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IWD2 source code lost, Beamdog is sad

ga♥

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Feb 3, 2017
Messages
7,595
Backups are my jam. I deal with this crap at my company all the time, you want data from 2008. Well you never gave a damn when I asked for money to update the system and keep the hardware running.

Backups are such a complex, costly system that very few companies understand. Proper backup tapes for that project should have been locked forever and just means of finding them and recovering them.

Really can't believe that they don't exist.

However, as I said I have dealt with many companies that hate paying for backups and DR.

We are talking about software companies, where software is the core business. Not the Apu's Pawn shop of Calgary.
 

vazha

Arcane
Joined
Aug 24, 2013
Messages
2,063
I hear beamdog has a young webmaster who's really into d&d and wants to break into game development.

they should go with that guy.
A crackerjack webmaster, to be precise.
 

Fry

Arcane
Joined
Aug 29, 2013
Messages
1,922
Full story quoted. Decide for yourselves if you want to give Kotaku clicks.

http://kotaku.com/nobody-can-find-the-source-code-for-icewind-dale-ii-1796724450

The people who make enhanced editions of old role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment want to do the same thing for Icewind Dale II. There’s just one problem: nobody knows where to find the code.

Beamdog, a Canadian publisher best known for releasing snazzy new versions of old Infinity Engine RPGs like the ones mentioned above, is looking to re-release Icewind Dale II with enhanced graphics and other improvements. But Beamdog’s CEO, Trent Oster, says his team can’t find the source code for Icewind Dale II. Without that code, he says, they can’t make any sort of enhanced edition of the game.

“We’ve searched all the archives we have access to, including all the data handed over to Wizards of the Coast from Atari and there is no source code for Icewind Dale II,” Oster told me in an e-mail. “We’ve reached out to our friends at Obsidian, as many of them were the development staff behind Icewind Dale II, and they do not have any source code. We’re stalled on the project without source and the project won’t move forward until we can find it. We’ve naturally moved on to other things until there is a change in the situation.”

Icewind Dale II, released in 2002, was the last game built with BioWare’s iconic Infinity Engine, a set of code used primarily to make isometric RPGs. The game came out during a time of financial turbulence for its publisher, Interplay, which would go on to shut down the game’s development studio, Black Isle, a year later in 2003. (Some of Black Isle’s staff then left to found Obsidian Entertainment, which is now making its own Infinity Engine-inspired Pillars of Eternity games.)

Perhaps as a result of that turbulence—or confusion over who owns what—Icewind Dale II has simply disappeared. “Icewind Dale II was created by Interplay working off a customized version of the BioWare Infinity Engine,” said Oster. “They took the Infinity Engine variant they used to ship Icewind Dale and started from there. Somewhere along the path of the Dungeons and Dragons license moving from Interplay to Atari and then reverting to Wizards of the Coast, preserving source code and transferring it to the new rights holder, somehow data was lost.”

While developing enhanced versions of Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and the first Icewind Dale, Beamdog was able to get source code directly from BioWare. “I drove over to the BioWare offices and dug through hard drives and backups for a day and a half, building a big pile of everything I could find,” Oster said. “We pulled some of the Planescape source from BioWare archives and some from the [Wizards of the Coast] archives which came to them via Interplay and Atari. The Icewind Dale source code was also from both sources... When we’ve searched for the Icewind Dale II code, there is nothing, not even a pre-release version. We’ve done the math and without source code it is simply too expensive to attempt to reverse engineer from an existing version of the game data.”

Although anyone can buy and download Icewind Dale II on GOG, there’s no simple way to extract the source code from finished copies of the game. Because the code is all compiled, the data is inaccessible. “There is really no way to go backwards from a compiled game to the source code to rebuild it,” said Oster. “You can decompile the game, but the difficulty of digging through the decompiled blob and extracting anything useful is much too high.”

So Icewind Dale II remains in limbo—at least until someone finds an old floppy disk in their attic. Or goes to the right garage sale
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,660
Not gonna lie, former Trent supporter here. This is fucking hilarious watching Trent crash and burn. But in all seriousness we can't let this guy get the Icewind Dale 2 code.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
It's like one of those horror movies where a sadistic rapist/murderer has all of these women trapped in his basement. One by one he retrieves them, dragging them kicking and screaming to his upstairs torture chamber. But miraculously, the last girl manages to escape through a cracked window.

Right now she is running aimlessly through a white suburban neighborhood, half-naked and stricken with fear as the killer gives chase. Will he manage to catch and butcher her the way he did her friends? Or will she escape, driving him to madness and leaving him to die the painful death he deserves?
 

Ventidius

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
552
Eh, Icewind Dale 2 was more about the challenge than 1. Letting Beamdog get their hands on it and unbalance the crap out of it and make the players OP (lol Time Stop) like they did with IWD is probably for the best. Hi-Res would be nice though.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Eh, Icewind Dale 2 was more about the challenge than 1. Letting Beamdog get their hands on it and unbalance the crap out of it and make the players OP (lol Time Stop) like they did with IWD is probably for the best. Hi-Res would be nice though.

They wouldn't be able to stuff IWD2 with BG2 spells like Time Stop because it's not AD&D. Anything they add would have to be brand new.
 

Ventidius

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
552
Eh, Icewind Dale 2 was more about the challenge than 1. Letting Beamdog get their hands on it and unbalance the crap out of it and make the players OP (lol Time Stop) like they did with IWD is probably for the best. Hi-Res would be nice though.

They wouldn't be able to stuff IWD2 with BG2 spells like Time Stop because it's not AD&D. Anything they add would have to be brand new.

True, but then again, what really bugged me is that they never really got around fixing it by improving the encounter design or giving enemies more tools as well. I think that says a lot either about their competence or their attitude to the whole issue.
 

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
IWD2 source code lost, Beamdog is sad

Good, fuck Bumdog. Bunch of clueless cucks





mqdefault.jpg
 

Neanderthal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2015
Messages
3,626
Location
Granbretan
They've got a backup plan, they've cornered the market on antiquated hemp cable that they're hoping to sell for a fortune.

And you can zoom in on it by bringin it closer to your mush.
 

Reinhardt

Arcane
Joined
Sep 4, 2015
Messages
29,252
It's like one of those horror movies where a sadistic rapist/murderer has all of these women trapped in his basement.
More like "The Resurrectionist" by Wrath James White.

Dale has the miraculous ability to heal and raise the recent dead. But he's also insane. When he uses his power to brutally kill the woman next door, night after night, no one will believe her impossible story, so it's up to her to find a way to end the living nightmare.
 
Joined
Dec 9, 2013
Messages
226
Location
Calgary
Backups are my jam. I deal with this crap at my company all the time, you want data from 2008. Well you never gave a damn when I asked for money to update the system and keep the hardware running.

Backups are such a complex, costly system that very few companies understand. Proper backup tapes for that project should have been locked forever and just means of finding them and recovering them.

Really can't believe that they don't exist.

However, as I said I have dealt with many companies that hate paying for backups and DR.

We are talking about software companies, where software is the core business. Not the Apu's Pawn shop of Calgary.


Well I don't work for Apu, any company worth their salt. Should have backups, to some degree. Even lost source code from the 80s is turning up, and that's a miracle in itself.
 
Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
Same for ToEE sadly.
The source models/scenes for old games with pre-rendered graphics usually get the boot. Sad but true. This shit takes a lot of disk space and back in the day they didn't consider it a priority. Not to mention that the executives usually don't give a flying fuck about a game about 6 months past its release, so it's mostly the former developers who keep this shit for sentimental reasons.

I think our favorite homosexual developer TimCain still has the Arcanum shit stored somewhere, he mentioned a personal "archive" a few times in his posts. I wonder if the 3D models used to render the sprites are still there. Would be cool to have a 2.5D (a la ToEE) remaster eventually, this would allow for way more weapon/armor combinations.
 

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
9,939
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
However, as I said I have dealt with many companies that hate paying for backups and DR.
I don't think having versioning or at least simple backups was much of a thing in game development at that time...

As Drog Black Tooth said, I think it more likely that some dev may have kept the sources personally for sentimental reasons more than anything.
And if that didn't happen, well then they are lost.
 

Zer0wing

Cipher
Joined
Mar 22, 2017
Messages
2,607
Wonder what game they'll try to "remaster" next.
Any other isometric RPG? Post-NWN Bioware is Aspyr's territory.
Obsidian's KOTOR2 & NWN 2 fukken WHEN?
 

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