Baldur's Gate Beamdog's Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 Enhanced Editions

I have no idea why you all need to rage so much on a personal level? Let Trent, James Cameron and every other hack in the world be hacks. Who really cares? Aren't we here for the games? Read again what you just said. If it's going to be superior, why the need to rage? I'm happy they did something which could turn out to be very good. How many old games are forgotten with their source code never to be touched again?

 

http://www.gog.com

 

Fucktard. Firstly, it's not a given that it will become surperior. There's a lot of factors that need to go right for that. Secondly, there had long been talk of doing something with the franchise. These assclowns ruined it, and now it might be silent for years again, indeed it might not be picked up again.

 

The twelve steps of Incantatar's journey with Trent:

1. Oh this is best news ever! Trent was such an famous member of Bioware! Uh, no, I don't remember what he did just now, let me look it up...
2. This edition will be AWESOME! HD art! New characters! New areas! Bug fixes! Multiplayer enhancements!
3. Well, the companions will be voice-acted and hey, there's action-heavy battle-arena, that's great!
4. No no, they didn't steal modder's work, they brought them ABOARD! See? Co-operation!
5. No HD art upgrade? That's allright, they have a very small team and I'm sure they can touch up the graphics somehow!
6. OH, they have a respectable sized team of 13, had full access to source code and documentation and rode on the coat tails of modders? Well, they still got A LOT done! No, I've never seen any other such projects, especially not Thief 2 or System Shock 2, why do you ask?
7. Now calm down, they just need to hold back the product for a little while as they polish it. So much new content and Beamdog doesn't want to release anything buggy!
8. I'm sure these are all just launch-day hiccups!
9. Well now, sure there are some minor glitches - that I have never personally experienced, so I think you might be lying - but look, Beamdog released the first patch already!
10. Uh, ok, the new content wasn't so awesome after all but hey, what did you expect? Only 13 people and a year, why do you bastards demand miracles? Who cares if that one guy managed to make KotC by himself in ~2 years, Trent's team HAD to work with existing engine, that's surely much more difficult than creating a game from scratch!
11. Shup up you guys, patching and mods will make this perfect! I know because I'm an EXPERT of MODDING which is such a obtuse and byzantine secret art that none of you peasants could ever hope to understand it. The MOST RESPECTED modders of ALL TIME are still on board! Who? Shut up!
12. LEAVE TRENT ALONE!

From

to

 

I would (bro)fist you if i could.

 

My understanding is:

1) Scripting is almost identical between NWN and Dragon Age, probably the same as Infinity Engine too.
2) Dialogue systems and tools used are very similar.
3) General resource-oriented organization of file structure and asset creation (creatures, areas vs. levels, triggers, etc.) is very similar.
4) Actual look and feel of dev tools is very similar.
5) Distinction between indoor and outdoor areas is the same between Dragon Age and NWN, not sure if this is in the Infinity Engine too, but it is likely.

Given all that I would say it is very likely that a lot of the non-renderer, non-UI stuff (like the way the engine handles resources) is still being used. It also explains a lot of stuff like why Dragon Age doesn't really support any sort of open world, it's too limited by the old system of having levels and areas separate, connected using "area lists", that sort of thing.

The good side of that is that making content for any BioWare-style game is very fast and easy if you have done work with any of their games, but considering they are dumping it for new tech in upcoming games entirely, there is a greater chance of the source code being released... well, if it wasn't held by EA at least.

 

Summoning SCO, I seem to remember him having a fairly vast knowledge of IE programming, no?

 

No.

But i will tell you something - the approach of 'user modding' in IE and in both NWN and TES is different.

NWN and TES editors were made for lusers, and so follow a replace model, where objects and stuff 'in the areas' is to be overridden completely if it is to be changed. Scripting is monolithic since the control flow is complex, so adding stuff to scripts has no 'general algorithm' to have a chance to run your stuff.
Exceptions occur for dialog in TES (which was made on purpose to be unstructured for this very reason i suspect).

IE modding was made by programmers, much much after Bioware shipped the games, and by a curious and fortunate coincidence, IE file formats were amenable for extension, being mostly table-data-driven (and where it is hard, like in dialogs very smart transformations were created for weidu), and so follows a patch 'model', where objects in the areas can be appended or modify their properties (not that you can't replace them). Scripts follow the same idea since they are absolutely sequential, with well known 'skip the rest' triggers.
Naturally, this requires a programming language.
The great advantage of this model is that mods that are very hard to make coexist in the other model without 'megapacks' have the possibility to be installed without the modders knowing anything about the other (but it's still better to have something like mlox for when that fails).

 

IIRC, Aurora/NWNScript had tons of the common tasks built-in. You could do most (~70%) of the same stuff in IE, but you had to know what you're doing or things wouldn't work at all, whereas you had to try to break stuff in NWN; the remaining 30% was impossible in IE.

Dialogs in NWN were a joy to write; very much not the case in IE unless you're coming from a programming background already. You can get the hang of it with enough practice, but it stays fairly unintuitive (at least for me; I didn't put any more points in tech skills beyond "Competent").

 

Apparently 3rd time's the charm and BGEEEEEEEE is finally on App Store! It's described as version 2007, but the update notes describe it as v. 2007. Fantastic.

 

It amused me to see people on other forums presenting the constant patching as a good thing and not as a sign that Beamdog is desperately running around in fire suppression mode.

 

O frabjous day!

 

TrentMagi©.

 

People who liked the EE will like anything Trent&Friends give to them, as long as they are able to play more romances...

 

Wasn't he an artist or something? Animator, perhaps?

 

He worked in Bioware till 2009. As far as I know he had a big role in NWN... Everything makes more sense now.

 

Non-scaling UI fix + "archaic UI" mod:

 

XFD looks ten times better

 

Explain. What's XFD?

 

That a sole modder was able to create a better product in one week than Trent's team in idk how long.

 

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=XFD

Oh okay, yeah.

If you want a more BG2-like UI, try http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/9710/wip-gui-mod-for-bgee

Yep. Mod your baldur.ini file to look like this:

Code:

INSERT INTO options ROWS (
	'Graphics',	'Scale UI',	'0',

You can also add these if you want:

Code:

	'Program Options',	'Debug Mode',	'1',
	'Game Options',	'Color Circles',	'0',