pwrusr.com

Aint’t Neverwinter Nights 2 unpatched enough? Do you wanna take the Red Pill ? This part is gonna focus on the hardest part of getting Neverwinter Nights 2 + Neverwinter Nights 2: The Mask of The Betrayer Official Expansion fully patched, to work under wine-0.9.60 and Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 X86_64. For this guide to work, you should have followed literally my previous post, NWN2 + Ubuntu Hardy + wine. Since wine is a great piece of code, I take for granted you have not screwed it up with customization or particular settings, but I give you no warranties, I can say only this: mine works well. Ideally you have NWN2 installed and working and you just bought at a bargain price its Official Expansion, Mask of The Betrayer. If you’re to the requirements, I’m gonna guide you on how to install and update all the NWN2 stuff and play new, fun adventures!

• First things first, insert MoTB DVD and install as usual, just by following on-screen infos.

Now comes the delicate part: Updates. Updates are a bit more complicated, but nothing to worry about; essentially you have to manually download the updates and install’em manually with a tool, also you’ll download the bare, original game’s modules updates and install them manually. My DVD MoTB Expansion was version 1.10.1115 after installation, latest version was 1.12.1295, so I clearly needed to get updated. In order to be updated you’ll need to install the previous, incremental patches, until you get on track. I first tried to apply patches with standard nwn2launcher.exe welcome-screen (the one that does open up when you are starting the game), but unfortunately it hasn’t worked, so I started searching for an alternative and found the nwn2Patcher tool. Simply get yours and decompress it inside you nwn2 install directory. Here comes full terminal info steps:

• cd .wine/drive_c/Programs/Atari/Neverwinter Nights 2/
• wget http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/Download.php?id=104156

The downloaded zip file hold 2 files, a Readme (read It!) and an executable: the exe is the tool used to manually apply updates to the NWN2 + MoTB install. Now we need to download MoTB incremental updates and decompress them inside the NWN2 + MoTB directory (we’ll obtain some zip files that contain some *.rtp files).

• cd .wine/drive_c/Programs/Atari/Neverwinter Nights 2/
• wget http://vnfiles.ign.com/nwvault.ign.com/fms/files/nwn2other/19/nwn2_pcx1_english_from1101115_to1101116.zip
• wget http://vnfiles.ign.com/nwvault.ign.com/fms/files/nwn2other/19/nwn2_pcx1_english_from1101116_to1111152.zip
• wget http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/Download.php?id=108369
• wget http://nwvault.ign.com/fms/Download.php?id=113856

Next we need to download the files that will apply some mods to the ORIGINAL [& UNPATCHED] NWN2 original game’s modules:

• wget http://vnfiles.ign.com/nwvault.ign.com/fms/files/nwn2other/19/NWN2_PCX1_MODFIX_FROM100788_TO105912.zip

Next we’ll need to uncompress all of the downloaded files: we’ll obtain some .rtp files just inside the NWN2+MoTB install dir.

• unzip *.zip .

After all these downloads, you can start applying Patches, so browse your wine C drive (from the upper menu: Applications -> Wine -> Browse C:\ drive; go where you installed the game). Launch NWN2Patch.exe and, from the gui, incrementally apply the patches to the game (I started from 1.10.11115 to 1.10.1116 to 1.11.1152 etc.); simply browse the NWN2+MoTB install dir, choose the right .rtp files then click "Patch", repeat this procedure ’till the last. At this point you’ll need to apply the patch to the original NWN2 game modules, so select the Mod FIX .rtp file and click "Patch" again, same as before. Now you should have a working game, except one problem: It is damn slow, even from the first launch! For me particularly, because I have an external USB DVD-RW. The solution to this maybe installing a NoCD, but I don’t know if it is totally legal. BTW, I pwn the original DVDs, I bought them from play.com, so I feel I’m doing nothing wrong if I have some means to increase my game performance. Just search google for "NWN 2 Nocd", hopefully you’ll find a page to gamecopyworld, wich will allow you to download a nocd (take the one that apply to your version, i.e.: mine is v1.12.1295). Afterward uncompress inside the game dir and finally play. Now you should have a decent working game and, if you have a powerful enough svga and an average-res LCD, forgive for sometime XP.

I like games, who doesn’t? I started from "Press Play on tape" to misattributed "640K ought to be enough for anybody" to Voodoos & today’s wine. I’m also thinking to dump xp when possible and I’m with the people that thinks 2008 will be the Linux Desktop year. So that’s my short intro to my new Category: Games. I wish to start this new category with a classic DnD RPG: enter Neverwinter Nights 2 …great game..uh? OK, so, my actual rig [not a great one..], is an old power-hungry intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz EM64T paired with 2Gbs of DDR400 and a GeForce 6800GT 256MB; I have latest Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 64 bit with linux-2.6.24-rt and wine 0.9.60 from wine repos. I followed twickline’s guide on how to install DX9 to wine with his guide [beware, I have an accessible xp install on another partition, so I take this for granted]: shortly:

• start from a clean config.
• on winecfg, set it as Windows 2000, Vdesktop to 1024×768 and test audio.
• set dlloverrides by appending the following stuff: [Software\\Wine\\DllOverrides] 1206264929 "d3d8"="builtin" "d3d9"="builtin" "d3dim"="native" "d3drm"="native" "d3dx8"="native" "d3dx9_24"="native" "d3dx9_25"="native" "d3dx9_26"="native" "d3dx9_27"="native" "d3dx9_28"="native" "d3dx9_29"="native" "d3dx9_30"="native" "d3dx9_31"="native" "d3dx9_32"="native" "d3dx9_33"="native" "d3dx9_34"="native" "d3dx9_35"="native" "d3dx9_36"="native" "d3dxof"="native" "dciman32"="native" "ddrawex"="native" "devenum"="native" "dinput"="builtin" "dinput8"="builtin" "dmband"="native" "dmcompos"="native" "dmime"="native" "dmloader"="native" "dmscript"="native" "dmstyle"="native" "dmsynth"="native" "dmusic"="native" "dmusic32"="native" "dnsapi"="native" "dplay"="native" "dplayx"="native" "dpnaddr"="native" "dpnet"="native" "dpnhpast"="native" "dpnlobby"="native" "dsound"="builtin" "dswave"="native" "dxdiagn"="native" "mscoree"="native" "msdmo"="native" "qcap"="native" "quartz"="native" "streamci"="native"
• …inside ~/.wine/user.reg
• get DirectX 9 redistributable from here.
• install DX9 first uncompressing it to a folder (i used dx9): wine ~/Downloads/directx_mar2008_redist.exe
• … then launching setup: wine ~/dx9/DXSETUP.exe (ignore error msg).
• copy gm.dls to wine’s system32: cp ~/Downloads/gm.dls ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32
• you can now play with dxdiag settings: wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/dxdiag
• copy imm32.dll from your xp install to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32
• time to install Neverwinter Nights 2, so grab your DVD media and install it: wine /media/cdrom/setup.exe (My Install went flawlessly! It also installd Dot Net 2.0).
• For the sake of curiosity, I launched and it worked, even if there were some random errors; I solved random errors by getting Microsoft.VC80.crt and extracting its content inside game’s dir: unzip ~/Downloads/Microsoft.VC80.CRT.zip ~/.wine/drive_c/Programmi/Atari/Neverwinter\ Nights\ 2/

That’s it for the bare, unpatched, Neverwinter Nights 2. If you want to have the best possible experience, you should also install the patches and the official expansion, Mask of The Betrayer, but that’s another beast to deal with :)…don’t worry, soon I’m gonna post another tutorial, dealing with Mask of The Betrayer Official Expansion and updates. I wish to credit for all this stuff twickline from wine-review for DX9 tips and this guy from here for precious NWN2 tricks, please pay visit to their site for more tips.