What's the purpose of this mod?

[Borsook]

I've been dreaming of IWD1 to IWD2 engine conversion, that was never completed, but I see this conversion is thriving. I don't mean to sound offensive, but I think I'm missing the purpose of this mod. The only benefits I can see are kits and dual weilding... Plus bugs and things from IWD1 that don't work (like some spells). I'm sure there are other things that did not occur to me... so what else I, as a player can get from this conversion?

[Jarno Mikkola]

The Icewind game has really cheesed party talk mechanics, and there's only a one mod that tries and uses this in the whole Icewind Dale mods... there's about what 88 individual of them at least in the BG2 alone(and then there's the Classic Adventure & BGT-weidu/EasyTutu NPCs etc). Ouh and now the party members can actually join & leave the party, as previously they were locked in as a doll with numbers attached to them to represent numbers of skills. Of course those are not fully realized as there's only so much work as a few people can put into this project.

[grogerson]

I'll amplify Jarno's comment. There are few mods for IWD1 or 2 because of the many differences between they and the BG1 & 2 engines. These changes made them much harder to mod.

 

The reason for this project is to make IWD1 use the same rules as BG2, especially for kits and party joinable NPCs. It also makes it possible to add more new content, thus allowing it to become less lineal and more like BG1 (lineal quest but a lot of side stuff to make things more interesting). Kulyok's Icewind Dale NPCs mod, over at PPG, is the first to take advantage of this change.

[CamDawg]

It's a tax shelter, but not enough. I plan on spending 2014 legally dead.

 

edit: I was trying to be funny here, not sarcastic, since grogerson and Jarno already had good answers. Apologies if this came off otherwise.

[Borsook]

Thank you for all your responses... I have to say that it looks a bit like making IWD into BG2 (one character and joinable NPCs), I feel this may be out of place in rather barren world of IWD, but at least I see the inherent possibilities. Still a pity it's in IWD2 engine, as this is the only one in all IE series that actually tried to make the gameplay itself better (configurable buttons!) and does allow for talking NPCs

[jastey]

Talking NPCs yes, but it's the joining and leaving the group that isn't supported by the IWD(2) engines, but really really wanted by the modding community and I think also players for the possibility to switch party NPCs. In combination with additional quests that break the game's linearity, that would be just perfect.

[Chilvence]

If I could drag this topic back from the dead - wouldn't this mod potentially be useful for porting IWD to the new enhanced edition engine? There's probably never going to be an official version of that, but I don't think that's even really important, I'm sure everyone that would still want to play IWD has already bought it 40 times.

 

And if this hasn't been considered yet, well.. why not?

[Utopolyst]

Hi! First off: Thank you for the mod!

 

I would like to complement Chilvence on his thoughts: Are you planning on releasing a BG2EE compatible version? I don't know if it's a big hassle coding wise... yet it would be much appreciated to see one.

And something else: CamDawg, you wrote this awesome iwd mod install guide for the regular version, which worked great for me. Could you write one for Iwd-tutu?

 

Cheers and keep up the great work.

[rdz1122]

Bump.

 

Has anyone tried to use this conversion with the BG2EE?

[Jarno Mikkola]

Has anyone tried to use this conversion with the BG2EE?

I am quite sure it won't work cause there are several things the mod does that won't go out so smoothly ... .exe patching, dialog.tlk patching etc.

There might be a way to go around all those hickups... but it would be likely to involve vanilla's file sharing and I won't participate to that.

[rdz1122]

Derp. Well, I will just have to pay for BG2 Complete, again. I think this must be purchase #5 or so of this same game over the years.

[CamDawg]

Bump. Has anyone tried to use this conversion with the BG2EE?

At present, we have no plans to look at IWD-in-BGIIEE. It's hard enough getting it to behave on vanilla BG2.

 

You could try, but it won't go well.

[squiros]

would it be possible to add iwd on top of a bgt install?

[Jarno Mikkola]

would it be possible to add iwd on top of a bgt install?

No... instead you can make two BG2:ToB games by copy pasting the entire game folder to elsewhere and then editing the baldur.ini in the new directory so that the [Alias] -paths point to the new directory, and then install the BGT to the one of them while installing the IwDinBG2 to the other. And yes, you need to start each of them using the BGMain.exe in their directory, or a quick icon made and named separaly.

[Vlad]

I'm completing IWD in NeJ3 now (playing, testing). It's fully compatible with BGT. My installation is based on BGT and I've tested from the very beginning. Everything looks fantastic so far. Plus selected NPCs from BG1/BG2. Watch our forums.