The Earliest Mods created for Baldur's Gate?

Kaliesto

It was something I was thinking about tonight, but how far back was BG modding? Darkside of the Sword Coast was one of the earliest back in June of the year 2000, but could there be other mods older than that?

The original release of BG1 was back in December 1998, so that leaves a one & a half year gap.

Mathsorcerer

I don't remember any other mods from that time. Of course, at that time tools such as NearInfinity and WeiDU did not exist, so modding was significantly more difficult.

Aquadrizzt

I believe DSotSC is the oldest substantive mod (e.g. more than portraits/soundsets).

This is supported by a few things:

• I can't find evidence of mods that pre-date DSotSC, and many of the mods from that era specifically reference compatibility with DSotSC in their overviews.
• Much of the modding knowledge (e.g. byte indexes, file formats, etc.) was originally determined by research by the DSotSC team.
• DSotSC is the oldest mod listed on sorcerers.net

I also believe that DSotSC was made possible via the /override/ folder created by the Tales of the Sword Coast patch, which came out in April 1999, making it only about 14 months rather than 18. Looking at the patch notes from TotSC and the contents of that /override/ folder of a freshly patched install let people figure out which bytes corresponded to specific changes.

Kaliesto

So its pretty much the grandfather of BG modding, very interesting.

Isewein

That is correct, and can be substantiated by checking the old DSotSC website, still available via the invaluable Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20040629080632/http://www.dsotsc.com/

As for the history of TeamBG, the people behind the original DSotSC, you might also want to check out this "Snippets of Modding History" recollection by first-class raconteur JCompton: https://forums.pocketplane.net/index.php/topic,25460.0.html

StummvonBordwehr

awesome documentation.