PST:EE, making Morte a thief (tiny spoilers, maybe) (not sure, what exactly passes as ''spoiler')

[Guest Roman]

... well, at least trying to do so. There is no problem to change
Morte's 'class' variable to 'THIEF'. This changes his char sheet, lets
it show the pickpocket skill and stuff and lets him levelup after thief
rules, with adding thief  skill points. Problem is, i still can't
activate his thieving abilities ingame. Neither the hotkeys nor the menu
buttons works (thieving menu buttons won't even appear on the UI).

So i did the same to other chars to see what happens.

Changing the main char, The Namless One, works fine, the hotkey works
and thief's buttons appear in the UI.

Changing Annah to anything other than 'FIGHTER_THIEF' keeps the thieving
abilities (hotkeys and UI). So you will end up with a mage (e. g.) who
can backstab and pickpocket.

So the ability activation seems to be scripted elsewhere and not in the
.gam file in the gamesave which i'm editing. Where exactly? Which game
resources i have to change for this to work?

Greets and happy new year

[Guest Roman]

There is a field called "Script name" in the CRE resource subsection of
the GAM gamesave. In forums it is also called a "death value" and is
seemingly able to store a death status instead of a script reference.
The design decision is hilarious... it DOES make sense in some way
(you're dead? Ha! No script for you, little creature!) 
  But whatever. Changing the value makes strange things happen -- if
changed from "Morte" to "Annah", it will change Mortes char sheet to
show "tiefling" as race (regardless of the race field in his CRE
subsection in the gamesave, which is still set to "human"), the
biography is that of Annah and now thieving abilities will show up in
the menu, regardless of the class val in his CRE resource. His innate
ability ("litany of curses") disappears from the menu.
  There is no "Morte.BCS" (or "Annah.BCS") in the BCS listing, so what
exactly does this "script name" var refer to?

Greets

[subtledoctor]

My rough understanding is that the PST devs used the BG2 Infinity Engine as the bones of their game engine, but didn't use a bunch of stuff used in BG2, and hard-coded a bunch of stuff that in BG2 was kept in values in the .SPL/.ITM/.CRE/etc. file structure.  So where in BG2 you could change some stuff with file/hex-editing tools like NI, in PST a bunch of that stuff cannot be changed without finding and changing where it is hard-coded in the game executable.  I don't know, but I suppose that the NPCs' UI interfaces might be so hard-coded, instead of being determined by their class?

I SO wish the PST-in-BGEE mod had been made... would've been so great (so much greater than PSTEE turned out to be)

[kjeron]

SCRIPTNAME is not the name of a script, it is the name of the creature when referenced directly within a script.

I ran into this while trying to help Aquadrizzt - PSTEE hardcodes a variety of aspects to the creature's SCRIPTNAME, including a special abilities submenu unique to PSTEE.

It can be overridden through UI menu to display any of the classic actionbars, such as the class-based ones from BG, as well as the various submenu action bars.  All the buttons work, though clicking them closes the menu (a default behavior in PSTEE), so buttons that lead to submenu's aren't themselves viable (Select Spell button, Select Item Button, Special Ability button, Right-clicking a weapon or quick-spell slot), though the actionbars for those submenu's are still viable.

[Endarire]

@subtledoctor Agreed on PST-in-EET!  Discussion of its feasibility is here and seemingly still debated for how best to implement things.

[subtledoctor]

No - that thread is idle speculation. (And it doesn't make sense to include PST in EET anyway.) I was talking about an actual project from several years ago, which unfortunately never got off the ground. 

[Guest http://www.pocketplane.net]

Hm, i didn't expect that it has to do with the UI, because the hotkeys
also dont't work. I came across this posting
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/48994/the-new-ui-system-how-to-use-it
It describes how to activate a UI edit mode, which among other things
allows you to see, which lines in UI.menu file correspond to each of
the buttons. But it is a  trial-by-error to figure out what
they actually do
Man, and i thought it would be as easy as flipping a variable.

An overspanning storyline that links TNO and the main char of BG1 seems
indeed overambitious. But porting the PST game "as is" to the engine
used for BG2 doesn't seeme that unrealistic. Like the  Tutu project but for
PST