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.

I currently play on ToB but I planned on moving to EE after this run. I have EE installed...but for some reason I wanted to do ToB again but can't remember why now.

I also plan to move to EE soon. I played IA 5 and 6 countless times.
my only request ( within reason ) is to make IA more friendly with other mods, make it patch files instead of overwriting them, make it compatible with EET and the big mods.
thank you for all your wonderful effort. I am sure there are many people like me who are mostly lurkers, but that does not mean we do not appreciate all your work and effort.

Thanks for your feedback! Likewise, it's appreciated.


I did try to make IA more friendly, but the amount of overwrites is huge, converting it patching is an insurmountable task, especially if embarked upon without a good reason. It would be easier to work on compatibility with some specific mod if the IA's conceptual framework allows it (i.e., it's pretty pointless to try and make it work with spell revisions or item revisions or similar mod that touches the same aspects IA does).

I am married with 2 children and a very busy life. I hardly find the time these days to play. I hope I get time to play during the holidays, but when I do I want to play BGEE+ SOD ( for the first time ) + BG2EE + IWDEE using EET with improved anvil, Sandrah mod, BGQE, TDD, anthology tweaks and many more mods in one big mod, since I dont get to play frequently.
I dont care about SR or IR. I know adding many mods will make IA easier and some may consider it a cheat but who cares, let anyone play it the way they want, let me install it with many other mods and 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 party , dont punish me for not playing a certain style.
I know you cant have compatibility with SCS , IR, big picture, but can it be compatible with ascension and other quest mods at least.
again, thank you very much.

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.

You probably want to opt for the future. You can do a lot of fancy things with the new EE effects not possible before meaning more potential for extensions.
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.

critto, from the amount of BWS reports, people seems to install IA without "mega-installation". It might be the fact that you mod drastically change core rules etc So instead of spending time for this patching madness for compatibility, just say that IA can't be compatible with "mega-installation" and put you effort into new EE Opcodes and new engine possibilities. EE Engine is far more superior than old one and offers amazing possibilities. Make use of them to create even better mod and maybe next move would be compatibility concerns. Bug-less EE version should be prioritized at this point.

Thanks for the input!

I do not pursue any madness, as you put it, at the moment I've just commented on the subject because pyschlopes raised the question. I have never had any illusions about IA being compatible with BWS. I completely agree with your statements regarding the EE and its engine. My main worry and reason for creating this thread is to warn any old-time players in advance and hope to resolve any potential questions about transition to EE.

IA has become EE-only. This is no longer relevant.