[Discussion] details of item de-duplication

[DavidW]

I'd like to split the discussion of item duplication into two, since it's getting fairly confused. 

In the other thread, we can discuss whether de-duplicating items is a bug at all, and whether it should be included in the main EE fixpack, or made an optional component, or gated by an ini check, or just left out entirely for another mod.

This thread is for discussing how to do item deduplication, on the assumptions that

1) we want to build a component that removes either all, or all but one, of each duplicated unique item and replaces it with a generic item

2) as much as possible that component wants to be guided by developer intent, but recognizing that a certain amount of intelligent guesswork may be required to discern that intent.

Where that component goes can be separated out from how to design it. (If it absolutely shouldn't go in FP it can always go in SCS or Tweaks.)

[Bartimaeus]

3 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

(Yes there were multiple copies in SoA but to find them you basically had to 1) do the bard stronghold quest and 2) join Bodhi's side, and at that point it honestly just seems like an easter egg.

IIRC, in SoA there are Boots of Speed on Renal (not meant to be obtained - siding with Bodhi makes him disappear from the game entirely, so the only way to get them is through exploity kills AFAIK, so not really worth consideration), on one of the Planar Prison dudes (don't need to be a bard to get it, but yes, part of the bard/Haer'dalis quest line), and through the Mithral Token Machine in Spellhold. So there are two "legitimate" pairs in SoA. And of course, ToB adds like three or four more in a rather haphazard fashion.

P.S. Killing the current thread when people were in the middle of a discussion when you could've just made one new thread to handle one issue while leaving the original to cover the other seems like it would've been a better solution. If I hadn't already written this post when you closed it, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Edited May 5, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[subtledoctor]

Eh, splitting the discussion has merit - at least arguably - and just like messing with the Boots of Speed, any way it was done would be likely to annoy some person or another.   So whatever.

Thanks for reminding me of this info, though:

On 5/5/2022 at 3:56 PM, Bartimaeus said:

siding with Bodhi makes him disappear from the game entirely, so the only way to get them is through exploity kills AFAIK, so not really worth consideration), on one of the Planar Prison dudes (don't need to be a bard to get it, but yes, part of the bard/Haer'dalis quest line), and through the Mithral Token Machine in Spellhold. So there are two "legitimate" pairs in SoA.

I had forgotten that the bard pair is not actually part of the stronghold quest, and that Renal disappears if you side with Bodhi. And I totally forgot the Spellhold vending machine. So yeah two pairs available in SoA. And for the moment let's set aside the ones in ToB which honestly are almost like an officially-sanctioned convenience tweak so that the whole party can move at the same speed. So for the moment at least, the problem can be distilled down to, there are two items that both contain fluff descriptions claiming them to be a particular set of footwear that once belonged to Joe the Assassin. Or whatever. What to do about that?

1. Remove one entirely (yes this is a perfectly legitimate fix - make the facts on the ground match the item description)
2. Give a new, similarly unique, name and description to one of them (this means changing the underlying .ITM file for some but not all)
3. Give a new, "generic" name and description to some, reserving the existing unique description for one (changes some underlying .ITM files)
4. Give a generic name and description to some, and distinguish the unique one by adding some kind of mechanical difference
5. Give a generic name and description to all of them (make the item description match the facts on the ground)
6. Change nothing and live with the narrative ambiguity (frankly I'm not 100% sold on this being a "bug")
7. Keep the Paws of the Cheetah description for all instances, but with minor edits to suggest that several pairs of the boots exist.

People seem to have dismissed option #1 right off the bat. Which is fine. Nobody has suggested #2, probably because it seems inappropriate for a FixPack to add creative embellishments like that. Which is a fair point, a proper mod should do such a thing. Ditto for #4, adding or changing features is deemed beyond the scope of a FixPack. (But if anyone wants to raise one of these options, I don't mean to place them off the table!)

#3 seems pretty weird to me. First, I am not aware of any other instance where a unique item and a generic item share identical characteristics - except with some weapons, notably ones added by ToB, where the shared characteristic is a simple "plus" number. An effect like a movement speed increase seems different. (Even in SoD, where both files exist, the game, does not to my knowledge actually present the player with both versions, unless the player manually imports one.) Second, are they going to have different Lore requirements to identify them? Who is going to decide that? If they are both 'Identified' (all of their history revealed, likely by means of divination magic), then why don't we know the prior ownership and history of the generic ones? Just because we want to remove the unique description, that doesn't make these items literally generic! One of them has been used by an interplanar bounty hunter! One ended up in a vending machine in a psychedelic wizard dungeon! What are the stories behind those circumstances??

#3 would also have implications for other mods. Note, making this "optional" does not address these implications, and may even make the situation worse.

#5 solves all problems, but removes something special from the game which the developers obviously wrote and included in the game. It might be the smallest and most superficial example of something "special and unique" in a game but... sure, I guess it still is. I personally think this is the least bad way to change things. What it removes is one forgettable paragraph. It replaces something that apparently offends people's sensibilities with something else that may offend some peoples' sensibilities... it gives us a fairly simple balancing test to decide which one offends you more, and the simplicity of evaluating it seems attractive to me. So maybe people should evaluate this on its own before comparing this to other options.

#6 I guess belongs in the other thread, but there are several rationales that militate in its favor: first, reusing assets in a game is possibly evidence of dev laziness, but laziness does not equal bug; second, maybe it is a bug but it is a minor one that has never seemed to bother people that much, and any potential fix would have too many collateral consequences and this FixPack doesn't have to fix every little perceived imperfection.

Edited May 6, 2022 by subtledoctor

[The_Baffled_King]

4 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Eh, splitting the discussion has merit - at least arguably - and just like messing with the Boots of Speed, any way it was done would be likely to annoy some person or another.  

[snip]

If they are both 'Identified' (all of their history revealed, likely by means of divination magic), then why don't we know the prior ownership and history of the generic ones? Just because we want to remove the unique description, that doesn't make these items literally generic! One of them has been used by an interplanar bounty hunter! One ended up in a vending machine in a psychedelic wizard dungeon! What are the stories behind those circumstances??

Subtledoctor, as the previous thread was closed, just wanna say no pardon was required - all views on my opinions are fine, so long as I'm not accused of bad faith.

On a lighter note, I find it hilarious that Boots of Speed happened to be the poster child for both my tangential discussion with Bartimaeus, and the discussion over whether there's any inconsistency about DavidW's approach to some of the duplicated unique items in BG2...

As for the bit beneath the "snip", if it's "by means of divination magic", it's the Doylist interpretation that the devs had other priorities. If it's Lore-based identification... if either you or Bartimaeus want to read a veeeeeeery long post about Lore that includes the phrase "The Baffled King's Footwear of Awesomeness", start a non-fixpack thread elsewhere, and you'll get it at some point (I'm not going off-topic now the threads have been split to re-focus). In an abstract sense, I legit found the questions posed by Bartimaeus about Lore seriously interesting - it's the history, and the real world comparisons.

5 hours ago, DavidW said:

Where that component goes can be separated out from how to design it. (If it absolutely shouldn't go in FP it can always go in SCS or Tweaks.)

Isn't the better question re. the bolded bit "what would DavidW want?"? It's a bit more difficult to be sure of a person's preference when they insist on arguing dev intent

Edited May 6, 2022 by The_Baffled_King

[DavidW]

31 minutes ago, The_Baffled_King said:

Isn't the better question re. the bolded bit "what would DavidW want?"? It's a bit more difficult to be sure of a person's preference when they insist on arguing dev intent

Oh, if item deduplication ends up in SCS I can do what the hell I feel like. I mention it just because it wouldn’t be wasteful to spend time figuring out this component even if it doesn’t end up in FP.

My personal preferences do not coincide with my attempt to make an objective assessment of dev intent.

[subtledoctor]

21 minutes ago, The_Baffled_King said:

all views on my opinions are fine, so long as I'm not accused of bad faith

On a lighter note, I find it hilarious that Boots of Speed happened to be the poster child for both my tangential discussion with Bartimaeus, and the discussion over whether there's any inconsistency about DavidW's approach to some of the duplicated unique items in BG2

I don't think you have written anything in bad faith, and I think your opinions are fine even if I don't always agree. My first thought upon reading your post back there was "this guy is right, that approach is inconsistent!" And only after thinking for a bit did I come back around to the other side, that in fact there is a difference between how "generic" items should be treated when it is just a question of a weapon's "plus" value versus something with a more distinct effect.

And then I got hung up on the Boots of Speed (as the earlier conversation already had before I got here) I think because it's just a really hard nut to crack. Harder than any of the other instances of de-duplication. And then given that, I started to come around to the idea that maybe the FP should just walk away from it. It's the kind of thing that probably deserves its own mod. I would give only one of the instances of BOOT01 the unique name and description, and I would give it an extra ability to go along with them... maybe an APR bonus, or maybe (given the description) a backstab or thac0 bonus. And let all the other instances keep the generic movement-speed-only bonus and give them the SoD generic description. But it's something I would put in a mod at the end of the stack, like Tweaks or SoB, so it doesn't interfere with any other mods.

[CamDawg]

17 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

FP should just walk away

Yes, but at normal speed or double speed?

(I've already filled my quota of One Serious Post today. I'm on break.)

[The_Baffled_King]

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

My personal preferences do not coincide with my attempt to make an objective assessment of dev intent.

If I hadn't tried to be cute with my phrasing in that last post of mine, I would have said this: "I genuinely don't know what DavidW's personal preference is on this matter, because he's stuck to making arguments on the basis of his objective assessment of dev intent, so I'm curious what form a component of this type would take in SCS.".

54 minutes ago, CamDawg said:

Yes, but at normal speed or double speed?

The problem with trying to estimate what is or isn't likely to be something I want to spend my time on (see: other new thread) is that it's hard to factor in ahead of time that someone might drop something as hilarious as the above on the table... Laughed, went away, laughed again when I came back.

@subtledoctor

Yeah, we're all good! Wasn't a problem at all.

[suy]

11 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

People seem to have dismissed option #1 right off the bat.

I don't think so. Option #1 is removing items which are duplicated, which is what BG2 Unique Artifacts does, and a couple of us have mentioned it. I guess we've not talked much about this because the other mod already does it.

[DavidW]

I think option #1 very clearly doesn’t match dev intent. I don’t see any room for doubt that it’s intentional that multiple creatures in BG2 get Boots of Speed; the issue is what to do about those items’ descriptions.

[subtledoctor]

Agree.

EDIT - throwing this out there. While I have argued against option #3, it seems to be the current favored/proposed solution, so as a fallback position let me suggest an alternate implementation.

Currently the proposal is to keep BOOT01.itm for only a single  copy of the Boots, and (in BG2EE) replace five copies of it with BDBOOT05.itm, Beamdog's "generic Boots of Speed" from Siege of Dragonspear. But! The SoD files weirdly also contain another clone of the same item, BDBOOT11.itm. From what I can see in a quick perusal in NI, this item is identical in every way to BOOT01.itm - it is the Paws of the Cheetah.

So, if only one instance of the Paws of the Cheetah is to be left in the game, I suggest replacing that instance of BOOT01 with BDBOOT11. Leave the other five instances as BOOT01, only change their name and description strings to match that of BDBOOT05. I think this is a more mod-friendly way to achieve the same result, since any extant mods expecting to operate on BOOT01 will still work with five of the six instances, instead of just one.

Edited May 6, 2022 by subtledoctor

[CamDawg]

Since this seems to have gotten lost, I'll propose this alternative again. Changing the description of the Paws of the Cheetah from

Quote

Boots of Speed: The Paws of the Cheetah
These enchanted boots were once the property of a deadly assassin fond of chasing down his prey. He moved with such speed that his targets often didn't have the opportunity to respond, even on horseback. Over time the assassin's fame spread, and though his name was never known, all knew to fear the words last heard by his victims, "You can hide, but you cannot run!"

to something like

Quote

Boots of Speed: The Paws of the Cheetah
These enchanted boots, and several of its type, were once the property of a deadly assassin fond of chasing down his prey. He moved with such speed that his targets often didn't have the opportunity to respond, even on horseback. Over time the assassin's fame spread, and though his name was never known, all knew to fear the words last heard by his victims, "You can hide, but you cannot run!"

It's basically the same sleight of hand that the Ring of Princes uses--another common item with a unique-ish description:

Quote

Ring of Protection +1: Ring of the Princes
This ring and several of its type were originally crafted to protect the sons of King Castter De'wess, though who uttered the enchantment is unknown. History records that the rings remained within that family for at least thirteen generations, though they were all apparently lost within the space of one. Enmity between the king and the family of the creator may be to blame.

[DavidW]

In this specific case, my problem is that while I can see that a king's sons might need several rings, an assassin presumably only needs to wear one pair of boots. Unless he was literally a cheetah?

[The_Baffled_King]

6 minutes ago, DavidW said:

In this specific case, my problem is that while I can see that a king's sons might need several rings, an assassin presumably only needs to wear one pair of boots. Unless he was literally a cheetah?

The "deadly assassin" was clearly much-concerned with his image, so he owned various pairs of boots of speed in different colours and styles to allow coordination with his outfit of choice each day. I mean, sheesh, way to miss the obvious...

Edited May 6, 2022 by The_Baffled_King

[DavidW]

(https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0003.html)