I love me some NWN

I got my hands on a copy of NeverWinterNights for Linux the other day, and I’ve been playing it whenever I have spare time at night – what a great RPG. Now before the flame comments start, I’m on record as saying I don’t think it’s ethically crucial that games be free software because they aren’t software to begin with – they are art. At least, they art part is far more important than the programming part.
Which is not to say it’s not very good (and certainly a lot better) when they are free software, but like with music it’s good when it happens, but not evil when it doesn’t.

So back on topic, I really enjoy NWN. It’s rules are familiar to anybody who knows even the basics of DnD or has played Nethack for that matter, and it’s filled with tremendous flexibility of gameplay (as befits an RPG). I haven’t tried the online version at all I must admit, but the single player version is really nice. A compelling storyline with the kind of environment that allows you to live that storyline out.

NWN is of course, 32-bit only but I had no real trouble running it on Bluewhite64, all I had to do was grab the 32-bit SDL packages from slackware.com install them in a temp root and copy the usr/lib files into /usr/lib32 and it worked fine ever since.

I did find one nasty – it doesn’t play (no pun intended) nicely with twinview, putting itself in the middle of the two screens spanning halfway onto each. With Xinerama, it works perfectly. Of course Xinerama on NVidia means no compiz effects but I have also found that with twinview enabled my system is really slow and unstable, using Xinerama instead is much faster and works way better under KDE4.

I made one change though, I don’t run it under KDE at all, seeing as I have two screens, KDE needs to keep managing the one NWN is not on, and it’s not like I can multitask that way since the mouse is trapped inside NWN, so that was just a waste of resources, instead I created a .desktop file to launch NWN by itself and copied it into /usr/share/xsessions, now when I want to play it I just select “Neverwinter Nights” from my session menu on the login screen and log in, when I exit the game I’m back at the login screen. I tend to do this with most heavy-on-resource games anyway and I highly recommend it. Being able to completely switch off your desktop while playing games is just part of the real power that GNU/Linux with it’s immense customization offers over other OS’s.