
The GemRB project celebrates 20 year anniversary with a new release - Lightkey
https://gemrb.org/2020/08/24/the-gemrb-project-celebrates-20-year-anniversary-with-a-new-release.html
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MasterScrat
I love this project!

Many years ago I was playing with the idea to bring these games to the browser
(decade-old demo:
[http://lumakey.net/labs/battleground/demo1/](http://lumakey.net/labs/battleground/demo1/)).
I spent many long nights studying GemRB's code and the file format
documentation from the Gibberlings Three community!

If I ever find the time I'd love to turn it into some kind of reinforcement
learning environment :D

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regularfry
Confusing! This has nothing to do with rubygems, which I figured _might_ have
hit 20 years old. But no, they're only 16.

~~~
rietta
I thought the exact same thing! And this GemRB is not Ruby related at all.

On a side note, similar names abound in Ruby land! Only with a recent pull
request merged for typo squatting protection is it that rubygems.org will stop
someone from forking and publishing awesome_gem that is confusingly similar to
awesome-gem.

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hipnoizz
Ahh, memories...

I remember finishing Baldur's Gate 2, then buying Baldur's Gate 1 and then
spending a better part of holidays writing a Java app to convert BG1 data so
it can be run on the BG2 engine. I was able to go from the start to the end of
BG1-on-BG2 just with one glitch when the game could no switch from the
custscene to the in-game mode...

There was (is?) a very dedicated community that reverse engineered practically
all data formats allowing such projects like mine to be created. Of course
there were much more persistent and knowledgeable people who released their
projects to the world, so e.g. you could play from the beginning of BG1 to the
end of BG2 in one go! Lots of community-provided fixes, modes and total
conversions.

From what I know the guy (Avenger) who wrote the better part of GemRB
(probably like 95% ;)) got hired by Beamdog to work on enhanced editions of
BG1, BG2 and other Infinity Engine games to bring them to modern computers and
other devices. Thx for the Linux version! (Even if I don't like Beamdog
additions...)

~~~
Lightkey
It really was a blow to GemRB when he went to Beamdog, as he was almost as
active as lynxlynxlynx and worked on the core parts of the engine. 95% is a
bit of a stretch though, he is barely in third place in number of commits
before the project founder Balrog994, with lynxlynxlynx having five times as
many:
[https://github.com/gemrb/gemrb/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/gemrb/gemrb/graphs/contributors)

~~~
hipnoizz
My bad, should check contributions. Probably when I was playing with GemRB
Avenger was very active in the project, including their forum. But yeah, now I
remember Balrog and lynx as well..

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retro64
I'm glad to see this still kicking, for awhile I was afraid it might get
derailed when the enhanced editions were released along with Linux support.

I noticed that they only support a couple of chapters of Icewind Dale 2. Seems
like IWD2 never gets any love, but honestly, I thought the adventure was
garbage when it came out and still have never finished it. Ironically enough,
I was inspired this past weekend to fire IWD2 up again but failed to get it to
run in Wine (yet).

~~~
Lightkey
It does get plenty of love. It's just that out of all the Infinity Engine
games, it has the most changes and lynxlynxlynx is developing GemRB almost on
his own for the past five years. The engine was already outdated at that
point, so they added in graphical changes and switched to the 3rd edition of
Dungeons & Dragons, so it takes more love to support than the other games
(save for Planescape: Torment maybe, which was forked before Baldur's Gate was
even released).

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fouc
> GemRB is a portable free/libre open-source implementation of Bioware’s
> Infinity Engine, which powered classic CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind
> Dale and Planescape: Torment.

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jrochkind1
20 years and not a 1.0 release yet? Makes me wonder what release numbers mean
to people. In this case, I guess 0.x does _not_ mean that it is not considered
ready/mature for production use; and does _not_ mean that it is unstable and
could change in wildly backwards incompat ways from release to release?

~~~
Lightkey
If you read the changes of 0.8.7, you will see e.g. the bumping pathfinding. I
stopped playing on trying out GemRB for the first time when NPCs stood in the
door and I simply could not advance; that's game-breaking. The next version
will also have a major refactoring on another part, still lots to do.

~~~
jrochkind1
I guess there's something interesting about a 20-year-old project whose
community of utilizing developers is okay with no predictability or guarantees
of backwards compat?

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freedomben
> _The GemRB team announces the availability of GemRB 0.8.7, a new minor
> release to kick off a week of celebrations of the project’s founding
> anniversary._

Congrats on 20 years! Can we release a 1.0.0 version now? I know it's a
nitpick and version numbers are largely arbitrary, but I hesitate to use
software that is <1.0.0 because semver implies it is unstable. I know not
everybody uses semver, but I wish they would ;-)

~~~
Lightkey
The minor version gets upped by one every time another game is completable. As
Icewind Dale II is not yet finished, it will stay at 0.8.x for a while. You
can still enjoy the other games (Baldur's Gate I/II and Icewind Dale being the
best supported).

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Lightkey
Nice of Hacker News to relist my submission, as this time it garnered some
interest. Here is the first interview of the week with project founder
Balrog994: [https://gemrb.org/2020/08/25/interview-with-project-
founder-...](https://gemrb.org/2020/08/25/interview-with-project-founder-
daniele-collantoni.html)

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markus_zhang
Oh this is nice, have been looking at this project for a while as I love the
IE games.

