EET playthrough with 200+ mods

[subtledoctor]

Needs this.

(In fact k4thos himself wrote something similar, I'm surprised something like EET_end can't handle malformed .2da tables.

[Graion Dilach]

@subtledoctor The problem isn't really with the table being malformed here (a few NPCs in that table lack ToB entries and that's handled without problems) but that those entries lack dialog files completely. This is the code which merges and updates the dialog files to prevent issues during act transitions and it assumes the NPCs listed in it are actual NPCs afterall.

This is a mod bug and not EET_End's.

[subtledoctor]

9 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

This is a mod bug and not EET_End's

Yeah but this is why we have things like SOURCE_SIZE checks and IF_EXISTS. As I mentioned elsewhere, if you believe in the principle of "garbage in, garbage out," then any mod demanding to be installed at the very end of a massive EET installation should expect a certain amount of garbage in, and should have sanity checks to handle it where possible. Not stating that a failure to cover every possible point of failure is a bug, just pointing out that when points of failure are identified, they should ideally be covered.

Ideally. Because it's also nice when the thing going in last has some kind of active maintenance. But it doesn't seem like EET does.

Which raises a larger point:

On 4/4/2022 at 5:30 AM, Quester said:

This will be my first playthrough in about 10 years, my first time playing the EEs

On 5/11/2022 at 9:16 AM, Quester said:

Seriously, this installation process is kicking my ass. Will I ever get to play BG?

Maybe it's worth considering whether EET is really necessary here. I mean back in the old days I felt it was important to play BGT, but about 80% of the reason why was playing BG1 with the BG2 engine and screen resolution. Now... I mean yeah the idea of EET is nice, but it undeniably adds a not-insubstantial amount of complexity to the installation process (and, depending on how you treat the NPCs, it adds complexity to NPC management), and we already have BGEE using the same engine as BG2EE. Compared to BGT, it seems to be less reliable, and provide less reward. So maybe it is worth reconsidering whether it should be deemed a high priority.

I mean, I was hoping to do an EET install, but Beamdog is pathetically slow is updating the iOS apps and I couldn't get EET to work on the 2.5 games on a restricted platform. So I very quickly bailed on the idea and just modded BGEE and started playing. And honestly, I'm quite happy, the mod installation process was a small fraction of what it would have been, and I'm spending more time playing. When it's time to transition to BG2EE I can import a save, or just roll a similar character, whatever. Honestly its... fine. Better, in a lot of ways.

Don't mean to denigrate EET at all - I want it to exist, I want it to be continually improved, and I want it to be working better/more easily with more mods and on more platforms. But given the current state of things I think not using it should maybe be given just a touch more consideration. Because no one has mentioned this to Quester and maybe he would be having more fun if they had.

[Graion Dilach]

pdialog.2da shouldn't even have such lines to begin with. This isn't about the "certain amount of garbage in, garbage out", this is about that this contradict even what the file is supposed to be. Even if you pad out the lines, it's still wrong and you can't even ensure that you sanitize this properly. And honestly, silencing garbage data is bad and I would very much prefer if mods wouldn't accept garbage in outright. I call that false reassurance.

I mean, I had a scenario when the autosanitizing of argent77's kit library broke my game because the previous version of Elistraee's Song had an incomplete kitlist.2da entry and when I installed a kit relying on this library after that mod, this line got deleted from kitlist.2da but all the kit data everywhere else was kept, causing all kinds of exotic bugs.

Also, importing between the two games when modded isn't without pitfalls either. In this month I've seen two cases when import caused bugs because the SoD-dedicated spells offset the spell indices and players ended up with stuck spellslots because what they had as Sunscorch in BG1 turned out to be a nonexistant spell in BG2 even when they properly ensured the mod order is correct.

[argent77]

45 minutes ago, Graion Dilach said:

I mean, I had a scenario when the autosanitizing of argent77's kit library broke my game because the previous version of Elistraee's Song had an incomplete kitlist.2da entry and when I installed a kit relying on this library after that mod, this line got deleted from kitlist.2da but all the kit data everywhere else was kept, causing all kinds of exotic bugs.

The add_kit_ex library shouldn't remove table entries without at least triggering a warning. Can you provide a repro for this issue?

[subtledoctor]

Yeah, importing can also be tricky if you use a mod-added kit. I tend not to import, but instead to just create a new character similar to the old one. It's close enough, and it save metric tons of headaches, and gets me playing the game a lot faster.

Like I say, I would prefer playing EET if all else were equal. But there's no denying that it introduces a number of added vectors for problems and incompatibilities. BGT was simple: you installed BGT, then you installed mods. With EET you have three separate install steps for the thing itself, and two separate buckets for mods to be installed with it (some on BG1 before EET, some on BG2 after EET) and those can interfere with each other, or with EET, in different ways. By and large people have been doing a tremendous job of getting all this right and making it all work together, but from a structural standpoint it all just seems a bit... rickety.

[Quester]

@subtledoctor: I tried your kit table normalization mod thingy, unfortunately that did not solve the problem. EET end still won't install.

And sure, I have considered playing the games separately, without EET. I know that's an option. It's also an option not to try to install 200 mods together. 

I just figured, if others were able to get big EET installs to function without game-breaking issues, why shouldn't I be able to? Haha. It does require some perseverance though.

@Graion Dilach(or anyone really): Do you have any idea what I could do at this point to fix the broken .2da tables so EET End will be able to install?

 

[Graion Dilach]

I thought I was straightforward - just delete the lines containing a single coloumn (or if you normalized the 2da, a single value) from it with a text editor.

@argent77 I'll try to rebuild the folder. This issue was in November and I only kept the PI install log from that era pretty much after I reported the issue to Elistraee's Song.

[Quester]

On 5/20/2022 at 9:05 PM, Graion Dilach said:

I thought I was straightforward - just delete the lines containing a single coloumn (or if you normalized the 2da, a single value) from it with a text editor.

You probably were, it's just that I'm a little slow.  Thanks, it worked!

[Quester]

It seems I am no longer able to edit the first post in this thread. @CamDawg, is that something that happens when a thread hasn't been active for a while?

[jastey]

52 minutes ago, Quester said:

It seems I am no longer able to edit the first post in this thread. @CamDawg, is that something that happens when a thread hasn't been active for a while?

Unfotunately, it's the bitter pill we (that is, you members) had to swallow for G3 protecting itself against increased user activity taking up moderator time as of late.

[Quester]

After several reinstalls and tweaks to my modlist, I have started a playthrough with an elvish Abjurer. Probably one of the least played specialist mages. And yeah Abjurers are normally all humans, but I decided to allow any race for any class this time.

Current issues that I am having:

1. Despite installing 'BG2 Opposition Schools' through Tome & Blood, my Abjurer is able to learn Alteration spells. Which she shouldn't. I have no idea why.

For now I am simply restricting myself from scribing Alteration spells, but I would love to get a fix for this if anyone has an idea.

2. At temples, clicking on the Cures page crashes the game. I thought this was an issue with jtweaks component 'Temple cures work better', and I noticed that @subtledoctor has a quickfix thing for that on his GitHub, so I installed that. No change; Temple cures still crash the game.

So I don't know what else to do.

3. After visiting the FAI and talking to a bunch of quest givers, I started experiencing very annoying stutters. I remembered there was a tool called Stutter Debug Tool, so I downloaded and installed that. However, I am not able to determine what script, if any, causes the stutters.

The first post has been updated with the current install list.

Edited September 17, 2022 by Quester

[Quester]

Well I started a new game (again) and so far no stutters.

Points 1 and 2 are still happening though. @subtledoctor, any idea what might have gone wrong with the opposition schools? I can't see any other mod that messes with those things. (weidu.log in first post)

From my limited testing with a few specialist mages it seems no opposition schools are active.

[subtledoctor]

On 9/17/2022 at 1:26 PM, Quester said:

After several reinstalls and tweaks to my modlist, I have started a playthrough with an elvish Abjurer. Probably one of the least played specialist mages. And yeah Abjurers are normally all humans, but I decided to allow any race for any class this time.

Current issues that I am having:

1. Despite installing 'BG2 Opposition Schools' through Tome & Blood, my Abjurer is able to learn Alteration spells.

What game are you playing? EET? EET is on the BG2EE engine, meaning it already uses BG2 opposition schools. If you are playing BGEE or BG2EE then that option should not be available. Since EET is within the BG2EE game, likewise, that option should be unavailable. If you install the mod to force BG2 opposition schools in a game already using BG2 opposition schools... well, I wouldn't necessarily expect bugs, but I wouldn't be surprised by them either.

In other words, if you are playing BGEE, SoD, BG2EE, or EET, then your game already uses BG2 opposition schools. In this case you should only use the mod to switch to IWD opposition schools or no opposition schools.

EDIT - I guess PI operates by employing the --force-install tag, which could theoretically override the actual mod code that prevents this component being installed on EET...? It's possible that forcing it to install when it doesn't want to somehow overrides the way the .tp2 code passes a string variable to the function, and so the function used the default value which is "none" and which removes all opposition schools.

EDIT 2 - or maybe PI just had its strings confused, and you saw "BG2 Opposition Schools" which is component 1203, and in fact PI force-installed component 1201,
"No Opposition Schools."

In any case the answer remains: if you are playing one of the BG games and you want BG2 opposition schools, your game already has what you want so just don't install this component at all.

Not sure what the best path is now... it's installed pretty early in your stack, I would not try to uninstall it at this point.

...

As far as temples go: best bet is to open a temple .STO file in Near Infinity and check out the cures they are selling. If there is a problem, it might be pretty obvious. (Like if one of the cures being sold has no name, there might be no resource there. In such a case the easy fix is to simply delete the faulty cure from the list of things being sold. The tedious part is performing this fix on every  .STO file that needs it.)

[subtledoctor]

Sorry for double-post, but I bet I know what the problem is: I believe PI parses .tp2 files to determine what component are or are not valid to offer to the user. But I'm  guessing that it has not been coded to parse the way SUBCOMPONENTs employ implicit REQUIRE_PREDICATE conditions. Tagging @AL|EN in case this is true and/or useful.