[PsT, IWD] Spawn point issues

[CamDawg]

The easy one: @lynx noted that ar1600.ini (Warrens of Thought) has a buggy spawn point definition, specifically

spawn_point = [3898,1705:8]

That should be a period between the coordinates, not a comma. This traces back to oPsT.

For IWD, @Graion Dilach noted an issue with the Vale of Shadows spawn points:

This is the initial creature setup for the Vale of Shadows. The shadow at middle-right, circled in green, has a working spawn point and will respawn after a delay of three minutes. All of the other shadows have spawn points which are never activated due to typos in the ini file.

Having only one of the 16 shadows respawn is, I think, pretty clearly a bug. As noted in the discussion on the pull request, there are two viable solutions: disable or enable all of the spawn points. (FWIW all of these spawn points get deactivated when Lysan is defeated.)

So while the PsT one is fairly simple, I wanted to open up the IWD one for discussion.

[lynx]

Just noting that the pst one appears in two blocks of the ini, not just one. It's the only ini with this particular problem. I've now also checked if anyone misspelt the colon or the orientation, but no hits.

[Graion Dilach]

Regarding the IWD one - I'll just repeat myself; I always view the shadows enslaved by Lysan into fighting against the skeletons/zombies serving Kresselack, but even with the random shadow thanking the party for freeing them after Lysan's death, this connection isn't obvious because of the faulty respawning. Also, Lysan's touted up as an important priest in the lore, and restoring the shadows to spawn enough times makes her power more apparent and something more visible (I didn't even connected the two dots in my first playthrough and only after a followup run I realized those spawnpoints being disabled is what the shadow leaving the scene is about).

So even if there are disagreements of the spawnpoints in question, I consider it enabling all of them as UB material on the bare minimum atleast.

Edited July 27, 2022 by Graion Dilach

[DavidW]

I'm torn on this.

The case for fixing it: it was clearly at least at some point intended to have all 16 spawn points operational. It is very unlikely that Black Isle intentionally deactivated all but one of them, since they could have done the deactivation very much more quickly and cleanly than that. It is much more likely that it's just a typo that someone only partially got around to fixing (especially since the single active spawnpoint is just the first one listed. So I'm basically convinced that the developer intent of the original level designer was for the spawn points to operate.

The case against fixing it: this will drastically change gameplay and game balance in the Vale of Shadows. There are 16 of these spawn points and they reset extremely quickly. I vividly recall that single shadow spawn point being a memorable pain on my first playthrough 20+ years ago. Having all 16 active will have a very noticeable impact on the experience of playing in the Vale. The actual experience of the Vale of Shadows passed Black Isle's balance review and QA, and then passed Beamdog's QA. The originally-intended one didn't, and I suspect it wouldn't. This isn't some edge-case situation or missing spell-effect icon: it's a major change to a significant encounter area on the critical path. There is a clear sense in which the developers, collectively, by definition intended it to function roughly as it actually does.

(As I mentioned on Discord, I spotted this bug when I originally coded respawns for IWD-in-BG2 (which uses an awkward hacky workaround for ini files, since the oBG2 engine doesn't support them). I originally fixed it, but immediately noticed how drastically different the Vale of Shadows felt and reverted. I stupidly didn't flag it to Beamdog when I gave them the IWDEE prototype.)

On balance, I think we should leave it completely unchanged for the (core component of the) FP - I'm not even in favor of turning off the single operating spawn point, since that too is part of the emergent gameplay even if its origins are someone's error. I'm strongly in favor of adding it as an optional component either in the FP itself or in some UB.

 

[lynx]

Another thing to note, the shadow does respawn, but it respawns weaker. It's the only different shadow, not a lesser one like the rest. After the first respawn, all are the same.

And there should be two respawning, shadow1 and lshadow1.

Like I said before, I think the case for leaving it be is stronger than for enabling. Besides what was already said, just looking at the ini  gives me an impression that the timeline was like this: all spawns are shadow*, then they disabled them by gimping the spawn groups, then they added shadow1.

 

[CamDawg]

50 minutes ago, lynx said:

Another thing to note, the shadow does respawn, but it respawns weaker. It's the only different shadow, not a lesser one like the rest. After the first respawn, all are the same.

The only (non-Lesser) Shadow is the one to the upper-left of the green-circled. The green-circled shadow is a Lesser Shadow (vsshadow), Lesser Shadow 1 in the area file, and is replaced with an identical vsshadow.

If the spawn points were enabled, then yes, the Shadow (shadow) would be replaced with a Lesser Shadow (vsshadow) on respawn.

[lynx]

Why makes you think it's not enabled?

[Sam.]

Can the spawns be enabled in such a way that they are tied to the game difficulty, thus getting the best of both worlds?  Gameplay at normal difficulty modes remains as intended / verified by QA, but the underlying error gets corrected and is exposed to maybe Insane and HoF difficulty modes.

[DavidW]

10 minutes ago, Sam. said:

Can the spawns be enabled in such a way that they are tied to the game difficulty, thus getting the best of both worlds?  Gameplay at normal difficulty modes remains as intended / verified by QA, but the underlying error gets corrected and is exposed to maybe Insane and HoF difficulty modes.

That feels way outside the scope of what a fixpack can/should do. For UB, maybe.

[argent77]

While I would like to see all spawn points enabled, I agree with DavidW that it causes quite a balance problem. A spawned Lesser Shadow is worth 350 XP. Destroying all 16 Lesser Shadows would yield 5600 XP. That's a lot of XP at this stage of the game, especially since you can repeat the whole process indefinitely.

[Graion Dilach]

Filed the Vale of Shadows respawn restoration to IWD-UB in https://github.com/Gibberlings3/iwd_unfinished_business/pull/2.

[CamDawg]

PsT is fixed; IWD is now in the IWD UB mod.

[lynx]

It looks like I forgot to mention one other file. Perhaps it's not a bug and the engine handles it well, but it's worthy a test.

An excerpt from opst ar0502.ini, with some empty sections:

[guard4]
/.../
[guard5] <-- bad (empty), but harmless

[guard5] <-- actual section
/.../
[guard5] <-- bad (empty) and overrides contentful section

[guard6]
/.../

[CamDawg]

It looks like this was already fixed in PsTEE--there are no duplicate sections in ar0502.ini.

[argent77]

55 minutes ago, CamDawg said:

It looks like this was already fixed in PsTEE--there are no duplicate sections in ar0502.ini.

The duplicate sections still exist in PST:EE, but they don't appear to have any negative effect in the game. "Guard5" is responsible for the guard on the left/lower side of the "Dream World" door in the Foundry, but he's properly spawned by the game.