Character level over 50

[Guest JJ M]

First of all, sorry if this is not the proper place for this kind of message. I usually don't use forums, but maybe this could be interesting to someone.

I have baldur's gate I and II since more than 15 years ago, and recently decided to start a new game with trilogy and many mods, including the tweaks for level 50 characters.I thought it would be a good idea to be able to extend the .2da tables to really high levels, in case I wanted to change the rules or whatever.

After extending the tables I found it was impossible to pass level 50, because anytime I gave enough experience with an editor to reach levels over 50, I level up and immediately the character returns to level 50 keeping the HP, XP, and all the rest, so you could level up infinitely. As I found in some comments, its a hardcoded characteristic, so there are no mods to change that.

So, I expent last evening with a hexadecimal editor and CheatEngine trying to find how to pass this, and I have found a solution. I haven't decompile anything, so I just have a slight idea of what the code does, but it seems to be a calling for a function that checks level of characters, and if it founds a numerical value over 50 it overwrites 50. This function is called several times, at loading, saving, leveling up, etc...

To allow the game to accept characters with levels over 50 you need to change BGMain.exe using a hexadecimal editor. Searching for the string FE FF FF 32 (a comparison with value 0x32 = 50) will find 6 results. In my version they start in 00 07 25 68. That is the function to be changed. You only need to change that last value (0x32) for the hexadecimal equivalent of the maximum level you want, in my case 0x64=100, resulting FE FF FF 64.

Of course, I haven't tested this enough, something unexpected could be broken somewhere, and I don't really know if someone cares about very high levels, but anyway I post it in case this could lead to new mods or rules change to make the game different.