Icewind Dale: ToEE - Total Conversion

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon the existence of the Baldur's Gate / Tales of the Sword Coast Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate II / Throne of Bhaal Enhanced Edition, Icewind Dale Enhanced Edition and the new Baldur's gate: Seige of Dragonspear. [In my defence I've had my head stuck in internet spaceship games for the majority of the last 10 years, so a lot of new developments have gotten past me.] Since I never played the original games back in the day I (perhaps too hastily) bought the lot on Steam.

The idea behind such an action? a Total Conversion mod for (hopefully) the entire Infinity Engine collection to be rebuilt using The Temple of Elemental Evil's engine.

[Stands back warily awaiting gasps, angry shouts and incoming projectiles]

From my preliminary gaming experiences in BG, and what I have researched of the bestiary of the BG series, I foresee few obstacles on the 3d modelling side of things, (Gibberlings and Wyverns could be adapted from Warewolves and Ice Lizards respectively, I believe there is a Basilisk model in ToEE, but I could be mistaken) many of the monsters used in the games are already present in ToEE, there may be a few that I'm so far not aware of so please feel free to jump in and suggest models that are not present in ToEE so other model substitutions can be discussed, or new models entirely created.

It has been possible to add new modules to the ToEE game for a long while, and aside from KoTB and multiple versions of the ToEE Co8 patches the feature has been greatly underused. the BG isometric maps are it must be said inferior to the ones we are use to in ToEE, but with a little scale increase to make the maps appear geometrically correct compared to ToEE's 3d models they would serve our purpose well assuming there are no legal ramifications from using them.

Baldur's gate has a huge fan base still, and a project like this may help to increase traffic and interest in modding ToEE as a result of completing this project, and hopefully tempt more people into creating new modules for ToEE.

This post is intended as a conversation starter to discuss, legal ramifications, interest in joining in with the project if it takes off, opposition to the proposal etc...

EDIT: Renamed the thread to reflect on the recent focus change towards IWD from Baldur's Gate.

 

I was actually going to just update the rules used from 2nd Ed in BG to 3.5 Ed too, so the rules side of it would basically remain unchanged from basic ToEE's perspective as well.

The ToEE engine is great at what it does already so changing it to 2nd ed rules seems largely pointless imo.

The main thing that makes ToEE great is the turn based engine, basically the same reason BG was never on my playlist, same for NWN, they aren't proper turn based games. I don't mind pressing the space bar to end my turn, but being forced into pressing it to decide what I want to do on my turn grates on me greatly.

 

Huh, didn't know about that, time to start over again I guess

 

The 6 second round doesn't phase me in real time D&D CRPG's and MMO's when you have only one character to control, it's when you have 6 characters to control in that same amount of time when things go awry. Too much going on simultaneously and no time to think about your actions.

 

The main issues you'd face with an IE TC map-side are clipping (waking on top of buildings instead of behind them) and the z-axis of the display of the maps in IE games, which is more 'flat' that ToEE. That'll make the characters look a bit like they're leaning instead of standing straight up.

 

Pardon me?

 

The last time we discussed this, for memory (however many years ago it was) the concern was the orientation of the maps. It's definitely not the same as ToEE. Gaear or Darkstorm or whoever can remind me of the exact numbers, but it's not 'true isometric', ToEE is done from a certain angle (ie a specific angle from the horizontal) and BG is done from a different angle. This will become problematic when you start to introduce models for doors etc: they will look very wrong (leaning rather than standing as Gaear said above). Can a rescaling fix that? I have my doubts...

Otherwise I have always been a fan of this idea - the maps are there, the dlg files just need editing rather than writing from scratch - a huge task but certainly worth considering.

 

I must confess I hadn't thought about the angle being wrong, re-scaling won't fix that, and making new maps while not impossible would be incredibly time consuming. Do we know the what specific "type" or angle that was used for the ToEE isometric maps? There must be some decent maps available from other games that could be re-purposed for making new ToEE modules, even if we have to write a new adventure from scratch.

 

Just had another thought about the Isometric problem, could it be possible to either stretch or squash the height of the BG map images to match the isometric angle In ToEE?

I'm going to try and put together a BG map in ToEE and play around with it.