Sunday, January 13, 2008

Neverwinter Nights 2

Neverwinter Nights 2 is another game of BioWare second in the Neverwinter Nights series. It's with D&D rules and the story plays in the Forgotten Realms near Neverwinter. It has decent 3D graphics, requires a strong GPU/CPU combo to play. Using this guide I could install and play NWN2 with wine 0.9.52 plus the additional native dlls of Windows (devenum, dxdiagn, d3dx9_30, imm32, ms vc80 dlls and such) and a little registry tailoring with wine's regedit. Tested it for some couple of hours, configuring 3D options and playing. Works good so far, slower than in Windows although but only a few drawbacks in the graphics with the similar look. One major problem is the small map is not working as you can see it on the shots. I will modify this post later if more things turn out. I have installed Mask of The Betrayer expansion and am playing it - as I've already finished the original one (under Windows).

I could easily patch the game in offline mode to the latest NWN2 final patch set. I only had to download the update zip files (around 240 MB). Combats and such work with good speed. I had to switch shadows off, bloom on, water reflections off, water refraction on. Without these I had some problems with the shaders of the game. Turning shadows off means a large cut on GPU stress and it made the game rather playable with medium look distance in 1280x1024 with my configuration.

I've found an open bug in wine's bug tracker. There's a workaround for non displaying maps in outdoor area: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9193#c15. ("Pressing ALT-ENTER twice...") No luck with indoor though.

The installation of the expansion was pretty straightforward without any errors. To apply the latest patches I had to rename the nwn2_pcx1_*.zip files to nwn2_pc_*.zip to make it work with the offline installation. I've started the campaign with my good old wizard/pale master combination, level 18. Playing the expansion I have not met any critical bug yet. I've patched the game to the latest expansion patch available. One mediocre problem I've found is the rest option getting stuck. I had to restart the game to be able to rest. (I remember that this happened once in plain NWN2 under Windows too.) This occurred only once so far in a gaming of 4-5 hours. Also going to the shadow plane once resulted in the gray shader blocking the view from above. (Restarting the game helped.) So far that's about the expansion.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

So what's the plan? Do you want to finish each game, one after another or is the storyline a tarantino-like one? =)

You could link to the post about this blog on forum.freegamedev.net (maybe you see some sense in it?)

pzi said...

I'll finish each someday probably but I stumbled upon this nwn2 wine wiki just a few days ago and was eager to test it out with my nwn2 and MoTB expansion. To tell the truth I don't plan to go into details of story line of the games just wanting to share if I could install, play and finish it or not and what problems surged. Currently I think I prefer to play NWN2 MoTB to Icewind Dale but won't write down every detail of story and such, only some screenshots for the proof of running in wine. :-D

Yes, I've already posted there in the offline subforum. :-)

pzi said...

and yes, an overview of the game I'll write regularly to present the game to people who doesn't know'em.

Anonymous said...

1. My oppinion is, that it's not too important to know about the game's content, I think the "the game runs and you can finish it" information is the main point here. So reporting about many games instead of reporting in detail about few games is for the guys/gals, who I suppose read/will read/find the blog, more valuable.

^^ I meant you could link from *here* to the forum in the nav bar =D

pzi said...

:-) I see, we share the vision then about what's useful in this case.

okay, i've added the usual links section. :)

pzi said...

Welcom, Khaal! I've updated the post with info about the expansion. I'll add you to the co-authors of the blog. :-) It's great that you wanna join the effort!

nath said...

Just a small nitpick: NWN2 wasn't created by BioWare but by Obsidian. They just licensed the engine from BioWare. That's the same as with KotOR where the first game was created by the Bios and the second by Obsidian.