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

[subtledoctor]

As always: sometime after doing the first quest for Mae'Var, stealing the Necklace of Talos from the Talos temple, I start getting hit by lightning when walking outdoors. The Weathermistress tells me her divinations found out my crime, and I better bring it back or else. I believe this is from the PPG QuestPack. I go and finish the Thieves Guild content, attacking Mae'Var... and there is no Necklace of Talos. This happens every single time I have played BG2EE with QuestPack in the last several years. Am I the only one experiencing this? Is there some solution out there that my Google-fu is not finding? (Aside from CLUA'ing MISC4Y.itm into my inventory.)

I guess I can just throw an ADD_CRE_ITEM into my standard (ever-growing) collection of hotfixes. But this is quite frustrating, and it would be nice to know if there is a better solution.

[jastey]

The lightning stroke was some other mod, not the Questpack. I forgot which one, though. I'd recommend the Stutter Debug Tool to see which script block triggers the lightning but I guess it's still no option for your platform.

[jastey]

36 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

The Weathermistress tells me her divinations found out my crime, and I better bring it back or else.

Not trying to start any rumors, but I think this is from the Mazzy mega mod. At least I'd deduct it from a help thread here. Tagging @BCaesar.

[subtledoctor]

24 minutes ago, jastey said:

The lightning stroke was some other mod, not the Questpack. I forgot which one, though. I'd recommend the Stutter Debug Tool to see which script block triggers the lightning but I guess it's still no option for your platform.

Oh, whoops! Turns out this is part of the All Things Mazzy mod. (Pretty random... but that whole mod seems pretty random.) I'm not sure if this is a longstanding bug or an interaction with another mod. There is a moment after you steal the necklace where one of Mae'Var's underlings says "hey cool, can I have this?" and leaves. I don't know if All Things Mazzy intends that you should somehow find the guy (but how? there are no clues) or if All Things Mazzy intends to keep the necklace with Mae'Var and it is some other mod that inserts that guy. In any event, I guess I'll just hotfix it by adding the necklace to Mae'Var himself. It would be slightly weird if you get to him and kill him before you do his first quest... but that's an edge-case I'm willing to tolerate.

[Graion Dilach]

I don't know v1.039, but on v3.05 Mae'Var passes the necklace to his priest of Cyric. It's using CreateItem though, so you can't pickpocket it. And his dialog isn't patched either to get it from him.

On a second check - that whole dialog tree looks shaky enough that I can imagine it falling apart (the priest is supposed to interject during delivery that it'd look nice in his temple).

There's also the option in v3.05 to just pay 10k after a week has passed though.

Edited February 8, 2023 by Graion Dilach

[jastey]

20 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

It would be slightly weird if you get to him and kill him before you do his first quest... but that's an edge-case I'm willing to tolerate.

Killing Mae'Var too early triggers some rogue that insta kills the PC.

[Connelly]

1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

All Things Mazzy mod. (Pretty random... but that whole mod seems pretty random.) I'm not sure if this is a longstanding bug or an interaction with another mod.

It has the problem that it gathers a ton of content to be installed with a few vaguely defined options. The main and second components include *sixteen* and seven subcomponents each, all of them installed in bulk, some of them without apparent correlation and tagged as "optional", which... I'm going to need a dictionary here.

Without touching on the content itself (I'm probably on the minority with a negative view) the mod needs some heavy modularization, because bundling so much in only a handful of component doesn't do it any favors. I've tried several times to dig in the readmes and code for potential incompatibilities, but I always end up getting a monumental dizziness and just skip installing it. And I'm the type of stupid user who barely bothers with that.

46 minutes ago, Graion Dilach said:

I don't know v1.039, but on v3.05 Mae'Var passes the necklace to his priest of Cyric. It's using CreateItem though, so you can't pickpocket it.

I had to check this because I last played with v2.33, and if I'm reading it correctly, wow, I'm genuinely mindboggled. It's basically the new quest branch breaking itself before the options can realistically be taken, to punish the player doing the next main quest step due the actions of an NPC. I'm only barely surprised because I do remember the mod liking its player mistreatment and threats of them for taking certain (not even evil) choices.

Edited February 8, 2023 by Connelly

[Graion Dilach]

Yeah, the content of the mod is highly dubious. I've dropped it from my own installs by now, the way I listed those details was because I stashed away my July megainstall for DLTCEP as a work folder and it still had this one installed.

[subtledoctor]

2 hours ago, Graion Dilach said:

Mae'Var passes the necklace to his priest of Cyric. It's using CreateItem though, so you can't pickpocket it. And his dialog isn't patched either to get it from him.

On a second check - that whole dialog tree looks shaky enough that I can imagine it falling apart (the priest is supposed to interject during delivery that it'd look nice in his temple).

There's also the option in v3.05 to just pay 10k after a week has passed though.

Yeah, I get the interjection about "would look nice in the Temple of Cyric." The problem is, the item is not dropped by the priest after the Mae'Var fight. I don't know if that's something about the mod failing to work, or maybe another mod alters the fight and changes the priest and the new version doesn't have the item? Hard to say.

I have 30K gp and need 60K for a ticket to Funhouse Island, I'm not about to burn 10K to circumvent a bug.   I'll just hotfix a copy onto Mae'Var. Doesn't really matter who possesses it, as long as it is among the detritus on the floor at the end of that fight, then all works as intended.

1 hour ago, Graion Dilach said:

the content of the mod is highly dubious. I've dropped it from my own installs by now

I mean the name is the most dubious thing, I have no objection to a mod that has a bunch of little unrelated tweaks. It's just that it's called "All Things Mazzy" and it seems to contain all sorts of things unrelated to Mazzy.

[InKal]

yeah all things mazzy oh, yeah! jaheira putting the shapeshifter back into the shapeshifter....

[Connelly]

5 minutes ago, InKal said:

yeah all things mazzy oh, yeah! jaheira putting the shapeshifter back into the shapeshifter....

/frowns and rereads the readme

/notices the Jaheira & Wilson romance and looks away, contemplating the universe

4 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

I mean the name is the most dubious thing, I have no objection to a mod that has a bunch of little unrelated tweaks. It's just that it's called "All Things Mazzy" and it seems to contain all sorts of things unrelated to Mazzy.

Oh no, at least from what I remember there is a ton of things about Mazzy, and a good bit of the non-Mazzy content has Mazzy content. And unless it was hopefully toned down, even your party will be Mazzy content. :_D

[Guest BCaesar]

Hi all, BCaesar here.

Actually the mod is called: MegaMod 3.10: Mazzy Romance, Clara NPC, Darkside Anomen, Flying Aerie, For The Evil, & more! (DONE), as it says in the thread here: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/71473/megamod-3-10-mazzy-romance-clara-npc-darkside-anomen-flying-aerie-for-the-evil-more-done/p1

Anyway, little annoying to hear the WeatherMistress is once again being a pain. It was one of the earlier things we wrote and coded and we've gone back to fix it a number of times over the years, but if it's still causing problems in the latest version then I'll probably just turn part of it off.

[BCaesar]

5 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Yeah, I get the interjection about "would look nice in the Temple of Cyric." The problem is, the item is not dropped by the priest after the Mae'Var fight. I don't know if that's something about the mod failing to work, or maybe another mod alters the fight and changes the priest and the new version doesn't have the item? Hard to say.

I have 30K gp and need 60K for a ticket to Funhouse Island, I'm not about to burn 10K to circumvent a bug.   I'll just hotfix a copy onto Mae'Var. Doesn't really matter who possesses it, as long as it is among the detritus on the floor at the end of that fight, then all works as intended.

I mean the name is the most dubious thing, I have no objection to a mod that has a bunch of little unrelated tweaks. It's just that it's called "All Things Mazzy" and it seems to contain all sorts of things unrelated to Mazzy.

Well it's currently called MegaMod 3.10: Mazzy Romance, Clara NPC, Darkside Anomen, Flying Aerie, For The Evil, & more! (DONE), as it says in the thread title: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/71473/megamod-3-10-mazzy-romance-clara-npc-darkside-anomen-flying-aerie-for-the-evil-more-done/p1

It is indeed a collection of whatever random stuff we decided to write and code; it started off as a Mazzy mod. As we added other projects we thought about breaking it up into various individual mods, but decided that created even more problems with coding and compatibility, so instead it's all one giant thing. As a general rule the people who hate one part of the mod tend to hate many parts, and vice versa, so it's mostly worked out fine.

Anyway, sorry to here that the WeatherMistress is being a pain yet again. It was one of the first things we coded and we've gone back and bug-fixed a number of times. The priest is indeed supposed to have the necklace when you kill him, but it's all done rather shakily, so I'm not overly surprised it's not working again.

I'm inclined to just fix it by deleting various parts of it. It was one of the first Mazzy things we coded and a lot of the early stuff we did was rather pointless and just caused problems (as opposed to the later-coded intentionally-pointless parts that I'm rather proud of ).

Apologies for the double-post above. I did that, then remembered I actually have an account here and logged in.

Edited February 9, 2023 by BCaesar

[BCaesar]

On 2/8/2023 at 10:36 AM, Connelly said:

It has the problem that it gathers a ton of content to be installed with a few vaguely defined options. The main and second components include *sixteen* and seven subcomponents each, all of them installed in bulk, some of them without apparent correlation and tagged as "optional", which... I'm going to need a dictionary here.

They're not optional to install, they're optional in that you can turn them off in game.

For example, if you don't want to see Jaheira's in-game romance, with Wilson in the place of CharName, you can turn it off as a response after the first Gruuf, Whuf, Sniffle, Growl.

Edited February 9, 2023 by BCaesar

[BCaesar]

@subtledoctor

Okay I had some free time so after talking with Ratatoskr I pulled open the mod, poked around to see the damage, fixed it, tested it as best I could think of, and sent the new lines off for translation. Should be posted in a few days, as soon as we get the Russian version back.

Basically I drastically reduced the amount you have to pay the temples to regain their good graces (13 and 100 gold respectively) and changed some of the dialogue. I also made it so Mae'Var now gives the items back to you since he doesn't want them. So it should work better and be less buggy and if it does bug out it won't cost much to fix.

Pulling open that old dialogue and coding is always awful. I read this stuff and go "Who wrote and coded this garbage?" and unfortunately in this case the answer is me. I can't even blame Ratatoskr for this one. And then something always doesn't work and the testing always takes longer than I think it should. But hopefully this is fixed now and we won't ever have to deal with it again.

On the upside as I was testing a Mazzy dialogue popped up and the music put me in a better mood. Plus we completely re-wrote all of her friendship/romance dialogue so it's better than the old stuff with Mae'Var I was trying to fix.

And then later a Jaheira-Wilson dialogue popped up and I got to experience such fine lines as:

//14th Wilson-Jaheira Love Talk
CHAIN IF WEIGHT #-1 ~Global("_bWilsonJaheiraTalks","GLOBAL",53)~ THEN WILSONJ _bWilsonJaheiraLoveTalk14
	@134 /*Roar? [OH87197]*/
		DO ~SetGlobal("_bWilsonJaheiraTalks","GLOBAL",54)~
== JAHEIRAJ @135 /*We have had many people seek our deaths so far. Some would have been friends had things been different. This weighs on my mind. [JAHEIR93]*/
	= @136 /*They acted out of fear. I do not know what to suggest. I... I don't know what to do.*/
== WILSONJ @137 /*Snuffle, sniff... roar! Roar... growl, sniff sniff. Snort... growl. ROAR!*/
== JAHEIRAJ @138 /*Like all good advice, that was absolutely no help at all. It was poetic though...*/
	= @139 /*Come, let's get going.*/
EXIT

And that is pure gold. I will not be told otherwise.

Edited February 9, 2023 by BCaesar