I would like to point out that dxdiag displays "Intel(R) HD Graphics Family" regardless of what specific chipset you have. To find out what intel graphics you have, you must right-click your desktop, select "Screen Resolution", go to "Advanced Settings" and copy the "Adapter String". This may be important to make a distinction between intel chips that had little issues with baldur's gate (my HD3000 for example) and intel chips that simply didn't run it at all.
By the way... did Baldur's Gate 1 always have shadow thieves? I was... surprised...
Oh, just remembered: despite what I wrote in the e.mail, I do have a very small bug. When I go back to the game after minimizing it (I play on full screen), I can't scroll the screen with the mouse in south and east directions. I have to enter some other screen (inventory, spells...) and then it works again.
This actually happened to me but I forgot about it until you mentioned it. I'm hoping it's a small issue that's been done away with by the new renderer, patch or whatever.
I have see the same thing, although for me I can't move to the west. What seems to happen is the column of pixels that trigger the map movement move ~1-3 pixels from the edge of the screen, so I have to hover the mouse slightly in from the edge to move in that direction.
Oh, just remembered: despite what I wrote in the e.mail, I do have a very small bug. When I go back to the game after minimizing it (I play on full screen), I can't scroll the screen with the mouse in south and east directions. I have to enter some other screen (inventory, spells...) and then it works again.
I had this bug too. Yes its fixed on the patch.
Also I just realized the game has no load screens anymore. Very nifty.
Oh, just remembered: despite what I wrote in the e.mail, I do have a very small bug. When I go back to the game after minimizing it (I play on full screen), I can't scroll the screen with the mouse in south and east directions. I have to enter some other screen (inventory, spells...) and then it works again.
I had this bug too. Yes its fixed on the patch.
Also I just realized the game has no load screens anymore. Very nifty.
EE never had load screens, so this is a fairly late observation!
Oh, just remembered: despite what I wrote in the e.mail, I do have a very small bug. When I go back to the game after minimizing it (I play on full screen), I can't scroll the screen with the mouse in south and east directions. I have to enter some other screen (inventory, spells...) and then it works again.
I had this bug too. Yes its fixed on the patch.
Also I just realized the game has no load screens anymore. Very nifty.
EE never had load screens, so this is a fairly late observation!
True, but there was a slight pause. Now it is pretty much instant.
Not heard anything back, unfortunately. But, to anyone who suffered with the stuttering audio/video with the movies, has that been resolved? How are they looking?
I have always had the stuttering audio in the videos. I mentioned that to dee in my email, though I am not part of the beta. If I get in I will mention it here.
I noticed another oddity in the UI. The multiplayer menu seems to get shifted all the way to the left on widescreen monitors. It's particularly noticeable when UI scaling is off. Anyone else getting this issue?
-ui looks MUCH improved, transparency and less clutter is a real treat, you have to play older version and then this to fully appreciate it -jumping into dialogue now has a nice transition -new font is very, very good, easily readable and adds to overall feeling of high-res -inventory looks much better with "fit whole item in square". i'm surprised at the difference it makes -in scaled mode, icons in spellbook seem to be fixed, so no more blur. in general, scaled UI functions much better now -used spell icons are grayscaled instead of "dithered"- looks better -outdoor areas have extra black border when you hit the bottom for easier area transition accessibility (i thought it was a bug at first) -journal editing hyper-sensitivity (stepping into edit mode when releasing mouse button) is gone -quests seem to update properly now (tested on edwin-dynaheir quest) -personalized starting colors for classes- NICE -more info in feedback it seems
THE BAD-ish
- bug with thieving points resetting to level 1 when reactivated in dual classing seems to be still in effect. i'm not sure what caused it, maybe it is shadow keeper's fault. i'm willing to believe it won't be an issue in future replays - outermost border in UI screens (character screen, inventory...) are cut too sharply and need some additional feather/work, along with black borders in starting screen, but that will be addressed as it seems -UI scaling is not optimized- it seems this is more my issue as others seem to like this, but i have 1980x1080 monitor, and while UI looks nice at that resolution almost all the screens are too small to be usable. new font helps, but in the end, portraits, inventory,map, journal are all too eye-straining small. obvious solution would be to manually downgrade resolution of the monitor but lucky as i am, i have problems with changing to 1600x900, which is the next proportional downgrade (getting black screen flashing and no solution on net- thank you ATI). i hope we will still have UI scaling option in bg2EE, can you confirm this? for now, i will have to continue playing with UI scaling on.
my only question; is there a way, ANY WAY to manually set the default resolution of the scaled UI? or otherwise force de-scaled UI to different resolution without changing monitor resolution? (already tried editing window height and width in .ini and it didn't work).
as reported, when exiting and reentering the game, some screens have to be opened to resume normal scrolling functionality.
FINAL THOUGHTS: some improvements are obvious outright but i would recommend to everybody to play 5 min with older version first, before applying patch. difference is much more noticeable and appreciated this way. overall this patch is a big improvement, game feel actually modernized now. good work, overhaul team.
I'm a lucky owner of an Interl Integrated and I've just tried the patched game for the first time, it worked perfectly. I've been able to play through all the black pit adventure without any problem or slowdown at all and without having to run the game in win95 compatibility mode. So the patch completely solved my problems.
To put it in another way, I'm definitely going to buy bg2ee now.
Things are going a lot faster than I think any of us expected to; it's really wonderful to see such strong support from our players, and we're determined to make good on that confidence.
Well, what else could you expect from fans who were waiting for this patch for 8 months now ?
I've finished downloading the patched game and just fired it up. The only problem I've had so far is that the game was black-screening and crashing, up until I changed the compatibility settings to disable visual themes. It's run perfectly after that. The title screen flickering that was my only previous issue has stopped as well, so my eyes thank you for whatever change put an end to that.
I can't comment on any bugs or improvements to combat since I started a new game and I've yet to leave Candlekeep (I'll be back when I do), but for now, I like what I see.
Oh, just remembered: despite what I wrote in the e.mail, I do have a very small bug. When I go back to the game after minimizing it (I play on full screen), I can't scroll the screen with the mouse in south and east directions. I have to enter some other screen (inventory, spells...) and then it works again.
I have also had this bug and forgot to mention it in my email (sorry!), though for me it was that I couldn't move North and East. Whatever was causing this seems to be fixed, because I haven't had it happen even though I've tabbed out of the game a few times to come here.
Interesting thing I just noticed: The patch added some new AI scripts which seem interesting. They seem to be class based variations on the 'Control' script. For example, the Cleric/Paladin variant aggressively uses Turn Undead. How aggressive you can tune with a quick key press. The thief version is similar but for Hiding and trap detection.
The only reason I noticed the new scripts was because the default script seems a little more aggressive than I recall. Everyone seems to rush enemies at greater range during combat unless I'm directly requesting them to do something.
I'll be testing a few of the new scripts out later today to see if they work as advertised.
Beta test report: Test subject: AMD Phenom II x4 965 + nVidia GeForce GTX 470
I've noticed some slight microfreezes of about 50 msec during the battle of Gorion vs. Sarevok while Gorion was casting spells. However, I'll test this phase again with another character after I moved the game to an SSD because I think it's my slow HDD. Update: It was the HDD that was slow, the animations still feel choppy but no freezes.
The Tethtoril quest bug is fixed.
Also, I noticed some length glitches with instant tooltips: * Going from a small name to a larger name will cut off the tooltip * Going from a large name to a smaller name will left-bind the name and extend the tooltip too far. Unfortunately, I cannot screenshot this behaviour because the tooltips are not screenshotable.
I'll do further tests on my second system (Intel Core i7 2600K + AMD Radeon HD6970) on thursday.
[NOTE FOR TRACKING: I've also emailed this report to Dee]
I've never had that happen in 1.0.2014 or the beta patch for single player or multiplayer.
The Alt-Tab problems could be random, depending where you caught the renderer while it tried to display the game. Try hitting Alt-Enter twice (not too fast), it might fix some problems.
Good: Well.. I had a different Alt-Tab issue (couldn't scroll after Tabbing back in game and the cursor disappeared - for example if I wanted to leave the area). That one is fixed.
Like the detailed racial descriptions.
Love the new font. Very crisp and easy to read.
Great job on the icons, they look very sleek.
Bug: Familiar icon doesn't scale well. it actually gets out of bounds from the item square.
I've never had that happen in 1.0.2014 or the beta patch for single player or multiplayer.
The Alt-Tab problems could be random, depending where you caught the renderer while it tried to display the game. Try hitting Alt-Enter twice (not too fast), it might fix some problems.
Not random for me. Also need to add that I am using dual monitors with BGEE Beta on main.
Comments
To find out what intel graphics you have, you must right-click your desktop, select "Screen Resolution", go to "Advanced Settings" and copy the "Adapter String".
This may be important to make a distinction between intel chips that had little issues with baldur's gate (my HD3000 for example) and intel chips that simply didn't run it at all.
By the way... did Baldur's Gate 1 always have shadow thieves? I was... surprised...
Also I just realized the game has no load screens anymore. Very nifty.
THE GOOD
-ui looks MUCH improved, transparency and less clutter is a real treat, you have to play older version and then this to fully appreciate it
-jumping into dialogue now has a nice transition
-new font is very, very good, easily readable and adds to overall feeling of high-res
-inventory looks much better with "fit whole item in square". i'm surprised at the difference it makes
-in scaled mode, icons in spellbook seem to be fixed, so no more blur. in general, scaled UI functions much better now
-used spell icons are grayscaled instead of "dithered"- looks better
-outdoor areas have extra black border when you hit the bottom for easier area transition accessibility (i thought it was a bug at first)
-journal editing hyper-sensitivity (stepping into edit mode when releasing mouse button) is gone
-quests seem to update properly now (tested on edwin-dynaheir quest)
-personalized starting colors for classes- NICE
-more info in feedback it seems
THE BAD-ish
- bug with thieving points resetting to level 1 when reactivated in dual classing seems to be still in effect. i'm not sure what caused it, maybe it is shadow keeper's fault. i'm willing to believe it won't be an issue in future replays
- outermost border in UI screens (character screen, inventory...) are cut too sharply and need some additional feather/work, along with black borders in starting screen, but that will be addressed as it seems
-UI scaling is not optimized- it seems this is more my issue as others seem to like this, but i have 1980x1080 monitor, and while UI looks nice at that resolution almost all the screens are too small to be usable. new font helps, but in the end, portraits, inventory,map, journal are all too eye-straining small.
obvious solution would be to manually downgrade resolution of the monitor but lucky as i am, i have problems with changing to 1600x900, which is the next proportional downgrade (getting black screen flashing and no solution on net- thank you ATI). i hope we will still have UI scaling option in bg2EE, can you confirm this?
for now, i will have to continue playing with UI scaling on.
my only question; is there a way, ANY WAY to manually set the default resolution of the scaled UI? or otherwise force de-scaled UI to different resolution without changing monitor resolution? (already tried editing window height and width in .ini and it didn't work).
as reported, when exiting and reentering the game, some screens have to be opened to resume normal scrolling functionality.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
some improvements are obvious outright but i would recommend to everybody to play 5 min with older version first, before applying patch. difference is much more noticeable and appreciated this way.
overall this patch is a big improvement, game feel actually modernized now. good work, overhaul team.
To put it in another way, I'm definitely going to buy bg2ee now.
Well done guys
I can't comment on any bugs or improvements to combat since I started a new game and I've yet to leave Candlekeep (I'll be back when I do), but for now, I like what I see.
Edit: I have also had this bug and forgot to mention it in my email (sorry!), though for me it was that I couldn't move North and East. Whatever was causing this seems to be fixed, because I haven't had it happen even though I've tabbed out of the game a few times to come here.
The only reason I noticed the new scripts was because the default script seems a little more aggressive than I recall. Everyone seems to rush enemies at greater range during combat unless I'm directly requesting them to do something.
I'll be testing a few of the new scripts out later today to see if they work as advertised.
Test subject: AMD Phenom II x4 965 + nVidia GeForce GTX 470
I've noticed some slight microfreezes of about 50 msec during the battle of Gorion vs. Sarevok while Gorion was casting spells. However, I'll test this phase again with another character after I moved the game to an SSD because I think it's my slow HDD.
Update: It was the HDD that was slow, the animations still feel choppy but no freezes.
The Tethtoril quest bug is fixed.
Also, I noticed some length glitches with instant tooltips:
* Going from a small name to a larger name will cut off the tooltip
* Going from a large name to a smaller name will left-bind the name and extend the tooltip too far.
Unfortunately, I cannot screenshot this behaviour because the tooltips are not screenshotable.
I'll do further tests on my second system (Intel Core i7 2600K + AMD Radeon HD6970) on thursday.
[NOTE FOR TRACKING: I've also emailed this report to Dee]
Try hitting Alt-Enter twice (not too fast), it might fix some problems.
Good:
Well.. I had a different Alt-Tab issue (couldn't scroll after Tabbing back in game and the cursor disappeared - for example if I wanted to leave the area). That one is fixed.
Like the detailed racial descriptions.
Love the new font. Very crisp and easy to read.
Great job on the icons, they look very sleek.
Bug: Familiar icon doesn't scale well. it actually gets out of bounds from the item square.