Icewind Dale: ToEE - Total Conversion

You could merely add a disclaimer to your installer that has to be accepted in order to complete the install ... i.e. This modification of the TOEE game and the representation of IWD and any trade marked media is solely for the purpose of celebrating this wonderfully creative product and is not intended for sale or resale, or for anything other than paying homage to a great game.

 

As soon as you redistribute anything from IWD, you violate their copyright.

At the end of the day, you should be trying to mitigate the risk of litigation from the copyright holder. (Whoever that is for IWD).
A disclaimer that doesn't actually prevent people who never bought IWD from playing might or might not be enough to disuade them from issuing DMCA claims.
The most substantial way to circumvent copyright issues is to not redistribute anything from IWD. Realistically that can only be done by extracting all necessary data from an IWD installation on the user's disk, like the BG1 total conversion for BG2 used to do.
If you can't do that though, it becomes mostly about how much risk you're willing to take.

 

We could have an installation script which does that.
I.e. like the hypothetical automated conversion tool that was discussed earlier, except that to keep it simple it wouldn't cover all the complex and messy aspects of the game data (characters, dialogs, quests, etc.), but instead only get the "large" assets like map backgrounds, sounds, and videos.

Automatically extracting images, sounds, and videos from an IWD installation is feasible with the help of WeiDU or other tools.
The script that controls the extraction could be written in Python to make it cross-platform compatible. (Please no Microsoft Windows BAT script... )

There would be some complications like the doors that have to be manually removed from maps - I suppose you could store just the changed parts of each map with the total conversion mod, and let the install script automatically extract the original maps from IWD and overlay the changed parts on top of it.

What I don't know, is if the ToEE side of the conversion can easily be automated. Like converting videos to the proprietary Bink format. Or the "sectoring" of the back background images into the map format that ToEE understands.

 

Yeah but as long as users need to buy their game in order to use the total conversion, they won't complain.

If you redistribute everything, i.e. effectively give users a way to download and play the entire game (in another engine) without buying an original copy, they might not be happy. But even if you did that, I'm sure Beamdog's reaction wouldn't be to send lawyers to destroy you - they'd just kindly ask you to remove the download.

Beamdog is not some heartless corporation - they're a small company, and pretty friendly with the modding community. In fact, IWD:EE started out as a fan-made total conversion mod that converted the original IWD content to the original BG2:ToB engine. Then after Beamdog had created the Enhanced Edition engine based on the BG2:ToB engine and used it to release BG:EE and BG2:EE, they took over the existing IWD-in-BG2 conversion mod (with permission from the original modder of course!), and used it to create IWD:EE....

 

Both is possible. But from a complexity standpoint, offline conversion (during/after installation) is easier to do and should probably be preferred. It also maintains compatibility with vanilla.

What could be used is the knowledge from Temple+ regarding the ToEE file formats.

Checked around a bit more: Videos are problematic, just as i remembered. There is no open source BINKW encoder that I know of. The ffmpeg implementation sadly only supports decoding. We could add mp4 playback support to T+, but I don't know what could be done about vanilla.

 

How would you even convert the video files though? I don't know of any bink video encoder you could use.

 

Most of the videos are a narrator reading off a book, which might as well be presented as slides. Or, just include them as converted files. I think the critical thing to do is to ensure that you can't play the game without having IWD, which IMO is sufficiently achieved by excluding the map art (save for the tiles that need doctoring like doors/chests).

My advice is not to worry about it too much right now, and have some faith that the necessary tools will materialize Can't make any promises but it's something that I'm also interested in pursuing, possibly 4-5 months from now (which is my estimate of how long it'll take to do the pythonized class definitions + necessary UI overhaul for T+). I imagine it'll be quite a while before the first release anyway so it shouldn't hold you back.

 

Rad tools from rad games could be used for converting to bink

they have the necessary dll plugins for converting video formats to bink

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/14713/movie-file-format

this link thread shows the needed video format encoder to get the proper translation

to the bink encoder.

you can use 7zip tools to extract and install all the files from

IWD. you just need a good C program to do the directory and file searches to pass to

7zip and create the directory index needed (If you plan to pack from a Iwd Disk or previous install you wwould need a c program to validate the files passed to
7zip or just something like Xcopy)

just a suggestion.

you could also use the windows install packager creater

iexpress.exe to create the compressed installer that runs

the install app and extracts any tools or plugins needed during the install.

 

Why does it need to pull all of the files for conversion?

Why not have it just pull a single file that is easily converted just for varification of owning the original game?