So I bought NWN: Deluxe the other day, which came in 2 paks totalling 5 CDs; 3 for NWN itself, and 2 expansions (Shadows of the Undertide, Hordes of the Underdark).

Now the installation was pretty painful so i thought I'd document it.

Installing NWN:

This might the hardest part :/ since there are tons of methods out there, so it's easy to get confused. The official site recommends either :

• downloading the content in a .zip and forgetting that you have 3 CDs.
• copying the data from a windows installation. (or a WINE one, I kinda recommend this method)

You should skip the update step, since we'll be updating to the Final Patch 1.69 after installing all CDs.

There are other third party installers (from liflg and icculus.org) but they didn't really work for me (the installations were missing many files).

You should remember to get the Linux binaries from bioware (first step in official guides).

You are most likely to get errors if you try to run the game now, but we'll fix that soon enough.

Installing SotU and HotU (Expansions)

Just follow the official guide here, and do as it explicitly tells you; i.e just unpack the .zips in the CD to your nwn installation dir. Don't try running the installers. HotU requires some extra files that should be downloaded as instructed. Also run the ./fixinstall script when you're done.

Installing the 1.69 final patch.

Get it from here. and then unpack it to your nwn dir.

Modify the nwn script.

open the file nwn in your installation with your fav editor. You should make it look like that:

#!/bin/sh

# This script runs Neverwinter Nights from the current directory

export SDL_MOUSE_RELATIVE=0
export SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa

# If you do not wish to use the SDL library included in the package, remove
# ./lib from LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./miles:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

./nwmain $@

This makes sure we're using ALSA for sound and using our installation's SDL libs instead of the ones that came from bioware. which are outdated and almost guranteed to give you errors.

Also to make sure we get full sound, edit the nwn.ini file and change Number 3D Voices and Number 2D Voices to 32 instead of 8.

Extra stuff (Fullscreen toggling, Movies):

David Holland made quite an effort to end perhaps the last of the linux clients' bugs. Absence of the movies and windowed-mode.

NWMovies

At time of writing; Latest and best version of NWMovies is not on the official page, but through the NWN linux forums i found it to be NWMovies v.4 RC1. It doesn't require building, just:

• Unpack it in the installation dir.
• Get BinkPlayer from here, unpack the binary into our installation dir.
• Edit the nwn script to use it by adding this line with the exports:

export LD_PRELOAD=./nwmovies.so:$LD_PRELOAD

• Make sure you're not using Compiz because it causes nasty freezes with this fix.

Fullscreen toggle

This requires building a patched SDL version to use just with NWN. It's not very difficult but kinda lengthy.

• Make sure you have packages required for building sdl.

$ sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev build-essential

• Get the libsdl source code version 1.2.11 (latest version which is supported by a patch).
• unpack it somewhere, get the patch and put it in the dir.
• apply the patch.

$ patch -p1 < fullscreen-toggle-129.patch 

• configure and make

$ ./configure --enable-alsa
$ make

• if you get no errors, copy the lib to your nwn installation.

$ cp build/.libs/libSDL-1.2.so.0 NWN_DIR_HERE/lib/

• edit the nwn script line to use the sdl we just built. The export LD_LIBRARY_PATH line should be like this:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./libs:./miles:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH