I can understand not supporting iOS 4.x. Memory management got a whole lot less annoying with ARC (automatic reference counting) in iOS 5.x.
But there are a lot of people, myself included, who won't upgrade our devices to iOS 6 because we want a Maps product that works and, you know, has public transit directions. Until that changes I'm staying on iOS 5.
It's a shame. I'd buy this in a heartbeat. I love to support actual games (social "games" not being games by my definition), which seem to be becoming increasingly rare.
They actually are working on iOS 5 right now according to their mailing:
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for iPad is currently English only, with additional languages coming in a free update. The iPad version also requires iOS 6, but iOS 5 support is coming soon!
I could understand this sentiment if the iOS device in question was an iPhone, but do you really rely on Google Maps' directions to help you navigate on your iPad while you're out and about on the road?
For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.
I know as a developer I'm not even thinking about iOS 6-only releases until the middle of next year. Which is a bitch because dealing with the iPhone 5 without autolayout is no fun at all.
Note that 256 megs is how much physical RAM the iPad 1 has; the amount available to the foreground application is much less than that. Indeed, on the iPad 1 you're lucky if you have much more than 100 Megs to yourself while you're running.
And, as others have said, higher color depths will make some difference, and no doubt the port puts a lot less effort into RAM conservation than the original did.
All your points are correct, but when the original version required 16 MB of RAM it wasn't expected to be able to dedicate all of that to itself either.
Per one of the devs on Twitter, a lot of the difference in base memory requirement is that the original expected to have a significant swap file to work with on top of those 16 megs, while the iPad app has no such luxury.
I believe the default was 640x480x16 bit. I am not sure whether you could up it to 32 bit 1024x768 but I know you could in BGII. Still have my disks somewhere.
Just because you refuse to move with the times doesn't mean the developer wants to be stuck with you.
In all our apps the people hanging on to iOS 5 is about 10%, and it's shrinking all the time. So there's very little incentive for the dev to bother putting in the time and effort to try and sort out whatever issues there are on iOS 5 / performance issues on the iPad 1.
I don't know. My mom who is by no means a technical user was carefully avoiding the upgrade for a month on her iPad, just due to the bad news about maps in mainstream news. (And Then she accidentally clicked yes on an upgrade nag notification, and spent the rest of the day discovering broken stuff. Not just the maps, but e.g. the Youtube app and all the browser bookmarks disappearing).
I wonder how much effort had to go into reworking the orginal codebase to make this performant. The Infinity Engine that was used for BG didn't use OpenGL acceleration until BG2 and IcewindDale. I bet this was a fun project to work on.
I doubt they are using the GemRB open source implementation [0] since it is GPLv2.
Baldur's Gate is one of my favorite games of all time, and I'm generally behind the Enhanced Edition - I hope a new generation of gamers will be inspired by the world of BG, as I was 14 years ago.
Having said that, playing BG:EE on PC for the past week I've been disappointed by the lack of polish, and the number of bugs still present. GameBanshee - probably the most respected site about computer RPGs - published a pretty critical review (of the PC version):
The developers were seeing out of memory issues on the iPad 1, thus the requirement for iOS 6. I believe there is still some hope they can get it to run, but ultimately, that didn't hold up the release:
I realise it's kind of ridiculous to complain, but it's also ridiculous that a 14 year old game won't play on a few years old tablet, and I'll need top urchase this year's model if I want to play said 14 year old game.
I pasted this above as well, but they're working on iOS 5 support:
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for iPad is currently English only, with additional languages coming in a free update. The iPad version also requires iOS 6, but iOS 5 support is coming soon!
Finally! There's one game I've been waiting for on the iPad for ages. The burning question: is it a literal port or did they speed up some of the awfully slow "go fetch a broomstick from the other side of the map at walking speed" quests that are so common at the beginning of the game?
I was going to get this on PC, but 20 bucks for a game a still have sitting on my shelf is a bit much.
OTOH i will jump on it when it comes to Android, not only a much more reasonable 10 dollars but i think the touchscreen experience might add value in its own right.
I feel like the controls are pretty decent. It's pretty much a straight port from the PC, so the menus are the same, etc. The hitbox for small items can be a bit of an issue, but that's my only complaint so far.
You may want to browse through the TouchArcade forums for more feedback and videos:
In app purchases DO NOT work on iPad version. I paid 3 bucks and the new character is nowhere to be found with ZERO EXPLANATION as to what to do after they took my money.
But there are a lot of people, myself included, who won't upgrade our devices to iOS 6 because we want a Maps product that works and, you know, has public transit directions. Until that changes I'm staying on iOS 5.
It's a shame. I'd buy this in a heartbeat. I love to support actual games (social "games" not being games by my definition), which seem to be becoming increasingly rare.