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Company News Beamdog working on a Baldur's Gate interquel set between BG1 and BG2, and some other stuff

GloomFrost

Arcane
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993
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Northern wastes
Indeed. But compare IE to Unity. Unity is supposed to not ask for a high end rig and even if you do have one, PoE still takes century to load.
Actually yeah, the wasteland early access was so laggy it was crazy, especially considering piss poor graphics.
 

t

Arcane
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Messages
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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
iYgOVLg.jpg
I liked that map! It's Q3A, not Unreal Tournament though. UT was better btw.
 

Whalenought_Joe

Whalenought Studios
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Nosgoth
Since they seem incapable of leaving Baldur's Gate alone, a 1.5 adventure that could be neat is if you started a new group of adventurers who's end is eventually capturing the Bhaalspawn for Irenicus — maybe importing the player's characters from their EE game or something. Being a goon of Irenicus would be interesting, though without his voice actor not quite the same.
 

Vikter

Learned
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
I don't mind the fanfiction thing, but I almost tried to kill myself when I zoomed in in EE. Seriously, what the hell was that? You shouldn't do that in a game with 2D backgrounds. If they do that shit again in this interquel, I will sell every organ of my body, sell them, buy stock in Beamdog and sell it back to EA. Screw everything.

And what engine was EE running on? I think it was pretty solid. Wasteland 2 ran like shit on Linux, while BG2EE was great, and I imagine that Unity is usually pretty poorly optimized on any platform.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
I don't mind the fanfiction thing, but I almost tried to kill myself when I zoomed in in EE. Seriously, what the hell was that? You shouldn't do that in a game with 2D backgrounds. If they do that shit again in this interquel, I will sell every organ of my body, sell them, buy stock in Beamdog and sell it back to EA. Screw everything.

And what engine was EE running on? I think it was pretty solid. Wasteland 2 ran like shit on Linux, while BG2EE was great, and I imagine that Unity is usually pretty poorly optimized on any platform.

Um... the infinity engine?
 

Vikter

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Um... the infinity engine?
Really? That sounds weird to me. I honestly didn't know that, and I thought since they had the source code (I assume), they just ported it using a newer engine, since it has iOS and Linux versions, and I didn't know Infinity had that kind of support, unless they are modding the engine up to this day. I would be amazed if Infinity is still being used like that, and sad that it's not more widely used.
 

Kem0sabe

Arcane
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Mar 7, 2011
Messages
13,076
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Azores Islands
Indeed. But compare IE to Unity. Unity is supposed to not ask for a high end rig and even if you do have one, PoE still takes century to load.
Unity is a shit engine with extremely poor optimization, keep in mind that unity games have been known to fry gfx cards in the past.

Wish PoE had used another engine, but load times have been improving slightly during the beta and if you stick it on an Ssd it gets some more milage.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
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Messages
10,350
Really? That sounds weird to me. I honestly didn't know that, and I thought since they had the source code (I assume), they just ported it using a newer engine, since it has iOS and Linux versions, and I didn't know Infinity had that kind of support, unless they are modding the engine up to this day. I would be amazed if Infinity is still being used like that, and sad that it's not more widely used.

Actually, I could be embarrassingly wrong, but maybe you're just making me unsure. Infinitron
 

Vikter

Learned
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Infinity Engine's rights belong to Bioware and Beamdog has the license to modify it, then? That makes sense. Although since it's so old I wish they had a non-proprietary version. I don't necessarily want to see billions of low quality indie CRPGs due to this kind of thing, like happened to RPG Maker and the "comedy games", but I would love to see how Infinity worked back in the day, and GemRB is just not that.
Anyway, it's great how Beamdog managed to milk so much out of it.
 

Nihiliste

Arcane
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Infinity Engine's rights belong to Bioware and Beamdog has the license to modify it, then? That makes sense. Although since it's so old I wish they had a non-proprietary version. I don't necessarily want to see billions of low quality indie CRPGs due to this kind of thing, like happened to RPG Maker and the "comedy games", but I would love to see how Infinity worked back in the day, and GemRB is just not that.
Anyway, it's great how Beamdog managed to milk so much out of it.

Great?? Travesty was more the word I was thinking of.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,379
Unless you owned an expensive high end rig back in the 90s, bg did take it sweet time to load.

BG loading times were quite quick on even mid-level rigs if you bothered to install all the CDs onto a HD, the CD loading was what made it slow.
 

tuluse

Arcane
Joined
Jul 20, 2008
Messages
11,400
Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Infinity Engine's rights belong to Bioware and Beamdog has the license to modify it, then? That makes sense. Although since it's so old I wish they had a non-proprietary version. I don't necessarily want to see billions of low quality indie CRPGs due to this kind of thing, like happened to RPG Maker and the "comedy games", but I would love to see how Infinity worked back in the day, and GemRB is just not that.
Anyway, it's great how Beamdog managed to milk so much out of it.
It doesn't and never belonged to Bioware. It belonged to Interplay.
 

GarfunkeL

Racism Expert
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Insert clever insult here
Bioware made the engine, though. Wasn't their original plan to use it to make an RTS? And then Feargus/Fargo convinced the Bio-doctors to make an RPG instead. I guess they sold it to Interplay? Or it belonged to Interplay because they were funding Bioware at that time?
 

Infinitron

I post news
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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
It doesn't and never belonged to Bioware. It belonged to Interplay.

It really isn't this simple. Bioware "owned" the engine in the sense that they were able to continue developing it into the Aurora and Eclipse engines. They didn't lose the source code or the right to use it when their relationship with Interplay ended. Bioware may indeed have "owned" the engine, with Interplay simply having a permanent or long-term license to use it. Publisher-developer relationships were more egalitarian in those days.

And indeed, Wikipedia states:

Infinity Engine is a game engine which allows the creation of isometricrole-playing video games. It was originally developed by BioWare for a prototype RTS game codenamed Battleground Infinity, which was ultimately re-engineered to become the first installment of the Baldur's Gate series. BioWare used it again in the subsequent installments of the series, but also licensed the engine to Interplay's Black Isle Studios.
 
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GloomFrost

Arcane
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Dec 9, 2014
Messages
993
Location
Northern wastes
BG loading times were quite quick on even mid-level rigs if you bothered to install all the CDs onto a HD, the CD loading was what made it slow.
At that time not every HD was even big enough for a full install. High end doesn't just mean the latest graphic card and lots of ram.
 

Melcar

Arcane
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35,215
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Merida, again
At the time BG came out I think I had a 6GB drive. It was a pretty shit Dell, even in those times. Most "mid-range" PCs had 20GB or so if I remember correctly.
 

GloomFrost

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2014
Messages
993
Location
Northern wastes
At the time BG came out I think I had a 6GB drive. It was a pretty shit Dell, even in those times. Most "mid-range" PCs had 20GB or so if I remember correctly.
20 gb Hd was not in any mid range PC s in 98, no way in hell man. 6 gb is more like it and don't forget, you would have Windows installed on it plus some other games except for bg. So not that much room left for a full install.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
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Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
The real problem with IE was save load times, which is what they made faster. Probably by not doing something stupid like invalidating already in memory caches for the in-file one.
 

Melcar

Arcane
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Messages
35,215
Location
Merida, again
20 gb Hd was not in any mid range PC s in 98, no way in hell man. 6 gb is more like it and don't forget, you would have Windows installed on it plus some other games except for bg. So not that much room left for a full install.

Maybe poor people with poor people PCs.
 
Weasel
Joined
Dec 14, 2012
Messages
1,865,661
The real problem with IE was save load times, which is what they made faster. Probably by not doing something stupid like invalidating already in memory caches for the in-file one.

Trent's BG:EE postmortem also mentioned some interesting problems they had with the engine:

What Went Wrong
1. Epic Code Complexity

We began work on the project almost two years from ship. At the start we planned to "ninja in, make some minor changes, replace the graphics system and ninja out." As we began to work with the code base, we found severe performance and stability issues with the engine. We traced some issues back to the core threading model of the Infinity engine.

Infinity was multi-threaded before there were processors capable of parallel code execution. As such, it was designed around a concept of threading that never really emerged. The main issue was that all of the threads shared the same set of data. The problem is all these threads were created and they all hit the same memory and as such, blocked each other, stalling all threads until the current one completed.

The code was also heavily laced with critical sections, which caused (in some cases) 70 percent of execution time spent in no-ops. Our long-term solution was to machete in and remove the threading, removing a couple hundred thousand lines of code from the game. The end result was more stable and had fewer performance irregularities. The "ninja-in" approach was tried in other areas, as well, and every time the end result was consistent. We always found a ton of complexity solving an era-specific problem that no longer applied. We continue to find roadblocks in the code and we're improving it as we go.

2. Intricate Code-Data Dependency

I have a development joke I often drop: "When a programmer believes he/she is being clever is when they create the greatest atrocities." The Infinity Engine is chock full of clever. For example: to render a character to the screen, the correct frame and orientation of a character sprite is first loaded out of a resource file using a very heavy resource-management system. The sprite is then color-mapped using a 256-color palette swap to enable player colors. Following the re-mapping, any number of further palette-manipulation code (stoneskin, anyone?) can step in and further change the actual data. Then the sprite is rendered against whatever potentially covering elements are nearby.

The final result is sent to the screen in 64x64 pixel tiles to be rendered. The entire system runs under a dynamic update system that flags 64x64 tiles as updated and renders them or, with no change, leaves the tile from the previous buffer. The volume of clever shifts and tweaks along the way make it nearly impossible to track down all the ways in which a simple sprite can be manipulated. In some cases, the data can reference many different .2da data files on how it can be manipulated, from equipment-changing animation frames to a data redirection to render a dwarf sprite instead of the default human. Complexity is par for the course in an RPG of this magnitude, but the intricate linking of assets and code really limited our ability to make the architectural improvements we wanted to make.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Cry me a river about the game being moddable. "intricate linking of assets and code" indeed.
 

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