Bring Neverwinter to Linux and/or Vulkan

masterofthedead · July 2016

With the rise of the new low-level APIs, the ability for games developers to dramatically improve the performance of their games on multiple platforms is upon us.

While DirectX 12 is restricted to only Windows 10, Vulkan; a similar API is truly multi-platform as it supports Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, vista, XP, MacOS, Linux, Android, Playstation, and any other OS you can think of. It is the spiritual successor of OpenGL and can interpret/use just about any code from other APIs including DX11/12.

While it is true that there are many Mac users, the likelihood that you will get all the College Mac users to play Neverwinter on a machine they never considered a "gaming machine" is unlikely. Whereas, the Linux side of the coin sees many millions of active Linux users. True, not all of them are "gamers", but a large majority of them are and/or want to be. There is already a large collection of games written for Linux that date back to the early 90s. There is also a growing Steam library of Linux specific and Linux compatible games to choose from.

As evidenced by the rather large collection of tutorials both on these forums, on steam, and on the web in general on how to run Neverwinter in Linux via WINE and PlayOnLinux, it would seem that releasing a patch to allow players to use Vulkan for their render engine would make it easier and more viable to release a Linux client on Steam.

On Linux, the graphics drivers have come an extremely long way. Intel, Nvidia, and AMD all have very good driver stacks and most of the time the OpenSource driver stack for those vendors performs just as well if not at times better than the proprietary versions.
Mainstream Linux distros (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE) are quite easy to use and support most if not all but the bleeding edge of hardware available in the commercial space.

Vulkan is OpenSource so there is no money changing hands to gain access to the code and API guides.

If no Linux client, then at least support Vulkan API.

Look at Doom on Vulkan. Digital Foundry found that The AMD FuryX on Vulkan gained up to a 50% performance improvement. So, the potential benefits of Vulkan for hardware performance in a game is pretty significant over existing APIs. This even applies to older hardware. Another tech group showed that at 1080p on an R9 290, they were getting at least 90FPS on max settings.

cilginordek · July 2016

Yes please this game is the only reason keeping me on windows.

santralafax · July 2016

I had heard that Neverwinter runs successfully on WINE.

samaka · July 2016

I use OSX, sorry macOS, as my primary operating system. I literally only use Windows for playing this game, and previously DDO. Yes, DDO does have a native macOS client, but it doesn't support things like anti-aliasing (really!) and the performance was considerably worse vs Windows.

I don't know if PWE/Cryptic would do as you asked... didn't STO have a native macOS client that was discontinued to due insurmountable technical problems?

durynte · July 2016

I use the Wine emulator for NWO, running on top of Linux on a machine from the vendor with an apple logo. It runs fine. I turned the graphics all low, that is about it. But I guess the intention of the OP was promotional in first place.

masterofthedead · July 2016

If the devs used Vulkan API, and Opensourced the client, the Linux community could create the Linux native client themselves.

santralafax · July 2016

masterofthedead said:
If the devs used Vulkan API, and Opensourced the client, the Linux community could create the Linux native client themselves.

Ah-and opensourced the client. I would say good luck with that. Then we might know the meaning of "A Chance" and other sacred items....

masterofthedead · July 2016

santralafax said:

masterofthedead said:
If the devs used Vulkan API, and Opensourced the client, the Linux community could create the Linux native client themselves.
Ah-and opensourced the client. I would say good luck with that. Then we might know the meaning of "A Chance" and other sacred items....

Not the server code. The client just downloads information from the server and lets you play it. The server still holds all the secret sauce. If the server supports Vulkan, the client just needs to be written to use Vulkan and support the OS. The server does the rest.

cilginordek · July 2016

durynte said:
I use the Wine emulator for NWO, running on top of Linux on a machine from the vendor with an apple logo. It runs fine. I turned the graphics all low, that is about it. But I guess the intention of the OP was promotional in first place.

Can you tell your specs and how you configured wine?

wildfirede · July 2016

The game beeing run on a quite old engine with a few optimization during the years and the lack of the developers to even understand how enchant glow works make me think that aint gonna happen, hell i am even surprised they managed to port it to ps4.

durynte · July 2016

cilginordek said:

durynte said:
I use the Wine emulator for NWO, running on top of Linux on a machine from the vendor with an apple logo. It runs fine. I turned the graphics all low, that is about it. But I guess the intention of the OP was promotional in first place.
Can you tell your specs and how you configured wine?

You may as well look over here:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=15053

specs:
Machine: Macmini4, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, Memory 4 GB
Gfx: NVIDIA GeForce 320M, monitor resolution 1920 x 1080

wine setup, in terminal:
- Make a wine directory, i.e. "cd $HOME; mkdir .wine-nwo"
- Then let wine install its 32bit emulation in there:
env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-nwo" WINEARCH='wine32' wine 'wineboot'

- To find the supported resolutions run:
xrandr

- Now configure wine:
env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-nwo" WINEARCH='wine32' winecfg

- I chose "win xp" for operating system, for drivers pack "d3dx9_36" which seems sufficient, chose running as virtual desktop in some size I like (1440x900 ?), and chose "sandbox" mode for not mirroring the standard user directories into windows.

Now get the arc installer from WWW, and let it install launching it from wine. It does (did) everything fine. If you'd like to pay for Zen, run:

cd "$HOME/.wine-nwo/drive_c/arc/Arc/"; env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-nwo" WINEARCH='wine32' wine ArcLauncher.exe

And to launch NWO, run:

cd "$HOME/.wine-nwo/drive_c/arc/Neverwinter_en/"; env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine-nwo" WINEARCH='wine32' wine Neverwinter.exe &> /dev/null

I don't use any command line options in the NWO launcher.
Go ahead and configure Option for NWO from esc-Menu, save the settings.
I turned the graphics all low, especially the #particles for explosions to 0. For it is fast paced, and I want the pace, the details of the visuals not so important.

Oh, by the way. I hope
https://appdb.winehq.org/commentview.php?iAppId=15053&iVersionId=30786&iThreadId=92391
CrypticCliff is still on board! If so, thank you again for making available plenty of entertaining hours for non steaming, non looking into the window(tm) peeps!

tripsofthrymr · July 2016

masterofthedead said:
If the devs used Vulkan API, and Opensourced the client, the Linux community could create the Linux native client themselves.

The client is patched, often weekly, and must match the server version in order to play. Even if PWE were happy to open source their IP (unlikely), it isn't practical to have a separately maintained client for the same servers.

caith3000 · July 2016

We need a native MacOS client. there are many of us mac users who are gamers now! I played NWO on bootcamp on my older Mac, but don't want to have Windows OS on my current Mac.

Bring Neverwinter to Linux and/or Vulkan

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