In his recent video, Tim Cain mentioned offhand that he does own the source code for Arcanum and ToEE, and that he made three offers for an Enhanced Edition, but none of them were accepted. I cannot help but wonder - was that Beamdog? Would it have included Co8 and Temple+, which effectively are an EE already? And have any of you mod developers been able to draw on Tim's source code, even if under an NDA or something? Or is there any great modding hurdle remaining for which the source code would prove the solution if it were released?
As far as I am aware none of the modders here has ever had access the source code for ToEE. I know Agetian had interraction with Steve Moret while working on the ToEEWB project. I am not aware of Tim Cain ever helping any of the modders here, though I heard tell that he himself has recommended our mod and that he thinks it's great. I've never heard or seen any suggestion that anyone here had signed an NDA. Steve Moret is quoted to have said he wished he had tools half as good as ToEEWB while making ToEE as the Dev Tools they used (WorldEd) was terrible - having used both myself and having been one of the major testers for ToEEWB I can say WorldEd isn't great, but it does have advantages in some areas, while ToEEWB is also a powerful tool in other ways. There was talk of an EE version of ToEE that GoG (Good Old Games) wanted to put together, but since we neither had the source code, or even knew who had it, the talk sadly came to nothing. The original idea behind Temple+ was (at least I thought) to wholesale replace the source code we didn't have for ToEE with new code we have access to, and fixing issues as we found them, it's since added classes, races, and abilities to the game and fixed other issues like pathfinding etc... but has yet to replace the source code in it's entirety.
I think you'll find our EE chatter was with Beamdog. It was extensive, and a driving force behind both KotB 1.0 finally getting finished, and Temple+. Unfortunately, nothing came of it due to simple commercial realities. The decision was made at the time not to speak about it due to professional courtesy. I never agreed - courtesy is in how you handle things - and everybody involved was courteous, professional and tried very hard to make it happen. Unfortunately it didn't. Tim Cain was not at all involved with our chatter to my knowledge (Ag may have reached out to him?), his attempts at an EE must have been something completely seperate, possibly based around Arcanum. O and I have said many times ToEEWB is superior than WorldEd, but the latter is essential for a lot of map-related stuff. ToEEWB is actually a dedicated ToEE tool where WorldEd is an Arcanum tool re-tooled for ToEE, bizarely enough. No, I don't believe there is anything in the source code that the Temple+ guys need, they have cracked it all. Good to see you around, @Isewein - have a play of Paladin's Cove if you haven't already, it is superb. EDIT: Actually watching the video - he says, "I made 3 different offers, "they" never made a counter offer..." Who is they? That is indeed the question.
Thanks for the clarification! I can only presume that "they" must have been Beamdog, too, then - which could somewhat account for their "ghosting" Tim, if they maybe got confused and thought that the matter had already been settled with Co8. That's a charitable reading, at least. Sounds like something came of it after all, then. Thank you! I've just discovered it - it looks absolutely wonderful, especially since the author likened it to Stardust and TPB. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like I can get ToEE to run on my Macbook, so it'll have to wait until winter.
Are you using Temple+? Ag said ToEE worked with, ummm, Wine I think (without Temple+). If i remember rightly, I am not a Mac person
That may well be - I'm not really used to Mac either and have never looked into emulators. GOG claims ToEE to be compatible out of the box, but apparently that has been deprecated since Mac went full 64-bit-exclusive. To be honest, I have little incentive to put so much effort into it if Temple+ doesn't work with Mac at all anyway. I might as well wait until winter (I live a rather nomadic life these days).
I run Temple+ on Linux using (a wrapper for) wine. I don't know what the Mac situation is for wine these days, but perhaps you could get it working that way.
I took a listen. I am so intrigued by this. Nice to get some behind the scenes info. Also pissed that Atari and WOTC didnt do better by Tim, we could have had an EE or better yet sequels. He was planning Giants and Drow!!! WTF! I hope someone bank rolls and gets Tim to work on the other games haha....
