Actually... you'll be (pleasantly, I hope) shocked when you get a chance to run both games side-by-side. The game with some tightening up can (and is!) running much more quickly and efficiently.
Oh yeah. I'm so used to changing areas or saving and waiting for the little loading screen--in the beta these are near-instantaneous. If it wasn't for a bit of green text in the battle window there are times I would swear I hadn't hit the save button.
Can I expect it to run my stupid-long scripts more quickly?
Oh, if you only had some kind of "in" who could hook you up with access to see for yourself.
Seriously, join the dark side beta. We have cake.
For Pete's sakes, please do get David Wallace on that team! SCS/SCSII is the greatest thing since sliced bread (for the BG series).
@Nathan You're saying you want to move your desk to this side of the room...? I'm not sure how we're going to get @Tanthalas and @AndreaColombo within violence distance but they'll get theirs too. Oh yes. Yes they will.
@Treyolen yes - my understanding is that certain load actions no longer slam the CPU to 100% while they're happening, so, that along with some of the other changes we've made would result in less power-draw fo sho. Efficiency for the win!
@Coriander I'd like to delegate my daily beat-down to our intern.
I didn't see this posted anywhere, but one of the big reasons is probably an API issue. There is really no way to port Baldur's Gate to iPad without removing all the reliance on DirectX/Windows specific APIs and replacing them with things the iPad supports, like OpenGL. Baldur's Gate 1 was never released for Mac OS X, and required mods, like BG TUTU to run the content. There weren't third-party APIs that could convert Microsoft specific code to something that could run on OS X at the time of the BG2 port, so the Mac and Windows versions probably diverged pretty drastically. The Mac versions were always pretty buggy too, but from what we've heard from the developers here, It's pretty amazing MacPlay got a port working at all.
On top of being cleaner, I'd imagine the "new" Windows and Mac OS X and iPad codebases have a lot more in common than the old ones.
One thing I'm personally interested in is load time and disk I/O. With today's faster hard drives and SSDs, moving between areas should be nearly instantaneous.
Wouldn't a more efficient code base also help with battery life on the tablets?
Assuming they graciously give back CPU time when they don't need it, yes. Traditionally, games assume you're running something with infinite power (PC, console) and you're not doing anything significant other than playing, so they just agressively take every cycle they can regardless of how optimized the code is. The situation is quite different on mobile though, I assume Beamdog must have tweaked the code to play nice with battery life and whatnot.
Wouldn't a more efficient code base also help with battery life on the tablets?
Assuming they graciously give back CPU time when they don't need it, yes. Traditionally, games assume you're running something with infinite power (PC, console) and you're not doing anything significant other than playing, so they just agressively take every cycle they can regardless of how optimized the code is. The situation is quite different on mobile though, I assume Beamdog must have tweaked the code to play nice with battery life and whatnot.
Yes, in fact - something I noticed whenever I'd boot up the older games for reference just now is that my CPU fan would always turn on, so today (thinking about this thread) I got curious enough to double-check what was happening. On an 8-core system, vBG1 and vBG2/tutu/etc slam one of the cores to 100%, which translates into 13-15% total usage in task manager, and causes the laptop fan to freak out.
BG:EE on the other hand, happily idles at 2-4% in Windows 7 alone... no problems! There are likely to be some other power-saving tricks to apply to the iOS/Android builds that aren't applicable on a desktop system as well, but as-is it should be quite decent to your battery.
@rimaan - no videos yet, and probably ever. The release date is less than a month away, so you'll just as quickly see the real thing in action on your very computer
I'm not a programmer or modder, so perhaps someone can enlighten me. You hear the team struggling with the apparently horrible source code of the original, to clean everything up. That's where a lot of their time is going right now. My question is, why? It's not like the game can run much faster on present day computers. What's the advantage for consumers?
There is a field in programming which is called refactoring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refactoring). If you have legacy code refactoring becomes important to make the code more flexible or more understandable, etc. And it's a tedious job. Often there are time restraints on software projects and not everything that is important is written down. Then you spend lots of time to understand what the original author of a piece of code intended to do. Especially all those tiny details get important because a slight change might have some greater side effect.
One thing I'm personally interested in is load time and disk I/O. With today's faster hard drives and SSDs, moving between areas should be nearly instantaneous.
Comments
@DavidW I'd say that stupid-long scripts are going to be fine but I have no idea how long that might be.
@Medillen ...this could be possible, maybe...
Make cake jokes, what do you expect?
@Coriander
On top of being cleaner, I'd imagine the "new" Windows and Mac OS X and iPad codebases have a lot more in common than the old ones.
BG:EE on the other hand, happily idles at 2-4% in Windows 7 alone... no problems! There are likely to be some other power-saving tricks to apply to the iOS/Android builds that aren't applicable on a desktop system as well, but as-is it should be quite decent to your battery.