Specifically, the four flavors of playing in the Baldur’s Gate universe - basic, recommended, tactical and expert - are just too broad. The BWP expert mode is for people doing compatibility testing (or really have no other life) - the game is guaranteed to crash and the fun comes from figuring out how to fix it - but not much fun for someone who just wants to experience the game and its better mods. The BWP tactical mode is too hard, simply because every possible option to make the game tougher is chosen, and the game becomes a slog through monster muck, so this is aimed at people who live in the BG world, want to squeeze the juice from every spell option, and are looking to challenge themselves endlessly - again, not really for someone to simply enjoy a fun game. However, a basic BGT-only game doesn’t leverage mods (which often have more elements of humor and entertainment value than the vanilla version of the game) and the BWP recommended mode still has so many modifications built-in that you get so much money and so much capability during the course of gameplay that it has the potential to take as much out of the game as it puts in (even if you can live with the methodology of the corrective mods aimed at this problem).
So on my second round of 2010 experimenting, I moved to BWP v9.2, used it to download every mod it could find, then I found the rest manually (even the Chinese and Polish ones - a little OCD, but the challenge was fun). I then put each mod into its own numbered folder, matching the sequence as shown in the English BWP manual. However, instead of just letting the install pack do its thing natively, I went through the batch files line by line, activating some of the tactics choices, eliminating other choices and in some cases complete mods that I found reduced my pleasure in the game (obviously highly subjective) - especially the endless array of NPCs [in my last version of playing BWP, I just took to killing most of them outright - kind of like Robert Stack attacking the endless line of donation seekers in Airplane!]. I then ran the modified BWP batch files. Much to my surprise, this actually worked, but not without some pain. Despite my best efforts, it took me several failed runs (changes that I screwed up for one reason or another), before I got a happy, clean and functional version of the BWP game environment. Now I did all of this work in VMWare Fusion 3 and just to keep it really challenging, I also experimented with using a network drive (that multiple Macs could access and use). Here’s what I found out:
- Some of my choices sucked (giving me renewed respect for the efforts associated with BWP), but since the only way to keep the game speed playable is to biff up the approximately 9 billion files (small exaggeration, but when it actually hits this number the universe will end - a small variation on Clarke’s 9 Billion Names of God - consider yourself warned o prolific modding community) in the override folder, you can’t go back and fix it without an entirely new set of edits of the batch files and a re-build of the BWP instance. Since this is, in fact, a long and tedious process, it isn’t hard to sympathize with the tutu crowd that BWP is too inflexible and that you’re better off with fewer mods and a more nuanced experience.
- The great thing about BWP is exposure to almost all of the mods out there. Let’s face it, the problem with the tutu approach is you have to pick and choose with limited actual experience the mods and their various combinations. A look at the combinatorial math (how many different ways can you combine 350 mods) quickly yields numbers that state that you’d still be trying to play game variations right up to the “big rip” at the end of the universe - not especially practical.
- The truth is that I like and play both approaches - I use BWP to gain knowledge of the mods I like and get that feeling of a chaotic world where you can’t possibly experience or control everything - just like the real world. Once I know what I really like and why, I use those mods in a tutu instance of the game, which is a lot faster to create than a BWP instance (especially if you keep a virtual machine (VM) of a core tutu implementation to modify), and where I can experience the impact of an individual mod choice that doesn’t get submerged in 50 other mod choices.
- Using network drives to store and access vmdk files (the emulated Windows world set up by VMWare Fusion) can really suck if they get accidentally detached in mid-stride. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how to repair vmdk files when this happened. Fusion cleverly keeps changes from the “core” vmdk by using a series of interim files [usually invisible, but you can get to them] - you can throw away corrupted interim files and recover your primary instance - it’s still a pain though. I learned to duplicate my core VM and always play with a copy.
- Performance on network drives was surprisingly good - much better than I expected. This was true for both wired (100BaseT at a minimum) and wireless (802.11n) access. This did allow for experimenting with a variety of Macs as game machines - laptops, iMacs and minis all got into the game. However, if your network isn’t bulletproof or you’re really going to push the edge of what a VM package can do, you’re probably better off with a locally attached drive until you get a stable instance that you’re going to play for real.
- Performance of VMWare Fusion 3 in general is too slow for a full implementation of BWP - it works OK for a simpler tutu instance however. I like Fusion for the setup however - snapshots are implemented better than Parallels (just a personal opinion - I’m sure Parallels fans would disagree) and the feel is more like a generic Windows environment - I can’t imagine experimenting with mods effectively in CrossOver Games. After getting all of the BWP (or tutu) kinks hammered out, I’d play the final version in Parallels or in a CrossOver Games bottle - best of both worlds (speed for gameplay and clean experimentation in Windows - I would think this would be equally true for Wintel machines using Windows VMs as well - using the native Wintel machine when you’re happy with a configuration, but use a VM and snapshots for development of it).
- Virtual machine snapshots are both a blessing and a curse. When your snapshot is a 2 to 20 GB file - it can take a long while to create. However, it made experimenting with BWP so much easier that the time cost was worth it. I’d snapshot the VMWare machine that held a modified batch file before the run began. The batch file would error out because of something I did in the editing process. I’d snapshot it again at that point. Usually I could figure out what went wrong, edit the batch file to allow the process to continue, and most of the time I’d end up with a working BWP instance. If my fix didn’t work I could go back to where the batch file failed and try again or go back to before the start of the batch file run and reconfigure from that point. Having a VM pristine list of mods before they get processed and being able to keep going back to it until you get it right is the only way to really play effectively with BWP instance creation (other than just accepting the author's choices in the original batch file).
- Finally, snapshots are an absolute miracle when there are multiple outcomes when actually playing a BWP instance. Unlike going back to a save file that must be made pre-fight, a full-on Tactics mode activated fight that is going to last for a considerable number of minutes can be paused mid-fireball, snapshot, and replayed - this time using your Steaming No Save Possible Fecalball of Death spell instead of the Grease spell you unwisely chose in the heat of the moment.
It was about this time that an engineering company hired me to work on their Netcents-2 proposal (a multi-billion dollar Air Force gig to modernize their networks via remote application & network management and virtual machine technology) - alas, RL intruding on VL. Two years later, I’m finally free to pursue Bhaalboys and related minions again, and the BWP author and various related minions, henchpersons (henchpeople?), and modification gurus have hardly been standing still. You folks are simply the gift that keeps on giving! Better VM engines, BWP v11.1 and an array of bug-stomped versions of modifications await.
Posts, post-testing, will be posted posthaste.
