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]

You could support the v6.x versions for vanilla and EE and switch to EE-only once v7 comes out. OR make some v7 specific items only install on EE and just not be available in ToB or something alike.

I'd rather not go that particular route with differentiating branches of development for distinct versions of the game. I know all too well what a pain that is to support separate feature lists on a very complicated and obscure platform such as BG. Maintaining something like that would require employing a more sophisticated development cycle, and that would feel more like a job rather than a hobby. It wouldn't be fun anymore.

If I am to abandon ToB as a platform, I'd do it completely, with exception of providing support for the 6.x branch, as you suggest.

This post has been edited by critto: Sep 5 2016, 08:09 PM