[discussion] Inclusion of 'modder stuff'

[CamDawg]

'Modder stuff' is deliberately vague, because I'm not sure what, if anything, folks might want to change.

I'm prepping fixes for the malformed kit tables, and I'm wondering if I should formally extend all of these tables out to level 50 while I'm here. This is something we were pretty strict about in BG2FP--I believe adding ToB scripting commands to SoA was the only change made purely for modding--but I was curious if folks think the same standard should apply for EEFP, and what (if anything) you'd like to change in a 'default' game.

[Sam.]

If a particular change either:

1. Makes modding a particular facet of the the game substantially easier or more straightforward (eyeing low to mid skill modders) without a) applying further restrictions to what can be done and b) requiring mods that want to do this check if EEFP is installed and if not do the same thing EEFP would have done (making EEFP's code superfluous).
2. Significantly reduces the opportunity for bugs to arise in mods installed downstream, with no drawbacks

Then IMO it is worth considering.

[subtledoctor]

Off the top of my head, maybe adding kit tables that may not exist by default? (Generally this means the mage and specialist tables, but there’s no reason not to check all the base game’s tables for FILE_EXISTS_IN_GAME and copy some in if not.) 

This can trip up even the most fabulously talented modders.

[DavidW]

23 hours ago, CamDawg said:

'Modder stuff' is deliberately vague, because I'm not sure what, if anything, folks might want to change.

I'm prepping fixes for the malformed kit tables, and I'm wondering if I should formally extend all of these tables out to level 50 while I'm here. This is something we were pretty strict about in BG2FP--I believe adding ToB scripting commands to SoA was the only change made purely for modding--but I was curious if folks think the same standard should apply for EEFP, and what (if anything) you'd like to change in a 'default' game.

It's only worth doing once the EEFP is established as a standard (or when it's incorporated in 2.7). So don't spend time doing it now. It's trivial enough to add in a later release.

[Bubb]

The animation INIs could use a good cleaning — many of them ended up with dead fields / the wrong fields all together. Not really important from a bug-fixing perspective, (if the fields are incorrect the engine falls back to hardcoded defaults), though it would make working with them easier.