Icewind Dale The Icewind Dale Series Thread

[Chippy]

I pick up everything. I sell eveything. Inventory management makes me horny. Like that guy in Fallout Tactics. Those of you who don't do inventory are bottom dwelling low-lives. RPG-lite trash. One of the best things about BG1 was that sense of satisfaction from arranging the inventory just right (while in the inventory screen and your party was moving towards a store) so that all the bastard swords were in one characters inventory, and you'd get max gold for them in a store.

Then I'd buy everything in all of the stores. Build up an entire repertoire of green scrolls and potions. Like a real adventurer. Prepared for stuff. Not like some ill-prepared moron.

 

[Crispy]

Some of you people complaining out paying for the inferior the EE edition are either not true IE fans, or liars. True IE fans have bought all these games at least 5-6 times already, what's another EE edition. It's like paying for your daily coffee, but then yearly.

Either way, you disgust me.

And the Daily Most Bizarre Post in GRPG Award goes to...

 

[A horse of course]

Quicklooting is, as Lolura would say, degenerate. It's ok in a super-fast-paced casual dungeon crawler, but not BG. The real problem is, as said, when you get situations like IWD2, with over a thousand enemies to loot and having an inventory full of ammunition and shit because you have no idea when you'll get to the next vendor.

 

[Melcar]

Some of you people complaining out paying for the inferior the EE edition are either not true IE fans, or liars. True IE fans have bought all these games at least 5-6 times already, what's another EE edition. It's like paying for your daily coffee, but then yearly.

Either way, you disgust me.

And the Daily Most Bizarre Post in GRPG Award goes to...

You saying you don't have multiple copies of the IE games? Un-fucking-believable.

 

[Tigranes]

I pick up everything. I sell eveything. Inventory management makes me horny. Like that guy in Fallout Tactics. Those of you who don't do inventory are bottom dwelling low-lives. RPG-lite trash. One of the best things about BG1 was that sense of satisfaction from arranging the inventory just right (while in the inventory screen and your party was moving towards a store) so that all the bastard swords were in one characters inventory, and you'd get max gold for them in a store.

Then I'd buy everything in all of the stores. Build up an entire repertoire of green scrolls and potions. Like a real adventurer. Prepared for stuff. Not like some ill-prepared moron.

What do scientists call the threshold when you have more potions than there are turns left until the heat death of the universe

 

[Melcar]

You USE your potions?!

 

[Jigby]

Quicklooting is, as Lolura would say, degenerate. It's ok in a super-fast-paced casual dungeon crawler, but not BG.

Quicklooting in IWD2 is useful to the extent, that you can detect and pickup objects that are under 125 dead bodies (like keys to doors and whatnot), which otherwise you'd have to find by cursor lawnmowing. BG games just don't have that kind of quantum of dead bodies. Quantity, not quality

inventory full of ammunition

So you're playing without the tweak pack? (unlimited ammunition stacking). You really must like the inventory management in IE :D.

 

[A horse of course]

Quicklooting is, as Lolura would say, degenerate. It's ok in a super-fast-paced casual dungeon crawler, but not BG.

Quicklooting in IWD2 is useful to the extent, that you can detect and pickup objects that are under 125 dead bodies (like keys to doors and whatnot), which otherwise you'd have to find by cursor lawnmowing. BG games just don't have that kind of quantum of dead bodies. Quantity, not quality

inventory full of ammunition

So you're playing without the tweak pack? (unlimited ammunition stacking). You really must like the inventory management in IE :D.

I'm not sure if it's a bug with modern hardware or it always worked this way, but in IWD2 the loot outline sometimes fails to show up under multiple bodies.

I never play with those tweak packs unless it's to fix a bug or something.

 

[Jigby]

So I've been playing around a little bit with shader injectors like ReShade and I found a use for it for IWD2. More specifically, one notorious problem with IWD2 is that its fog of war flickers. This really is a broader IE problem, those old preBeamdog IE games used a dotted pattern for FOW that was rendered on top and on many monitors this causes flickering (similar to pixel walk effect http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php). Now the IWD2 enhanced mod supposedly changes the pattern and fixes it, so not sure what the longevity of this particular solution is but w/e. If you use ReShade with a filter that changes the dotted pattern, you can obviously get rid of the flickering. SMAA works, some smoothing filters like billinear or hqx or probably xbrz can work. Smoothing filters cause blurriness so I opted for SMAA and it works rather nicely. Here's a video comparing scroll flickering with and w/o SMAA.

https://streamable.com/gxgsl9

Do note that Streamable probably reencoded the video when I uploaded it, because the dotted pattern on the video is more coarse-grained and it flickers less than in the game. The flickering is monitor dependent so it's a bit difficult to capture, but you get the point, it's about the difference. With SMAA the pattern disappears. Maybe on this picture comparison you can see it more clearly -> https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/juxt...html?uid=bdd008c4-bef3-11eb-b7bf-95443c729a29

It's just SMAA filter applied, you can perhaps go the route of hqx + adaptive sharpen filter. Whatever works for you. I used dxwrapper from here https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper (Dd7to9=1; AutoFrameSkip=1; FullscreenWindowMode=1) to convert the game to DX9 and then used reshade on top of it.

 

[AwesomeButton]

More specifically, one notorious problem with IWD2 is that its fog of war flickers

It doesn't flicker if you replace the dll. I'll check back when I'm at my PC.

 

[Jigby]

It's not a DirectDraw issue. (there is a ddraw fow problem, but this one's different). Unless there is a dll that changes the fow rendering.

 

[Dwarvophile]

What happened to this project of porting Icewind Dale in the Temple of Elementary Evil engine ?

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's not a DirectDraw issue. (there is a ddraw fow problem, but this one's different). Unless there is a dll that changes the fow rendering.

This is the only fix I need (I'm on Windows 10) after I make a clean installation of IWD 2. BTW amazing the guy is still supporting it: https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases

 

[Melcar]

That flickering I remember was a constant when I played on LCD screens. When I used to play the games on CRTs I don't recall flickering FOW. Enabling 3D rendering on the games that supported just did not have that issue (the FOW rendering was different).

 

[Jigby]

It's not a DirectDraw issue. (there is a ddraw fow problem, but this one's different). Unless there is a dll that changes the fow rendering.

This is the only fix I need (I'm on Windows 10) after I make a clean installation of IWD 2. BTW amazing the guy is still supporting it: https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases

It's a monitor thing + resolution you're playing at thing. Depending on those 2, the flickering is more/less pronounced. It can be best seen with fog of war over snow.
You can kind of test it on the website I linked before - http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php If you scroll up and down, the boxes there might start to flicker. But with a high quality monitor, fewer of them will flicker.

 

[Gargaune]

This is the only fix I need (I'm on Windows 10) after I make a clean installation of IWD 2. BTW amazing the guy is still supporting it: https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases

There are currently no configuration options available, but this is expected to change in an upcoming release.

I look forward to it, though I'm not hoping for miracles anymore. I just tried it, which means I've now tried all three DirectDraw libraries for this game, GOG's, Aqrit's and Narzoul's, and I can't get rid of that dreadful jitter/blur effect when I pan the camera around. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to be framerate-related, Aqrit's draws at a fixed 30FPS whereas this one ostensibly reports 80 frames on a static image and plunges to ~60 when moving the camera, but it's still the same story either way.

 

[Baron Dupek]

What happened to this project of porting Icewind Dale in the Temple of Elementary Evil engine ?

Too good for this world.
Dev(s) abandoned project due to lack of time/passion/inspiration/whatever. Or they stumbled upon some technical issues...

 

[Melcar]

I think the ToEE engine is just too hard to work with.

Anyway, just finished my third run of IWD EE and now I'm going to start to role a new party for the recent update. Last run was a 4 man party (human Sorcerer, elf Swasbuckler, half orc Barbarian, halfling Priest of Lathander), so I may just roll like that again (even with four the pathfinding is atrocious). Barbarians are fun, Archers make everything trivial, Sorcerers break the game in a fun way (there are a few items that double your spells). I tried an Assassin and found out they nerfed the poison ability.
Aside from a few kits/classes (like the Archer and Sorcerer) most of them don't break the game too horribly. If you powerplay/metagame you will break anything, but a single class kited character that's not min/max I find it very viable and the game can still beat you up if not careful. Enemies also sparingly use the new spells and abilities. Took me a while in my first run to realize the drow spellswords were using stoneskin for example. Dual wielding is the thing that breaks combat the most, due to all those awesome single handed weapons with passive abilities. You can have a dwarven defender impervious to physical damage.

 

[Chippy]

I pick up everything. I sell eveything. Inventory management makes me horny. Like that guy in Fallout Tactics. Those of you who don't do inventory are bottom dwelling low-lives. RPG-lite trash. One of the best things about BG1 was that sense of satisfaction from arranging the inventory just right (while in the inventory screen and your party was moving towards a store) so that all the bastard swords were in one characters inventory, and you'd get max gold for them in a store.

Then I'd buy everything in all of the stores. Build up an entire repertoire of green scrolls and potions. Like a real adventurer. Prepared for stuff. Not like some ill-prepared moron.

What do scientists call the threshold when you have more potions than there are turns left until the heat death of the universe

I'll let you know when you're dodging Greta death drones, and slowly dehydrating on the wasteland while I'm sitting comfortable in my bunker, sipping tea, and playing Baldur's Gate.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Proof that Josh Sawyer is more responsive to feedback than Swen, who is apparently the genius designer of indie RPGs and therefore infalliable.

My argument was that the prolonged satisfaction of clicking every piece of loot to pick it up is better than that of swooping all loot with one click. Area loot may be faster, but that's an element of the game that may not really need streamlining. Also, not using area looting makes the player check out the loot better. Sometimes you don't even know what you've looted otherwise.

When you kill a strong opponent there is a satisfaction in walking up to the body and checking what the person had on them. If you loot the person together with minions the experience losses its excitement and personality.

 

[Gargaune]

When you kill a strong opponent there is a satisfaction in walking up to the body and checking what the person had on them. If you loot the person together with minions the experience losses its excitement and personality.

I agree, but pixel-hunting each and every goblin corpse to pick up an axe and 2GP is tedious busywork, and there's a lot more of it. It would work better if loot drops were rarer but more valuable.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

When you kill a strong opponent there is a satisfaction in walking up to the body and checking what the person had on them. If you loot the person together with minions the experience losses its excitement and personality.

I agree, but pixel-hunting each and every goblin corpse to pick up an axe and 2GP is tedious busywork, and there's a lot more of it. It would work better if loot drops were rarer but more valuable.

You can also do area loot for minions and traditional for harder enemies, so you won't lose the experience of each enemy having on them the equipment they used in battle. Or you could only area loot money and consumables and leave minion equipment on their bodies.

 

[Gargaune]

You can also do area loot for minions and traditional for harder enemies, so you won't lose the experience of each enemy having on them the equipment they used in battle. Or you could only area loot money and consumables and leave minion equipment on their bodies.

It's an option, but you have to consider the potential for confusion, you might get players overlooking an important drop in a pile of carcasses.

Still, I think the real potential for this discussion isn't in videogames, but in tabletop. Just imagine it...

"Nanoc cleaves the last goblin in twain, the party is victorious."
"Ok, we search the bodies."
"Sure, which one?"
"All of 'em, duh!"
"That's not how this works. I mean, you don't just enter a dungeon and declare you disable all the traps, now do you?"
"Fine, uh, left to right, I search the first goblin."
"You find a goblin axe and two gold pieces."
"Okay, now I search the second goblin."
"You find a goblin axe and two gold pieces."
"Third goblin, lemme guess, a goblin axe and two gold pieces?"
"Correct."
"Okay, fuck this, you wouldn't have us search each one of the twelve goblin corpses if there weren't something worth having!"
"Would you like to roll an investigation check?"
"Please! Look, I rolled a sixteen!"
"On which goblin corpse?"
"Are you serious?! Even with a roll? Whatever, this one, the one I was looking at already!"
"You redouble your efforts on the third goblin corpse, and as you turn him over, you catch the sight of something glittering up his backside. You pull a small garnet out of the dead goblin's asshole."
"Great. Fantastic. I go back to investigate the second goblin. I rolled a twelve."
"You go elbow deep into the second goblin but find nothing more."
"Next. Rolled fourteen."
"You thoroughly search this goblin corpse before you realise you've already searched this body and looted his ass garnet."
"No, I meant next as in... You know what? Nevermind. We leave the dead goblins and move further into the dungeon."
"... Are you sure you don't want to search the other ten dead goblin assholes?"

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Beautiful story. My heart has been uplifted, thanks for sharing

 

[McPlusle]

Is it just me or does IWD feel way longer than BG? I just replayed BG2 so I might just be Infinity'd out for a while but IWD1's first chapter alone just felt glacial, no pun intended.