My new "Made in Heaven" mods

[Connelly]

Heads up to whoever is thinking about tinkering with the Fixes & Restoration mod. Installing the Spells Restoration component before IWDification's Divine Spell Pack will return a "index out of bounds" "Invalid spell number: -1" error. I understand it's a type of error that comes up when there are more than 50 spells in a given spell level, but MiH's component only adds four divine spells and installing them the other way around seems to avoid this problem.

It might be fine in a big install to move Spells Restoration alone into to the spell mod group after IWDification's spell packs but I haven't tried yet.

Edited October 22, 2023 by Connelly

[Angel]

16 hours ago, Connelly said:

Heads up to whoever is thinking about tinkering with the Fixes & Restoration mod. Installing the Spells Restoration component before IWDification's Divine Spell Pack will return a "index out of bounds" "Invalid spell number: -1" error. I understand it's a type of error that comes up when there are more than 50 spells in a given spell level, but MiH's component only adds four divine spells and installing them the other way around seems to avoid this problem.

Very brave of you to play around with a mod I have not even officially released yet!  I guess it is time for more... experiments.  The pain will only be passing, you should survive the process.

Silliness aside, this one seems to be specific to BGEE, I can't reproduce it on BG2EE.  I'm trying to figure out if I did something stupid or it's just iwdification not taking a changed situation into account.

EDIT: Found the issue.  The divine spells component tries to force new icons for the HLAs CLERIC_ELEMENTAL_SWARM, CLERIC_GREATER_ELEMENTAL_SWARM, CLERIC_SUMMON_DEVA, CLERIC_SUMMON_FALLEN_DEVA.  However, these do not exist in BGEE, so the spell restoration component of MiH F&R clears the unused references from spell.ids.  This causes Iwdification to trip on this part.

EDIT 2: As a workaround, you can disable recycle_unused_idsnames in the mih_fr.ini file.

Edited October 23, 2023 by Angel

[Connelly]

46 minutes ago, Angel said:

Very brave of you to play around with a mod I have not even officially released yet!  I guess it is time for more... experiments.  The pain will only be passing, you should survive the process.

Hah. I don't mind doing a few installation tests to check "what if I cross a chicken with a starfish?" and find out what not to do in a new install, although now that I'm confined to a potato PC I can't do that as much. I'm crap to give feedback about things like balance and such , so if this helps a little, all the better.

[DavidW]

This is fixed now in the core IWDspells library (though not yet ported to IWDification or SCS).

[Lurker]

MIH_EQ, Tactical Challenges: Throne of Bhaal, Enhanced Battles: Saradush; quoting the readme:

Quote

Cursed Prison: The other path into Saradush castle is now home to high-level vampires and the entire prison is now a desecrated zone, strengthening undead and gradually draining the living. You should not stay around longer than needed.

That effect affects the whole party, even if only a single character is actually inside the prison area, while the others are waiting outside or even in another building. That's one way to sell the tweak from MESpells, which extends the duration of "Negative Plane Protection" to 8 hours...

[Angel]

4 hours ago, Lurker said:

That effect affects the whole party, even if only a single character is actually inside the prison area, while the others are waiting outside or even in another building. That's one way to sell the tweak from MESpells, which extends the duration of "Negative Plane Protection" to 8 hours...

Mm, I did not take that possibility into account.  I guess the easiest fix would be to make the prison entrances party required, but maybe I can think of a better solution.  Thanks for the report!

[Lurker]

Recently I'm doing lots of reinstalls for testing purposes. And since I'm again waiting for one to finish, I'd like to report for once that MIH_EQ is unfortunately the biggest time hog present in my setup, by far. The setup-mih_eq.debug also is the largest, with 30 MB.

(description of environment)

If it helps:

                WeiDU Timings
DEFINE_DIMORPHIC_FUNCTION        0.000
[...]
BUT_ONLY                         0.860
saving files                     1.125
loading files                    4.188
COPY                            21.712
READ_*                          56.539
eval_pe                         75.363
process_patch2                 157.724
function overhead              1107.957
TOTAL                          1427.874

For comparison, here's some data for SCS, 2nd biggest time hog (I don't use the improved AI, if that matters):

                WeiDU Timings
load TLK                         0.000
[...]
stuff not covered elsewhere      2.586
COPY                             7.793
eval_pe                         36.285
READ_*                          37.641
process_patch2                  87.943
function overhead              498.311
TOTAL                          680.482

MIH_IP comes 3rd:

                WeiDU Timings
ADD_PROJECTILE                   0.000
[...]
loading files                    0.577
COPY                             3.533
READ_*                           5.448
eval_pe                         15.803
process_patch2                  34.375
function overhead              361.803
TOTAL                          423.550

 

Edited October 31, 2023 by Lurker

[harticus33]

Looks great! I like lots of spells, will Made in Heaven Spells work with SRR? I installed SRR before Made in Heaven and IWD-ification.

[Angel]

2 hours ago, harticus33 said:

Looks great! I like lots of spells, will Made in Heaven Spells work with SRR? I installed SRR before Made in Heaven and IWD-ification.

I do not support installing my mod and SR(R) together, but from what others reported the arcane- and divine spell packs at least should work.  Some of the tweaks might not though, but I don't have exact data on this.

Also be aware that there is some overlap between my paladin component and IWD-ification's class updates.  It's not harmful but you may see some duplicates, such as getting Smite Evil twice.

[Connelly]

A couple more problems I noticed when installing Fixes.

A bunch of mods (mostly quest and NPC ones) were throwing warnings about not finding the entry for WIZARD_DISPEL_MAGIC in spells.ids for their scripts, and if I understand things correctly, this means creatures both vanilla and modded won't use the spell. When reading the spells.ids after going through the Spell Restorations component, it seemed to not only reorganize half the entries in there, but remove the WIZARD_DISPEL_MAGIC entry as well as others (ie WIZARD_KHELBENS_WARDING_WHIP, WIZARD_WIZARD_LOCK, WIZARD_ALARM or WIZARD_HOLD_PORTAL). I can't tell if they remain under new names or to what extent is any of that needed, but I worry that this may cause many things in the game to not work correctly because they can't find the spells they need.

The creature fixes is also throwing this install error: "You are trying to edit mdearth1.CRE, which does not exist in the game".

 

[Angel]

1 hour ago, Connelly said:

A couple more problems I noticed when installing Fixes.

A bunch of mods (mostly quest and NPC ones) were throwing warnings about not finding the entry for WIZARD_DISPEL_MAGIC in spells.ids for their scripts, and if I understand things correctly, this means creatures both vanilla and modded won't use the spell. When reading the spells.ids after going through the Spell Restorations component, it seemed to not only reorganize half the entries in there, but remove the WIZARD_DISPEL_MAGIC entry as well as others (ie WIZARD_KHELBENS_WARDING_WHIP, WIZARD_WIZARD_LOCK, WIZARD_ALARM or WIZARD_HOLD_PORTAL). I can't tell if they remain under new names or to what extent is any of that needed, but I worry that this may cause many things in the game to not work correctly because they can't find the spells they need.

I tested an install on both BGEE and BG2EE and cannot reproduce this.  WIZARD_DISPEL_MAGIC is still present in spell.ids in either case, as it should be.  Note that the order of entries in spell.ids may be changed so it may not appear

As for WIZARD_KHELBENS_WARDING_WHIP, in BGEE this entry does not exist to begin with, it's not removed by me.  The entry for the spell is WIZARD_WARDING_WHIP.  In BG2EE both entries exist and point to the same spell.

Lastly, WIZARD_WIZARD_LOCK, WIZARD_ALARM and WIZARD_HOLD_PORTAL are dummied out spells that will never be implemented, as they are impossible to implement under engine restrictions (there is no opcode to hold or lock doors).  Removing these entries is why I change spell.ids to begin with, as this frees up more slots for spells.

[Trouveur80]

I really like MiH QE, my trip in the Cloakwood spiders area was a struggle against five phase spiders thanks to SCS, and only three characters survived.

I noticed that sometimes poison from phase spiders didn't put the poison icon on the character portrait. I don't know if it is related to MiH QE, but I never encountered this before.

Also, greater basiliks are immune to normal arrows, but there is no display of this immunity in the text box or a warning from the attacking character. If I didn't read the readme, I could have thought it was a bug instead of a feature. ^^

No having access to two ankheg armors really affects the balance. I never bought so many healing potions before trying your mods.

[Angel]

31 minutes ago, Trouveur80 said:

Also, greater basiliks are immune to normal arrows, but there is no display of this immunity in the text box or a warning from the attacking character. If I didn't read the readme, I could have thought it was a bug instead of a feature. ^^

The arrow immunity is provided by dragring.itm, an in-game pseudo-item worn by all dragons.  I don't think it's possible to make it display a message, just like you don't get a message from someone protected by Protection from Normal Missiles.  Or if you are fool enough to go after a dragon without enchanted arrows. ^^

[Trouveur80]

5 hours ago, Angel said:

The arrow immunity is provided by dragring.itm, an in-game pseudo-item worn by all dragons.  I don't think it's possible to make it display a message, just like you don't get a message from someone protected by Protection from Normal Missiles.  Or if you are fool enough to go after a dragon without enchanted arrows. ^^

fair enough.

It's nice to see basiliks having some tricks against low level farming.

[Trouveur80]

Baby wyverns are very dangerous now, and the new bounty hunters were deadly, I needed to throw all I had to them to defeat them.

Did you also updated baby wyvern form for avenger kit ?

It was nice to meet again the Surgeon.

Did you also allow to speak to the hamadryad in wyverns part cloakwood ? It was nice not to have to kill her with my druid.