Technical Conundrum, a lil' Love, and a question on Mod usage

[Guest Dravis85]

So I wanted to start by stating my appreciation to the guys here a G3 for all the bug fixes, tweaks, and mods they have developed for one of my all time favorite games. Everything you guys do is golden in my opinion.

 

The 2nd reason for this post is to report on the successful installation and running on win 7. I ran into multiple issues with installation, then configuration, then gameplay freezes/crashes or bugs. Thankfully I got all that worked out now, all thanks to G3 I think.

 

Basically, I installed SOA then TOB to public folders, then the patches, then the G3 bugfix package, and the G3 tweaks package (specific components I'm not sure of) and finishing with the Widescreen Mod. ALL issues with running the game in WIN 7 were resolved with this installation order. I have UAC off by default, but compatibility mode wasn't necessary to have the game run.

 

This brings me to the 1st question: How is it that the Widscreen Mod fixes a bug that crashed the game when equipping katanas? In the first dungeon doing the intial equip (from the small room with the golem) and putting a katana on Imoen would freeze the game and crash. Add in the widescreen and no more? Dont get the technicalities of that.

 

And Question number 2: Is it an inherent functionality of the Widescreen mod to render the inventory, journal, spell pages, or character screens at the games original resolution (as far as I can tell). I ran the mod to display at 1920 ('x') x 1080 ('y') (native resolution for my screen and the res of my desktop). The game was originally set to the 2nd highest "unlockable" resolution (16?? x ?) from the BG configuration tool. If there is a way to have the game render the auxillery screens at the same resolutiuon as the "gameplay" that would be great.

 

Question 3 goes with Q2: Is there some other setting I should be using on the BG configuration tool that works better with the widescreen mod or does the mod take over completely on those settings?[/size][/size]

[the bigg]

1) The 'standard' 1280x960 and higher modes are buggy, so that must be the reason of the crashes. Widescreen forces the non-buggy 1024x768 mode to work as your asked for resolution.

2) Stretching (like what 1600x1200 used to do) would require a full redraw of all icons and GUI elements, which is impossible to do.

3) Widescreen makes BG2 ignore the 'resolution' setting, everything else is handled as it was before.

[Jarno Mikkola]

This brings me to the 1st question: How is it that the Widescreen Mod fixes a bug that crashed the game when equipping katanas? In the first dungeon doing the intial equip (from the small room with the golem) and putting a katana on Imoen would freeze the game and crash. Add in the widescreen and no more? Dont get the technicalities of that.

Well, the bug belongs to the unsupported mode of the game, the Katana's paper doll's picture goes off screen and the game crashes in the default game...

The Widescreen Mod rewrites the functionality, so that the base screen is the 1024x768+the black outside borders... on screen sizes that are bigger than the required amount.

 

And Question number 2: Is it an inherent plah, plah plah.

_{Where's the question? And it's indicator, the question mark, this: ? As you actually asked multiple questions...}

But basically yes. And you could make a GUI mod that would give you the screens in set size, if it's installed after the Widescreen mod, but you need an computer artist and a coder that knows what he is doing...

But it will still be quite hard to fit all the screens in one big x₁*y₁+x₂*y₂+...x_n*y_n.

 

Question 3 goes with Q2: Is there some other setting

Well, the safest preset size is the 1024x768...