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Installing Neverwinter Nights Diamond on Linux

Neverwinter Nights is an Dungeons and Drangons style Role Playing Game [RPG]. Bioware has released a Linux client, so that one can play the game under Linux. This is very cool. There are very few commercial games that support Linux. Linux support in Neverwinter Nights is a big reason why I purchased the "Diamond" edition of the game. Of course, installing software like this can be a bit tricky under Linux, so I decided to give a quick write up about how I got it working. Note: you need to purchase the game.

First, Gentoo has the basic Neverwinter Nights client in portage so if you are just interesting in playing the original game, you can use portage. However the Diamond edition includes the Shadows on Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark expansion packs, which are not supported by portage version (At least not as far as I can tell).

These instructions are based on the following forum post and are not intended for novice users. This is how I got Neverwinter Nights working.

Install

1. Download The linux client
2. Download The HotU update
3. Download the latest version of the updates Version 1.67
4. Download dialog.tlk This may not be necessary for you, but it was for me
5. Create an installation point, for example: /opt/nwn and cd into that directory
6. Mount the Neverwinter Nights: Diamond dvd.
7. unzip $DVD/Data_Shared.zip
8. unzip $DVD/Data_linux.zip
9. unzip -o $DVD/data/xp1.zip (-o == overwrite, xp1 == expansion pack 1, SotU)
10. unzip -o $DVD/data/xp2.zip (xp2 == expansion pack 2, HotU)
11. (from 1) tar -xzf nwclientgold.tar.gz
12. (from 2) tar -xzf nwclienthotu.tar.gz
13. (from 3) tar -xzf English_linuxclient167_xp2.tar.gz
14. (from 4) unzip -o NWNEnglish1.67dialog.zip
15. chmod 755 dialog.tlk

Set Permissions

Everything should now be installed, however if you installed the software as root, you will need to update the permissions so a normal user can run NWN. This configuration will allow and user in the games group to play. You should never run any application like NWN as root.

1. chown -R root .
2. chgrp -R games .
3. chmod g+rw -R .

Now run the fixinstall script that should be in the base of the NWN installation, /opt/nwn in this case. Hopefully there will be no errors.

Updating

If you are updating a previously installed version, you may want to chown and chgrp your save games back to your username and the group users.

1. cd saves
2. chown -R username "00000 - quicksave"
3. chgrp -R users "00000 - quicksave"

There may also be files in the localvault for which you need to change the permissions.

1. cd localvault
2. chown username charname*
3. chgrp users charname*

I have not yet tried installing the Kingmaker module.

Troubleshooting

Here are some solutions for problems I've had.

No text in menus

If you don't see text in the menus, make sure that you've downloaded and installed the dialog.tlk file. See steps 4, 14 and 15.

NWN hangs while unpacking a module

If NWN hangs when loading a new or saved game, then double check you permissions, This can happen if one of the files that NWN needs to load is not readable by the current user.

NWN crashes when loading maps

When moving between areas that require loading a new map, NWN crashes. For me, the progress bar makes it about 70-80% of the way, and then stalls for a second. NWN will either crash or the progress bar will jump to 100% and everything will be ok. I suspect this has something to do with my video card drivers (ATI binary drivers) and the kernel version (currently 2.6.17). This did not happen as often with previous driver/kernel versions. As of writing this, I am getting crashes about 5-10% of the time.