gliamonster: This is great news, rather than people naively paying out for "enhanced" versions they can turn to the open source community and get improvements for free (as they should have done with Baldur's Gate instead of paying again...)
molerat: This attitude is one thing that always irked me (to say the least) about some of the anit-EE people. Note that I'm saying some, not all.
Just because you have the time and know how to dig up all the third party mods and install them doesn't mean other people do.
I'm relatively neutral on the whole deal myself (the existence of the EEs that is), but acting like its simple for everyone or its how it "should" be done is the naive thing.
I know plenty of intelligent adults who may enjoy a game like Baldur's gate or Icewind Dale but quite frankly have limited entertainment time, and/or limited experience with installing programs on computers.
People that might, say, accidentally end up installing malware on my mother's laptop making me deal with the headache of removing it all. (My brother was guilty of this one, and he's not exactly stupid by any means, just not computer savvy sometimes.)
People like my cousin who are busy busy busy who have better things to do than learning which mods are what, where they can be obtained reliably, and if there's anything special that needs to be done to install them. Remember, just because you know such and such mod website is relatively safe doesn't mean that everyone does. Why spend that time learning how to even "run" the game when they can just be playing it instead? (Edit, my brother is also in the pretty damned busy category, what with kids and all.)
Having a newer version of the game that they can just click "install" and then click "play" on are ideal fore these kinds of people.
Especially when you get into older versions of games that, while they still technically run on modern OS's, may have issues or inconveniences that modern games don't have, and people won't want.
No, I'm not saying the EE"s are awesome sauce or whatever.
What I'm saying is don't assume that because its easy for you to do, or you have time to do, or you think it should be done that way, doesn't mean it actually is that for anyone else. People have their own priorities, and quite often convenience is a thing they are willing to pay for (clearly, since the EE's seem to be selling quite well despite they many detractors I see on this site).
Also, people being happy that the code is lost... Yeah why really? Sure, Beamdog would probably use it to make another EE, but them aside the loss of the code also means a loss of the game in a historical sense.
20 years from now are OS's going to use the same calls/system things/whatevers (sue me I'm not a coder) they are now? No, probably not.
Hell, eventually they will go to an new architecture all together much like when things jumped from 16 to 32 bit and suddenly all those old DOS things wouldn't work on the new computers. (Yes, they kept backward compatibility when they jumped up to 64 bit processors, but keeping it going will become less and less viable as technology progresses.)
Are emulators going to be reliable enough to run these things?
Maybe, but the further you get into windows and the direct3d/directx/whatever the more complicated you get. Especially when you consider how badly some games use those API. There's a blog/forum post out there written by a former AMD or NVidia employee describing the horrible state of some games using the DirectX APi, and how they basically had to hack in things for individual games to make them work because the devs didn't follow the rules so to speak.
Any directx emulator that's coded is going to have to deal with all those individual game hacks, and is going to have to do so without the aid of the companies that made the games.
Essentially the game becomes much more likely to be lost to time. How is that a good thing?
Edit: Small typo, clarifying a line.
The problem is not with EE's per se.but with some of what Beamdog to the games. The Addition of New Charecters and items to the games pissed a lor of people off, in my opinion quite rightly.
I think a lot of the beamdog hate is really oner the top,but some of it Beamdog brouth upon itself with some bad decision.
I think if the EE's had simply given us the original modidfed to run on a modern computer without jumping through a lot of hoops (things like screen support, graphic glitches with modern video cards,etc) there would be few objections.
