Poll: moving IA to EE-only Options

[critto]

Hi, everybody!

Lately, I have been considering moving Improved Anvil to support only Enhanced Edition, abandoning support for vanilla ToB.

Pros:
1) a better, more modern engine that is being actively supported by paid professionals
2) no need to deal with lots of hardcode, weird nuances and obscure issues of the old engine (tons of time is being spent on reading through forums and researching old issues that have been discovered and forgotten already)
3) the new EE engine has new features that would allow for some creativity, but it is not possible to reproduce them in ToB due to old engine's limitations
4) with great probability, any new-coming IA player would opt for EE these days

Cons:
1) potentially leaving old-time players behind

The only concern here our old-school players who can't or won't move to EE for some reason. To be honest, it's not much of a reason because BG2:EE is fairly cheap and light-weight, comes up quite often in GoG discount sales, does not require significantly more powerful PC, works on every platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). The practical decision here is that EE is better.

I do feel compelled, however, to ask for the community's input. Vote and share your concerns, please.

[critto]

EET support is not something that I can guarantee. While the possibility to install IA on top of EET and affect only the SoA+ToB portion of the game is somewhat realistic, having the mod improve the whole game does not appear to be a very realistic task at all. There's just too much work to be done. Neither could I guarantee IA working on top of a huge install like that.

Unfortunately, IA is a mod that was never designed to play well with others. It would be broken by other mods and most certainly would break stuff if installed on top of everything.

Earlier this year, I've attempted to remove hardcoded copying over of items and convert them all to patches. I realised that a straightforward automatic conversion of differences between files into a sequence of byte patches would be even harder to support and very prone to breaking whenever some mod changes some file's structure compared to the one that was used to build a patch against.

This leaves only a manual task of going through file by file, calculating diffs and preparing patches by hand. It's an incredibly time-consuming task. There are hundreds of files affected by IA. Even if it makes things easier if we were to abandon support for ToB (game files differ between ToB and EE even without any external mods, which complicates the task further), I am not sure I am ready to devote so much of my time to this venture.

Which is why it's hard to predict compatibility with huge, monumental mods such as Sandrah or TDD. The smaller ones - it could be done, I guess, but on a case-by-case basis.

On the good side, "not be afraid I will insta die once I reach a certain XP level, make it possible to get the robe of vecna even if I dont have a necromancer in my part" the majority of this does not exist in IA anymore.