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Baldur's Gate seriesBaldur's Torment(11 posts)(11 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted March 24, 2016
Hello everyone!

According to my most favourite site in the whole world (but not the whole universe), Planescape: Torment has unused assets from Baldur's Gate 1.

[url=https://tcrf.net/Planescape:_Torment#Baldur.27s_Gate_Leftovers]https://tcrf.net/Planescape:_Torment#Baldur.27s_Gate_Leftovers[/url]

I'm not really sure why that's in there, but I'd like to take a shot in the dark if you don't mind. Planescape used the BG1 assets as a skeleton for the game itself and the developers never really got around to removing the data.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if that was wrong though. I'm not a game developer, I'm not a computer programmer, and I never even played Torment. Maybe me and this thread don't actually exist and you are currently suffering from severe hallucinations. Who knows?
Posted March 24, 2016
It's nothing new. All Infinity Engine games, Icewind Dales included, have remnants from the original Baldur's Gate lurking in there.
Posted March 24, 2016
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Hickory: It's nothing new. All Infinity Engine games, Icewind Dales included, have remnants from the original Baldur's Gate lurking in there.
Thanks for the info! I didn't know that about the IE games.
Posted March 24, 2016
Here's the thing:

If you, as a developer, were to remove all the unused assets, it is very likely that you would make a mistake and remove something that is actually used by the game. This would likely lead to a crash that would then take time to debug.

Leaving in the assets saves the time it would take to remove them and ensure that the game still works properly. Also, the assets don't take much space, and as of the original release of the Infinity Engine games, we don't have to deal with things like fitting the entire game in 64K. This isn't the pre-DOS games where games had to run from floppy disks.
Posted March 24, 2016
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dtgreene: Here's the thing:

If you, as a developer, were to remove all the unused assets, it is very likely that you would make a mistake and remove something that is actually used by the game.
This is a scenario that should absolutely never happen. That's what testing and quality control is for. I do agree that leaving them in is not a big deal though.
Posted March 25, 2016
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dtgreene: Here's the thing:

If you, as a developer, were to remove all the unused assets, it is very likely that you would make a mistake and remove something that is actually used by the game.
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Hickory: This is a scenario that should absolutely never happen. That's what testing and quality control is for. I do agree that leaving them in is not a big deal though.
It shouldn't happen, but it can and does happen. In playing Wizardry 8, I have tripped a couple of assertions in the final version of the game, and one of them is so easy to reproduce that it should have been caught by the testers. (If you use up the last of an item by pressing Shift-U to use the last item, the assertion is tripped and the game crashes.)

Incidentally, Baldur's Gate 2 has the debug item "killsw01" (that's the code you enter to get the item using cheats) that was left in. The item was made to allow the testers to quickly play through the game without having to worry about those pesky battles. Note that this item is not balanced at all and will completely remove all challenge from the game, so I don't recommend using it on a serious playthrough. (It makes you nearly invincible and hits for thousands of damage when you attack, among other things.)

Note that the Kill Sword mentioned above is not the same weapon that Arkanis Gath uses; that weapon instead has an instant kill effect that doesn't allow saving throw or magic resistance, but can be blocked with Death Ward.
Posted March 25, 2016
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dtgreene: In playing Wizardry 8, I have tripped a couple of assertions in the final version of the game, and one of them is so easy to reproduce that it should have been caught by the testers. (If you use up the last of an item by pressing Shift-U to use the last item, the assertion is tripped and the game crashes.)
I'm not seeing the connection with leaving unused assets in a game. What am I missing?
Posted March 25, 2016
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dtgreene: In playing Wizardry 8, I have tripped a couple of assertions in the final version of the game, and one of them is so easy to reproduce that it should have been caught by the testers. (If you use up the last of an item by pressing Shift-U to use the last item, the assertion is tripped and the game crashes.)
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Hickory: I'm not seeing the connection with leaving unused assets in a game. What am I missing?
The killsw01 is unused in the game, hence the connection.

You can easily cheat any of the unused items into your inventory, provided you know the filename. In fact, if there are unused areas (are there any?). you could probably cheat yourself into them. Of course, remember that those areas likely haven't received the same testing coverage as the areas that are used, and as a result, any content there might be buggy.
Posted March 25, 2016
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Hickory: I'm not seeing the connection with leaving unused assets in a game. What am I missing?
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dtgreene: The killsw01 is unused in the game, hence the connection.
Yes, but that was a new paragraph, "incidentally" remark from you, so the connection was not made. Not to mention you were talking about using up a last item.
Post edited March 25, 2016 by Hickory
Posted March 25, 2016
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dtgreene: The killsw01 is unused in the game, hence the connection.
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Hickory: Yes, but that was a new paragraph, "incidentally" remark from you, so the connection was not made. Not to mention you were talking about using up a last item.
The "using up a last item" comment was me commenting on a bug in Wizardry 8, similar to the sort of bug that might come up if a deleted item were to be used. (Actually, in a sense, I think that is what is happening here; the item disappears from your inventory before the game uses it, and then notices that it's trying to use an empty slot, which is not supposed to happen.)

Wizardry 8 actually does have some unused items in the game, most of which existed in Wizardry 7 (like the Thermal Pineapple), but some of which are new (like the Demon Doll).

In any case, it is normal for the topic of conversation in a thread to drift a bit.

By the way, I think it might be possible to keep BG1 only items in BG2 by doing the glitch that lets you avoid losing your equipment at the start of the game.
Posted March 25, 2016
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dtgreene: By the way, I think it might be possible to keep BG1 only items in BG2 by doing the glitch that lets you avoid losing your equipment at the start of the game.
Or simply give them to yourself via the console or save game edit.
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Baldur's Gate seriesBaldur's Torment(11 posts)(11 posts)
(11 posts)