The GemRB project celebrates 20 year anniversary with a new release | Hacker News Reader

The GemRB project celebrates 20 year anniversary with a new release

gemrb.org

49 pointsLightkey16 comments

I love this project!

Many years ago I was playing with the idea to bring these games to the browser (decade-old demo: http://lumakey.net/labs/battleground/demo1/). I spent many long nights studying GemRB's code and the file format documentation from the Gibberlings Three community!

If I ever find the time I'd love to turn it into some kind of reinforcement learning environment :D

Confusing! This has nothing to do with rubygems, which I figured might have hit 20 years old. But no, they're only 16.

I thought the exact same thing! And this GemRB is not Ruby related at all.

On a side note, similar names abound in Ruby land! Only with a recent pull request merged for typo squatting protection is it that rubygems.org will stop someone from forking and publishing awesome_gem that is confusingly similar to awesome-gem.

Ahh, memories...

I remember finishing Baldur's Gate 2, then buying Baldur's Gate 1 and then spending a better part of holidays writing a Java app to convert BG1 data so it can be run on the BG2 engine. I was able to go from the start to the end of BG1-on-BG2 just with one glitch when the game could no switch from the custscene to the in-game mode...

There was (is?) a very dedicated community that reverse engineered practically all data formats allowing such projects like mine to be created. Of course there were much more persistent and knowledgeable people who released their projects to the world, so e.g. you could play from the beginning of BG1 to the end of BG2 in one go! Lots of community-provided fixes, modes and total conversions.

From what I know the guy (Avenger) who wrote the better part of GemRB (probably like 95% ;)) got hired by Beamdog to work on enhanced editions of BG1, BG2 and other Infinity Engine games to bring them to modern computers and other devices. Thx for the Linux version! (Even if I don't like Beamdog additions...)

It really was a blow to GemRB when he went to Beamdog, as he was almost as active as lynxlynxlynx and worked on the core parts of the engine. 95% is a bit of a stretch though, he is barely in third place in number of commits before the project founder Balrog994, with lynxlynxlynx having five times as many: https://github.com/gemrb/gemrb/graphs/contributors

My bad, should check contributions. Probably when I was playing with GemRB Avenger was very active in the project, including their forum. But yeah, now I remember Balrog and lynx as well..

I'm glad to see this still kicking, for awhile I was afraid it might get derailed when the enhanced editions were released along with Linux support.

I noticed that they only support a couple of chapters of Icewind Dale 2. Seems like IWD2 never gets any love, but honestly, I thought the adventure was garbage when it came out and still have never finished it. Ironically enough, I was inspired this past weekend to fire IWD2 up again but failed to get it to run in Wine (yet).

It does get plenty of love. It's just that out of all the Infinity Engine games, it has the most changes and lynxlynxlynx is developing GemRB almost on his own for the past five years. The engine was already outdated at that point, so they added in graphical changes and switched to the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons, so it takes more love to support than the other games (save for Planescape: Torment maybe, which was forked before Baldur's Gate was even released).

> GemRB is a portable free/libre open-source implementation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine, which powered classic CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment.

20 years and not a 1.0 release yet? Makes me wonder what release numbers mean to people. In this case, I guess 0.x does not mean that it is not considered ready/mature for production use; and does not mean that it is unstable and could change in wildly backwards incompat ways from release to release?

If you read the changes of 0.8.7, you will see e.g. the bumping pathfinding. I stopped playing on trying out GemRB for the first time when NPCs stood in the door and I simply could not advance; that's game-breaking. The next version will also have a major refactoring on another part, still lots to do.

I guess there's something interesting about a 20-year-old project whose community of utilizing developers is okay with no predictability or guarantees of backwards compat?

> The GemRB team announces the availability of GemRB 0.8.7, a new minor release to kick off a week of celebrations of the project’s founding anniversary.

Congrats on 20 years! Can we release a 1.0.0 version now? I know it's a nitpick and version numbers are largely arbitrary, but I hesitate to use software that is <1.0.0 because semver implies it is unstable. I know not everybody uses semver, but I wish they would ;-)

The minor version gets upped by one every time another game is completable. As Icewind Dale II is not yet finished, it will stay at 0.8.x for a while. You can still enjoy the other games (Baldur's Gate I/II and Icewind Dale being the best supported).

Nice of Hacker News to relist my submission, as this time it garnered some interest. Here is the first interview of the week with project founder Balrog994: https://gemrb.org/2020/08/25/interview-with-project-founder-...

Oh this is nice, have been looking at this project for a while as I love the IE games.

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