NWN shiny water

[a_h]

Hi!

My Parhelia arrives the next few days, so I wanted to check the shiny water status in Neverwinter Nights:

Any updates? I've read that the 1.30 update (SoU too) fixes the hard locks, but I didn't find any infos wether the P is ever going to show me the shiny water. AFAIK it had something to do with unsupported NVidia-extensions, right? Any changes? It's just one year after the nwn-release...

Thanks, Hannes

[Che Guevara]

Don't know anything about the shiny water status with parhelia.
But former it also didn't work with radeon 8500 of my friend, with latest patch it works fine (perhaps they use normal embm now? I hope so because thats a matrox technology).

[Zao]

This is quoted from a support email from me with Bioware.

I spoke with my graphical programmers, and it is done with Pixel
Shaders. The issue with Matrox was that they used a different language
than the Nvidia cards (also different from ATI). Since the Matrox cards
were a much smaller market, it was decided the development time needed
to implement this "eye candy" could be better spent elsewhere.

I'd guess that it's done with some NV / ATI extension, since I believe this is before any generic fragment shader extension is available.

I've got another issue that's been bugging me a while, I don't have any 16x-FAA in NWN. All edges are aliased.
But since I'm running NWN in Linux nowadays for better performance, a fix for me personally isn't that urgent, because I don't think that 16x-FAA is available in the Linux drivers.

[a_h]

Ok, ok. Seems Bioware doesn't care about the P too much - just like I thought. However they enabled the Atis in a rather late patch (1.24?), so I had some hope they would do that for the P too.

Maybe if we knew what extension is used, we could ask the devrel-people to support it (very small chance indeed).

Ok if you use the linux-drivers you're accustomed to other (bigger) problems...at least what I've heared.

[Zao]

On the contrary.
I've got almost no problems with the linux driver.
The problems I've got is that my terminals are blank after exiting X, but that one is fixable by quickly switching to another VT and back. Also, GLXgears and Tenebrae Q1 under WineX3 locks the system hard.

Except for those avoidable problems, I'm running fine, getting good performance in all GL apps, and as good as one would expect under WineX3.

[a_h]

Hey, I thought Tenebrae supports the Parhelia? Somewhere in the eternal depths of Murc that was menioned...

Great, that there aren't any major problems! I imagined that the drivers were really stable, but were lacking full acceleration of the OpenGL features.

[leech]

I have pretty good luck with just about everything that I've thrown against the OpenGL drivers for linux. GLXGears works fine for me, though I haven't tried anything besides Diablo 2 through WineX (it wouldn't load if I enabled the 3d part...)

Leech

[a_h]

Could somebody ask at Bioware which extension they use and wether there are any plans to support the P?

I tried, but you need a cd-key to be able to post in their tech-support forum.

[Che Guevara]

Thats a shame, isn't it??

They use a kind of embm, a technic introduced by matrox, but bioware just integrate modified versions (by nVidia an ATI) of embm and the only cards it doesn't work are matrox cards!!!!!!!!!

[a_h]

Yeah, it's a shame...

Would be great, if we could make ourselves heared at bioware though, so if somebody could post there a question about this extension/state, that would help a bit (maybe).

7 threads from Parhelia-users this year and the last post from the parhelia+shiny water thread dates from 25th of september of 02. I think we could annoy them a little more.

Any help would be appreciated, guys!

[leech]

It looks to me like it uses just the pixel shaders. The screenshot I found, doesn't look much different than the water in Morrowind.

Leech

[a_h]

AFAIK Morrowind supports the shiny water on the Parhelia, so - since I'm more an AD&D-fan - I would like to see that on the P too (in nwn of course).

Ok, I'm going to try to email them at nwninfo@bioware.com and nwbugs@bioware.com. Let's see how they react...if they react at all.

Somehow I'm wondering what problems bioware has with nwn, since they release continously patches, but the Ati 9600er owners cannot play nwn at all (constant crashes) - after roughly 16 patches! Consider how many guys have that card.

After 1 year since the release they fixed the P crashes (patch 1.30)...

Let's see what the nwn-people will do.

Update: the original-email adress nwnbugs@bioware.com seems not to work - anybody any alternative adresses?

2nd Update: found the original adress: nwbugs@bioware.com!! Always those typos...

[a_h]

No reaction of bioware yet. As far as I can see, they're having heavy problems with their securom-cd-protection. Maybe they should add an activation instead...

[leech]

Secu-rom??? Oh yeah, that thing that the Windows Client uses There is no securom protection for the linux version.... well their own damned fault for not having the linux client on the CD.

Actually from what I know the pre-1.28 version of the game DID work on the parhelia, something was broken though in 1.28/1.29 that was fixed again in 1.30 (in fact from reading various forums, it was the deep water that would crash the Parhelia, so quite possibly they HAD tried to enable shiny water for the Parhelia, and it just didn't work, but then again it could have been due to Matrox's drivers. After all, they did break the Water effects in Morrowind for one of their driver releases.

Leech

[Zao]

NWN crashes on my new computer, but only in Windows

Too bad that I probably can't run it in Linux due to Hyperthreading.
Do any of the SMP guys know how the Parhelia works if booted with a normal kernel?
I've not had the time to configure Slackware properly yet due to configuring Windows keeps up all my time.