Baldur's Gate The Baldur's Gate Series Thread

[KainenMorden]

I'm saying that with all the respect in the world for those modders but for example, David W the creator of SCS recommended IWDification, adding iwd spells to the BG games. It is too much of an advantage to the player to have those spells, especially the Cleric spells, for a number of reasons but besides the AI not using them optimally or reacting to them well, you barely fight any Clerics and Clerics are strong enough already. To be fair to SCS, I haven't played for a year and there has been an update since then where supposedly the AI has been improved in regards to using/reacting to Cleric spells but I still don't think they belong.

Exactly which spells from IWDification do you think give such a huge advantage to players? There's a few buffs that are good to have, but enemies in general are stronger in SCS so getting +2 THAC0 basically just balances out an enemy with 2 more AC. The non-buff spells are on average kinda mediocre imo.

SCS also nerfs a lot of abusable BG2 spells so on the whole I think spell balance is far better.

Entropy shield is the main one that comes to mind, sun scorch early on. Beyond that, you're adding buffs you wouldn't normally have and your enemies aren't really compensated in any way. Part of the "point" of SCS is that you cant just run over everything. So your enemy is stronger but then you can buff up more so you're on "equal" footing. Well, why? The game needs to have some advantage over you to keep it interesting. I did a run with IWDification, just the arcane + divine spells and quickly realized I shouldn't use any of them and enemies did sometimes use them, especially the arcane spells but I don't think I'll ever do a run with them again.

Theres still a bunch of cheese possible with SCS but I don't see how adding spells would balance it better.

I typically use Spell Revisions. To my recollection, SCS assumes the player is using Spell Revisions. I don't go past version 3. Version 4 makes too many serious departures from original BG2. Version 3 takes a few more liberties than I'd like, but overall it's a bit better balanced than version 2. The Icewind Dale spellbook was always inferior to BG. It has some fun things in it, but overall I don't consider it power creep at all to add it into the BG saga. The best thing about Icewind Dale spells were some of the animations. Chiefly the web spell.

I don't think at any time did the creator of SCS assume Spell Revisions would be installed since there are conflicts between spell modifications each made and there's been reports of the AI not reacting to SR correctly.in 2019, SCS releases had built in support for SR. SR did influence SCS design in some aspects like modifying Insect Plague.

I understand BG2 Clerics and Druids aren't quite as good as IWD Clerics and Druids but I'm fine with that and find that efforts to balance things out typically result in an overcorrection but to each his own.

 

[I eat frozen vegetables]

For the five people who care, gemRB has been updated.

 

[Chippy]

For the five people who care, gemRB has been updated.

Waddaz dis do again?.

 

[Melcar]

For the five people who care, gemRB has been updated.

Waddaz dis do again?.

It's a source port for IE games. Last I tried it (several years ago) it was rather incomplete. Probably should give it a go one of these days.

 

[Spike]

I am playing BG 1 non-EE through GOG and my single and sole complaint is the pathfinding AI, especially how it takes a century to get anywhere. But maybe that's the point to instill this sense of adventure, I dunno. I am loving it overall.

 

[Vic]

But maybe that's the point to instill this sense of adventure

no it's just shitty pathing

did you increase your pathing setting to 32000?

 

[Spike]

But maybe that's the point to instill this sense of adventure

no it's just shitty pathing

did you increase your pathing setting to 32000?

Had no idea you could do that, based. Guess I will do that, just in options?

 

[Vic]

But maybe that's the point to instill this sense of adventure

no it's just shitty pathing

did you increase your pathing setting to 32000?

Had no idea you could do that, based. Guess I will do that, just in options?

yeah in the config .exe, it helps a bit with the pathing but it will still suck for the most part

 

[Atlantico]

For the five people who care, gemRB has been updated.

An open source IE engine, can be used on any platform, any OS. Pretty damn neat

 

[ds]

For the five people who care, gemRB has been updated.

An open source IE engine, can be used on any platform, any OS. Pretty damn neat

Especially useful when you want to play RPG games.

 

[Average Manatee]

It's an engine made for playing infinity engine games, therefore an infinity engine engine. It works.

 

[Desman]

I just want someone to mod Motb into the IE or ToE engines

Turn based or real time with pause i don't care i just don't want to deal with shitty 3D and wonky camera.

 

[Melcar]

Tried the latest Gemrb. Definitively seems more polished compared to the last time I tried it and picks up the games without having to mess around with the config file. Widescreen support is nice, even if it does weird shit to the GUI. Animations are still wonky and sound sometimes is out of sync. Tried BG and IWD (IWD is rather crash happy).

 

[d1r]

I am playing BG 1 non-EE through GOG and my single and sole complaint is the pathfinding AI, especially how it takes a century to get anywhere. But maybe that's the point to instill this sense of adventure, I dunno. I am loving it overall.

baldur.ini
Maximum Frame Rate=43

This value will increase the overall speed of the game. I found that 43 is a nice sweet spot for making the game look more fluid, also not run too fast.

 

[the mole]

my biggest disappointment with baldur's gate is that when I genderswapped shar teel, I couldn't pawn her off to the succubus in that final dungeon, game ruined 0/10

 

[Melcar]

Been playing with gemrb some more. IWD is unplayable due to the constant crashes. I am using the Windows version, so maybe using the Linux appimage is better. BG is playable, but animations are glitchy and some sounds are missing (like clicking on GUI icons and some NPC sound files). Joinable NPCs also seem to have swapped portraits for some reason. I guess one can play it fully like this, but for me it gets on my nerves. The screen scaling is good and looks crisp using the nearest neighbor scaling option (it defaults to "best" which is shit) unlike the blurry mess that is the EEs. The GUI gets split up into three disconnected sections when you change to a widescreen resolution, which makes it look a bit weird. It also has some QoL features like item highlight. Console commands are different and I could not get most of them to work, but I'm sure it's a syntax thing I'm not getting right. Weather effects and their environmental sounds seem to be broken (it has yet to rain in my playthrough).

BG and IWD are supposed to be the best and most complete games for this, so I won't even try the others. Good effort I guess and it has improved quite a bit since last I tried the project (some +5 years). It's just not quite there yet.

 

[ds]

Weird, doesn't match their own status page which claims BG1 to be not just completable but even "polished" whatever that means. The linked list of bugs for BG1 also doesn't mention your issues - that could just be due to lack of people testing and reporting issues though.

 

[d1r]

What is even the point of GemRB?

 

[ds]

Same point as OpenMW or any other engine re-implementation. To have an open source cross-platform version of the game that runs on your toaster and which you can extend however you want. Also because it's fun to build these things.

 

[Melcar]

Weird, doesn't match their own status page which claims BG1 to be not just completable but even "polished" whatever that means. The linked list of bugs for BG1 also doesn't mention your issues - that could just be due to lack of people testing and reporting issues though.

Yeah. I was also expecting a near 1:1 play experience from the original game. The wonky animations and missing sounds don't translate to "polished" to me. Could be some weird shit from WINE, so going to try running it "native" using the appimage or building it myself. I'm not that far into the game (barely getting to the Friendly Arm Inn), but so far I could see being able to finish the game, unless I come against some worse issues down the road.

 

[Jigby]

It's not really a 1:1 reimplementation. Not sure to what extent is the guy using the disassembly, it's a bit of a clean room approach. Mechanics are not identical, I compared some things to IWD2 and they work differently (like hiding, spell casting failure.... i.e. mechanics). Also it's ~5 games in 1 so there's that too.

 

[Poseidon00]

Can't decide how I want to run through the trilogy, it's been a while.

Do I start with a thief kit, looting everything in BG1 until i'm filthy rich and rolling in wands?

Do I start with a skald, buffing my allies and summons and letting them do the heavy lifting?

Do I make a Priest of Talos and dual him into Mage, letting him reliably tank his own spells?

 

[Jigby]

What is even the point of GemRB?

I guess you can use it if you're on ARM and don't want to use Beamdog. And also you're not on Android, so no exagear....

 

[Melcar]

It's not really a 1:1 reimplementation. Not sure to what extent is the guy using the disassembly, it's a bit of a clean room approach. Mechanics are not identical, I compared some things to IWD2 and they work differently (like hiding, spell casting failure.... i.e. mechanics). Also it's ~5 games in 1 so there's that too.

It's not bad and I can see myself playing this over the EE. Looks much better, the classic GUI (almost), the animations, original movies, etc. If the underlying mechanics are slightly different that's still fine. But watching an NPC suddenly drop dead while the idle animation was playing during a battle, NPCs registering a hit when not even a cosmetic attack animation shows, NPCs remaining silent when you right click them, battle cries being cut off for no reason, little things like that makes it seem like you are replaying some janky 90s game instead of the masterpiece that BG was/is.

 

[Jigby]

It's not really a 1:1 reimplementation. Not sure to what extent is the guy using the disassembly, it's a bit of a clean room approach. Mechanics are not identical, I compared some things to IWD2 and they work differently (like hiding, spell casting failure.... i.e. mechanics). Also it's ~5 games in 1 so there's that too.

It's not bad and I can see myself playing this over the EE. Looks much better, the classic GUI (almost), the animations, original movies, etc. If the underlying mechanics are slightly different that's still fine. But watching an NPC suddenly drop dead while the idle animation was playing during a battle, NPCs registering a hit when not even a cosmetic attack animation shows, NPCs remaining silent when you right click them, battle cries being cut off for no reason, little things like that makes it seem like you are replaying some janky 90s game instead of the masterpiece that BG was/is.

I think if you're on Windows/Linux you can just run the OG infinity engine, works perfectly fine on wine. Or at least I wouldn't use it on x86... I'm not really dissing the project, it's just that to me its best use case would be as a reference - to look how things work. But given that it doesn't try to follow the OG 100% I can't really use it that way fully - always have to keep in mind that there might be some major differences.