[iwd] Crash in IWDEE chargen

[CamDawg]

What's happening

1. Start a new HoW game in IWDEE.
2. Delete one of the existing pregen party members.
3. In the open slot, make a trueclass cleric of evil alignment.
4. After selecting your weapon pips, you're presented with this screen:
   
5. Clicking 'cancel' crashes the game. Clicking 'level up' takes you to the appearance part of chargen, bypassing spell selection.

What should be happening

When you select your weapon pips, this popup should not happen and you proceed to spell selection

Notes

HoW uses 25stweap.2da to give default equipment to new NPCs. The default helmet for clerics is the Blessed Helm of Lathander, an item disallowed for evil clerics. This prompts the popup from (what appears to be) the dual-classing menu.

Swapping in a different helmet is easy, however, all items in the table require review to avoid incidents with other kit/class/race combos.

Edited November 6, 2022 by CamDawg

[CamDawg]

Trying to assign illegal items in ToB results in the items being moved to inventory and not this popup, so it's possible this needs a UI fix instead.

The problem is widespread--since strength is checked, pretty much any low STR character has a good chance to encounter this with the default armor or weapon.

[Dan_P]

This might be an issue with premade parties. Replacing the first guy, Gorris, doesn't cause this crash. Helm of Lathander gets moved to the inventory. Same with creating a fully new party or importing level 1 characters. Items will get moved to inventory.

But that file has issues in general. Everything to the right of Wild Mage is buggy, especially once you start adding mod kits. Kits will have nothing at all, or a wrong selection of items.

Priest of Tyr isn't listed at all and Tempus has the same item list as the ToB file. But in the unmodded game, they, as well as shaman, start with nothing at all.

I don't have technical knowledge to talk about it more than that. I'm just mentioning this because I saw this post.

[Dan_P]

Looking into it a bit more, the issue in the op seems to be only with the default premade party. I changed the premade party with my Premade Party Adder mod, and no crashes. Helm of Lathander gets moved to inventory if adding an evil cleric, and you proceed to spell selection, regardless which character is replaced. So it has nothing to do with premade parties in general. Might be something wrong with the cre files or the way the game looks up the default cre files, causing the chargen issue.

Edit: slightly expanded

Edited November 6, 2022 by Dan_P

[CamDawg]

From Discord:

Bubb said:

The crux of it is the engine uses a hack because the new character is "levelling-up" to the HoW starting experience, so it puts the character creation engine into the levelling up state. IWD-mode has a specific branch to correct the state after proficiencies, though the error condition still treats things as if this is a failed level-up. "Cancel" has the engine exit to the character screen. The character screen ticks the worldscreen, thus crash. The "Level up" option doesn't handle the transition to spells correctly because it thinks this is a level-up, and you don't select starting spells during level-up. Not fixable without a code fix.

CamDawg said:

Damn. I was hoping it was a UI thing and we could just copy the BG2EE workflow.

Bubb said:

Dan_P makes a valid point though

if you clear all the premade party members suddenly it works

CamDawg said:

Yeah, just saw his post, so it gets goofier.

Bubb said:

...

it's checking the items of the first character against the current-being-created character

since the pregen characters are imported with items already in their inventory, the real problem is that the 1A1FIGHT has items that the cleric can't use, like a Two-Handed Sword (edited)

CamDawg said:

So you could still conceivably run into this is you were making multiple party members yourself? Or is this tied to the party being premade?

Bubb said:

I think the engine adds the starting items after creation, when you hit "done" on the party menu

so a completely user-created party isn't affected

CamDawg said:

Well, that gives us a viable workaround.

We can strip the premade of items and use their override scripts to populate their inventories for games starting in HoW directly.

[CamDawg]

Fixed, though as noted by Bubb above, this needs to be fixed in code. Also note that while this will mitigate the crashes with the pregens, you can still get crashes if you import a character with equipment into the first slot.

Issues with the starting equipment table has also been fixed.