Discussion of tipun’s IWD mods and their integration in EET games

[Endarire]

If this were 2000 and you mentioned your options, I'd be confused at what you meant by "Uber."

But as for a greater plot connection between SoA and IWD, the option sounds appealing, at least in theory.

[subtledoctor]

On 2/15/2023 at 12:32 PM, Graion Dilach said:

Why do you want to tie this to tipun's mod?

tl;dr: because it’s already installed. 

On 2/15/2023 at 12:32 PM, Graion Dilach said:

and k4thos's IWD-in-EET's also a dynamic import-based project

IWD-in-EET is utter vaporware. Who knows what it is. From vague discussions of it, it seemed to be moving in a direction of being inflexible for adaptation by other mods, chained by the leg to EEex and thus platform-dependent, and inextricably linked to major game system changes in order to support playing IWD2 as a 3E game. I wanted to try importing just TotLM, but when I asked k4thos to peek at the importation code to get me started, I got no response. So whatever benefit might be derived from using a dynamic resource-importation model, is negated because any such code is rotting on k4thos’ hard drive. There certainly could be lots of benefits over tipun's way of doing things! But they are purely hypothetical.

Anyway then Argent77 turned out to have already made TotLM-in-BG2EE! Fantastic! Saved me the effort. So then I got the idea to do something similar with HoW. But I can’t make heads of tails of how TotLM-in-BG2EE actually works or got its resources, and the only other model I was aware is the aforementioned vaporware. 

Then I started hearing about tipun’s mod, and mostly ignored it, until I saw his precursor project, HoW-in-EET. Just what I was looking for! I installed and played it and it had some bugs, but nothing to make it not worth playing. 

Then tipun told me the HoW bugs are fixed in the bigger IWD1_EET mod. not ideal, because I only want HoW... but what the hey, if it’s fixed it’s fixed, and from reports you can ignore tipun’s TotLM and instead play Argent77’s - they can both live in the same game install.

Whatever the quality of tipun’s mod, it has the singular virtue of being the only game in town. As a bonus, it leaves to other mods the decision of  how to combine it with EET, and it does not require IWD2 or rely on EEex. So I’m trundling my way through a new EET install and decided to give it a whirl. I just installed IWDification and IWD1_EET and TotLM-in-BG2EE, and before I move on to kit and tweak mods, I paused to consider whether I can use these assets that are already in my game, but currently unused. It took less than an hour and only a few lines on Weidu to get HoW working as I’d like; so the question is whether I can quickly and efficiently do a bit more than that. 

I’m still in the “idly discussing” phase - I haven’t even sat down and looked at the resources yet. But I can tell you, doing a full built-from-the-ground-up mod like TotLM is almost certainly not feasible given my abilities and/or time and/or resources. 

EDIT - unless I just copy the stuff out of my /override folder right now, that tipun’s mod installed there? That seems like stealing, though. 

Then again, isn’t that how tipun got them in the first place? Hmmm…

But strings will be a PITA, and probably take more time than I can afford. 

EDIT 2 - Also, tipun’s mod is already installed, for HoW-in-EET. If I add my own copies of these IWD resources the install will be more bloated, not less. 

Edited February 21, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Okay, I think I have this under control, enough to create a basic proof-of concept to test in-game. If it seems cool, then it could be iterated and improved and maybe split into an independent project.

The only thing I haven't got for the proof-of-concept is patches for two dialogues. That's something I've simply never done and I haven't learned that whole side of Weidu (even though that's what Weidu was originally created for!).

If anyone familiar with dialogue patching wants to help, post here or DM me. (I won't spoil the precise planned patches here unless people don't care, and say they want to hear more about it.)

[subtledoctor]

I've got a version that installs! And seems to make all the proper changes. Still a proof-of-concept - it doesn't address little thing alike Sheemish or the possibility of some dialogues that may refer to IWD etc. And it's not traified, etc. etc. But the best way to figure out what else it needs is to just play it.

I'm tempted to cut short my current playthrough and do a new install to try this out...

If anyone wants to try it out, feel free.

[Jarinex]

I wonder if other mods like SCS would work with a mod like this. I tried to get into iwd recently and just didn’t have that same feel to me. If something like this works I might be able to at least try out the dlcs 

Edited February 18, 2023 by Jarinex

[jmerry]

The SCS AI improvements rely on detecting and replacing specific combat scripts. The project this is using as a base copies IWD resources, which means it's using copies of that game's scripts. Those probably aren't on the list of things to be replaced, so installing SCS on top of this wouldn't do much of anything. You'd need an explicit compatibility patch for the two to work together properly.

[subtledoctor]

Next part of the project: as I say I’m not really interested in bringing a BG party to IWD, except for some snack-size excursions. But it would be nice to have access to IWD as a separate campaign, especially as I have been unable to play the actual IWDEE app on my iPad for the last several years due to Beamdog’s ineptitude. Not to mention the intriguing possibility of playing IWD2 1) with the BG2 2E and 2) on an iPad. 

Problem is, tipun’s even with the secondary “Icewind End” mod, do not add IWD1 or IWD2 as actual separate campaigns. EET does this quite nicely - it BG1, SoD, and BP1 and allows you to start play in any one of them, alongside BG2, ToB, BP2, and a tutorial. So the next part of improving IWD integration is giving tipun’s IWD campaigns equal status with the other ones.

Of course, I have NO idea how to do that. Presumably it needs some UI work to tie into EET’s campaign selection screen, and some settings entered into campaign.2da, custom startare.2da files, etc. Hopefully I can glean a bit of what EET does in this regard, and maybe find some weidu code to ape…

Edited February 18, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Jarinex]

 

1 hour ago, jmerry said:

The SCS AI improvements rely on detecting and replacing specific combat scripts. The project this is using as a base copies IWD resources, which means it's using copies of that game's scripts. Those probably aren't on the list of things to be replaced, so installing SCS on top of this wouldn't do much of anything. You'd need an explicit compatibility patch for the two to work together properly.

Yeah, it’s usually why I don’t install extra content mods for bg. Just wishful thinking is all lol.

[Endarire]

tipun said this regarding permission for editing his version of IWD in EET.

Sure. The only request is to indicate that this is different from the original, and indicate what exactly has been changed.

[subtledoctor]

I’m not making any changes to tipun’s mod, I’m just making a little add-on mod that will, e.g. put tipun’s IWD games onto the EET “campaigns” screen, or move Hjollder from Kuldahar to Athkatla, etc. 

[Endarire]

Thankee.

[subtledoctor]

So my current project is to get the IWD1 and IWD2 campaigns from tipun's mod onto the EET "Select Campaign" screen. While integration of more content in the main EET game is nice, I would also like to be able to play the IWD games on their own. (Especially as I am tantalizingly close to being able to play IWD2 a) with the 2E ruleset, and b) on an iPad.)

Unfortunately while my add-on mod properly add them to the campaign selection UI, you cannot actually play those two campaigns this way:

• IWD1 crashes to desktop as soon as it would normally start the game (after you select the game difficulty and press "Venture Forth").
• IWD2 plays the intro movie after you press "Venture Forth" and then I can hear the scrolling chapter text screen, and upon pressing Escape I can hear the introductory conversation with Hendron on the Targos Docks, and even navigate through the conversation using the keyboard. But the screen is totally black, the game does not show the UI or game screen.

I'm at a loss as to why these are happening. Notably, this does not happen if you start a BG2 game and then console warp to the IWD1 or IWD2 intro areas. In that case, after the console teleport puts you in the IWD area, it plays each game's intro movie (and, for IWD2, shows the scrolling chapter text), and then you can play the game normally.

So there is some kind of problem in the transition from the character generation UI to the IWD1 and IWD2 games. But I am pretty lost at sea trying to figure it out because I have no idea what the game engine is doing in that transition, or why it would show different behavior than warping to the campaign via console. I tried to match everything EET itself did to add the BG1/SoD/BP1 campaigns, but I seemingly must have missed something. If anyone has any ideas or experience with this sort of thing, it would be greatly appreciated.

The latest, almost-working, version of my little mod can be found here, if anyone wants to play around with it. My test environment:

• BG2EE v2.6
• EET (v13.4)
• IWD1_EET
• IWD2_EET
• d5_IWD_EET_integration
• EET_End

Edited February 21, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Gorionar]

Hello. I now understand your idea about IWD in EET. I'm certainly not a technical modder, I would look at the starting scripts of the game baldur.bcs and baldur25.bcs.

[oraclex]

I like you idea of having IWD as a selectable campaign quite a bit!  I guess one can always still CLUA back and forth to iwd/bg if the urge is there, right?. good luck SubtleDoc,

[Graion Dilach]

I've glimpsed through the chapter related UI code, but couldn't find out how the game assigns chapters/chapter backgrounds to events. Something tells me that's the step where everything goes haywire (note that Black Pits is chapter 0).