Temple of Elemental Evil: Baldur's Gate Total Conversion Mod.

[Allyx]

Greetings all.

I must confess I am a newbie to the world of Baldur's Gate, but not to D&D in general, (I've been playing on and off for 21 years or so) and not to D&D CRPG game modding (I've been a modder for the Temple of Elemental Evil for 13 years or so). I recently purchased Baldur's Gate 1 EE & 2 EE, and Siege of Dragonspear, and Icewind Dale 1 EE on Steam with the intention of discovering for myself if if would be possible to make a Baldurs Gate Total Conversion Mod for Temple of Elemental Evil, thus marrying one of the best loved D&D CRPG adventure series with the best CRPG turn based D&D tactical game engines.

I hope to use the maps, story, dialogue and movies from the original Baldur's Gate game adapted as necessary for use in the Temple of Elemental Evil game, and have 3D models and animations for items, scenery and monsters not currently available in ToEE created from scratch or adapted from existing models to provide a full Baldurs Gate experience to players of ToEE, and vice versa.

Please feel free to reference our sister thread on this matter at the Circle of Eight forum and offer assistance to this project if you so wish to do so.

As I stated earlier I am new to Baldur's Gate modding, and as such I am having some difficulty getting started. For one thing I'm unsure as to whether such a project would even be allowed legally? Do I need to seek permission to use certain files? If so who do I address this question to? Both games have been extensively modded by fan based communities so I am inclined to believe that the basic unmodded game files are basically fair game but please correct me if I am wrong.

I have thus far been unable to extract the game maps from Baldur's Gate which will need all open-able doors removed, and possibly resized to accommodate ToEE's 3d character models. I gather Infinity Explorer requires the Baldur.ini file which does not exist in the Steam version of BG EE. Is there another way to extract the maps so they may be edited?

All dialogue files will need to be recreated from scratch obviously, and while I have looked at some, the format is unfamiliar to me, is there a FAQ or something for getting started with dialogue editing?

The Infinity Engine games use a different scripting language to ToEE which uses Python for it's scripts, Is there a detailed list of global flags and variables that get set via scripts and/or dialogue files available somewhere so we may recreate the many complex situational nuances of Baldur's Gate's story in ToEE.

I'm sure there will be many many more questions from me if this project gets underway in earnest, I hope this community is as helpful as the Circle of Eight has proven themselves to me to be over the years, and I would appreciate any assistance I receive from yourselves.

 

[Jarno Mikkola]

For one thing I'm unsure as to whether such a project would even be allowed legally? Do I need to seek permission to use certain files? ...

I have thus far been unable to extract the game maps from Baldur's Gate which will need all open-able doors removed, and possibly resized to accommodate ToEE's 3d character models. I gather Infinity Explorer requires the Baldur.ini file which does not exist in the Steam version of BG EE. Is there another way to extract the maps so they may be edited?

Dialogs...

Legally we are all in the grey zone, but as long as you don't intent to make money out of the project, you are pretty much OK with what ever you use.

If you really wish to make money, well you go and talk to Atari, or the BeamDog studios who make the Enhanced Editions games.

 

The best tools to get files out is the either a currently updated Near Infinity snapshot or the DLTCEP.

All the dialogs, are a bit tricky in BG2, they consist of dialog lines(line reference in the dialog.tlk file), and the programming of them, in a .dlg file. The lines that are stored in the dialog.tlk file, which you can export with the above tools. You probably are not going to aim to edit the BG2 games dialog, at which you'll need the weidu.exe at pretty much everything, and there's a bunch of tutorials about that.

 

Well the global are used as variables. There's tons of them ... and nope, nobody has really looked and listed them as the dialogs, scripts etc modify them, so there's really no point in that. As you can add as many as you wish.

 

Fun fact, the ToEE games resources have been used in BG2 moding for a tiny bit, there's a couple area textures and that sort of thing, they fit well to theis game, so I would expect the BG games maps fit to the ToEE engine as well.

[lynx]

Is there something like IESDP for TOEE? http://gemrb.org/iesdp

 

I doubt TOEE has the required triggers and actions to make the port of dialogs and cutscenes easy. I think this would be a bigger issue than remaking ad adjusting the graphics.

[subtledoctor]

Not to throw you a curveball, but I would suggest porting Planescape: Torment instead of BG.

 

- BG has already been ported to the TOB engine (Tutu/BGT), the NWN2 engine, (BG: Reloaded), possibly to the Dragon Age engine (?), and of course, to the Enhanced Edition of the Infinity Engine. How many versions of BG do we really need?

 

Whereas, poor PS:T is in desperate need of being saved so future players can play that adventure...

[lynx]

How many future players do you think will prefer the nwn2 version of bg2 to the originals or ees?