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...)
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.
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).
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 ;-)
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/). 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
