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

[subtledoctor]

12 hours ago, Guest the_sextein said:

when I left candlekeep catacombs I went to Ugeloth's Beard and there was a dude at the inn that asked me to go to the spine of the world so I stashed my gear and he teleported me …

I played Icewind dale all the way through and compleated all quests … Everything went great until the end … After winning the battle, the end cinematic played and then the death animation played again and all party members were healed and were left on the floor where the portal to hell had been opened.  Problem is, there is no way to leave the area and nothing triggers my return to Ugeloth's Beard so the game has a game breaking bug after you beat the final [IWD] villian

Yes, this jives with Oloriniel’s experience playing IWD1_EET, IIRC. This is just how tipun’s mod works at the moment. It imports the IWD game, and he has a plan for a mod that adds quests and such to incorporate it into an EET game. But those quests have not yet been made so right now there is just this guy in Ulgoth’s Beard as a simple placeholder with a simple mechanism to get you to Easthaven. 

That’s nothing to do with the mod in this thread, which is geared toward not playing IWD inside EET. If you go to IWD through Ulgoth’s Beard, you are only using tipun’s mod, which is simply unfinished and, for now, requires using the console to get back to your EET game. 

I don’t know where to report such things… you could join the Arcane Coast forums I guess, or mention it in a thread in the EET forum where tipun’s stuff has been discussed. But it’s not really a bug, just something he hasn’t gotten around to doing yet. I’ve read through his thread at Arcane Coast and I’m pretty sure he’s already aware of this. 

[Guest The_sextein]

Ok thanks for the confirmation.  I am using your mod to access HOW from baldur's gate 2 but I fully expected my party to be teleported back to Ugeloth's beard with all of my gear missing and maybe the old wizard would say good job ect.  What I ended up doing was using the console to get back to baldu'rs gate and then I dropped all of my IWD gear and bought and sold gems at a loss until all my money was gone.  I'm going to continue on from there.  I set a custom XP value for enemies and quest rewards of 60% with EET Tweaks and when I got out of the candlekeep catacombs my party was level 6-7.  At the end of Icewind dale they were level 8-9.  They should be level 10-12 at the end of SOD and I heading towards that later on today.

I just figured I would say something about it, I know Tipun's mod problems are not directly related to your mod but nobody seems to be having an active conversation about the experience or how to improve it. BTW, do you know how I could import my Icewind Dale EE music into Tipun's Icewind Dale EET mod?  The sound compression is killing me.

[Guest The_sextein]

Nevermind on the music, I figured it out.  You just need to rename all the music folders and files from Icewind Dale EE. Rename the lower case "b" to capital "D" and then drag them into your Baldur's gate 2 music folder and overwrite it.  As for the backdrops, I could spend days fixing all of the alignment problems with project infinity or I could attempt to find them from the IWDEE version and rename them if necessary and simply overwrite them as well.  I'll probably attempt it when I have time.  Hopefully Tipun will put the finishing touches on Icewind Dale EET to at least bring the party back with a little parting comment from the wizard.  Really that should have been done before moving on the Icewind Dale 2 in my opinion but I'm very grateful for these mods and would love to support them.  I think Beamdog's 2.5 patch and 2.6 patch has had a bad effect on the mod community because modders have gotten tired of waiting for official patches that are needed to get things to work correctly like the old days.  I'm still blown away by how bad the pathfinding is even when compared to the original game in some situations.  The gray scale on pause option still causes water to flicker 2 years after the last patch that enabled it by default ect.  It was around that time that Icewind Dale in EET was abandoned and SCS went into a buggy state with no updates for years.  I think I might have manually fixed all of my SCS problems after days of toying around with things and taking advice from other users on this site.

[megrimlock]

15 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Yes, this jives with Oloriniel’s experience playing IWD1_EET, IIRC. This is just how tipun’s mod works at the moment... If you go to IWD through Ulgoth’s Beard, you are only using tipun’s mod, which is simply unfinished and, for now, requires using the console to get back to your EET game.

I also had this experience, but I thought it was because I also had tipun's HOW mod installed separately at the time. What tipun apparently intends to happen is that you warp straight from the Belhifet fight to HOW if you didn't already do HOW as a sidequest en route to Belhifet. So I thought my separate (additional) install of HOW was causing that transition to break somehow. And likewise possibly this integration mod is likewise causing that transition to fail because it also has a duplicate Hjollder/route to HOW? That might be pure nonsense on my part.

In any event you can console back to Ulgoth's Beard and manually set the flag to get the congratulations speech and reward from Maladernoth (set FC_GLOBAL_IWD_VARIABLE to 5).

There's also another variable called "PARTY_IN_ICEWIND_DALE" which I assume you should set back to 0 when you console back to civilisation to avoid breaking things - it certainly screwed up my subsequent NPC recruitment because there is something in the dlg folder in tipun's Icewind_EET - a file called iwd1_pdialog - which for me totally screwed up the joining/booting dialogues for all NPCs (I couldn't tell people in Chateau Irenicus to seek out the nearest inn, for instance). In subsequent installs I simply deleted the contents of that file before installing Icewind_EET - there are no joinable NPCs in tipun's IWD anyway, so I don't know why you would want to change party composition while you are there.

Edited May 1, 2023 by megrimlock

[subtledoctor]

5 hours ago, megrimlock said:

What tipun apparently intends to happen is that you warp straight from the Belhifet fight to HOW if you didn't already do HOW as a sidequest en route to Belhifet. So I thought my separate (additional) install of HOW was causing that transition to break somehow.

Weird… and kind of annoying sounding. But no, this need to console back to Ulgoth’s Beard happens without HoW-in-EET. (And personally I would not install both since IWD1_EET already includes HoW and I’m sure they haven’t been tested together and could interfere. Better to just install IWD1_EET and then add another copy of Hjollder, as my mod does.)

5 hours ago, megrimlock said:

And likewise possibly this integration mod is likewise causing that transition to fail because it also has a duplicate Hjollder/route to HOW?

No, my mod would not interfere with the end of IWD1. It only creates a duplicate copy of Hjollder in the world; it doesn’t change the original at all. And if you actually play HoW while you are in Kuldahar my duplicate copy disappears, so the actual quest is not duplicated. 

The only script my mod changes is the one at the end of HoW, after Icasaracht. My understanding is that it looks like this:

- If you play HoW from Kuldahar, the ending is unchanged and it kicks you back into the IWD campaign. 

- If you play HoW from the Sword Coast, after Icasaracht it runs the IDTOEET script which kicks you back to Ulgoth’s Beard. 

- If you play HoW from my duplicate Hjollder in Athkatla, it hijacks the IDTOEET script and kicks you back to the Bridge District of Athkatla. 

That’s how things should work, anyway. And none of that should have any bearing on what happens after defeating Belhifet in Easthaven. 

Edited May 1, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Endarire]

doc, what say you to warping the party back to Ulgoth's Beard after beating the IWD 1 in EET final boss?

Thankee!

[subtledoctor]

I wouldn’t know how to do it. I don’t know how tipun has set things up, I don’t know what scripts are involved, I don’t have the time to try to understand how someone else coded things. 

And equally important, tipun has his own ideas for how that will work and I’m not about to step on his toes. Imagine you make a mod and it’s simply not yet finished, a work in progress, someone else comes along and says “your mod works like this now.” 

Alternatively, if I did do that, and next week tipun makes some progress and fixes things on his end, then all my work would be instantly invalidated. 

tipun’s work is his work, and it will be ready when it’s ready. My mod gives an alternative way to access those resources for those who want to try something different. End of story. 

Edited May 1, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Endarire]

Thankee!

For your implementation, does finishing the IWD1 Severed Hand soft lock the game?

[subtledoctor]

14 hours ago, Endarire said:

For your implementation, does finishing the IWD1 Severed Hand soft lock the game?

I… don’t understand the question? Why would Severed Hand soft lock the game?

[Endarire]

To clarify doc, when using your implementation of Icewind EET and beating IWD1 in EET, does the game also soft lock like with tipun's version?

Thankee!

[subtledoctor]

18 hours ago, Endarire said:

To clarify doc, when using your implementation of Icewind EET and beating IWD1 in EET, does the game also soft lock like with tipun's version?

Oh you mean at the IWD end-boss. (Which is in Easthaven, not Severed Hand, just FYI.)

My mod is geared toward playing IWD as its own campaign. You don’t go back and forth between Easthaven and the Sword Coast. It’s supposed to be just like playing IWDEE. Just as in vanilla BGEE the game ends immediately after defeating Sarevok, in IWDEE I believe the game ends immediately after defeating Belhifet. So it’s not “soft-locked,” it’s just the end of the game. 

I haven’t played it through to see if tipun’s imported version works that way… but in short, my mod doesn’t touch that fight at all so it would be handled exactly as tipun’s mod already handles it. 

[Endarire]

I was mentally switching IWD1 & 2 for final fights.

I asked about your mod's implementation of the final fight because you had the Severed Hand 'Easter Egg' in BGII and I'd much prefer to avoid needing to console escape when even being able to walk out is better.  (Being warped to safety is better still!)

Thankee!

Edited May 5, 2023 by Endarire

[Endarire]

Even adding as optional install time components the ability to be automatically warped back to civilization after beating IWD1 in EET and IWD2 in EET is something that various players have wanted.

Thankee!.

[Guest The_sextein]

On 5/1/2023 at 6:36 AM, megrimlock said:

I also had this experience, but I thought it was because I also had tipun's HOW mod installed separately at the time. What tipun apparently intends to happen is that you warp straight from the Belhifet fight to HOW if you didn't already do HOW as a sidequest en route to Belhifet. So I thought my separate (additional) install of HOW was causing that transition to break somehow. And likewise possibly this integration mod is likewise causing that transition to fail because it also has a duplicate Hjollder/route to HOW? That might be pure nonsense on my part.

In any event you can console back to Ulgoth's Beard and manually set the flag to get the congratulations speech and reward from Maladernoth (set FC_GLOBAL_IWD_VARIABLE to 5).

There's also another variable called "PARTY_IN_ICEWIND_DALE" which I assume you should set back to 0 when you console back to civilisation to avoid breaking things - it certainly screwed up my subsequent NPC recruitment because there is something in the dlg folder in tipun's Icewind_EET - a file called iwd1_pdialog - which for me totally screwed up the joining/booting dialogues for all NPCs (I couldn't tell people in Chateau Irenicus to seek out the nearest inn, for instance). In subsequent installs I simply deleted the contents of that file before installing Icewind_EET - there are no joinable NPCs in tipun's IWD anyway, so I don't know why you would want to change party composition while you are there.

Could you be more specific on what exactly I need to type into the console to fix the NPC recruitment?  The problem I'm having is when I try to pick up Neera, she joins the party but will only walk a few steps before stopping.  I have to click where I want her to do repeatedly and it's unplayable.  Very strange.

[subtledoctor]

18 hours ago, Endarire said:

Even adding as optional install time components the ability to be automatically warped back to civilization after beating IWD1 in EET and IWD2 in EET is something that various players have wanted.

And tipun is working on that. Again, I am not about to step on his toes. Especially when almost the entire thrust of this particular mod is to NOT play the full IWD campaigns inside EET.