Hi, I''m just asking if someone knows how does the Baldur''s gate engine work. Thanks Chris

It''s called the "Infinity Engine". It was developed by Bio Ware.

The Infinity Engine File Format Hacking Project might have something for you. Otherwise, use Google


NPCs will be inherited from the basic Entity class. They will be fully independent, and carry out their own lives oblivious to the world around them ... that is, until you set them on fire ...

It uses BItmaps for the graphics...just a big picture the characters walök on, and then there''s a second bitmap that contains alpha information, say when a character is "behind" a tree...

- Sleepwalker

Well..it is one big bitmap but it is sliced to smaller 64*64 tiles for cacheing and color reduction( each tile got it''s own color palette, instead of being true 24bit each tile has 256 24bit colors saving more than 50% of tile memory) purposes.
Then there are the lightmap, heightmap and searchmap, doing their stuff.
all of this is in more depth described at the Infinity Engine File Format Hacking Project web side adress given above.

What I really want to know is how there cacheing of the tiles work in-game, when and how are they reading from the file, ie what does the alghoritm look like...

//Smash Smash Smash The $IMF$