Praises,complaints and bugs

[Guest my very bad english]

First of all, I want to say that I'm really impressed by the work and efforts made in

creating this great fixpack. The number of fixes and the way they are documented in detail is outstanding. But after well deserved praise I must say there is a couple of things that doesn't sit all that well with me. By this I mean that you guys are sometimes overzelaous. This is especially case with various NPC tweaks and theirs

spells. Striping various divine spellcasters of their spells is in my opinion bad idea and better left to Divine remix and simillar mods. Druids are already weaker than clerics without further aid in that matter. As for aligment based spells I might agree

with holly and unholly word but not with holly smite which is nowhere prohibited from evil priests which make sense because in the course of game you fight mainly

evil foes. Edwin in BG2 is supposed to have 3 extra spells, one because he is specialist mage and two from his amulet (I think). About Joshimo and his thieving

skills maybe he is designed that way by game developers like Coran and Kagain in

BG1. We all know that Coran can't have 20 dexterity and 3 stars in bow or Kagain

20 in constitution but majority of players like them the way they are. Further, why

monks can't use priest scrolls and sensate amulet? In old Baldurdash they can and it

is clearly stated in the text update. They are "monks" after all. Arrows of fire have

+2 THACO both in BG and BG2 and it is also shown in Baldurdash text update. Without that THACO bonus they are much inferior to acid or even ice arrows.

Dragons immune to projectile fire?

I wonder what Bard from "Hobbit" would say to this. My arrows of dragon slaying

(increased damage against dragons) would be pretty useless then.

Liches should be immune to summoned demons?

When I battling liches prior to demon summoning they always cast protection against evil on themselves. I presume this is not beacuse they are champions of

light and my udead hunter is the evil villain.

Ranged weapons proficiency penalties reintroduction fix in BETA core fixes isn't bad

idea in theory but I think it will only needlessly complicate things in reality. This is

more OBC thing. I also don't like ideas of summoned creatures shouldn't drop items

when slain and unusable staff of woodlands for rangers but these are minor issues.

Most of this things came in "take it all or leave it" package which is unfortunate but

understandable given huge number of fixes.

Now when I'm done with complaints it is turn for some yet unresolved bugs:

Eagle short bow from BG gives extra melee atack when used prior hand to hand

combat. That extra atack last until next loading. I just love using this exploit with

Joshimo, Nalia and Imoen. I snitch this one heavy hearted.

Aganazar scorcher and similar efects like potion of fire breathing and fire mephit flame atack all have double efects in TOB but not in SOA. Yet another TOB bug is

priest "magic resistence" spell which makes your and every enemy priest and druid

untargetable and unselectable for it's duration. One of the most annoying things I ever saw. I think Ascension mod is dealing with this bug.

In the very end of this topic I must say that this post wasn't meant to be a long list of complaints beacuse I trully admire your work and think it is a very god job. Still

it could be better with this things taken in the account. Of course, this is just my opinion.

[CamDawg]

Thanks for the kind words. A lot of the stuff you've brought up was discussed previously, but I'll try to address it to save you some search time.

 

Striping various divine spellcasters of their spells is in my opinion bad idea and better left to Divine remix and simillar mods. Druids are already weaker than clerics without further aid in that matter. As for aligment based spells I might agree

with holly and unholly word but not with holly smite which is nowhere prohibited from evil priests which make sense because in the course of game you fight mainly

evil foes.

We do not add any alignment restrictions to spells, merely enforce the existing ones. (Un)Holy Word and Holy Smite/Unholy Blight are already alignment-restricted; start a good, neutral, and evil cleric and compare their spellbooks.

 

Edwin in BG2 is supposed to have 3 extra spells, one because he is specialist mage and two from his amulet (I think).

Edwin has too many spell slots, even when his amulet is accounted for, which is what we're fixing. Even without the fix you'd go back to his normal progression at the next level-up; all that's being changed is that's it's now correct from the moment he joins instead of from his first level-up.

 

About Joshimo and his thieving

skills maybe he is designed that way by game developers like Coran and Kagain in

BG1. We all know that Coran can't have 20 dexterity and 3 stars in bow or Kagain

20 in constitution but majority of players like them the way they are.

Imoen and Jan had their thieving skills bumped up; are you going to advance a similar argument that we shouldn't mess with them? I don't recall a lot of criticism of Dorner for adjusting Imoen's thieving skills in BD and I don't anticipate a lot for similar changes to other characters.

 

Further, why

monks can't use priest scrolls and sensate amulet? In old Baldurdash they can and it

is clearly stated in the text update. They are "monks" after all.

The amulet's original description explicitly states it's usable only by cleric; to quote Nythrun, "monks are priests except how they aren't." You're not the first person to request this, though, which is why there's code you can uncomment at the end of the tp2 to change this back.

 

Arrows of fire have

+2 THACO both in BG and BG2 and it is also shown in Baldurdash text update. Without that THACO bonus they are much inferior to acid or even ice arrows.

The description was changed from BG to BG2 by the devs, meaning they actively made the change.

 

Dragons immune to projectile fire?

I wonder what Bard from "Hobbit" would say to this. My arrows of dragon slaying

(increased damage against dragons) would be pretty useless then.

Liches should be immune to summoned demons?

When I battling liches prior to demon summoning they always cast protection against evil on themselves. I presume this is not beacuse they are champions of

light and my udead hunter is the evil villain.

The developers made these choices, not us. They bungled the targeting and they weren't being applied.

 

Ranged weapons proficiency penalties reintroduction fix in BETA core fixes isn't bad

idea in theory but I think it will only needlessly complicate things in reality. This is

more OBC thing.

What's it complicating?

 

I also don't like ideas of summoned creatures shouldn't drop items

when slain and unusable staff of woodlands for rangers but these are minor issues.

The Staff of the Woodlands is already unusable by rangers in ToB; this is a fix for SoA only. As for summons, BioWare couldn't make up their minds here either--some did, most didn't, and it didn't make any sense to leave it half-assed.

 

I'd be happy to show you how to roll some or all of these back on your copy so you don't have to play with the stuff you don't like.

 

Eagle short bow from BG gives extra melee atack when used prior hand to hand

combat. That extra atack last until next loading. I just love using this exploit with

Joshimo, Nalia and Imoen. I snitch this one heavy hearted.

Everything on the effect looks correct--so if there's a bug here, it's one in the engine and we won't be able to fix it.

 

Aganazar scorcher and similar efects like potion of fire breathing and fire mephit flame atack all have double efects in TOB but not in SOA.

I recall similar reports for dragon breath attacks as well, but I've never found anything that could cause this in the files.

 

Yet another TOB bug is

priest "magic resistence" spell which makes your and every enemy priest and druid

untargetable and unselectable for it's duration. One of the most annoying things I ever saw. I think Ascension mod is dealing with this bug.

Never heard of this one; will look into.

 

In the very end of this topic I must say that this post wasn't meant to be a long list of complaints beacuse I trully admire your work and think it is a very god job. Still

it could be better with this things taken in the account. Of course, this is just my opinion.

Thanks for taking the time to put this together. Feedback is critical to a project of this scope--though I've said before, due to its sheer size the Fixpack is bound to have at least something that makes you go 'What the hell? Why'd they change that?'

[devSin]

Edwin has too many spell slots, even when his amulet is accounted for, which is what we're fixing. Even without the fix you'd go back to his normal progression at the next level-up; all that's being changed is that's it's now correct from the moment he joins instead of from his first level-up.

It turns out that his default spellbook is pretty much fine (the only thing we need to be doing is reducing his # memorizable by 2 for each CRE rather than that big rebuild patch)?

 

Imoen and Jan had their thieving skills bumped up; are you going to advance a similar argument that we shouldn't mess with them? I don't recall a lot of criticism of Dorner for adjusting Imoen's thieving skills in BD and I don't anticipate a lot for similar changes to other characters.

Indeed, funny how nobody complains when the rules require that points be *added* to something. ;-)

 

The description was changed from BG to BG2 by the devs, meaning they actively made the change.

Also to point out that this makes fire arrows equivalent to ice arrows (not inferior). Acid arrows are better even with the erroneous THAC0 bonus here.

 

The developers made these choices, not us. They bungled the targeting and they weren't being applied.

Turns out that targeting and power are completely (and I mean "completely" in the absolute strongest sense here) ignored in equipped effects. These were always working, with the exception that they could be dispelled (lazy copy/paste from Protection from Evil/Normal Missiles spells).

 

What's it complicating?

I'd say the fact that nobody noticed this for 10 years means nobody pays attention anyway, so I can't imagine there's really anything to complicate. :-)

 

Everything on the effect looks correct--so if there's a bug here, it's one in the engine and we won't be able to fix it.

The eagle bow shouldn't be obtainable in BG2 (IIRC, it has another APR buff in the ranged header and other brokenness).

 

I recall similar reports for dragon breath attacks as well, but I've never found anything that could cause this in the files.

Scorcher is hardcoded. The problem with dragon breath weapons is that the application duration for the DRAGBLCK and DRAGSILV PROs are 2 (meaning always 2 impacts on targets in area). Unlike the red and green breaths that only use these for visuals, the others use these breath projectiles for the main spell (meaning everyone in the AoE gets hit twice, always). The kicker is that the duration has to be 2 for the animations to actually run (I have no idea why). Fix would be to duplicate these two and create new animation-less clones that only impact once (but then all the scripts need to be updated and all the spells changed and new "shell" spells for the breath visuals created... pain).

[DavidW]

Yet another TOB bug is

priest "magic resistence" spell which makes your and every enemy priest and druid

untargetable and unselectable for it's duration. One of the most annoying things I ever saw. I think Ascension mod is dealing with this bug.

Never heard of this one; will look into.

Don't bother: it's a bug in the Ascension version of Detectable Spells, not a Fixpack issue.

[Nythrun]

The problem with dragon breath weapons is that the application duration for the DRAGBLCK and DRAGSILV PROs are 2 (meaning always 2 impacts on targets in area).

 

I'm not following you here, but couldn't we just append a zero duration immunity effect to these two? Or did you try that and not get it to work?

[devSin]

I'm not following you here, but couldn't we just append a zero duration immunity effect to these two? Or did you try that and not get it to work?

I switched a long time ago to using these as visuals only and switching the spells to either of REDHIT or GREENHIT (me? add projectiles? Hell, no!), so I was just looking into projectiles (still a few bugs, sigh) and ran across the true reason why these are broken.

 

I didn't actually do any testing into making the normal cones behave, but it sounds like a one second immunity might work.

 

In AoE projectiles, the duration specifies how many times in-range characters will get hit, and the delay (correctly labeled in my latest NI builds) gives the time in frames between hits. For whatever reason, dragon breath needs to have a duration of 2 (even with a 1/15s delay between hits) for the BAM to play.

[Nythrun]

One second immunity does work, zero seconds doesn't (sigh).

 

I dunno about this one. Maybe the thing to do is trim the .bam a bit.

 

/edit

nah, that won't work either. Yucky.

 

//edit

Wow, I'd forgotten how awful these animations are - they don't even show for several orientations.

[devSin]

The breath animations should show up at most orientations (I believe they're 5 cycle BAMs like the beholder rays instead of 10, but big deal). The problem is usually the distance to the target and the caster's spell point (3D traveling in the PRO header makes the animation start at the cast point, way up there for dragons, and travel vertically if necessary to the dest point); the engine doesn't like it to overshoot, so it's often that you don't see anything at all (probably one of the primary reasons I'm sticking with the *HIT projectiles so at least the explosion will look cool).

 

There's also a BAM for the silver dragon without that transparency "fix"; it's fucking beautiful (you get to see all the detail), but it doesn't position correctly.

 

Same with a not-so-badly dithered HOLY_LIGHT_FROM_ABOVE, but they didn't do the whole animation (just the good-looking bottom half and then another BAM for the bottom and top one that looks like ass).

 

One of these days, I'll have to redo the soundset 2DA patches to account for the fact that they don't actually work, and we should probably hook up the extended night for the druid grove and black dragon cove (the latter is free, but the former needs a WED; luckily, WRITE_ASCIIT 0x24 AR1900N is the total effort required). As with animationspeak above, AR1900N is hawt.

[Nythrun]

Ooh, these are the only two areas with unreferenced night tilesets, too. Let's write it up before we forget again - this looks great.

COPY_EXISTING ar1900.are override
		  ar2807.are override
 READ_SHORT   0x48 location_flags
 WRITE_SHORT  0x48 location_flags | 0x40
BUT_ONLY

COPY ~bg2fixpack/wed/ar1900n.wed~ override

 

I'm starting to think one of the problems with dragsilv.pro is the travel animation - it really looks like it, by analogy with the red/green dragon projectiles, wants

COPY_EXISTING dragsilv.pro override 
 WRITE_ASCII 0x104 spsdrbur

possibly with a palette ripped out of spsdbur.bam. Maybe not a fix, but it's really feeble as is, and at least you can see the explosive-cone-trap-mess this way.

 

What's wrong with the soundset 2da patches? This is another one of the patches I omit in favor of DalePillaging, for the most part. We'll need one of these

COPY_EXISTING mcar.2da ~override/mcwl.2da~

and they're ugly without something like

COPY_EXISTING msal.2da ~override/msa2.2da~
 REMOVE_2DA_ROW 0 1
 INSERT_2DA_ROW 0 1 ~%DEST_RES% /salamander,frost/~

...but most of them look okay?

 

Well except for the chicken Good thing you can't notice.

ar1900n.rar

[devSin]

For #1, we have to include the WED (for people without full install), so we can go ahead and zero out all the secondary tiles (unhooked-up and unfinished and completely unused in day AR1900, but nonexistent in AR1900N so best to be neat) and make sure that the subsequent flags DWORD (after the secondary index WORD) is zeroed (for all tiles; should already be in normal AR1900.WED, though). AR2807 is not as sweet, but it has all the necessary support files (and the glow at the entrance is really pretty).

 

If that's the broken silver dragon breath (the good-looking one), it won't shoot at the right point. The only bugfix change is to kill the prelude-to-explosion sound (TRA_06 or whatever) since it doesn't explode like red and green breaths (which are implemented correctly). The speed can be left at 0 (it's hokey but doesn't make a difference and won't cause problems unless AoE type is round explosion, where you get a nice Speed must be greater than 0 for fireball! assert).

 

For soundsets, the engine can handle only two sounds -- although probabilities will be updated for multiple entries, with four columns, instead of getting an equal chance of loading any individual entry, you actually get a 25% chance to hear the first entry and a 75% chance to hear the last (i.e., the engine only ever looks at the first and last columns when loading WAVs). (This could very well be an engine bug.)

 

Also, the ATTACK_style entries are completely unused. For any attack sequence, the engine plays only the ATTACK (Row 0) sounds (the row labels are designer labels only; these 2DAs are run with hardcoded row, col+1 order). Apparently, this extends to the CRE soundsets too (Attack 1 is the *only* sound that will play, it will play 100% for any attack sequence, the volume is lowered, and it gets the pitch/environmental fx processing like the 2DA sounds).

 

The MCWL change can be accompanied by removal of the patches to assign directly to the crawler CREs. Seeing as the first row is pointless, I'm in favor of just letting those REPLACE_TEXTUALLY blah halb stuff alone (as long as we don't BUT_ONLY, it won't matter whether the change succeeds or fails).

[Nythrun]

For #1, we have to include the WED (for people without full install)

Thought they died off in the Chicxulub impact event? It's still worth including at any rate.

 

If that's the broken silver dragon breath (the good-looking one), it won't shoot at the right point.

I'd been assuming that's the .bam you'd been referring to a couple of posts ago. It's not centered (especially skewed for S and SE facings) - I'm blabbing about it because spsdbur.bam isn't any better, it just has a pair of nearly empty frames at the beginning so you don't notice the asstacy as much. There's nothing much we can do about the screwy home coordinates for dragon animations, but a rotate 5 degrees and pad with transparency would take care of most of the disconnect - again, probably not a fix.

 

The only bugfix change is to kill the prelude-to-explosion sound

Okay. It's too brief to be audible over the mothership whirring that's playing in .spl anyway.

 

For soundsets, the engine can handle only two sounds -- although probabilities will be updated for multiple entries, with four columns, instead of getting an equal chance of loading any individual entry, you actually get a 25% chance to hear the first entry and a 75% chance to hear the last (i.e., the engine only ever looks at the first and last columns when loading WAVs). (This could very well be an engine bug.)

This I did not know, thanks. Don't much enjoy knowing it, either At least it's easy to correct.

[devSin]

Tsk, tsk. You're always supposed to manually jump to the area above Ellesime's room *before* changing to the dragon animations. ;-) (Sweet mother of god how many times I've done crap like this to have perfect testing "rules" for every scenario.) The one that uses black transparency will start off to the right of her head instead of shooting straight down from the head (if she were facing west, most of it would be outside the room's northern wall).

 

This I did not know, thanks. Don't much enjoy knowing it, either At least it's easy to correct.

It's easy to correct, but it sucks terribly. I died a little when I found out.

 

I imagine the attack sequence stuff is intentional (the BG series has "always" battle cries and "mostly" combat music where the IWD series doesn't, and there are already hardcoded swing sounds when displayable/tagged weapons are wielded), but it still made me cry (especially since the sounds are sometimes really unique and appropriate, like Demogorgon's tentacle swooshes, but are totally unusable). And then finding out that they hardcoded special attack sequence sounds to crap like ankhegs and basilisks and wyverns (but nothing else) and that dogs, dopplegangers, bears, and ghouls aren't "re-bound" to different tags when they do the palette swap (like slimes, spiders, and wolves are) and will always use the same base soundset...

 

Oh, well. At least I found that MCAR was bound to MCWL for whatever reason... and I hooked up the ankheg emerge/hide sounds. So not a total loss, I guess.

 

We got bit by the compressed BIFF issue with AR1404*MOS (and now COPY it over), so it seems to have survived that particular incident. (We should be copying AR1400N over to AR1404 and AR1404N anyway because BioWare's AR1404 MOSs somehow came out the wrong size.)