kreso

however...
3) Ascension mod for EE is buggy
4) graphics are worse than old engine + 1PP mod (let alone Infinity animations)
 

3) Could you please report them so community might want to fix it

4) 1pp mod is included inside EE, maybe you want to have old anti-aliasing method? Take look into options.

 

 

And lua options system is horrible.

Are you talking about the format of baldur.lua file?

 

Re Ascension - pools are permanently "locked", so you can't reach them; Solars teleport to them so the only way to fight them is at range. This breaks the whole Ascension battle, since you need to use cheat keys to click the pools, and then leave their vicinity, but demons spawnng there can't reach you anymore. 

Mel wouldn't spawn when it should. I had to CLUA her in. Note that these aren't unfixable issues, it's just that when you play a no-reload game this stuff is very bad. It breaks immersion, and moreover it breaks concentration.

Graphics - I don't know what exactly is wrong with EE graphics, I simply prefer the simplicity of old game over it. I haven't even bothered with outlines, that causes extreme lag on my machine.

Lua - yes, that's what I'd expect from a modder, not a game studio. Even ToBex customization looks better than this.

There are other things that I find really annoying after a while (poison vs stoneskin, no damage spell disruption, imp.invisibility saves being hardcoded and similar) and which made me revert back to the good old BGT.

UI, Character sheet, and most of all Journal on EEs are; well, awful. Even thou I'm not really the kind of player that cares much about that stuff, there's no escape from the horrors of trying to read your journal entries on an EE game. Sooner or later you'll be pressing the J key by accident. Why change stuff that worked just fine for 20 years? And for the worse?

Sure, there are pros and cons to both of these games, but when I look at the overall picture I simply find the old engine much more to my liking, and even when I load it up with a bunch of risky mod combinations such as 1pp + Infinity Animations it seems to be less prone to crashes than a relatively simplistic EE install (EET, Ascension, Revisions, Refinements, SCS). EE crashes even w/o mods. Since I play only no-reload games, you can imagine the pain of a random crash in a battle as long and complex as Ascension or Yaga Sura.

Worst of all, these are no crashes like an invalid helmet animation/shield and similar that one can fix with an editor, these are far more complex and probably beyond modders' reach.

EE has one thing still going for it - it's (I hope...) being worked on so hopefully next patch will do something about these issues, if they're considered to be issues with BD anyway. If I see a Cloakwood spider shooting their  web at the top left corner of my screen when the next patch comes out, I won't be very happy.

Problems I encountered during my BG1EE playthrough:

 

Game crashes every time during the Corsone+Osmadi encounter, probably because of some scripting error.

The modified diary of Sarevok (I think it's a component of the NPCProject?) causes massive lag after the death of Cythandria until you put it in a bag of holding.

Nimbul, the assassin in Nashkel, was absurdly powerful in comparison to the unmodded game for some reason. Probably not a bug, but it was the only encounter that felt very wrong.

Corsone + Osmadi has been reported to DavidW - the problem seems to be in swapping out cursed weapons or similar. The easiest fix is to "decurse" the Backbiter spear.

I can't say about nimbul - what can happen is that mod *A* wanted to improve him by giving him a few levels, then SCS reads his level and gives him a decent spell selection and scripting.

2) I can do stuff with mods that I could never do in the old engine, like mess around with fighting styles. Extra APR for specializing in SWS, stunning shield bash for specializing in S&S. SPLPROT.2da, SPLSTATE.IDS, opcodes 318, 321, 326, 328, 337... these things are amazing.

ToBex already can tweak extra apr for spec. Some stuff can be mimicked on old engine. It's not as straightforward as new opcodes, but some of it can be done.

and somebody extended ToBEx to cover these new functions

Afaik, there were 2 people in BG modding history with such expertise, Taimon and Asc64 (and I'm not sure even them could implement some EE stuff to BG). To the rest of us, this is just Chinese (no pun intended).

As somebody who's been very much against EEs, then played only EEs when the latest patch came out - all I can say is that original game + ToBex is still better.

Incredible, but true. 

EE advantages are many:

1) faster load times

2) zoom

3) SoD campaign is ok

4) new opcodes make some stuff that was only a dream possible (extra high WIS should make one immune to Confusion? Granted...)

5) moddable kits like sorcerer and monk

however...

1) EEs lag with cloud-type spells. On my game water (in fact, not water, but fish animations(!)) causes immense lag as well. What good does it do if my map loads in 2 seconds (8 on old engine) if a Teleport Field spell will drop my FPS to 5?

2) crashes.

3) Ascension mod for EE is buggy

4) graphics are worse than old engine + 1PP mod (let alone Infinity animations)

5) pathfinding. It's worse than in old BG, it's worse than in old RTS games.

6) bugs. Spider webs flying everywhere, having your entire party dead due to unknown reasons and similar. None of these exist on old game.

7) ToBex isn't implemented properly. Three of the most important tweaks for me (regen stacking, no disruption on zero damage and concentration tweak) either aren't implemented or don't work as they should.

And lua options system is horrible.

For all these reasons (and many more), vanilla > EE. I still hope some day all these will be fixed and old BG will retire; but given how Beamdog updates these games I don't think that day will come soon. 

Roxanne I know you hate SR but a lot of people love it, you could perhaps be more helpful by actually discussing what the observed effects are (neither of your links does that) so things can be made compatible, rather than just proposing a rule to prevent people from installing the mod. That's kind of disrespectful...

Anyway apparently the issue has been identified and solved already.

Actually, the issue that SR creates here is in fact so trivial that once I realized what causes that graphical meltdown I was stunned in awe.   And it looks so cool that everybody should experience this once anyway.

Link to it.