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, and Daniel Andrade.
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 Ubuntu 8.04 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 BinkPlayer movie player. You will also need SDL_mixer, as that is a requirement of BinkPlayer
Perl is installed by default of almost all Linux distributions by default.
BinkPlayer is available from: http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm
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.
"./nwmovies_install.pl build" will NWMovies from source code.
Optional things:
libSDL_gfx: http://www.ferzkopp.net/~aschiffler/Software/SDL_gfx-2.0/
This is only necessary if you wish to attempt to scale Bink movies to take up the entire screen. (Not recommended for performance reasons)
Either install the 32bit libSDL_gfx package for your distribution, or build a 32bit version of the library from the source code, and place the libSDL_gfx.so in the NWMovies directory.
MPlayer, or plaympeg:
If you choose not to use BinkPlayer, there is old code in nwmovies.pl to
play movies that have been converted to mpeg, via MPlayer, or plaympeg.
However, BinkPlayer is the recommended movie player, and the old code in
nwmovies.pl is left over from old versions of NWMovies, and has not been
tested extensively.
If you are not using BinkPlayer you will need to convert the .bik movies into something MPlayer or plaympeg will read. gjj's nwnbink2ogm ( http://delirare.com/stuff/nwnbink2ogm.php ) is known to work for MPlayer, and should be a reasonable starting place if you insist on trying plaympeg.
Again, the recommended movie player is BinkPlayer, and since there are no known issues using it, I would strongly recommend attempting to use it first.
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 $HOME/.nwn/nwmovies*
Installation instructions:
*) Unpack the tarball in your NWN directory
cd (NWN install location)
gzip -dc nwmovies-(version).tar.gz | tar xvf -
*) Execute "nwmovies_install.pl" to check a few known sound card things.
./nwmovies_install.pl
This will check a few odds and ends and hopefully give you some clues about how your sound subsystem is configured. *Note: This does not check the new PulseAudio sound system at this point.
If you wish to build remove from source, execute "./nwmovies_install.pl build" and it will attempt to build NWMovies from source as well as check some sound card configuration.
See "nwmovies.README.soundcards.txt" for further documentation, and suggestions.
*) Download and install BinkPlayer in the NWMovies directory.
cd (NWN install location)/nwmovies
unzip BinkLinuxPlayer.zip
chmod 755 BinkPlayer
If you are not using BinkPlayer for your movies, you will need to convert them at this point.
BinkPlayer may also be placed somewhere in your PATH.
*) Install your movies.
The movies should go in the "movies" directory under the main NWN directory. They should be on your NWN CD's somewhere. The exact location varies depending on the particular version of NWN you bought. They may also be in one of the "Language_data" ZIP files in the case of standalone SOU/HOTU.
I believe this is the default collection of movies:
uholld1@crusader:~/nwn/movies$ 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.
Movie fullscreen scaling:
To enable movie full screen scaling you must install libSDL_gfx either via your distributions package management system (if available), or by building it from source.
If you build libSDL_gfx from source, the resulting shared library file libSDL_gfx.so must be placed in the (NWN install location)/nwmovies. If you install it via your distributions package management, you should not need to do anything further beyond the below documentation.
Once libSDL_gfx is installed, you need to modify the nwmovies.pl script, and remove the '#' comment character at the beginning of the following line, so it reads as such: (Approximately line 57)
$ENV{"BINK_SCALE"} = 1; # Scale movie to full screen.
This enables the fullscreen scaling.
Optionally, you may uncomment the following line as well: (Line 58)
$ENV{"BINK_SMOOTH"} = 1; # Smooth the scaled movie for even
This enables software anti-aliasing of the scaled movie. The movie looks significantly better, however, it also slows down movie playback signficantly.
Fullscreen scaling, and smoothing both are resource intensive, and may not be possible based upon your systems hardware.
Movie performance setting:
By default BinkPlayer is extremely resource intensive for some strange, and apparently unnecessary reason. As such there is an performance impact lessening change that is enabled by default.
If you are getting poor performance out of your movie playback you may wish to disable the change.
Remove the '#' comment character from the beginnging of the following line from the 'nwmovies.pl' so it looks like so: (Approximately line 61)
$ENV{"BINK_NOPERF"} = 1; # Disable some performance
This will allow BinkPlayer to use full CPU for performance. Ordinarily you should NOT need to turn this on except on lower end hardware. Or while debugging NWMovies.
Additional variables:
The following addtional variables are recognized by NWMovies, and are controlled internally. You should not need to modify them manually, and are here only for documentation puposes.
BINK_WIDTH, BINK_HEIGHT, BINK_FULLSCREEN
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.
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 garentee 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.
MPlayer at one point required the 'x11' output driver, instead of the 'Xv' output driver. Attempting to use the 'Xv' driver crashed the X server.
smpeg worked at one point as a movie player, if you can edit nwmovies.pl appropriately, and convert your movies to MPEG1.
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 david.w.holland@gmail.com. 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 david.w.holland@gmail.com