Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for the iPad | Hacker News Reader

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for the iPad

itunes.apple.com

84 pointsadamwintle47 comments

I can understand not supporting iOS 4.x. Memory management got a whole lot less annoying with ARC (automatic reference counting) in iOS 5.x.

But there are a lot of people, myself included, who won't upgrade our devices to iOS 6 because we want a Maps product that works and, you know, has public transit directions. Until that changes I'm staying on iOS 5.

It's a shame. I'd buy this in a heartbeat. I love to support actual games (social "games" not being games by my definition), which seem to be becoming increasingly rare.

Perhaps you are greatly overestimating how much "a lot of people" actually are.

I don't know. My mom who is by no means a technical user was carefully avoiding the upgrade for a month on her iPad, just due to the bad news about maps in mainstream news. (And Then she accidentally clicked yes on an upgrade nag notification, and spent the rest of the day discovering broken stuff. Not just the maps, but e.g. the Youtube app and all the browser bookmarks disappearing).

I'm pretty sure your mom doesn't represent 'a lot of people'.

No one represents a lot of people, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of people holding off on upgrading to iOS 6.

For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

I know as a developer I'm not even thinking about iOS 6-only releases until the middle of next year. Which is a bitch because dealing with the iPhone 5 without autolayout is no fun at all.

I suspect the reasoning is to prohibit first gen iPads.

> For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

The iPad 1 has 256 megs of RAM. The iPad 2 has 512, The 3 & 4 a gig.

"Requires iOS 6" is the easiest way, as a dev, to get the store to enforce the requirement that your app needs more than 256 Megs to run comfortably.

For comparison, the original version of Baldur's Gate required 16 MB of RAM (32 MB recommended).

On the other hand, I think that ran in much lower resolution and in 8bit color.

If you still have the original disks, you can recreate the magic with GemRB.

http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start

I believe the default was 640x480x16 bit. I am not sure whether you could up it to 32 bit 1024x768 but I know you could in BGII. Still have my disks somewhere.

Note that 256 megs is how much physical RAM the iPad 1 has; the amount available to the foreground application is much less than that. Indeed, on the iPad 1 you're lucky if you have much more than 100 Megs to yourself while you're running.

And, as others have said, higher color depths will make some difference, and no doubt the port puts a lot less effort into RAM conservation than the original did.

All your points are correct, but when the original version required 16 MB of RAM it wasn't expected to be able to dedicate all of that to itself either.

Per one of the devs on Twitter, a lot of the difference in base memory requirement is that the original expected to have a significant swap file to work with on top of those 16 megs, while the iPad app has no such luxury.

ARC isn't even an iOS feature... it's a compiler feature.

weak refs in ARC require OS support

You can always use PLWeakCompatibility on iOS4: https://github.com/plausiblelabs/PLWeakCompatibility/

They actually are working on iOS 5 right now according to their mailing:

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for iPad is currently English only, with additional languages coming in a free update. The iPad version also requires iOS 6, but iOS 5 support is coming soon!

Just because you refuse to move with the times doesn't mean the developer wants to be stuck with you.

In all our apps the people hanging on to iOS 5 is about 10%, and it's shrinking all the time. So there's very little incentive for the dev to bother putting in the time and effort to try and sort out whatever issues there are on iOS 5 / performance issues on the iPad 1.

I could understand this sentiment if the iOS device in question was an iPhone, but do you really rely on Google Maps' directions to help you navigate on your iPad while you're out and about on the road?

Actually, iOS 6 has awesome maps... of the world of Baldur's Gate.

Google Maps web UI for IOS still works fine. You can even make it an icon right under the new Maps.

I'm such a geek for these old isometric games. If you are too, I'd recommend checking out Project Eternity (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternit...) and Wasteland 2 (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2) on KickStarter.

Both were very successful in raising funds, so I'm hoping we see a renaissance of the genre and some new IP.

If you like these, you should check out the RPGs by Spiderweb Software. They're available for iPad as well as Mac and PC:

http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.html

dont forget Fallout 1 and 2.

I wonder how much effort had to go into reworking the orginal codebase to make this performant. The Infinity Engine that was used for BG didn't use OpenGL acceleration until BG2 and IcewindDale. I bet this was a fun project to work on.

I doubt they are using the GemRB open source implementation [0] since it is GPLv2.

[0]: http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start

Baldur's Gate is one of my favorite games of all time, and I'm generally behind the Enhanced Edition - I hope a new generation of gamers will be inspired by the world of BG, as I was 14 years ago.

Having said that, playing BG:EE on PC for the past week I've been disappointed by the lack of polish, and the number of bugs still present. GameBanshee - probably the most respected site about computer RPGs - published a pretty critical review (of the PC version):

http://gamebanshee.com/reviews/110209-baldurs-gate-enhanced-...

I hope the iPad version benefited from an extra week of polish. An earlier build was rejected, implying the have done some bug-squishing:

https://twitter.com/TrentOster/status/275743862507589632

It looks like it requires iOS 6, so I won't be able to play it on my 1st gen iPad. Sad times!

Nor on my iPad 3, which I have deliberately not 'upgraded'... oh well, I'll wait for BG2.

I pasted this above as well, but they're working on iOS 5 support:

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for iPad is currently English only, with additional languages coming in a free update. The iPad version also requires iOS 6, but iOS 5 support is coming soon!

The developers were seeing out of memory issues on the iPad 1, thus the requirement for iOS 6. I believe there is still some hope they can get it to run, but ultimately, that didn't hold up the release:

https://twitter.com/TrentOster/status/276748438882902016

Yeah, the original iPad is the most memory-constrained ARMv7 (i.e. iOS 5-capable) iOS device out there.

I realise it's kind of ridiculous to complain, but it's also ridiculous that a 14 year old game won't play on a few years old tablet, and I'll need top urchase this year's model if I want to play said 14 year old game.

If you can manage to setup a DOS emulation layer on your iPad 1, you'll find out that the 14 year old game would play just fine.

The new, just released, native version of the 14 year old game, however, will not.

I for one think it's nice that this story hasn't been flagged. It's a Friday, and this was welcome news for me. Thank you, @adamwintle, for the post.

Anyone know how the save system works? Can you hit the home button at anytime and come back in to the game later right were you left off?

Finally! There's one game I've been waiting for on the iPad for ages. The burning question: is it a literal port or did they speed up some of the awfully slow "go fetch a broomstick from the other side of the map at walking speed" quests that are so common at the beginning of the game?

More-or-less a direct port. They added a stand-alone 'arena mode', and a few new NPC companions, 2 of whom have an associated quest/new area.

I was going to get this on PC, but 20 bucks for a game a still have sitting on my shelf is a bit much.

OTOH i will jump on it when it comes to Android, not only a much more reasonable 10 dollars but i think the touchscreen experience might add value in its own right.

The total price is the same, the PC version includes several DLCs, while on iOS you buy them separately.

I would love to see a gameplay video on the iPad. The controls could be very tough...

Here's the first half of the tutorial:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pOqwUoJniPQ

I feel like the controls are pretty decent. It's pretty much a straight port from the PC, so the menus are the same, etc. The hitbox for small items can be a bit of an issue, but that's my only complaint so far.

You may want to browse through the TouchArcade forums for more feedback and videos:

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=169358

Hm, did I time it wrong or why did no one see my earlier submission? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4887373

In app purchases DO NOT work on iPad version. I paid 3 bucks and the new character is nowhere to be found with ZERO EXPLANATION as to what to do after they took my money.

This is the first thing that's made me want an ipad for anything more than marking up web development work.

On Android you could play it (and Icewind Dale, etc) with the FOSS https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforg...

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