Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview
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Tor.com: BG: EE is being developed on a revamped version of the Infinity engine the engine upon which the original Baldur's Gate games were built. How much of the engine did you have to re-build or re-write to bring it up to speed, and what kind of technical enhancements have been added?
Oster: We initially planned a very surgical rework for the engine technology. Our plan was (to ninja in, fix a couple things and ninja back out.) That ninja plan died a horrible death early on. We realized the scope of work required to improve the engine how we wanted, and a simple Ninja effort would not suffice. I would guess we've rewritten over half the engine at this point. The major enhancements from the re-work are:
- Shader-based upscaling of artwork: We can display the art at much higher resolutions than the original game and it looks much improved.
- Performance: The old engine was spending 70% of [its] time blocking memory; this bottleneck and many others have been eliminated, allowing the game to run much better.
- Multi-platform support: BG was never meant to run on the iPad/Android or Mac. We've rebuilt the core of the engine to run across all these platforms.
- Multi-platform multiplayer: We rebuilt the engine such that an iPad can play with a Mac, with an Android tablet, and a PC. Any device can play with any other device.
- All new UI support, re-based at higher resolution, which means the game looks better from top to bottom.
Tor.com: What factors led to delaying BG: EE until November 28? Anything significant, or just taking the time to really polish the final product?
Oster: We simply were not happy with the quality of the product. We played the build of the game, laid out all the [must-fix] bugs and we could not ship the game we wanted by the original date. We immediately contacted out partners and started working out terms for a delay in the product. The fellows at the Wizards of the Coast were very supportive. Our team strongly believes in the idea that if we make a great game, we will be successful. We would not have had a great game in September. As an independent developer, the financial burden of that decision rested on us and I'm happy we were able to shoulder it to make a better game.
