NWMovies is inteded to be a solution to a minor "missing movie" deficiency in the Linx NWN client.
Long story short: It puts the movies back into the Linux client just like they are on the Windows clients.
Acknowledgments:
My thanks to Bioware for supporting NWN on the Linux platform.
The Linux NWN community members for their support, specifically Skildron, Eyrdan, Benjamin 'Asaru' Dirks, JonSvenJonsson, Eljar, Hesham Hassan, Azlinon, Urban Widmark, gjj, Daniel Andrade, alanswanson, scfarley.
If I've forgotten anyone my apologies, its been a long time.
Requirements:
NWMovies now includes pre-built binary modules. They were built on a Fedora40 system. If they work for you (and you trust they're what I claim them to be) there is no longer any need to build NWMovies from source.
You will still however need at a minimum, Perl and the FFMpeg ffplay media player.
Additionally, you will still need to run the ./nwmovies/nwmovies_install.pl command to install the requisite symlink
(or type 'ln -s nwmovies/nwmovies.so .' -- your choice :-) )
Building from Source requirements:
gcc, Perl, libelf, and full development headers.
If you are building on x86_64, you will need to install the appropriate 32bit versions of your development libraries. NWN is a 32bit application, and the 64bit versions of development libraries installed by default are of no use.
Also note building 32bit binaries on a 64bit x86_64 OS is often considered "hard" and not a trivial exercise.
The "nwmovies_install.pl" script can be used to build the source as well, by utilizing the "build" option.
eg: "./nwmovies_install.pl build"
Cleanup pre-instructions:
#) Remove any old versions of NWMovies, with a simple
cd (NWN install location)
rm -rf nwmovies*
#) If you are using nwuser, and installed NWMovies in your home directory, be certain to remove any NWMovies related files in your home directory as well.
rm -rf $HOME/.nwn/nwmovies*
Installation instructions:
*) Unpack the tarball in your NWN directory
cd (NWN install location) git clone https://github.com/nwnlinux/nwmovies
*) Install nwmovies. (utilizing pre-build binaries) ./nwmovies/nwmovies_install.pl
*) Install nwmovies. (building from source) ./nwmovies/nwmovies_install.pl build
*) Install your movies.
The movies should go in the "movies" directory under the main NWN directory. They should be on your NWN CD's somewhere. The exact location varies depending on the particular version of NWN you bought. They may also be in one of the "Language_data" ZIP files in the case of standalone SOU/HOTU.
I believe this is the default collection of movies:
uholld1@crusader:~/nwn/movies$ ls *.bik AtariLogo.bik credits.bik prelude_chap1.bik XP1_Intro.bik BiowareLogo.bik ending.bik WOTCLogo.bik XP2_Intro.bik Chap1_Chap2.bik fge_logo_black.bik XP1_Chap1_Chap2.bik Chap2_Chap3.bik NWNintro.bik XP1_Chap2_Chap3.bik Chap3_Chap4.bik prelude.bik XP1_Closing.bik
*) Modify the 'nwn' startup script to include the following line:
export LD_PRELOAD=./nwmovies.so
Before it executes "./nwmain"
Also note, the libSDL included with NWN is horribly old, and tends to cause problems on newer systems (from xcb_lock issues to no sound) so you may wish to edit the LD_LIBRARY_PATH setting in 'nwn' as well to remove the "./lib:" entry.
*) Run NWN. ./nwn
If you have edited the nwn script appropriately, the first time you run NWN, NWMovies will build the INI file, and then exit. This is normal. The second run of NWN will execute normally.
*) Run NWN a second time.
This time NWN should start up, and play the movies properly. You should be able to hit "escape" to abort a playing movie.
The screen does flicker at the beginning and end of a movie. There are long term supportability issues involved, but there is an environment variables you can set that may help remove it.
The 'Movies' button at the NWN main menu should work.
The only known bug is the music at the main menu does not work when you first enter NWN. Entering the game, and then quitting back to the main menu causes the music to start working. There is no known reason for this. The button click sound howver works normally.
If you do not have any sound at all in either NWN, or in the movies, you possibly have a single PCM channel sound card and may need to look into your audio software mixing options see the 'nwmovies.README.soundcard.txt' for further documentation.
Further Documentation:
Skipping specific movies:
If you wish to skip specific movies, while leaving others enabled to be played. You've two options.
You can delete the movie. If a movie is missing NWMovies obviously can't play it.
If you can't delete (or don't want to delete) the movie (as might occur when using NWUser), you can place the title of the movie(s) in a 'nwmovies.skip' file. One title per line. The titles are not case sensitive, "AtariLogo" works just as well as "atarilogo".
The file must be placed in either in the top level nwn directory, or in $HOME/.nwn/nwmovies.skip
Screen Flickering at movie beginning/end:
Per code inside of libSDL, libSDL enforces fullscreen applications to maintain a keyboard, and mouse grab, so that other applications cannot interfere with the fullscreen application.
The only officially supported way to disable that grab, is to toggle the
fullscreen state of the window. NWMovies toggles the NWN fullscreen state
off at movie start, and toggles the fullscreen state back on at movie end.
That toggling is the source of the screen flickers.
However, you may enable a hack in NWMovies that manipulates internal libSDL state, to make libSDL believe NWN is not a fullscreen application. If libSDL believes NWN is not a fullscreen application, the normal grab release mechanisms work, and NWMovies does not need to toggle the fulscreen state of the the NWN window.
To enable this hack add the following line to your 'nwn' startup script.
export NWMOVIES_GRAB_HACK=1
This is not enabled by default as it manipulates internal libSDL state, and maybe broken at any time by the libSDL developers. However, since SDL 2.0 has been released and SDL 1.2 is now in maintenance mode, this is now unlikely and it is safe to use this hack.
Changing media player:
To change the media player from the default settings, add the following example line to your 'nwn' startup script and adjust to desired preferences.
export NWMOVIES_PLAY_COMMAND="command -options"
The movie filename is appended to the command.
2017/11/12 - Per Sean Farley, the following works under FreeBSD, as he had issues with ffplay.
export NWMOVIES_PLAY_COMMAND="mpv --fullscreen --keep-open=no"
"--no-config --no-input-cursor --no-osc --no-terminal"
"--osd-level=0"
2024/10/13 - There was a recommendation to attempt a steamdeck utility named 'gamescope' by Unaccounted4 on GitHub, by modifying the NWN script to set the H/W options appropriately.
gamescope -H 1080 -f -- ./nwmain $@
Unfortunately, all my Linux systems are VM's, and gamescope is not VM friendly, so I cant comment on its effectiveness.
Additional variables:
The 'nwmovies_install.pl' script recognizes the CC, CFLAGS, and LDFLAGS when building NWMovies from source.
Log files:
There is a bit of a log file in 'nwmovies.log'. If you do run into issues hopefully between the output NWMovies displays at startup, and the contents of the log file, any issues will be easily identifiable, and quickly resolveable.
32bit libraries for 64bit systems (Ubuntu)
Since I was testing the latest build on a shiny new 64bit Ubuntu system. These were the packages I needed to add to it to build NWMovies.
And the order I added/removed things, since I didn't get it right the first try. ( I do not recommend following these instructions, as there is something seriously wrong here. )
dpkg --add-architecture i386 apt-get install libc6:i386 apt-get install libgl1:i386 apt-get install libglu1-mesa:i386 apt-get install libsdl1.2-compat:i386
The five lines above should be minimum to get NWN to execute with pre-built NWMovies libraries.
To utilize the default ffplay movie player:
apt-get install ffmpeg
Building NWMovies under 64bit Ubuntu:
apt-get install gcc apt-get install gcc-i686-linux-gnu apt-get install libc6-dev:i386 apt-get install gcc-multilib
Installation of libsd1.2-compat-dev creates some really bad autoremoves, DO NOT DO IT. It looks like it'll break your system good....
apt-get install libsdl1.2-compat-dev:i386 apt-get install libelf-dev:i386
Other issues:
Please feel free to contact me via the Bioware forums, or at my gmail.com address with questions, comments, issues, etc.
Flames will be redirected to /dev/null. As will testy bug reports.
Friendly bug reports will be examined as time permits.
I won't guarantee that I can solve any, and all problems but I will at least attempt to as my time permits.
I will at the very minimum need the output NWMovies displays when starting NWN, and possibly the output of the 'nwmovies.log' file.
Known Issues/Bugs/Comments:
The main menu music does not work after starting NWN w/ NWMovies. Entering the game, and backing out to the main menu, the music works. Known issue, no known cause, nor resolution.
I do not guarentee this to work on any computer, except my own. If it should some how allow all the magic smoke to escape your computer, well tough. You were warned. Avoid swimming for at least three hours after using this product.
What little bit of this that is copyrightable is copywritten by David Holland [email protected]. You may do what you wish with this code so long as some credit is given to me, and the copyright is maintained.
If someone would like to send me better installation instructions, and or code updates, I'll gladly update the package and attribute the improvements to them.
David Holland 05/03/06 [email protected]