I think I'll throw another 2 cents in (now making 4 cents total). I think the main reason most of us play
BGT is because of the number of quests contained in
dsotsc and sobh (which was originally written as a
BGT mod). And now something called
ntotsc is being developed. I think because of area naming and other issues you can't install these mods in Tutu. Maybe I'm wrong, how many mods and quests are there for
BG1 in Tutu?
Second, all this talk about being able to start a
SoA, or
ToB game is a non-starter. If you're playing BP (I assume all those playing
BGT also play BP) you reinstall your entire game with every new game you start. For me that has been about 2-3 times a year. In other words the fact that
BGT lets you play a
ToB only game is irrelevant because you are regularly reinstalling the complete game every few months. I hope none of the modders is wasting their time on making this option available. Or, in other words, there are too many bugs in a
BGT game to not reinstall every few months so that you can incorporate new bugfixes and new mods.
But most important for me is maintaining continuity between
BG1 and
BG2. I know that the games were not originally written that way by Bioware but if the original games were perfect there would be no mods. I am under the impression that, because of the way
BGT is set up, it is possible in the future to write mods that span both
bg1 and
bg2. In a way it already happens with several NPCs being transferred directly from
bg1 to
bg2 at the transition.
Having said all this I would really like to thank SimDing0 for what he is trying to do in this discussion. Right now the
bg modding community is best described as anarchy. Part of this is a result of the copyright laws, no one except Bioware can claim ownership of
bg so everyone who writes a mod has to do it for free and once they distribute it they lose control of it. The result has been several different groups (TeamBG-now FW, Pocket Plane, 3 Gibberlings, Chosen of Mystra) all making mods independently of one another. Now most people in these groups are Americans. We have been trained since childhood to value our independence and to hold on to as many rights as possible. If the modding community is already in a state of anarchy (everyone is his own king or queen) it is an uphill battle to get them to form into an organized, more centralized group. What SimDing0 sees and I think is trying to accomplish is that by becoming more of a single group there will be more and better mods available to all of us and he is right. However because we are currently organized as an anarchy there is no method for agreement as to how best to unify the efforts of the different groups. (not even the capitalistic one because all these mods are free) I think people will have to voluntarily, on their own, decide to seriously consider what SimDing0 is proposing. And to do this we (or maybe just me) will need more info on the issues we (or again maybe just me) think are important.
Finally, even though
BGT or Tutu might not win out the question of which will be used by most people playing the game (or probably both will) the efforts with each I think can be helpful to the other in identifying which areas have problems, which scripts need to be modified, etc (I don't really know since I haven't written a mod). At least to begin there could be a discussion about standardizing the names of the .are files. Anyway I hope at least some of what I said helps.
Again thanks to everybody in all the different modding communities for making this great game even better. (I actually spend more time in the forums than playing the game.)
PS: Is Irenicus really sticking his finger up his nose?
Edited by russ, 10 February 2005 - 10:50 AM.
