Cliftor: What's the word these days on the possibility of ever getting the IE source? I imagine that would render many modding headaches moot.
Extremely unlikely. One of the reasons you don't see old commercial engine source released publicly is that they have third-party proprietary dependencies, such as AV playback code, which the owners of the engine can't legally release. Those dependencies could be stripped out, of course, but that would take time and effort *and* would give you a codebase that wasn't useful until the open source community plugged something else in which would work. Infinity definitely falls under that category, not only because of the codebase but because of the proprietary AD&D ruleset which is baked into the code.
I had a conversation with Bioware's licensing rep years ago and Infinity was not available at any price--nobody remained with the company who really understood it, and that was in 2005. He said that they had experimented with providing Infinity to a few universities, but it ended up being far more hassle for everyone involved than it was worth.
I suppose it's possible that EA International would feel differently, and assign an employee to the not-insubstantial task of stripping stuff like Bink and AD&D out of the engine, and release it... but the odds are very very very very low.
thelovebat: Just curious, what's the point of modding such a great game as this?
Adding in everything from items to new characters and subplots. Some people do prefer the purity of the original, however.
Another small question, what's the point of a widescreen patch anyway? Does it serve some purpose, or make the aspect ratio better? I say that because Baldurs Gate looks just fine on my 1080p monitor.
Sure, the monitor can stretch the 640x480 image to fill your screen, but you're just zooming in. The widescreen mods increase the size of the playfield so that far more map real estate is visible on-screen at once, and you don't have the sometimes-blocky zoom effect.
