First, I mean Second, try at a big(ish) EET install

[subtledoctor]

A small note on a specific mod @Lava: I don't love the way the Circlet of Distant Shores has changed, in the Shades of the Sword Coast mod. It used to give a huge boost to visual range, whenever you are wearing it. I agree that needed to be changed, but... now it gives a huge boost to visual range for two rounds, once per day. I'm not really sure what the utility of this is? Maybe instead of that 12-second visual boost, just have it cast Farsight once per day?

Also, there's a bit of a mismatch between the description and the actual function. The description says "increase visual range by +2" but it's not clear what that +2 is... like, what units is that in? I looked at the item in Near Infinity and the visual range bonus actually has parameter2 set to +15. My understanding is that the default visual range is 30 feet (or whatever units), and your boost does add about +50%, to that. So either the item description is inaccurate, or it means something by "+2" that is not clearly explained.

I'll throw out a suggestion: rather than changing the description, you could change the item itself to match the description - change that +15 to +2 in parameter2, and change it back to "while equipped" timing. This gives a very small bonus to visual range - only about the size of a medium creature's foot circle. But it is still noticeable because the player can spot enemies a second before the enemy spots the player. If the player has "pause game when enemy sighted" this will let that character be slightly more effective when scouting. I give this small bonus to all rangers in my ranger mod, and I really like how it plays.

[Lava]

Sorry, I am not changing that. I got reports a multiple times that this item can be exploited a lot. People would throw fireballs at creatures that could even see them in almost every battle. So nope. And it does help, it allows you to position yourself pretty well before big battles without alarming the enemies and it doesn't have to be used like farsight.

As for the description -- yes, it is vague, probably just as the opcode description. To this day I have no idea what "The Statistic Modifier parameter seems to be in the 0–15 interval." mean in Stat: Visual Range means.

However, while I may improve description at some point, I am not changing how it works now. I'd rather it be really useful in some situations than let it be so overpowered and, to be honest, almost like a cheat.

[subtledoctor]

8 minutes ago, Lava said:

I got reports a multiple times that this item can be exploited a lot. People would throw fireballs at creatures that could even see them in almost every battle.

I feel like people do that anyway? Figure out where the enemy is, then begin combat by lobbing a fireball at them (or Web+Cloudkill, or whatever people do). That's what a lot of people do, I don't know that this one item makes much of a difference. (Note - I say this on the assumption that the bonus would be toned down from +15 to +2.)

That said, I totally respect your reasoning. Just noting my reactions to modded content as I come to it in this playthrough.

8 minutes ago, Lava said:

To this day I have no idea what "The Statistic Modifier parameter seems to be in the 0–15 interval." mean in Stat: Visual Range means.

That confused me as well when I first started using that opcode. I think what it means is something like, if you set the parameter higher than 15, maybe it loops around and just applies the bonus of 16-30 as a bonus of 1-15? Maybe? My findings in actual gameplay is as stated above - each point of bonus is about a 4% increase in visual range. (And note, this does not extend the range of spells - for lots of spells, you will have to walk right into the enemies' visual range in order to cast. Of course, AoE spells are an exception and can be cheesed, as has been done since time immemorial. Maybe the reason I don't find the extended visual range to be problematic in my game is that I apply it to rangers, and they cannot cast Fireballs...)

Edited December 29, 2022 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

So, things have worked out rather well here. I found the Great Book of Unknowing, then went to Ulgoth's Beard, and completed Ice Island. Then further north, to clear the coast of fire salamanders and an orc cult on the Fields of the Dead. Saved some civilians from them. Then back to Ulgoth's Beard and booked a tour of some tourist attraction called Durlag's Tower. Went through there, yadda yadda, and got enough XP to regain my fighter levels in the room before the end boss. Boy was that satisfying. I still opted for the chaotic way to go through that fight - I always choose the more chaotic option - but still, boy, what good timing.

Back to Ulgoth's Beard, put down the demon cult. Then there is some talk of another cult? This is the final NTotSC content but honestly it's the weakest part of that mod. I think I'll skip it. Now I've got my fighter class levels back, and everyone is in good shape (I figured out why Tenya was missing some spells, the 5E casting mod is going to need an update), and I've played BG1 twice in the last year or two and I'm super tired of it... I think I'll head straight to the final fight and then move on to SoD.

Except...

except...

who is this guy in the Ulgoth's Beard tavern with a non-standard sprite? He looks like a barbarian, or, a barbarian who's packed on some holiday pounds. (Haven't we all?) I walk over to the corner and he calls out to me! His name is Hjollder and he wants me to help his tribe avert a war. Hey, I'm pretty good at averting wars, I've already done it once! So I go with him and I end up in Lonelywood, far to the north. Cool! I am in Heart of Winter.

So I'm going to play through HoW, but refrain from hitting the level-up button, and then set my XP back down to ~160,000 after I finish. And then go back and move on to SoD.

I had forgotten just how short HoW is. It's basically two maps of exposition, then an island full of undead; then a cave full of trolls and golems; then some fighting humans; then a cave full of undead and sahuagin. If it was structured slightly differently, it would basically be one big prestige dungeon, with about the same amount of content/fights as, say, Watcher's Keep.

Burial Isle is not as hard as I remember it from my last IWDEE game. I'm probably too well-equipped. A full party at the end of BG1, especially with a bunch of mods installed, is wildly powerful. The drowned dead could not last long enough to get close and pose any serious danger. TBH this would work better if done early in BG2 - it would be a better challenge even if I was 2-3 levels higher, because I wouldn't have as much equipment. The loot here is insane, though. What you can buy in Lonelywood and from Edion is fairly reasonable, given it's all quite expensive. But the tombs under Burial Isle have a short sword +4, an axe +3 with Slow on hit, an axe +5, and a mace +5. Crazy stuff. I'm just going to dump these into the lake... maybe some future adventurers can entice a nereid to give them a +5 weapon someday . Vexing thoughts works fine, Contact Other Plane worked when cast from a scroll, and I got the armor, the only problem was the cut-scene that put the armor in my inventory bugged out the screen and prevented me from using the EE zoom-in/zoom-out feature. I had the same issue in some maps in @argent77's TotLM-in-BG2EE mod... don't know why. So I reloaded and left Vexing Thoughts there. Shame, I bet the ability to cast Firestorm could be pretty handy in the final Sarevok fight.

Edited January 21, 2023 by subtledoctor

[mickabouille]

I'm curious, what mod are you using for HoW in BG1?

I feel I should be able to find it but my fumbling gave nothing (unless it's an in-house, personal mod of your, of course)

[Endarire]

@mickabouille
He probably meant tipun's IWD in EET mods.  (These aren't the mods from k4thos.)

[mickabouille]

@Endarire Thanks.

I knew about Argent77's totlm mod, and sort of knew about Tipun's iwd inside EET, but hadn't looked at it (it appeared to me,at the time, as a "maybe, one day" mod).

But I don't see anything in this link about how in eet (and nothing from Tipun themselves, with doesn't scream "it's ready now" to me).

In Subtledoctor's weidu.log, I think it appears as HOW_EET, which seems a more contained and attainable that the whole of iwd1, which is why I saw a parallel with totlm and imagined a similar mod.

[subtledoctor]

3 hours ago, mickabouille said:

I'm curious, what mod are you using for HoW in BG1?

I feel I should be able to find it but my fumbling gave nothing (unless it's an in-house, personal mod of your, of course)

See here. (I think that links to a Google Translate version of the Arcane Coast forum.) In short, it is at the link for @tipun's post for his IWD1 and IWD2 in EET projects, in a spoiler at the bottom of that post.

I don't know exactly what the story is - did tipun start with just adapting HoW, and then get more ambitious and expand the project to IWD1 and IWD2 in total? The HoW-only mod seems abandoned... is it an earlier effort? More likely to have bugs? I don't know. I'm pretty sure the bigger IWD-in-EET project has not been touched in a while, and people report bugs in that one, and I surmise that bigger projects are generally more likely to have more bugs. And in general, if I want IWD in my BG, I would prefer to have each IWD campaign to be a separate add-on. With tipun's HoW-only mod, and argent77's TotLM mod, I've got two of the three, structured just how I like them.

I'm about halfway through HoW, and I haven't seen any bugs apart from the aforementioned screen-zoom issue and the traps in burial isle not triggering the "pause when trap detected" setting.

Edited January 1, 2023 by subtledoctor

[mickabouille]

Ok thank you.

I hadn't used google translate in... a decade? Not sure. And I'm impressed because that's now more like actual text

I saw at the end of the thread that there are now some repositories (with Tipun's greenlight) at

https://github.com/11jo/IWD1_EET

https://github.com/11jo/IWD2_EET

https://github.com/11jo/Worldmap_IWD_EET

and https://github.com/11jo/Icewind_EET

(though sadly not for the HOW self-contained one).

Not much technical activity though (mostly translation work).

Edited January 1, 2023 by mickabouille

[Guest]

@mickabouille

How is here too https://github.com/11jo/HoW_EET
 

The main problem I saw while testing (not playing...) is a issue that prevents quests from being displayed in the journal, the headers and dates are displayed, but not the texts. (corrected it was du to missing titles in french translation)

 

french forum...

 

On 1/1/2023 at 10:52 PM, mickabouille said:

Not much technical activity though (mostly translation work).

Yes, the mods are just hosted here until Tipun have time to work on it again, but he still answers occasionally on ArcaneCoast.

 

Edited January 15, 2023 by JohnBob

[subtledoctor]

Argh, spoke too soon about no bugs. The belt that regenerates and summons ogres, crashes the game. Need to fix that, and then play the whole remorhaz map again…

[subtledoctor]

In looking at fixing the ogre summoning belt, I noticed that the creatures it summons - ogresu.cre - also have their script name corrupted, just like Najim in the Black Pits. Out of curiosity I ran a little mod with this code to see how widespread the problem is:

BEGIN ~identify bad CREs~

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP GLOB ~^.+\.cre$~ ~override~
  READ_ASCII 0x280 script_name
  PATCH_IF (~%script_name%~ STRING_CONTAINS_REGEXP ~cre_str~) = 0 BEGIN
    PATCH_PRINT ~%SOURCE_FILE%~
  END

These are the results:

Spoiler

Quote

A7#CHSU.CRE

A7#CLSU.CRE

A7#CWSU.CRE

B2#ELEM1.CRE

B2#ELEM2.CRE

B2#ELEM3.CRE

B2#ELEML.CRE

B2#ELEMT.CRE

BASILGSU.CRE

BASILLSU.CRE

BDANKHSU.CRE

BDBGOBG1.CRE

BDBGOBG2.CRE

BDBGOBG3.CRE

BDCARLIN.CRE

BDCRAWMU.CRE

BDCROMMU.CRE

BDDANC01.CRE

BDDANC02.CRE

BDELEFIR.CRE

BDELFIRM.CRE

BDGHBRSU.CRE

BDGOGH01.CRE

BDGOGH02.CRE

BDHELP01.CRE

BDHELP02.CRE

BDHELP03.CRE

BDHELP04.CRE

BDMENGO.CRE

BDMEPSUE.CRE

BDMEPSUF.CRE

BDMEPSUI.CRE

BDMEPSUL.CRE

BDMYCSU1.CRE

BDPETSGS.CRE

BDSERVSU.CRE

BDSHA01A.CRE

BDSHA01B.CRE

BDSHA01C.CRE

BDSHA06A.CRE

BDSHA06B.CRE

BDSHA06C.CRE

BDSHA12A.CRE

BDSHA12B.CRE

BDSHA12C.CRE

BDSHA18A.CRE

BDSHA18B.CRE

BDSHA18C.CRE

BDTELEKI.CRE

BDWELEDG.CRE

BDWELEDS.CRE

BDWELEMS.CRE

BEARBLSU.CRE

BEARBRSU.CRE

BEARGRSU.CRE

BPDINGUE.CRE

BPSHAMB.CRE

BSALGHST.CRE

BSDIALOG.CRE

BSVOICE.CRE

C0PKITT.CRE

C2KIT.CRE

C6GUEN.CRE

CARRIOSU.CRE

CATJAGWP.CRE

CATLIOSU.CRE

DECKFELE.CRE

DJINNISU.CRE

DOGWAWP.CRE

DOGWISU.CRE

EFREETSU.CRE

ELAIRPR3.CRE

ELAIRSU4.CRE

ELAIRSUW.CRE

ELEARPR.CRE

ELEARPR2.CRE

ELEARPR3.CRE

ELEARSU4.CRE

ELEARSUW.CRE

ELFIRPR.CRE

ELFIRPR2.CRE

ELFIRPR3.CRE

ELFIRSU.CRE

ELFIRSU4.CRE

ELFIRSUW.CRE

ESXBLADE.CRE

ETTERCSU.CRE

GHASTGSU.CRE

GHASTS.CRE

GHASTSU.CRE

GHOULSU.CRE

GLOBSHAM.CRE

GPSKEL1.CRE

HOBGOBSU.CRE

JAGUARSU.CRE

JELLMUSU.CRE

KOBOLDSU.CRE

L#NWM4C.CRE

L0SMWII.CRE

L0SUMM1.CRE

L0SUMM2.CRE

L0SUMM3.CRE

L0SUMM4.CRE

L0SUMM5.CRE

L0SUMM6.CRE

L0SUMM7.CRE

MISTPO01.CRE

MOONDOG.CRE

NYMPHSU.CRE

OGRELESU.CRE

OGRESU.CRE

OHBMINSU.CRE

OHHRAT.CRE

OHHSHAD.CRE

OHHWOLF.CRE

OHNVORC.CRE

OHNVOROG.CRE

OLSKEL1W.CRE

OLSKEL2M.CRE

OLSKEL3M.CRE

RABBITSU.CRE

SAHANGU.CRE

SAHLACE.CRE

SAHSKEL.CRE

SAHZOMB.CRE

SENSTALK.CRE

SKELSU01.CRE

SKELSU07.CRE

SKELSU11.CRE

SPBEAR1.CRE

SPBEAR2.CRE

SPBEAR3.CRE

SPBEAR4.CRE

SPBEAR5.CRE

SPIRBEAR.CRE

SPIRLION.CRE

SPIRSNAK.CRE

SPIRWOLF.CRE

SPLION1.CRE

SPLION2.CRE

SPLION3.CRE

SPLION4.CRE

SPLION5.CRE

SPSNAK1.CRE

SPSNAK2.CRE

SPSNAK3.CRE

SPSNAK4.CRE

SPSNAK5.CRE

SPWOLF1.CRE

SPWOLF2.CRE

SPWOLF3.CRE

SPWOLF4.CRE

SPWOLF5.CRE

STALKESU.CRE

SUMDJINN.CRE

SUMEFREE.CRE

SUMELAIR.CRE

SUMELEAR.CRE

SUMELFIR.CRE

SUMTAN01.CRE

SUMTAN02.CRE

SWAAIR01.CRE

SWAAIR02.CRE

SWAEAR01.CRE

SWAEAR02.CRE

SWAFIR01.CRE

SWAFIR02.CRE

SWORD02.CRE

TAFAMIL.CRE

TASLOISU.CRE

TELELFIR.CRE

TELICESA.CRE

TOMEGOL1.CRE

TOMEGOL2.CRE

TOMEGOL3.CRE

TOMEGOL4.CRE

WOLFDISU.CRE

WOLFWISU.CRE

WOLFWWSU.CRE

WORGSU.CRE

WRAITHSU.CRE

XVARTSU.CRE

YSRSGHST.CRE

That's... a long list of creatures with their script names messed up. Anyone have any idea how much of a problem this is? It was problematic with Najim because has has a dialogue attached to his script name and it wasn't initiating. But most creatures don't have that...? Most of these seem to be summons. Like, does it really matter if worgsu.cre has a corrupted script name?

Is there a possible way to fix this? Do most creatures usually have a script name that matches their filename?  Would it be at all reasonable to write a little mod that, for each of these creatures, does

COPY_EXISTING ~[this.cre]~ ~override~
  WRITE_ASCIIE 0x280 ~%SOURCE_RES%~ #8
BUT_ONLY

?

Is this really bad? Is it worth abandoning this install and setting up a new one? Given that I'm on the cusp of a new campaign, I could do that and continue "this game"...

Edited January 3, 2023 by subtledoctor

[jastey]

3 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Would it be at all reasonable to write a little mod that, for each of these creatures, does

I wouldn't. It probably messes up the one incident where different creatures have the same script name because a quest counts NumDead or something.

[subtledoctor]

11 hours ago, jastey said:

I wouldn't. It probably messes up the one incident where different creatures have the same script name because a quest counts NumDead or something.

Sorry, I meant, only do that for the files where the script name is currently “cre_strref” (which we know is wrong, and in fact is too many bits for that field)

EDIT - in other words, we know “cre_strref” is wrong, so changing those files would at least do no harm, and might help… right? If those predicates are true, then would the filename (%SOURCE_RES%) be the best thing to change it to? 

Any creatures whose script name is not “cre_strref” would not be touched. 

Edited January 2, 2023 by subtledoctor

[mickabouille]

Can't say I know enough to answer "can it make things worse", not a modder, but:

I assume you mean for your install only, in any case you could obtain a report of all .CRE that would be modified and check nothing is amiss. And then weidu allow to revert if it ecer breaks anything and you can detect it immediately.

For the more general case (not limiting to your own install), it would be interesting to know _what_ mod broke this (unless it was like this in a vanilla game?)