Offtopic Anvil Discussion

[Drew]

You know, before that cute little blonde girl who stole everyone's hearts in ET and the Poltergeist movies became a household name, Drew was actually a boy's name......

[Guest temujin]

You know, before that cute little blonde girl who stole everyone's hearts in ET and the Poltergeist movies became a household name, Drew was actually a boy's name......

I was thinking of exactly her. Ok, my bad!

 

Still, my point stands.

[Guest!]

Something just happened that further makes my (and several others') point about criticism and e-psychology.

Okay, perhaps it's thread necromancy, but it was too good to pass.

[cmorgan]

Guest!, I am cool with you posting what you wanted to post, but I think at this point I need to point out the alternatives -

 

Things Everyone Could Be Doing Instead Of Reading This Thread

• Offering to assist NiGHTMARE in completing LOI by providing code, ghostwriting dialogue, proofreading, or just hanging about asking what you can do to help. Not feedback, not lists of what he has wrong, not things he should have thought of, not opinions on anything - just straightforward code/assistance when wanted.
  
• Building a One-Day NPC into a full-story arc BG through ToB character. Either your own, or a totally new one. Choose your own favorite PnP character, or someone who is a bit-player in one of the stories. What was bentley like as an adventurer? His wife? What ever happened to Brage after he was healed? Could he assist the party?
  
• Prodding JC into providing outlines, dialogues, and ideas for Keto ToB, and coding it for him (see #1 on scope and sequence). Or providing him with several thousand dollars US in development money so the game ships faster (c'mon - you don't need to eat that lunch - send him lunchmoney).
  
• Revisiting UB and BG UB, or The Vault, or many, many other good solid mods that still directly overwrite in-game .cres and helping establish patching code which removes .cre overwrites for the mods to increase theoretical compatibility, ditto with the dialogue using careful COPY_TRANS actions or newer WeiDU materials, and contributing code. See #1 for the whole bit about "code not commentary".
  
• Help trace specific interactions between Sirine's Call, BG UB, and BG1NPC on both Tutu and BGT platforms and propose joint fixes that will allow all three to fully use all non-conflicting material, and silently drop the stuff that conflicts conceptually, allowing the maximum use of material between these mods.
  
• Help Salk out on the whole BG1 Fixpack thing - RL issues have left him a lonely team of one guy, holding the banner aloft, facing onrushing hordes of orcs and worse, entropy... the other folks will be back, but in the meantime, hop over and watch his back.
  
• Revisiting BG1NPC, identifying and providing code replacement for older REPLACE and INTERJECT code with more elegant solutions, (see CamDawgs tutorial thread newly posted on PPG's WeiDU forums), paying attention to WEIGHT. Ditto, any mod which throws an I_C_T2 error and just expects that WeiDU's following of the first action is good enough for govenment work (see jastey's and the bigg's information and discussion on ways to make I_C_T, I_C_T2, I_C_T3, and I_C_T4 work for the mods). And many experienced and well coded mods that still ship with non-designated Weights for REPLACE commands.
  
• Picking up one of the abandoned projects at PPG, G3, SHS, or whatever community you find yourself hanging out in, asking permission to take it on, and building it. [iNSERT LIST OF ABANDONED PROJECTS HERE>> from any IE Community Forum.] Even if you can't do the code, start up donating the dialogue. Or, as happened with me, cotton on to the mod you love the most, and beg to apprentiice (playtesting/proofreading is a good way to both help and demonstrate you are really around, not just popping in and dropping the project a few weks later).
  
• Create a code review (not a critical review, just a review of what is throwing errors or is operating to hijack states and overwrite resources other folks' mods depend on) of older projects, and send code updates to their maintainers, assisting them in updating their mods (on the understanding that some will use it, some will ignore it, and some will reject it - but at least you have been helpful and given them something to work with. As always, see #1 -it is easier for folks to use your code if they understand that you are not judging them or their content, just helping out).
  
• Build a real, solid Female romanceable character for the full story arc, one who is the protagonists equal. One who will be open to gradually becoming best friend and then life mate of your protagonist, preferably person to person (meaning both straight and gay, or bi) rather than gender to gender. With no offense to the canon BioWare NPCs, some of us dudes would like an equal partner that is more normal, hasn't had her wings sawn off, lost her husband of over 100 years, isn't an assimar/tiefling/child/combination (how hard does a guy have to search for just a nice, respectable girl who can give as good as she gets, whip your but when necessary, and back you in a bar fight as well as a social dance? Dynaheir dies, you know, and Sarah/Auren Etc. seem to prefer the ladies... On the straight female player's side, you have Gavin, Coran, Xan, Ajantis, a whole raft of romanceable males who are much more deeply developed. Some of us straight guys do actually look up after noting cleavage... ).
  
• Cull and datamine old coding threads, and organize them for easy scanning listed under common error, crosslisted by use in D, BAF, or TP2. Donate the results to each and every community who has a tutorial resource, as a "backup" to the IESDP and help forums, so that google searches for things like "error string_sub" can pick the wheat from the chaff.
  
• Rebuild the WeiDU documents using code from actual mods (three example from contrasting usage, from "simple" to "medium" to "complex", basically creating a WeiDU usage wikki that shows how different modders have operationalized WeiDu code to bring stories to life. Concentrate on the heavy stuff that can help, like patching and the advanced interjection/replacement/string set commands, to show why using some code makes things less compatible than other usages.
  
• Revisit personally created mods, and see how to efficiently use the internal variables created by interjections and running states, perhaps reducing mod added variable overhead. Change these to community prefixes, so that everything that shows up on LOCALS and GLOBAL ends up with a prefix for easy indentification and tracing. Or, offer to do this for other people's mods, especially folks who are newer and could use the help. (See #1 about advice - just help them, not criticize them).
  
• WALKING SPEEDS. BG2 Tweaks new BETA component. Take a "snapshot" of existing override, .cre by .cre, and build a test install. Run just that component, and diff the overrides to see what is being changed where. Report the results; then play and experiment with Haste, Slow, Polymorph, etc. Report on differences between the baseline install and the changed install, and troubleshoot why the
  effects seem to cause problems, and where those problems happen. Run a comparison, .cre by .cre, of relative speeds, and suggest changes necessary to match them closer to Faerun speeds or PnP versions, so that the component can be tweaked into providing BG walking speeds in the BG2 engine, and allow an
  additional tweak that makes bears and wolves run faster than humans, and golems move far slower than humand, etc.
  
• Find a modder, any modder. Offer to spend a few moments going over .tra files for typos. Bonus points if you speak multiple languages or can translate into any of the many, many languages we speak onthis international set of forms.
  
• Proofreading.
  
• Proofreading.
  
• Proofreading. Did I mention this before?
  
• Find non-english language sites that you can read, and look through them for error reports, translating them for the english-only speaking modder, so that things can get fixed for non-english-language distributions.
  
• Datamine and update the Player Help threads folks like Icelus worked so hard on, and make sure the links and advice match modern practices; help update any that seem to be needing help (for example, replacing the ubiquitous "In Your BGII - SoA Folder" references for things placed on Tutu, to reflect the fact that if you do that on an Easytutu install, you are not modding your Easytutu game...).
  
• Play through a targeted install, enjoying everything the modder has to offer, and then help write up either a walkthrough or "The Things I Find Cool About This Mod" review. Life is too short for someone to hear how their 10,000 hours per year of freely donated personal time and work sucks. Plus, it is easy to spoil your own enjoyment - when was the last time a professional artistic critic truly enjoyed their art, instead of having to force the distance to be objective? Play hard, enjoy yourself, write up what you liked about it, and grab a new set. There must be a massive number of potential mod combinations, story tweaks, and NPC combinations throughout the stroy arc - have you tried every single one?
  
• Install a new set of untried mods and enjoy the game. Build targeted installs or Mega-installs, and try all sorts of variant parties. Play with L1NPCs, and see what happens. Troubleshoot your install from from start to finish, testing every single action from multiple party perspectives and with varying alignment, gender, race, etc. - and report the results.
  
• If at work without access to installs or the ability to play/code, grab what knowledge you have and find a person experiencing difficulty on a forum with one of the things you know about, and help them. Heck, write them step by step instructions. You know you wished that someone had been sitting next to you the first time you stuck mods on your install...
  
• If at work and unable to mod, start writing a quest, story, or idea you always wanted to see, and either donate it as a mod idea or start working on your own mod (there are good people in all IE Communities who actually enjoy helping people start out.) Don't stop at the initial "Wouldn't it be cool if..."; start grabbing the tutorials and playing around with it. The tutorials can be printed - the IESDP has been reading material for several of my study hall proctoring sessions.
  
• If at work, no inclination to mod, no inclination to tell stories or create stuff, no inclination or ability to test, cut off from several forums (or like me, too busy to do anything but scramble around after the kids and keep my head above water) then you could always think through stuff that *could* be done, if the IE world just got on with the job, and spend several days mulling it over, culminating in a post like this one. It might not be useful, but at least it feels more like getting stuff done
  

[Caedwyr]

I hope you copy and pasted that from somewhere.

[Western Paladin]

cmorgan just won the universe.

[Gabrielle]

But, but that is like work. I rather have fun.

[Guest temujin]

Something just happened that further makes my (and several others') point about criticism and e-psychology.

Sad. Those nincompoops still haven't learned their lesson. Not only are they in denial, but now they've clung to the tired old 'if you find the game too hard, it means you don't know how to play' rhetoric.

 

This is my reply to that thread.

 

There is a big difference between saying 'the mod is too difficult' and 'the classes are unbalanced.' As far as I know, most experienced players who've played the mod have said the latter. In fact, even I said it myself I LIKED IA's final fucking battle.

 

And it's true. Mages, when used for offence, are useless. If you don't believe me, play the game as a solo mage without cheating (no xp cap remover or modifying your char through SK or such). There are some battles where, even if you manage to dispel the enemy's spell protections, it's not possible to win simply because your mage cannot deal enough physical damage. The mage's main form of attack (i.e. via magic) is completely nullified since certain enemies have complete (or extremely high) resistance to magic and missiles. Whereas if you play solo with a fighter-type, or a ranger-type, or paladin-type, hell even a barbarian or monk, your chances of surviving and winning battles are much, much higher.

 

Hell, even in the IA's own forums, a lot of the players who play solo like playing with a multiclass. Why ? Because they like the figher-type class' physical damage dealing combined with the mage/cleric's defensive spell casting primarily.

 

Of course, I'm sure those fools will continue to deny this.

[Guest Splunge]

[*] Proofreading.

[*] Proofreading.

[*] Proofreading. Did I mention this before?

Life is too short for someone to hear how their 10,000 hours per year of freely donated personal time and work sucks.

As my contribution to the requested proofreading, I would just like to point out that there are only 8,760 hours in a year (8,784 in a leap year).

 

[Baronius]

Splunge:

[Rabain]

That post by cmorgan should really be on the RSS feed, disseminated throughout all IE communities, stickied, printed and pinned to your fridge.

 

Nice.

[Guest Splunge]

Just to clarify, my previous post was not intended as a cheap shot at cmorgan’s excellent post. Instead, given the post immediately prior to mine, I was attempting a preemptive strike against further actual on-topic (or more acurately, related off-topic) discussion.

 

Yes I know I said I was going to disappear. I lied. So sue me.

[Cuv]

I agree Rabain

 

Well said there CMorgan

[Baronius]

I didn't mean to imply otherwise either. (I just found Splunge's post funny.) Quite good summary cmorgan. It's especially recommended to those who regularly participate in threads such as this while never released any mod or software to help the community.

[Guest temujin]

It's also recommended to those who pathetically defend a mod to death on several forums and also claim to have written a quintessential "tutorial" to mod-making despite never having made any mod worthy of discussion themselves.