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

[subtledoctor]

Well, I solved the problem from both directions: I updated Faiths & Powers, Might & Guile, Scales of Balance, and Refinements to use a different mechanism to achieve the 'Use Magical Device' feat/HLA/kit ability; and I also fixed my current game in progress by changing the op321 effects in D5_UMD.SPL to instead apply op72 to permanently change the SPECIFIC value to 0. This is a brute force fix, and not advised - really only if your game is broken in this way and you want to see it through.

I've got a womyn-dominated team now:

• Charname, a ranger->cleric of Bhaal
• Auren, a Weaponmaster fighter
• Jaheira, a fighter/druid
• Kiyone, a ranger who I gave the DR Forest Runner kit? Not exactly the best fit by theme, but the skills very much match her character.
• Kova, a mage/thief to whom I gave the Spellfilcher kit from MnG (given he was trained to infiltrate the Cowled Wizards)
• Nalia, I made a cleric/mage and gave her the Loresinger of Milil semi-bard kit from MnG. A bit of a hack, a single-class kit on a multiclass, but it pairs a profession suitable for a noble (cleric of of the goddess of poetry) with a self-directed profession capable of sneaking and in/exfiltration. And gives me MnG bard songs!

This is a very capable group. We completed the Jackal quest in the Heroes, Thieves, and Moneylenders mod. (And all I have to say about that is, "oof.") Then we took out Mae'Var. Now going back to Renal to advance the investigation into Kova.

Edited February 22, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Renal needs 24 hours to get the proof to help Kova, so I followed Nalia to her home, which I freed from a troll invasion. That put me over the cap for paid passage to Spellhold, so I bopped over to Trademeet and made a few donations to the Temple of Waukeen. Also met Elminster, who asked me to look in on the village of Portpentych. Then back to Athkatla where I spent a bunch of money and obtained evidence of Kova’s innocence from Renal and from Mae’Var’s quarters. Gave those to Bylanna; the last thing I need is with Jermien in Umar Hills. Conveniently that is my stronghold area, so I speak to Delon and then head there. I talk to Jermien and get mimic’s blood for him… and he blows me off. Boo. Okay, Clua console

C:CreateItem(“jersig”)

… and I’m done. Now I’m in the ruined temple of Amaunator. Something seems to be increasing the number of shadows that attack me around here, which is great. 

Kiyone & Kova’s chats are Driving. Me. Crazy. They seem to disregard whether I’m in the middle of a fight, and they are rambling, sniping pontifications on the nature of justice, or innocence, or faith, etc. et cet. et cetera over and over. I try to click through them as fast as I can, because they’re just not relevant to me. God, I know tis mod content goes through the other side of Spellhold, so I figured I would keep them in the party… but God, I would so dearly love to replace them with Valygar and Haer’Dalis. Or… maybe if I spec Valygar as a F/T and he can handle the trapfinding, then I can bring Brandock back into the party. Or even may Wahlanan. Walahnan. Wallawallabingbang. However you spell his name. A chronomancer sounds interesting. 

Edited February 22, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Connelly]

8 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Kiyone & Kova’s chats are Driving. Me. Crazy. They seem to disregard whether I’m in the middle of a fight, and they are rambling, sniping pontifications on the nature of justice, or innocence, or faith, etc. et cet. et cetera over and over. I try to click through them as fast as I can, because they’re just not relevant to me. God, I know tis mod content goes through the other side of Spellhold, so I figured I would keep them in the party… but God, I would so dearly love to replace them

*glances at that mod being just freshly added to his currently installing EET* Well, that's promising. Is the problem that they're insufferably written, or merely bad timing on the banters?

I only saw Walahnan for a few minutes but seems to be neat in both character and kit. Probably a crowd control winner.

 

By the way, something I wanted to ask somewhere and your install order seem to share much of what mine has, so maybe you might find the same issue. Have you opened any of your savefiles in Near Infinity? In any of my mega installs, any NPCs are listed as not in party even if they're clearly so in the game.

Example: I finish a BG2 install. New game, Jaheira and Minsc join. I save, and open EEKeeper. In the save list it shows the save with all four characters in the party. I open it, shows me Charname, I move to Imoen, and when moving to the next party member... EEKeeper crashes.

I open the save in NI. And it tells me only CN and Imoen are in the party, but not Jaheira or Minsc. They are listed as "Non-party member", probably the reason EEKeeper can't grok it ("it's in party, but it isn't? yet they are!? AAAAAGH-"). Changing the flags in NI seems to practically not do anything. Comparing the Minsca.dlg file (the one for when you find Minsc in the cage) with an unmodded one I was hoping to see some difference with the "NPC joins the party" command, but there's none.

Except for Imoen and Charname (and seems like some mod NPCs), it seems to affect everyone, including in my similar mod list for BG1. It's not a gamebreaking bug by all means as far as I could see, but still I've been trying to see what mods might be responsible, yet I can't replicate it with any mod alone on its own so maybe it's a combination of several mods. And the process is too slow and tedious.

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, Connelly said:

Is the problem that they're insufferably written, or merely bad timing on the banters?

  It's not bad writing. These are clearly defined characters, and they are fine characters as far as that goes. But the banters are long, and fire at random places, and they are relevant only to their characterization, not to the context in which we find these characters. An example:

Spoiler

 

Like, that is perfectly fine writing. And the characters are well-defined, and expressing their characterization well. But like, wtf does that have to do with the fact that we are clearing a nest of undead shadow creatures from a defaced temple to a forgotten sun god? I wanna say, What are you guys talking about?? It would be fine if this sort of thing fired once in a while, say, when we rest at an inn. But this happens in the middle of a dungeon, and there are a lot of these, more than a dozen so far and I haven't even paid Gaelan's fee yet. I am having the feeling that I am a side character in the Kiyone & Kova game, which is grating.

Plus, honestly, I play on an iPad because I can only grab little snippets of time to play BG. I might be in bed, tired, making 20 minutes of progress before closing my eyes. This pops up, and I honestly just can't be bothered to think too hard on what Kiyone thinks about the role of belief in a ranger's life in the Forgotten Realms. (Or whatever they are discussing - I'll be honest, I've seen that banter twice now, once for real and once after reloading a save just to get the screenshot; and then I uploaded the JPEG to imgur.com and then pasted it here, and I still haven't actually read it all. I just don't care enough!) I have to click 'Continue' twenty-four times just to get the text off my screen and continue playing the damn game. The writing might be fine, but reading it is getting in the way of playing and that's just super annoying.

(EDIT - if you notice from these pics, Kova asks if Kiyone has any new insights - because there has already been a discussion on this topic! This is a follow-up chat, and even though Kiyone's answer is "nothing new," the banter still goes on to a back-and-forth that requires 21 clicks to get through.)

1 hour ago, Connelly said:

Have you opened any of your savefiles in Near Infinity? In any of my mega installs, any NPCs are listed as not in party even if they're clearly so in the game.

So, my setup is a little unique because I am playing this on an iPad. My process for building the install was:

1. create a copy of the iPad game folder on my computer
2. install a bunch of mods there
3. transfer the modded files to the iPad

To inspect a save, I have to export it from the iPad to the computer, put it in a BG2 saves folder, and then open it in NI. I have a game folder with a modded setup just as it is on the iPad... but this game folder has no app executable to actually play. I have a playable copy of BG2EE on the computer... but this game has no mods installed.

I hope that was clear, because I feel it sheds a bit of light on the savegame issue.

So anyway, I export the savegame from the tablet to the computer, then open from the instance of NI in the heavily-modded game folder. This worked through the BG1 part of the game. Around the time I got to SoD,* this instance of NI could no longer open the BALDUR.GAM file in the exported game.

But I noted that that instance of NI had a lot of other overhead - it was opening a game with >100,000 files in the override folder. So I tried opening my savegames in the instance of NI in the unmodded BG2EE game folder, and it worked! I could see what was going on with each character - though of course, I could not follow any modded effects to their resources, because this instance of NI does not have any mods installed.

Now, I am into the SoA portion of the game,* and I cannot open my savegames in any instance of NI, anywhere.

* I don't know if these changes in whether I could open the savegame and how actually coincide with moving to different campaigns. That's possible - it possible that shifting from one campaign to another ticks some box in the savegame data and prevents NI from reading it properly. It is also possible, and seems more likely, that NI simply cannot handle opening files with the complexity of a savegame in this kind of modded game. I noticed that each of my party members had upwards of a thousand, maybe even several thousand, active effects on them. That might be hard to handle?

OTOH that might include ~1,000 effects when starting out in Candlekeep, and ~2,000 effects now in BG2. So it's not a steep climb over time - the number of active effects on characters in a game that could not be opened is not that much more than those on characters in a savegame that could be opened. So it could be other things that go into a savegame - here, I'll do a test right now...

Okay, I have a savegame with Charname alone in the Ducal Palace, just at the beginning of SoD. I can open that one in NI. Charname has 1,500 active effects - about 125 setting local variables, about 600 from the 5E spellcasting system, and another ~600 from the Will to Power psionics mod wild talent code.** Then a couple dozen for normal stuff like proficiencies, equipped item effects, etc. This savegame is about 6.4MB in size. In my current game, I booted everyone out of the party and exported a savegame with just Charname. This Charname should not have any more effects than the earlier one. But the savegame is 10.2MB in size, and NI cannot open the file. I'm not sure what is contributing to the file size bloat. Could be just other normal stuff going on - so many quests closed and unclosed, so many NPCs running around the game. It could still be related to party members' active effects - maybe even when party members are outside the party, all those effects still need to be tracked? And to be fair I have rotated a lot of NPC in and out of the party. (I suppose I could, very theoretically, apply some massive spell by script when NPCs leave the party, which strips them of almost all active effects, so that when they are outside the party they don't contribute to save file bloat... this would have to be done very carefully though, to make sure it doesn't screw them up if they ever rejoin the party. Maybe I'll experiment on this a bit.)

** (I have noticed that Will to Power has in some instances been doubling and even tripling the several hundred effects it applies, e.g. when NPCs leave and rejoin the party. This will be addressed in a forthcoming update to that mod.)

Still though, we're only talking about a 10MB file, even at its most bloated (so far). That doesn't seem like something these programs should choke on, given my computer has 16GB of RAM. So tl;dr: I don't have an answer as to why, but yeah I'm seeing the same thing and Oloriniel was as well in that playthrough.

TBH it doesn't bother me much? I'm not one to pick open my save files and mess with my character in EEKeeper anyway. If anything in the game needs fixing I can do it by swapping in updated resources like .ITM and .SPL files - I've applied 27 such little hotfixes to my game so far. But this generally doesn't require changing anything in the savegame itself. So this hasn't deterred my game from progressing at all.

Edited February 22, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Can I just note right here how much I appreciate the modders out there who DON'T use ASK_EVERY_COMPONENT or GROUP in their mods? Thank you!

That is all.