interacting with window manager standards properly ( like pausing the game when switching to another application ) should not be that difficult.

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Quoting: razing32

Quoting: Janne

For those that don't know, the original Neverwinter Nights actually did have a Linux version, although it wasn't officially supported and needed some manual tinkering to get working properly,

Well, it was official enough to have the Tux logo on the game box. They did officially support it; the main limitation was that the editor was never made available.

ps. The two "Penultima" campaigns by Stefan Gagne is still the single best thing I played on Neverwinter Nights, and one of the best computer RPGs I've played, period. No idea if you can still find and download them, or if they work on this new release though.

Did not hear of them.
Seems the dude still has them up on his site :
http://stefangagne.com/penultima/modules.html [External Link]

They are probably also at The Vault; along with just about everything else ever released...

https://neverwintervault.org [External Link]

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: etonbearsThe biggest problem was that NWN1 mods were based on assembling playing areas from pre-existing rectangular tile sets, for both interior and exterior scenes, which could be quite limiting even 15 years ago. It produces OK interiors, as one is generally accustomed to rectilinear architecture, but creating good exterior areas is challenging.

The simplicity allowed single creators to rapidly make a large numbers of areas though, which I believe had no small part in drawing in so many creators. NWN2's area editor was more powerful, but also much more tedious to use. I don't believe it's a coincidence that NWN2 had dramatically fewer games made with it than NWN. And both editors don't remotely compare to full-blown game engines, where you can't even build a garden shed in any reasonable amount of time.

Personally, I think the trade-off was very acceptable and a smart move by NWN devs.

That's true; custom content was also simpler to produce ( except tile sets ), but I think it was less to do with dev choice, and more to do with limited capabilities of PCs when NWN1 came out.

I think there are probably a lot of people that have story ideas that don't have all the other skills ( and patience ) needed to produce content in more recent games. It's not just the exterior editor, but the advent of cut-scenes, an increasing use of voice-acting, and a much higher custom-content level of detail that is now needed.

NWN1 was, I think, just a particular point-in-time that allowed almost anyone to get involved; but from a personal point of view, I much preferred the NWN2 tool-set, particularly for exterior areas.

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Quoting: razing32Curios when that editor comes out.
Never did play with it in the initial game which was Win only.
Truth be told , NWN was the first D&D experience I had and by far sucked at the most.

Using the editor was quite a nice experience; relatively easy to learn, and did what it needed to.

The biggest problem was that NWN1 mods were based on assembling playing areas from pre-existing rectangular tile sets, for both interior and exterior scenes, which could be quite limiting even 15 years ago. It produces OK interiors, as one is generally accustomed to rectilinear architecture, but creating good exterior areas is challenging.

You would definitely want to trawl through the community content to find additional tile sets, since exterior features like buildings, city walls, cliffs and so on have to be part of a tile - you can't just drop a wall or building onto a flat piece of ground as you might expect.

Other limitations I recall were a fairly small area size limit ( 32x32 tiles I think ), and no proper Z axis ( you can have height variation, but there is a single "walk-mesh" surface that can only have one Z value for any given X and Y ( so if you have a tile containing a bridge, it will either be one you can walk over or one you can walk under, but not both). The "walk-mesh" is created as part of a tile, so it is not something a toolset user needs to worry about.

Creating new tile-sets and other model content is NOT part of the toolset as far as I recall, and is obviously more complex.

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Ray-tracing is actually 50 years old this year! Happy half-century, ray-tracing!

But you would be hard pressed to believe this if you looked at the hype from MS, NVIDIA and AMD. And, unfortunately, the journalists just repeat the junk spewed by marketing departments, because, on the whole, they do not understand the software or hardware engineering at all.

The graphics rendering community is actually quite an open one; they talk readily about techniques and algorithms. Ray-tracing has been a hot topic for some years, and "one-bounce" ray-tracing has already appeared as an alternative to shadow mapping for determining the visibility of lights when rendering pixels.

More than that, ray-tracing is actually simple to implement. You can do so in DX12, Vulkan and OpenGL 4.x without much difficulty, and possibly older versions with a little thought.

So why is it not used much yet? The answer is simply that the classic ray-tracing algorithm is recursive, and unbounded. That is, you trace a ray from the camera through each screen pixel until it hits something in the scene, then you spawn reflection, refraction and shadow ( one per light source ) rays and follow them to see what they hit, potentially spawning more and more rays ( thus, unbounded ), and you cannot complete the processing of any ray until you have completed the processing of any additional rays it spawned ( recursive ).

This is completely at odds with the hardware architecture of current GPUs, which expect every calculation path to be bounded and even - that is, you should be doing the same amount of processing for each pixel, not an unbounded, potentially random, amount. This means GPUs are very inefficient at "proper" ray-tracing. To code a practical real-time ray-tracer with current hardware, you need to set a "depth limit" on the recursion to ensure the stream processors are generally fully occupied, rather than sitting idle waiting for the one outlier stream that needs hundreds of recursions. This limit will depend on scene complexity and target frame rate, but is probably no more than about 4 levels of recursion, probably less.

The value in these libraries is probably limited at the moment, but "free" gains may come later with *possible* direct hardware support ( it may not actually be a good idea to use dedicated silicon ), and more thought into alternative methods of non-recursive ray-tracing, along with perhaps optimisations using spatial and temporal coherence. The downside, from a developer perspective, is that using this sort of library begins to limit program flexibility and dictate data structures.

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Quoting: ripperPublic domain is open source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license#Public_domain_as_open_source_license [External Link]

Indeed. It is the only true expression of a grant of freedom, as there is no "let or hindrance" of any sort. The GPL, by way of contrast, is actually quite a restrictive licence.

There are many viewpoints regarding both licencing and rights management, and none of them are unequivocally "right" or "fair". I understand that some people dislike DRM and want everything freely available, but equally I understand that that this is not reasonable to do when you invest $100m in developing a product.

On a small scale, someone like Jason Rohrer can take the public domain route because the risk of loss is low. A small number of people will take the code and assets and work out how to get the game for free. Most who want the game will buy it, and there is no real prospect of large scale piracy, because it simply is not worth a pirate's time.

On a large scale, say "Fallout 4", if the code and assets were released the likelihood of loss increases greatly. You would still get a few people working out how to compile and run the game, but there is a greater probability that those builds will be put online and used by many people instead of purchasing the game. The number of potential buyers/players also attracts commercial piracy, sometimes on such a grand scale that the majority of sales are fakes.

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Quoting: ison111Am I the only one who doesn't like "heroes" in card games? I wonder if it has to do with the fact that in other card games I grew up playing it was just left up to my imagination to decide what type of person I was playing as.

No. Gaming, in general, used to be a niche pastime that tended to attract the imaginative and intellectually curious.

But the money is in the mainstream, and video games are definitely mainstream now. That audience wants Hollywood-style entertainment.

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Quoting: tpauI liked the original NWN, but for an enhanced edition i stil think the graphic is too old and looks outdated. Im a little bit disappointed.

They're doing what is reasonable, I think. Post-processing and UI changes are 2D operations, with minimal impact on game data. They can also create better textures with some automation.

Any other changes like normal maps or parallax maps would require data changes and additions to all the models. It would be a lot of work, and the resulting game would no longer be compatible with existing community content.

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