Beamdog Update, March 19, 2019

“Axis & Allies Online has been a labour of love from a lot of the developers over at Beamdog. We’ve been working hard to ensure we’ve made a game that is faithful to the source material, and just as fun to play.” ~ Cody Ouimet

These are busy times at Beamdog. We thought we’d give you a quick update on what we are up to:

• Axis & Allies Online is available to wishlist on Steam. Take a first look at screenshots and get ready for an official adaptation of the classic board game! Axis & Allies Online is coming soon to Steam Early Access for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Next Wednesday (3/27) at 09am PT we will have an AMA session at https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/ about Axis & Allies Online with our community manager Julius Borisov! Hope to see you there!
• Beamdog is heading to PAX East! We’ll be in Boston from March 28 - 31. Come meet us at the Skybound Games booth, where Trent Oster, Luke Rideout, Alfonso Munoz, and Sarah Dawson will be showing a playable demo of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for PS4 and Switch so you can try it hands-on. Check Skybound Games’ Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts for more details on bringing Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate ll, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights to consoles.
• The playable demo of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for PS4 and Switch at the Skybound Games booth will feature the voice and portrait of Evelyn from the Dice, Camera, Action! pack for the first time.

“We are Axis and Allies fans and we’ve worked hard to build a fun, accessible version of the game and we hope you enjoy playing it as much as we have.” ~ Trent

• Check out the latest Axis & Allies Online interview with Beamdog CEO Trent Oster and Producer Cody Ouimet by Axis and Allies.org about the origin story of Axis & Allies Online, development insights, and more.
• Back in February, Trent Oster gave an interview to The Fly where he discussed Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, console ports, creating original games, and more.
• Check out the latest issue of community magazine Wild Surge for an interview with Beamdog Marketing and PR Lead Sarah Dawson about Axis & Allies Online!
• Beamdog has 50 employees as of last week, and we’re still hiring! We’re looking for Programmers, Lead Programmers, and Designers to join our team!
• Last week we launched the new and improved Beamdog.com which now covers both the D&D games and Axis & Allies Online. As a part of our site update, the Beamdog Client also received a small update (2.1.11 ver) to point to the Beamdog Store’s new URL. If you’re using the Beamdog Client and haven’t updated yet, it should still work normally.
• Kate Welch, game designer at Wizards of the Coast, moved on to play Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition in her show, Welch's Game Juice. Join her on Twitch every Thursday at 3pm PT to win giveaways!

Let us know your thoughts on our new website!

• The next patch for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is not quite ready. As we mentioned in December, once we started on the renderer and 64-bit integration in earnest, that became our main focus. We have a team dedicated to the renderer, and the 64-bit merge has happened, but we’ve got a road ahead of us before we’re going to be able to put a bow on it and make it public, as the console branch requires us to spend time adding controller support, to spend time cleaning up some long-overdue UI problems, and other changes that will have far-reaching benefits in the long run.
• We don’t have a full feature list we can share with players yet, but the new renderer for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is very robust, and gives us, potentially, access to all the bells and whistles one looks for in a modern game. Luke thinks players and modders will be pleasantly surprised by its capabilities.
• A controller version of the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition UI for PC wouldn’t be impossible. The controller branch currently is distinct from the PC branch because Neverwinter’s UI wasn’t designed with a controller in mind, meaning we have to include a number of changes to UI and camera behaviour that we would have to reconcile between the console and PC versions. But either way, it would likely be something to investigate after the Console version ships.
• The iOS port of NWN:EE is in progress. We don’t have an ETA yet, but it is being actively worked on, as well as updates to the Android version in parallel.
• We have a team of dedicated QA who are testing all of the builds, logging bugs, performing regression testing, and confirming both functionality and bug fixes on a daily basis. All of the development team are responsible for fixing the bugs on the features that they work on. The “New” status in the public bug tracker isn’t a measurement of time in the tracker, but an indication of whether an issue has been triaged and escalated. If a bug is listed as “New”, it means it’s still in the queue to be triaged.
• The Dice, Camera, Action! voice and portrait pack will introduce a new vendor - Alveus Malcanter (voiced by Mark Meer). You’ll find him in each game (Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition) selling four items tied to the Waffle Crew. Any further items he would carry would always be thematically tied to the pack they’re distributed with.
• We looked into the possibility of an easter egg banter between Alveus Malcanter and Baeloth (since Mark Meer is the voice of both, as well as a few other voices in the game) in Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Unfortunately, it was out of the scope of what we could do for the first iteration of the Alveus Malcanter character.
• We’ve made significant improvements to pathfinding and collision in the console ports of our Infinity Engine games. Luke hopes to back-port these improvements to PC, but they’re not a part of the 2.6 patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition (which is still in the works).
• Luke has been interested for a while in making Ascension an official “DLC” for Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and a few other similar mods, but there are some challenges in that: we can’t legally distribute content that we don’t own or have permission from all involved parties. In the case of some, where the people who worked on it are not in communication with us, our hands are tied.
• It appears that the primary reason that Catmull-Rom was dropped in the 2.0 patch was that it caused some very large performance issues with the mobile versions of the game. It is something that might be worth looking at restoring, but we’d need to do a little more research as to why we were unable to keep it in the first place.
• There seems to be an issue with an old implementation of Android softkeys not playing nicely with Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition after they were updated to work with a newer version of the Android OS, which we had to do for security reasons. On some devices running Android 4.4 KitKat and earlier, the softkeys get in the way of the fullscreen game, but we’ve been unable to reproduce and fix as the issue only occurs on select devices that are no longer supported by Google.
• The 3.1.4 patch for Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition (which includes the Czech localization) has been live on Beamdog for a while now! If you have it installed via the Beamdog Client, it should either already be version 3.1.4, or updateable to 3.1.4 now. You can confirm the version number in the lower-right corner of the main menu after launching.

If you have a question for Beamdog, don’t hesitate to ask us on our forums. We'll try to get answers from Beamdog Producer Luke Rideout and then will directly communicate them back to you (above are Luke’s answers to the community questions asked in February, 2019).

September 07 Livestream Recap

“We’ve got a big list of feature requests. Keep telling us what you want to see in our games!” ~ Luke

During last week’s livestream Beamdog Producer Luke Rideout and Marketing & PR Manager Lee Guille shared the latest studio news and updates on the Dice, Camera, Action! Portrait & Voice pack, Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, and Infinity Engine games.

Missed the stream? It's on Twitch (we’re investigating a problem with our YouTube channel)! Here's a quick summary of the highlights:

• The Dice, Camera, Action! Voice and Portrait pack is shaping up greatly! The idea behind it is that you, as a player, can play as Strix (Holly Conrad), Diath Woodrow (Jared Knabenbauer), Paultin Seppa (Anna Prosser Robinson), Evelyn Marthain (Nathan Sharp), or even lead the whole Waffle Crew party together!
• The voice and portrait pack won't include inter-party banter for technical reasons, and will be English-only.
• International Dungeons & Dragons group interested in creating a voice pack in their native language are more than welcome to reach out to us!
• There will be unique lines for each character across Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.
• The voice and portrait pack will have to be purchased for each of game separately.
• We’re currently figuring out how the pack will work in multiplayer. The plan is to allow players playing with voice and portrait pack owners to see and hear these portraits and voicesets.
• Jared Knabenbauer (ProJared) is super excited about the pack. He’s been playing Baldur’s Gate since it originally released. Diath Woodrow was his first character. We’ll ask if he can create a Let’s Play!

“We’re hoping to pass modders the tools to make visual updates to Infinity Engine games!” ~ Luke

• Come say hi to our booth at Edmonton Expo (September, 21 - 23)!
• Beamdog is moving to a new office, and hiring! If you’re a programmer, technical artist, web developer, or human resources generalist - apply!
• There was a cancelled announcement planned for the PAX West panel. When we can, we’ll announce it, so stay tuned!
• Congratulations to Kevin- you won a Baldur’s Gate style portrait during the PAX West panel! Frith5 won another portrait as a viewer on Beamdog’s Twitch livestream, congratulations to you too!
• An email has been sent to a winner of a Baldur’s Gate style portrait as a result of signing up for the Beamdog newsletter! Watch out for more contests soon!
• We plan to release updates for our Infinity Engine games more often.
• The 2.5 builds for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition for the Mac App Store are in QA’s hands.
• Future patches for the Mac App Store will have the same cadence as our patches for other platforms. We understand we’ve made our Mac App Store fans wait long for the 2.5 update, and we’re going to do better!

“Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition Collector’s Edition is still in the queue!” ~ Luke

• A new development build for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is very close. It will contain the Road to 2.0 portraits, bug fixes, small toolset updates, and GOG features.
• We know a GOG build is taking a long time. If it turns out Rich Presence support requires more work, we’ll release the first build without it. We want to bring Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition to GOG as soon as possible.
• Desktop and Android versions of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition will be separate products and will have to be bought separately. We’re looking into ways to let you put your desktop CDKey on mobile if you choose to do so.
• Updating Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition to 64bit and improving the Toolset are completely different tasks. A 64bit version of the Toolset won’t be available immediately, but the current Toolset will be able to create content for the 64bit version of NWN:EE.
• We’re working to update Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition 64bit before creating mobile versions.
• The Android and iOS versions will be 64bit apps. They won’t be released simultaneously, as they need more time to work on individually.
• New enhanced models for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition are coming, but we don’t have any specific timelines to share.
• Adding more tile path nodes to Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is possible, but we’d like to hear your suggestions about how you want them implemented on our forums.

Excited for what’s next? Come and join the next livestream this Friday!

PAX West Panel and August 31 Livestream Recap

Trent, Alyssa, John and Sarah were joined by Holly Conrad and Jared Knabenbauer for our PAX West panel!

During a special announcement panel at PAX West on September, 1 Beamdog CEO Trent Oster, Art Director Alyssa Duguay, Community Manager Sarah Dawson and Wizards of the Coast, Senior Producer, Digital Licensing John Feil talked about the history of Beamdog and Neverwinter Nights, and showed footage of NWN:EE on mobile. Special guests Holly Conrad and Jared Knabenbauer announced the Dice, Camera, Action! Portrait & Voice pack DLC for the Beamdog Enhanced Edition Family of games.

A day earlier, Beamdog Producer Luke Rideout and QA lead on Infinity Engine games Kristin Warren shared the latest gaming updates and plans for the Enhanced Editions.

Missed the streams? Check out the Twitch video from our Panel (starts at 03:03:10)! Watch the August 31 Livestream here (sorry about the sound quality, we’ll make sure to fix audio-related issues this week)! Below is a quick summary of the highlights:

• The Dice, Camera, Action! voice and portrait pack DLC is coming to the Beamdog Enhanced Edition Family of games later this year! Waffle Crew cast members Holly Conrad, Jared Knabenbauer, Anna Prosser Robinson, and Nathan Sharp are recording player character voice-over for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Portraits and voices of Strix, Diath Woodrow, Paultin Seppa, Evelyn Marthain, and a special portrait for DM Chris Perkins will be available as DLC on Steam, Beamdog, GOG, Google Play, and App Store.

• If you’re local to Edmonton, we’ll see you at Edmonton Expo (September, 21 - 23)!
• We’re hiring! If you’re a programmer, technical artist, web developer, or human resources generalist - apply!
• We’ve seen requests to update Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition to the 2.5.17 build (to make the version in line with other games), and are working on it.
• The 2.5 builds for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition for the Mac App Store are with QA.
• A colossal amount of work has been put into the 2.5 patches, but we’re interested in making continued improvements for our Infinity Engine games. If you run into bugs, please use the public bug tracker - we have people checking them on a daily basis.

• We’re sorting out last steps on Rich Presence support for the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition GOG build. It’ll let players click and join friends, render your friends list in the in-game view, and get information about what server they’re playing on. We also need to make a change to our builds to deploy multi-language on GOG, since they support custom per-language installers.
• We’re working on a variety of visual improvements for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. We’re cautious about how we’ll be implementing new models into the game, considering old machines and mobile devices.
• During our PAX West panel we showed footage of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on Android (it’s still Work in Progress). A lot of work is being put into UI and supporting different aspect ratios.

• We’re actively looking into improving the maximum number of bones per skinmesh. Some progress has been made, but we don’t have any specific ETA for this feature.
• If you’re interested in seeing scripting functions that add DoMeleeAttack / DoRangedAttack functions, share your suggestions about how you want them implemented on our forums.
• We’ll be bringing people from the community to talk to during our livestreams. Stay tuned!

Excited for what’s next? Have questions about the Dice, Camera, Action! voice and portrait pack DLC and NWN:EE on mobile? Come and join the next livestream this Friday!