Hi folks,

Luke Rideout here.

We decided to change up the blog format this month, as the question-and-answer posts kept getting repeats of similar items, or queries we can’t really talk about yet. So, I wanted to go a little more free-form and talk a bit about what’s been going on in Beamdog-land over the last couple of months.

Upcoming Console Releases

As you are all probably aware by now, we’ve partnered up with Skybound on releasing all of our Enhanced Editions for Nintendo Switch, PS4, and XBox One (check out the full announcement here) - they’re coming along very nicely, and dare I say (as a 20-year fan of Baldur’s Gate and the rest of our games) feel pretty fresh played with a controller. We’re deep in the process of finaling the games now, and we’re really excited to see everyone’s reactions when they come out in the Fall. The whole team has been ultra-focused on making it work on a platform many said couldn’t work, and I’m like a proud father when I think about how well the team’s done.

For an overview of how the game works with a controller, I’ll point you to our Q&A from April (Question 9), but text alone doesn’t really do justice to how great it feels. We got some fantastic, very positive feedback when we demoed Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition at PAX East, and smoothed out a few more rough edges since then, so I’m confident that you’ll enjoy it when you try it out.

The 2.6 Patch for Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale

Some more news on the Infinity Engine games front: Remember the 2.6 update? Without going into gory detail, it’s taken quite a while to get it ready for primetime, due to the necessity of updating to 64-bit on a few platforms, some build issues requiring us to change how we compile Android, and the situation regarding the voice & portrait packs, so we haven’t been able to deliver it into your hands yet, but it should be on its way to you in short order.

Some highlights on 2.6, since I’m sure you’re wondering what to expect: We’ve identified and fixed a number of performance problems, and believe we’ve also found a working solution to some particularly nasty pathfinding code that was causing rapid, nigh-infinite calls to our pathfinding system in large fights. Coupled with improvements to our pathfinding system (that we are in the process of verifying won’t break multiplayer - one of our major concerns when evaluating the pathfinding code) - and related fixes to character bumping, we have made positive strides to solving some of the more well-documented long-term issues. The squeaky wheel finally got the kick, if you will.

The Google Play Fix

With the 2.6 update, our Android players will also be happy to hear that we’ve finally resolved our issues on Google Play, so you’ll be back online with 2.6, as soon as we can finish verifying the stability of the builds.

There were some questions about what exactly happened with Google Play, so let me shed some light on the situation. The short version is, what caused the issue was that we included a crash reporting tool in our games that would basically send emergency error reports to us in the event of app crashes so that we could gather telemetry and hopefully fix problems even without crash reports.

Unfortunately, that crash reporting software gathered this data using a Google Play Service called AdvertisingID, which tracks information about your phone’s hardware specs - really valuable in crash reporting, but unfortunately also subject to Google’s new policy on disclosure of data gathering, which meant we had to implement a message in-game describing basically what I just wrote above, or take it out. We did some evaluation, and decided to remove it in its entirety, so that’s all gone now.

That work was fairly trivial, but what unfortunately wasn’t trivial was that the build pipeline we used for all of the IE games on Google Play since we released 2.5 was deprecated, and we had to basically rebuild the project for our IE titles on Android entirely before we would be able to even resubmit. There used to be 3 ways to build for Android - all Google-approved, but the one we were using lost out when they decided to switch over, and now everything has to go through Android Studio. The silver lining being that thanks to this update, we’ve also updated to 64-bit and API level 26, which was necessary to stay listed on Google Play when it eventually removes support for 32-bit apps. We’re almost at the end of that road, and once we’ve verified that everything’s in good shape, we can QA it, and hopefully get it to you within the next few weeks.

Sorry for the time it took to get that all to you - but now that we’re both compliant with Google’s data collection rules, and updated to 64-bit, we shouldn’t run into any further issues when Google stops supporting 32-bit apps later this year (fingers crossed).

TL;DR: 2.6 is coming out on Google Play posthaste, including the re-release of Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition on Android. Other platforms also inbound. Shouldn’t be too long.

That’s all I’ve got for this Beamblog - Next time, I hope to have something interesting to share about the new Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Renderer!

Cheers!

Luke Rideout

Lead Producer & Project Director