Innovations

GemRB isn’t just a reimplementation of the Infinity Engine. While a lot of the changes and enhancements are in the core or targetted at power users and modders, there are also a few that directly benefit the players. Besides the obvious bugfixes, those include:

  • an extensive array of commands for the “Cheat” console.
  • effects of difficulty on xp and damage are configurable through difflvls.2da
  • arbitrary formations are supported: externalised to a 2da table, with an accompanying generator for the relative coordinates
  • more file formats are supported (eg. PNG, OGG), so custom portraits and sound sets are easier to create
  • many ToBEx extensions are also implemented

… and more, this list is not yet comprehensive

Ease of use

  • possibility to never even load the intro videos
  • a ctrl-w hotkey to consolidate all visible loot in a single pile under the cursor
  • inventory items are autoidentified if you have high enough lore
  • innates can be bound to quick spell slots
  • spell lists can be sorted by various attributes like offensiveness, level or spell school
  • learnable spell scrolls have a special border

GUI and high resolutions

  • window scaling, high resolutions support
    • for arbitrary higher resolutions at the same pixel count (resize the window while in windowed mode)
    • game window scaling, for more game real estate even without the Widescreen mod (just set a higher resolution)
  • custom font support
  • drawing FPS is settable and defaults to matching the screen refresh rate, rather than 30
    • animations themselves have FPS configurable, so newer assets displayed at e.g. 60 FPS can be created, instead of the 15 default
  • expanded debug console
  • general window dragging support
  • in character generation, the default portrait is randomised (for our sanity’s sake :))
  • some GUI tweaks that allow infinite kits, spells and so on or improve usability in other ways
  • better support for internationalization of game resources

Input

  • (multi)touch input support
  • joystick support
  • mouse
    • most games didn’t even support mouse wheels
    • holding shift while scrolling with the mouse wheel simulates horizontal scrolling
  • keyboard
    • if cheatdebug keys are turned on:
      • ctrl-y will also force unlock doors and containers
      • ctrl-shift-y will kill all the enemies in the area
      • ctrl-w will gather all the ground piles you’ve seen in the area under the cursor, merging items where possible
    • windows that you can bring up using hotkeys can also be closed the same way
    • many extra buttons are marked as default and default cancel, so you can use enter and escape