75 replies to this topic

[Almateria]

http://www.icewinddale.com

 

On today's Twilight Zone, a soulpatch comes to life and starts coding garbage

[Almateria]

A new "Story Mode" difficulty setting to allow players to experience all of the story with none of the Game Over screens

look at this trash

it's icewind dale ffs

[The Imp]

So that's a Icewind Dale imported to the BG...EE engine, just a bit better than what our DavidW did with the Icewind Dale 1 to the BG2:ToB Engine.
Little bit better as they did it with real money and more than 3 people. I bet this only happened because DavidW did it first.

Well, I can see where this is going. PS:TEE, hmm, I'll just wonder if they intent to finally sabotage the IWD2's rule system in favor of the better one...
 

Q: Can I import a Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition or Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition character?
A: No, you'll need to create a new character for your game in Icewind Dale.

Well, I'll say, this would have been actually very well possible had they not just said, ahh to hell with the old kit system, we'll make a new one and started from peddles.
The only reason to resonably do this of course is that the adventurers should start from level one, and not 40 from the end of the BG2 god phase.

I'll for see a mod that allows this to happen between the games, unfortunately it seems that it needs to be installed in all the three games before it's started, but whatever...

Edited by The Imp, 30 August 2014 - 04:31 PM.

[Almateria]

 I'll just wonder if they intent to finally sabotage the IWD2's rule system in favor of the better one...

Oh man, a 4e IWD2 would absolutely own. Now I'm worried that they'll actually try to shoehorn in their abominable kits and other stuff.

[Sergio]

are you happy for the EE edition?

[Galactygon]

Certainly, the possibility of a unified IE engine to all games is compelling enough.

Edited by Galactygon, 31 August 2014 - 06:29 AM.

[The Imp]

Certainly, the possibility of a unified IE engine to all games is compelling enough.

AKA, GemRB v2.

[Almateria]

are you happy for the EE edition?

I'm mad as hell actually and I'm not going to take it anymore!!!!

[Sergio]

why?

[Almateria]

It's incredibly low effort and they're not even pretending that it's not all solvable by mods.

[The Imp]

It's incredibly low effort and they're not even pretending that it's not all solvable by mods.

The thing is, they are at least trying to do something more than just mods... it's professional work to at least decree, might not be the most ambitious or like "the original game" quality, but they got the rights and so forth, so.

The IWD might be the low effort point for now... but, I would actually be intrested to hear DavidW's opinion about it in the future if he ever gets to play the IWDEE.

As now, we do not know the actual net effort... specially when the engine had to first be build to support all the OS'es, not just the original.

[Almateria]

I usually mentally connect "professional work" with some, you know, quality, unless it's Bethesda, which Beamdog apparently tries to outdo on the bug field.

[Sergio]

you can't blame them; they know there is a cow to be milked and they are going to milk it until it becomes a skeleton

[CamDawg]

So that's a Icewind Dale imported to the BG...EE engine, just a bit better than what our DavidW did with the Icewind Dale 1 to the BG2:ToB Engine.
Little bit better as they did it with real money and more than 3 people. I bet this only happened because DavidW did it first.

Err, no, 'a bit better' is not an accurate description. However, that DavidW and I had made great inroads with IWD-in-BG2 did help immensely.

 

It's incredibly low effort and they're not even pretending that it's not all solvable by mods.

Well, that's easy--it's because this assertion isn't remotely true. 

[Mike1072]

So that's a Icewind Dale imported to the BG...EE engine, just a bit better than what our DavidW did with the Icewind Dale 1 to the BG2:ToB Engine.
Little bit better as they did it with real money and more than 3 people. I bet this only happened because DavidW did it first.

Err, no, 'a bit better' is not an accurate description. However, that DavidW and I had made great inroads with IWD-in-BG2 did help immensely.

 

Are you contributing to IWDEE development?

 

Are you being compensated?

[Almateria]

you can't blame them; they know there is a cow to be milked and they are going to milk it until it becomes a skeleton

 

Exactly this except they are grinding the cow's bones, solving it in water and telling me it's milk, trying to prove it by its calcium content

 

 

Err, no, 'a bit better' is not an accurate description.

Oh god, is it even worse?

[CamDawg]

Err, no, 'a bit better' is not an accurate description.

Oh god, is it even worse?

It's certainly your prerogative to form an opinion about a sight-unseen project based on past results.

 

I was merely popping in to point out that the assertion that IWDEE is equivalent to anything mods can offer--especially when you're talking about my mods in particular--is simply wrong.

 

So that's a Icewind Dale imported to the BG...EE engine, just a bit better than what our DavidW did with the Icewind Dale 1 to the BG2:ToB Engine.
Little bit better as they did it with real money and more than 3 people. I bet this only happened because DavidW did it first.

Err, no, 'a bit better' is not an accurate description. However, that DavidW and I had made great inroads with IWD-in-BG2 did help immensely.

 

Are you contributing to IWDEE development?

 

Are you being compensated?

Yes. My role is the same on IWDEE ("scripter") as it is on BGEE/BGIIEE. Thankfully, unlike BGEE/BGIIEE, we don't have the third party pressure to release it at a certain deadline and we've been able to take our time on it until we're happy with it. DavidW helped with the initial part of the project before, unfortunately, his IRL obligations kept him away. We're both pretty pumped about it actually.

[Almateria]

It's certainly your prerogative to form an opinion about a sight-unseen project based on past results.

http://en.wikipedia....Sunrise_problem

[The Imp]

Sunrise_problem

The fun thing is, the actual probability is 1 and zero, (and will be that for the next 100 years) see the relationship between the earth and the sun is a little more complicated than just "simple".

I believe the same can be applied to the rest of the topic here.

[DavidWallace]

Just to confirm what Cam says. I'm very happy with what IWD-in-BG2 achieved given the constraints, but the key words there are "given the constraints". Inevitably IWD-in-BG2, which had no access to the code beyond what ToBEx provides, featured a bunch of horrible hacks:

- animations had to be shoehorned in via Infinity Animations, which - brilliant as it is - doesn't compare with sourcecode-level implementation
- spawns were managed by a bewildering array of invisible creatures
- persistent area-effect spells were managed by an even more bewildering array of invisible creatures. (That cloudkill effect you're seeing? Every single puff of smoke is being summoned by a random-walking invisible creature that appears, wanders for a second, casts, and dies. Another invisible creature at the middle of the effect recasts the payload effect once per second.)
- etc etc etc

And of course plenty of features (including some of the coolest spells) couldn't be implemented even hackily. And the install was pretty nightmarish.

I wrote a revised (and EE-focused) version of IWD-in-BG2 about this time last year, specifically as a starter for IWDEE. And it was a breath of fresh air being able to avoid hacky stuff entirely and just provide a starter point that could then be used by people with actual access to the source code. (Though I don't know how much of it was actually used in the end - I don't have the time IRL to reliably dedicate time to a multi-person coding project so I haven't really been involved at all since supplying the starter code.)