Game News Beamdog can't make Icewind Dale 2 Enhanced Edition because the source code is lost

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Morality Games]

Eh, some programmers think of coding as their art.

It aint art. You are supposed to look at you code from 5 yrs back in embarrassment

So programmers hate their past work and don't think of their work as being artistic.

The art world in a nutshell.

you got it wrong. Its about constant improvement. When you look at your old code you'd done everything different now. Better readability, optimization and so on.
If you want compare to art, its like comparing pictures made by same person when was 5 and 10 years old.

That's pretty much what artists think about their work.

It never stops. The creative lives of artists tend to be divided into different "periods" where they try new things, suck at first, and then grow in confidence and ability as they iterate and begin to realize their creative potential.

Basically any technically demanding job that isn't menial labor works like that. It's why ancient Greeks used the word "art" to refer to any kind of craftsmanship or technical skill, from architecture to sailing to writing to sculpting and painting, etc.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It appears to be more common at gaming companies than in other software industries.

Probably because games used to have much shorter shelf life.

 

[Taluntain]

Maybe obsidian devs still have the source code and they are just hiding it from beamdog

In before pic of Feargus locking the source code into the deepest dungeon and swallowing the key.

 

[Delterius]

Eh, some programmers think of coding as their art.

It aint art. You are supposed to look at you code from 5 yrs back in embarrassment

So programmers hate their past work and don't think of their work as being artistic.

The art world in a nutshell.

you got it wrong. Its about constant improvement. When you look at your old code you'd done everything different now. Better readability, optimization and so on.
If you want compare to art, its like comparing pictures made by same person when was 5 and 10 years old.

That's pretty much what artists think about their work.

It never stops. The creative lives of artists tend to be divided into different "periods" where they try new things, suck at first, and then grow in confidence and ability as they iterate and begin to realize their creative potential.

Basically any technically demanding job that isn't menial labor works like that. It's why ancient Greeks used the word "art" to refer to any kind of craftsmanship or technical skill, from architecture to sailing to writing to sculpting and painting, etc.

But there's a difference. Good programmers eventually learn that the only people who love their software are themselves. Everyone else would trade it for anything that works 1% better than their creation.

Even if Art has many meanings, surely there's such a thing as pure craftsmanship distinct from art.

 

[Davaris]

Good programmers eventually learn that the only people who love their software are themselves. Everyone else would trade it for anything that works 1% better than their creation.

For utilities that is right, but not muh favorite games.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Eh, some programmers think of coding as their art.

It aint art. You are supposed to look at you code from 5 yrs back in embarrassment

The reasons I hate old stuff is that I only look at old code that is maintenance free and without spaghetti stains that remained when there was a problem or someone had a bright idea 1 day before a meeting, and that got worse with time. Took me about 10 years to get to this point, the stuff that is older were basically accidents.

So programmers hate their past work and don't think of their work as being artistic.

The art world in a nutshell.

I had the opportunity to rewrite programs a 2nd time and you can normally produce great results in a fraction of the time.

But it costs time, and you normally dont have the motivation. This what people seem to miss: programming has a lot to do with motivation. For example you spend 3 years chasing a release date with an endless list of tasks and always think that once you have all the systems finished and some time left you can finally do optimization, fine tuning and polish and all that and it will be fun to finally perfect your creation. You plastered your code with 1000s of TODO: make some nice improvement here notes so that you don't forget even 1 single idea.

And then the program is running and you have some time and you do nothing. Because you are just happy you got it done and over with and it work, and you know you would spend another year just selecting fonts and arranging buttons and you would hate it. It's a bit like when people buy a house and think it will be the most perfect house in the world and then they abruptly stop at some point. Never change a running system or, at the end of 2 years even the greatest perfectionist runs out of compulsiveness.

This is also the reason so many games come out these days that looked great until release and they have no polish or optimization whatsoever and the developers promise to fix that in patches but never do it.

 

[Konjad]

I bought Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition when it came out. I never bought another Beamdog "game" and never will.

 

[Andhaira]

Tags: Beamdog; Icewind Dale 2; Trent Oster

I've always assumed that Beamdog would never release an Enhanced Edition of Icewind Dale 2 because it wasn't worth the investment. It was after all a fairly marginal game,

But it was still much better than PoE.

Also those who haven't bought/played IWD:EE yet, do it. It's the best of all the EE's and actually a great game; the idea of implementing the kits and spells from BGII into IWD has long been a desire of many and it was finally done, and done well.

 

[Stokowski]

Sometimes Infinitron is after all a fairly marginal newsbot.

 

[vivec]

Too bad, IWD2 is the one that's aged the worst.

IWD2 is sadly the good looking, the best sounding piece of shit IE game. The encounter design post-Targos sucks monkey doughnuts. Such a promising start ruined by the trash combat all through the game. I would pay to play the game with all the trash mobs removed.

 

[Valky]

Good. I would prefer it if older games lose their source code so untalented kikes can't dig up their corpses and shit all over them.