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Apple Businesses Entertainment Games

MacSoft To Publish Neverwinter Nights In Fall 2002 23

Posted by pudge from the like-i-need-another-game-to-waste-my-time dept.
Oddbod writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's gold news, Bioware has announced that IG arm MacSoft will publish the Mac version of Neverwinter Nights. They hint at porting the toolset over to Mac, which originally wasn't expected, but no promises so far."
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MacSoft To Publish Neverwinter Nights In Fall 2002 More

MacSoft To Publish Neverwinter Nights In Fall 2002

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  • It is a shame they didn't start development on a mac. The graphics and animation tools work together so much more easily.

    But what do I know about game development?
    • I was under the impression (from an IRC log from quite some time ago) that development was cross-platform from the get-go. Seems strange that it 'suddenly' needs to be ported when in the past it just required a rebuild to get the Mac version going. Things change, I guess. Hefty amount of bummed out Mac users on the Bioware boards.

    • Re:Port to macs? (Score:2, Informative)

      by SandSpider ( 60727 )
      This was originally meant to be Mac, Linux, and Windows versions all on one disc with concurrent development cycles (more or less). My guess is that they had too many platform-specific engine issues, and it would have delayed their windows release to work on those. Once the product's finished, the original team members are probably going to be reassigned to various other projects according to their studio schedule. Thus, rather than tying up the team members on bug fixes, they probably decided to farm it out to MacPlay.

      The reason they decided to finish Windows first rather than the mac has nothing to do with ease of development. The reason would be because they will have more sales on the windows platform than the Mac or Linux combined, so that's what they chose to finish.

      I have no insider knowledge about Bioware or this particular situation. I do know quite a bit about game development, and I have released a product on Windows and Mac on a single hybrid disc, so I have made some pretty good guesses.

      =Brian
  • The official NWN sites (the Bioware site, Amazon's page, EB's page) I've been looking at all this time have all implied that the Mac version would be released simultaneously with the Windows and Linux versions, in the same package. Some of them have said things like "Mac requirements forthcoming" even, IIRC. Now I find that it's going to ship in a seperate box? Bleah...
  • They should've gotten OmniGroup to lay down the conversion, Cocoa style, while magically enhancing the original PC code (and game performance) beyond all expectation, as they did with the rather hardware-itensive Giants, Citizen Kabuto [omnigroup.com]...

    From OmniGroup:

    • "This is the only version of Giants that can use multiple processors. We actually added multi-processing support while we were doing the port, as well as doing various optimizations on the graphics routines (and changing the graphics library from Direct3D to OpenGL). The end result is we're getting the same framerates on our Macintosh dual 500 MHz G4s with a GeForce 2 on an AGP 2x bus as we do on a brand-new, top of the line Wintel AMD 1.3 GHz Ahtlon with a GeForce 3 on an AGP 4x bus and DDR RAM."


    blakespot

    • Well, for one, OmniGroup is not owned by InfoGrames, the company distributing NWN, and MacSoft is. A port of the toolset may take a while (depending on how portable they made it), but a port of the game itself should take very little time because a Linux port already exists (at least, a port to OS X).

      Fall of 2002 isn't too bad... better than Fall of 2003 :)

      btw, having a separate box is often a good thing, because numbers aren't counted as PC sales, but I digress.
      • It's not portable at all. The bastards wrote it in MFC and DirectX. Not that I'm bitter. It's only that the most innovative thing to happen to PC RPGs -- being able to DM like in real life -- is the one feature they left out of the Mac/Linux versions. Oh, here. We're giving you every bit of the game on your platforms except the part everyone's excited about. Let's just dangle it under your nose instead.

        Now, there's a second middle finger for Mac users by holding off the publishing. I'd honestly rather them have not ported the game at all than to release a late, crippled version. It's just like that time I bought HoMM3 only to find out they didn't port the damned campaign editor.
  • ...but no promises so far.

    Of course not. The promises made so far haven't panned out. Expecting promises at this point would be like ... expecting promises from a game company. I don't know why I ever got my hopes up about a multi-platform release.

    As an aside, all my PC friends are laughing at me. (Well, a few are; I'm not kidding.) When will Mac martyrdom end?
    • Never, we'll always be shorted by those jealous PC gamers :-).
      I am very disapointed by this though. I was also under the impression that the Mac version would ship with the PC version. I suppose I just have to go back to worshipping Blizzard for keeping D2 and LoD on the same disks.
      • The real question is "Are they going to release the Mac binaries as a free download for those who bought the Windows version and want to run it on their Mac?"

        I believe it was mentioned the Linux binaries would be downloadable, they better do this for the mac version as well..

        • The real question is "Are they going to release the Mac binaries as a free download for those who bought the Windows version and want to run it on their Mac?"

          No, the real question is, "can you bother to read the press release before asking pointless questions?"

          It states that MacPlay is doing the port, not Bioware: therefore, the game will be in a separate retail box, since I suspect MacPlay is unlikely to give away their work for free...

          Jay (=
  • The FAQ [bioware.com] still says that they're doing a simultaneous release for WIn/Lin/Mac. It looks like the Marketing is not in sync with reality yet.

  • Here's the deal: (Score:2, Informative)

    by DoenerMord ( 21821 )
    It became apparent to anyone following the situation that Bioware's recent utter silence regarding the non-Windows clients means they had fallen behind. The company has been in a huge push to get the game out (as well as changing publishers), and so of course the first things to fall off the radar are going to be the Mac and Linux clients when in a crunch.

    The NWN Gold press release yesterday mentioned the Linux client would be out *after* the Windows version, confirming the statement above. So there goes any hybrid Mac/PC/Linux idea.

    If the Mac client is some indetermined length of time older than the Windows, someone's going to have to go back and get it up-to-date.

    Therefore, if the hybrid box idea is shot, it makes *much* more sense for MacSoft (another Inforgrames label) to do the Mac-specific marketing, QA, and even try and port the toolset (a beast in itself) so Mac users don't pay the same price for half the game. This is a *much* better idea than Bioware (who has never published a Mac game themselves) to try and do all this themselves.

    And for those wanting Omni to do it, MacSoft has stated to Insidemacgames.com that the porting house has not been decided yet. It could be them, Westlake, or some other programmers they often use for their work.
  • I would have thought that porting the authoring toolset to the Mac would be a no-brainer. The Mac-using demographic is heavily slanted towards creative types - writers, artists, musicians, and so forth. Who better to write good story lines, create monster illustrations, and so forth?
    • That's a nice theory, but it's never worked in the past. Mac users begged for UnrealEd for a long time without success. About the only editors that have made it to the Mac are StarEdit for Starcraft and the one with Heroes of Might & Magic II.(not III) Oh, and the Myth and Marathon editors, of course.
  • What about all the Mac and Linux users that pre-ordered the title expecting it to be a multi-platform release as promised? Not that we can't likely cancel our orders and get our money back, but it really sucks having to go through all the hassle and disapointment. Now that the Mac version has been pushed off onto another publisher, there is certainly no hope for us now. Just like with Return To Castle Wolfenstein and practically every other game, we'll be the last to see a version for our platform and weeks behind everybody else with updates. This truely saddens me Bioware. You had the opportunity to usher in a whole new era of commercial multi-platform software development and distribution and totally blew it. Yeah, you'll still get my money but you've certainly lost my respect.

  • This is bad news by any reasonable definition. Note that the official FAQ [bioware.com] still says "we are planning a simultaneous PC/Macintosh/Linux release for Neverwinter Nights, with all three versions to be included in a single box."

    Also note that Macsoft expects it will take them two months to finish the Mac version, not including the toolset. No clue how long the toolset would take if they decide to port it at all. Third, note that Bioware has never released a single Mac (or Linux) demo appliction, or even a screenshot of a partial prototype.

    For comparison, other porting houses like OmniGroup [omnigroup.com] and Westlake [westlakeinteractive.com] can plow through an entire port, starting from raw Windows-only DirectX-based source code, and turn out a complete Mac game in the same amount of time.

    The obvious conclusion is that Bioware has spent the past three years [macworld.com] working solely on the Windows version, and their claims about parallel simultaneous development were a crock.

  • By the time it's released for the Mac, the major bugs should be fixed (at least those that would affect both versions). It's always better to wait a little while for these things...
  • Someone posed the question, although it seemed a little more in passing...but seriously, what *about* the people who pre-ordered? I was this close to doing so myself, but I decided not to at the last minute. I know, though, that if I had ordered it, it would be coming in soon, but all of a sudden, I wouldn't be getting the product I had ordered. With Bioware claiming to have a hybrid release, supposedly pre-ordering would get you said hybrid. But then, *later*, you find out that it is not, in fact, a hybrid...well, that just doesn't work. They were taking orders for hybrid copies, not single-platform copies. So, my question is, did any of you pre-order it? And if you did, what is Bioware telling you? Or are they just ignoring you and playing innocent?

    -G

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