Temple of Elemental Evil: Icewind Dale Total Conversion
Allyx
Member Posts: 47
Greetings all.
I must confess I am a newbie to the world of Baldur's Gate, but not to D&D in general, (I've been playing on and off for 21 years or so) and not to D&D CRPG game modding (I've been a modder for the Temple of Elemental Evil for 13 years or so). I recently purchased Baldur's Gate 1 EE & 2 EE, and Siege of Dragonspear, and Icewind Dale 1 EE on Steam with the intention of discovering for myself if if would be possible to make a Baldurs Gate Total Conversion Mod for Temple of Elemental Evil, thus marrying one of the best loved D&D CRPG adventure series with the best CRPG turn based D&D tactical game engines.
I hope to use the maps, story, dialogue and movies from the original Baldur's Gate game adapted as necessary for use in the Temple of Elemental Evil game, and have 3D models and animations for items, scenery and monsters not currently available in ToEE created from scratch or adapted from existing models to provide a full Baldurs Gate experience to players of ToEE, and vice versa.
Please feel free to reference our sister thread on this matter at the Circle of Eight forum and offer assistance to this project if you so wish to do so.
As I stated earlier I am new to Baldur's Gate modding, and as such I am having some difficulty getting started. For one thing I'm unsure as to whether such a project would even be allowed legally? Do I need to seek permission to use certain files? If so who do I address this question to? Both games have been extensively modded by fan based communities so I am inclined to believe that the basic unmodded game files are basically fair game but please correct me if I am wrong.
I have thus far been unable to extract the game maps from Baldur's Gate which will need all open-able doors removed, and possibly resized to accommodate ToEE's 3d character models. I gather Infinity Explorer requires the Baldur.ini file which does not exist in the Steam version of BG EE. Is there another way to extract the maps so they may be edited?
All dialogue files will need to be recreated from scratch obviously, and while I have looked at some, the format is unfamiliar to me, is there a FAQ or something for getting started with dialogue editing?
The Infinity Engine games use a different scripting language to ToEE which uses Python for it's scripts, Is there a detailed list of global flags and variables that get set via scripts and/or dialogue files available somewhere so we may recreate the many complex situational nuances of Baldur's Gate's story in ToEE.
I'm sure there will be many many more questions from me if this project gets underway in earnest, I hope this community is as helpful as the Circle of Eight has proven themselves to me to be over the years, and I would appreciate any assistance I receive from yourselves.
I must confess I am a newbie to the world of Baldur's Gate, but not to D&D in general, (I've been playing on and off for 21 years or so) and not to D&D CRPG game modding (I've been a modder for the Temple of Elemental Evil for 13 years or so). I recently purchased Baldur's Gate 1 EE & 2 EE, and Siege of Dragonspear, and Icewind Dale 1 EE on Steam with the intention of discovering for myself if if would be possible to make a Baldurs Gate Total Conversion Mod for Temple of Elemental Evil, thus marrying one of the best loved D&D CRPG adventure series with the best CRPG turn based D&D tactical game engines.
I hope to use the maps, story, dialogue and movies from the original Baldur's Gate game adapted as necessary for use in the Temple of Elemental Evil game, and have 3D models and animations for items, scenery and monsters not currently available in ToEE created from scratch or adapted from existing models to provide a full Baldurs Gate experience to players of ToEE, and vice versa.
Please feel free to reference our sister thread on this matter at the Circle of Eight forum and offer assistance to this project if you so wish to do so.
As I stated earlier I am new to Baldur's Gate modding, and as such I am having some difficulty getting started. For one thing I'm unsure as to whether such a project would even be allowed legally? Do I need to seek permission to use certain files? If so who do I address this question to? Both games have been extensively modded by fan based communities so I am inclined to believe that the basic unmodded game files are basically fair game but please correct me if I am wrong.
I have thus far been unable to extract the game maps from Baldur's Gate which will need all open-able doors removed, and possibly resized to accommodate ToEE's 3d character models. I gather Infinity Explorer requires the Baldur.ini file which does not exist in the Steam version of BG EE. Is there another way to extract the maps so they may be edited?
All dialogue files will need to be recreated from scratch obviously, and while I have looked at some, the format is unfamiliar to me, is there a FAQ or something for getting started with dialogue editing?
The Infinity Engine games use a different scripting language to ToEE which uses Python for it's scripts, Is there a detailed list of global flags and variables that get set via scripts and/or dialogue files available somewhere so we may recreate the many complex situational nuances of Baldur's Gate's story in ToEE.
I'm sure there will be many many more questions from me if this project gets underway in earnest, I hope this community is as helpful as the Circle of Eight has proven themselves to me to be over the years, and I would appreciate any assistance I receive from yourselves.
Post edited by Allyx on
12
Comments
The gibberlings3 iessdp (not sure I spelt that acronym right, check Google) is a very useful resource for info on game files.
I believe there's a BG conversion in nwn2 called baldur's gate reborn as well you might want to see.
The neverwinter mod is called Baldurs gate reloaded.
Some good resources:
Iedsp will help you find your way around tyre infinity engine:
http://gibberlings3.net/iesdp/
Nearinfinity is an excellent tool:
forums.beamdog.com/discussion/30593/new-versions-of-nearinfinity-available/p1
Dltcep is another excellent tool:
http://gibberlings3.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=23917#entry196679
Good starting places anyway
Edit: weidu stuff
http://weidu.org/WeiDU/README-WeiDU.html
Thanks to both, I'll try again with Near Infinity, I had issues before with it, it claimed to be extracting the map files, but the folder I extracted the maps into was nowhere to be seen. Any ideas?
BG in NWN, BG in DA, and now BG in TOEE. Woaaah!!
Speaking of which, I have now extracted most of the maps, turns out Comodo Internet security was doing a fantastic job of protecting me from extracting the maps I wanted with NearInfinity. There are a number of maps which I could not extract though I think I so far have 447 out of 512. Extracting the individual maps results in an error of "Error Exporting AR2600.TIS" which is of course Candlekeep, and the first map I actually need. The .TIS files themselves seem to extract just fine, so by the omission of the .PNG files, I can see which maps I am missing.
Is there a website that hosts the maps for download individually or as a whole? Or another method for extracting the maps that I've not yet tried?
I am currently missing the following 60 map files:
AR0900
AR1200
AR1200N
AR1300
AR1300N
AR1400
AR1900
AR2000
AR2100
AR2200
AR2300
AR2300N
AR2400
AR2600
AR2600N
AR2700
AR2800
AR2900
AR3000
AR3100
AR3200
AR3200N
AR3300
AR3400
AR3400N
AR3500
AR3600
AR3800
AR3900
AR4000
AR4100
AR4200
AR4300
AR4400
AR4500
AR4600
AR4700
AR4700N
AR4800
AR4900
AR5000
AR5100
AR5200
AR5300
AR5400
AR5500
BD1000
BD1000N
BD2000
BD2000N
BD4000
BD4000N
BD5000
BD5000N
BD6000
BD7100N
BD7300
BD7300N
OH3000
OH3000N
I really like 3rd edition in NWN but haven't really compared to 3.5. If 3.5 is closer to 4.0 then that's bad from what I've heard.
But yeah I agree with The Doc, I don't see the effort being worth it since BG already looks pretty and is extremely rich in content. You get the benefit of upgraded ruleset but as he said you get that in the mod for NWN2.
How about porting Of Steamworks Arcana or something? Anyway, it's your deal if you guys want to put that much effort into this then good luck to ya and we're here and love to see product as it gets worked on.
One really great thing about NWN1 & 2 was the TOOLSET though. You know how hard it is mod things in BG, due to the limitations of the Infinity Engine. In the NWN games, that problem went away. Why? Because the Toolset is fantastic!
4.0 was when they made the ridiculous decision for the Spell Plague to cause Abeir to basically "magically" collide with Toril. And then all these Abeir specific things became part of Toril. (This made 4.0 lore so weird and convaluted.) Roleplay was emphasized way less. It was just a mess. Any 3.5 stuff that "resembled" 4.0 was not baseline, as per the PHB.
NWN2 yeah it's great that they are also doing a BG remake, I do have a copy of NWN2 here and I might just try it out, but it's still not turn based, psuso-turnbased with excessive pausing etc perhaps, but there is no better CRPG for the true feel of PnP D&D than ToEE.
The Circle of Eight have developed their own toolset, much like the Infinity Engine game Modder's have, which even Troika ex-employee's have stated are better by far than the toolset they themselves had to work with to make the game in the first place with one notable exception, the Troika made World Ed tool, which was mistakenly bundled into a Polish version of patch 2 is better at sectoring map files than Co8 built World Builder is, but World Builder is capable of doing so none the less.
Btw, if you guys haven't checked their mods, you might want to - they've brought so much life to the game!
In ToEE, tactics is all important. In my most recent run through my level 6 paladin beat Tolub in Nulb in a 1 vs. 1 fist fight even though Tolub had 20 extra HP, just by using full (2) attacks and 5' steps, thus robbing Tolub of his second attack each round as he had to move to get into range to punch. I know it's an AI exploit, but the humble 5' step has saved my ass countless times in ToEE, yet I doubt anyone ever uses it in NWN, or IWD II.
I remember in toee, you couldn't spread out your party liked this
I admire your ambition!
But I would recommend doing this with IWD1 instead of BG1. And probably also only with the IWD1 base game content, without the Heart of Winter expansion content. Because:
- Much fewer maps.
- Much fewer side-quests and quest NPCs.
- More combat focused.
- More beautiful
The downside is, of course, that there a fewer fans of IWD than fans of the BG series. So using IWD content might give your mod less of a community impact. On the other hand, I imagine that the kind of people who enjoy the combat-focused IWD might be more likely to give tactical turn-based a try, than people who play BG for the story...BG1 has a crazy amount of little indoor maps for all the houses in the cities, not to mention all the throw-away overland areas, dungeons, and caves in the countryside. Correctly setting all of them up in another engine will probably entail a lot of boring and repetitive work. IWD1 has fewer maps, but they are more unique, more deliberate, and more polished.
This means less complexity for the total conversion to deal with.
The appeal of IWD is the cool atmosphere (pun intended) and the never-ending sequence of challenging combat encounters. Since the main benefit for porting an Infinity Engine game to the TOEE engine would be to make the combat more tactical, this would be a perfect fit right?
The art style of the IWD games (as well as BG2) has also aged much better than that of BG1. Many BG1 maps look like they were assembled using a primitive tile map editor. The IWD1 maps look like they were all custom-rendered/painted.