Third - I mean, fifth! - attempt at a large EET game on a tablet

[subtledoctor]

I forged ahead, finished the install, and transferred the files over. I have to say, this may push the hardware too much, it may be riddled with bugs, but it is undeniably cool as hell. I’m rolling up a party for IWD, and there’s this problem: the available character sounsets are few, and bad. There are only 5 male and 5 female - and one of them is just growling and grunting. I so dearly miss the IWD soundsets! They had style. 

Unfortunately I think the current soundset mods make use of advances in this are introduced by the 2.6 patch. I need to see if I can find any older ways to get more soundsets on the 2.5 patch. 

Edited February 28, 2023 by subtledoctor

[Endarire]

tipun's also been away from his modding computer for a significant while now for whatever reason.  Don't expect him to update his mods any time soon.

I only noticed 2 versions of tipun's IWD in EET.  The newest is available now, and the older version was released before then.

Edited February 28, 2023 by Endarire

[subtledoctor]

Well. I very quickly hit a showstopping bug. Starting an IWD game, various interactions with the left side of the screen are causing the GUI to disappear and never come back.

• Go to the settings/menu; then press “back to game:” the GUI is gone. 
• My screen sleeps so I wake it up and press the clock button to unpause: the GUI disappears.
• Bring up the journal and then press the journal button again to make it go away: the GUI disappears.

That’s all I’ve tested so far. Trying different things is slow because I cannot do anything in the game, I have to kill the app altogether and then restart it. 

It’s almost like someone attached a phantom keyboard and pressed ‘h’ to hide the GUI/HUD elements. I have a full-screen shot of Griselda’s tavern, and I can move the party around or select individuals, but I cannot do anything else. It also kind of reminds me of the bug when I played my last run, where I thought it had entered a cut-scene after the boss died, but I still had control and the GUI came back by itself after the other boss-element-gem-thing was killed. Tipun said that bug was fixed in the full IWD1_EET, but clearly there is still something wacky going on. And even worse than it was in HoW_EET.

I need to see if the same thing happens when starting campaigns in other campaigns. If the GUI is breaking in BG1/BG2 then this whole install is busted.

Sigh. 

I suppose this could actually be something mimicking an ‘h’ press… something in a .LUA file? I can take a look at BGEE.LUA and any M_ files there are… but it’s like trying to read a novel in a language I don’t know. 

UPDATE: so I put all the files for this install into a desktop version of the game, and I can reproduce the problem there. And I've found:

• It really is like pressing 'h' - after the GUI goes away, on the desktop I can simply press 'h' to bring it back.
• It only happens once - if I open the journal and then dismiss it, or go to the inventory screen and then back to the main screen, etc., - any interaction with the buttons on the left side of the screen - the GUI goes away; but after press 'h' to bring it back, it doesn't happen anymore.
• It only happens when starting the IWD1 campaign - IWD2, BG1, BG2 etc. all work fine and do not show this behavior.

Which is really weird. Could it be scripted, somehow? Why would something dependent on the area or campaign be responsive to a UI interaction?

There's no way to simulate pressing 'h' on the iOS game to get past the one time this happens. It's a complete game-killer. Maybe I can script something to get around it?  [Checking IESDP...] Okay I see there are HideGUI() and UnhideGUI() script actions, but I don't see any triggers corresponding to the status of the GUI.

Maybe I cold put something in BALDUR.BCS that checks for whether the game has been idle for a while, and then fires an UnhideGUI() command? Though, I don't know if that would work when the game clock is stopped...

Just walking outside Griselda's Tavern triggers the bug too, moving from ID1006.are to ID1000.are makes the GUI go away. But if I trigger it and then bring it back inside the tavern, then I can move outside and among other Easthaven areas without it disappearing.

UPDATE 2 - there is a HideGUI() action in ID1006.BCS. It is supposed to fire earlier, I think maybe to hide the GUI during the opening conversation with Hrothgar? But for whatever reason it seems to be triggered by interacting with the UI. I removed it from the script, and things seem to be working now!

Weird.

Edited February 28, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

Still no soundsets, though. I dropped a bunch of .WAV files into /lang/en_US/sounds, per the old method of manually adding soundsets before the 2.6 patch. I did it identically in the desktop folder and the iOS folder. They should up fine on the desktop, but I have no new soundsets on iOS. I wonder if the mobile game simply cannot have new soundsets? Or, only the ones you have to buy from Beamdog? (Which, I'm sorry, are not very good, and I can't buy them anyway because EET overwrote my main screen UI with the in-game purchases button.)

EDIT - and solved this one too, on iOS the Sounds folder doesn't belong in /lang, but needs to be transferred over on its own.

Okay! Time to get to playing.

Any suggestions for a party? I started to make up a fairly standard paladin—ranger—fighter/cleric—druid—bard—fighter/thief—mage… but I might be open to more nonstandard ideas…

Edited February 28, 2023 by subtledoctor

[StummvonBordwehr]

So its zipping the Sound folder, adding the appropriate sufix and sending/exporting it to to your iOS device? If so, what sufix?

[subtledoctor]

1 hour ago, StummvonBordwehr said:

So its zipping the Sound folder, adding the appropriate sufix and sending/exporting it to to your iOS device? If so, what sufix?

Zip the 'sounds' folder from inside /lang, rename the .zip file to "sounds.bg2data" and then transferring it over.

That means when sending the /lang folder, you can copy it, delete the /sounds subfolder from inside the copy, and then zip the copy up and call it "lang.bg2data." I mean, why copy files over twice, right? Although I'm not sure why I care about the size of these archives - I've moved over something like 10 or 12 GB of data to my BG2EE iOS app. My copy of BG2EE is basically a TARDIS now.

I ran into some more problems:

1. FnP multiclass druids do not have their spells and stuff - due to a typo that needs to be fixed in FnP (edit - done)
2. Some minor string mix-ups in proficiency screens due to typos in weapprof.2da, needs fixing in SoB (edit - done)
3. Some weird mis-numbering of kits in kitlist.2da. Everything else was correct, so when I manually fixed the index numbers of about ~30 kits, everything else fell into place and now everything works fine. It's not clear how this happened... based on the position of the initial error and the position of where the error magically went away and the remaining 150 kits were properly numbered, it seems like this might have something to do with installing Refinements early, then uninstalling it and reinstalling it a bit later. That sort of thing shouldn't cause problems, Weidu is supposed to handle it. But here, it seems like it did? Oh well, easy fix at any rate.

I'd like to make a druid and dual-class to mage, but it's not possible. The only nature deity in FnP is the gnomish Baervan Wildwanderer... I suppose I could make the character a gnome. But maybe there should be more nature deities, for tall folk to do this. Or maybe I should make a hidden cleric clone of the Forest Druid kit. Or maybe all the current druid kits should just be moved into the 'cleric' class, to simplify things? (The multilcass druids are there already, it would be more consistent...)

Edited February 28, 2023 by subtledoctor

[StummvonBordwehr]

Thanks for the clarification and all the tinkering/reporting

[subtledoctor]

I was going to run a psion in the party - IWD is always a good place to try out weirder kits - but the aforementioned kitlist indexing problem has seemingly knocked the ranger/psion out of my ranger kits menu. Sigh.

So this is what I've got so far:

• Parena the Paladin, a Knight of the Golden Lion (paladin of Torm), high STR and CHA, proficient in greatswords, axes, and flails
• Durindel the druid/ranger, high DEX/CON/WIS, proficient in staff, daggers, bows, and dual-wielding
• Clorfinn the cleric of Moradin, high STR/CON, proficient in hammers, maces, crossbows, and shield-fighting
• Fallarin the fighter/thief, a Halfling Slinger, high DEX/CHA, proficient in slings, short swords, and daggers
• Myrian the mage/thief, a Meistersinger, high DEX/CHA, proficient in long swords, clubs, bows, and single-hand style
• Biorna the cleric of Baervan, high INT/WIS, proficient in staff and sling, and bound to dual-class to mage

This is... fairly boring. A pretty standard array. It covers all bases, will be very well-rounded, and will probably handle everything with ease. Although, crap, I forgot, I have all monster XP set to 1/2 for the sake of the EET side of things, and that will definitely slow my progress in IWD. Oh well, we'll see how it goes!

[subtledoctor]

Man, I had forgotten how harsh IWD is, and how miserly as well! In BG you're first level and you have to worry about a wolf. In IWD your 1st-level party gets three wolves, followed by six orcs, followed by eight orcs, followed by eight orcs plus an ogre! And my reward for it is... 10xp per orc and a lone ring of protection +1.
I must say, for some reason I really dig the green coloring on the goblins here:

Spoiler

 

It looks so much better - so much more goblin-y - than the yellow used in BG/BG2! But man, these dudes are no joke!

Spoiler

Since when do goblins have 36 hit points?? Is this part of tipun balancing the IWD campaign on the assumption that a high-level party from BG will be playing? And 10xp? Really?

Also I fought my way all the way through the Kuldahar Pass and went up to that bonus cave, fought an extra 15 goblins and some big beetles, and I totally forgot it was all for nine measly arrows +1   Gosh this game is stingy!

5E spellcasting was bugging out for a bit in the ogre cave, I was worried, but then I rested at the inn and now all is working perfectly. A good reminder, sometimes when there appears to be a bug, the easiest way to troubleshoot is to just let things reset by resting or leveling up etc. Only other bug is, a goblin marshal dropped a lesser static star +1, and it has no icon, just a blank square. But I'm actually pretty sure one of my own mods did that.

Apart from that, the prologue from Easthaven to Kuldahar has been... completely normal. Aside from the green super-gobs, I wouldn't be able to tell I wasn't playing the game natively. Good stuff!

[Endarire]

One possibility is that tipun uses the "Nightmare" (Heart of Fury) difficulty which drastically increases all enemy stats!

[jmerry]

The 10 XP ... you said XP from kills was halved, so that's probably 20. Level 1 goblins in the BG series have that value too. More than kobolds (7 XP), less than gibberlings (35 XP).

That toughness on the goblin archer, though... that's either a massive buff, or the creature is something like level 4 (32 HP). Which should be worth hundreds of XP rather than a mere 20; checking some SoD goblins, a chieftain (L4, 32+8 HP) is worth 250 and a worg rider (L3, 30+3 HP) is worth 175.

[subtledoctor]

Damn, it appears that Refinements overwrites the Illusionist kit table. After all these years, how did I never notice that?? Bad mod!

15 hours ago, Endarire said:

One possibility is that tipun uses the "Nightmare" (Heart of Fury) difficulty which drastically increases all enemy stats!

Their thac0 and AC are garbage, which is why my party is still alive. (thac0 18, AC 6)

7 hours ago, jmerry said:

That toughness on the goblin archer, though... that's either a massive buff, or the creature is something like level 4 (32 HP). Which should be worth hundreds of XP rather than a mere 20; checking some SoD goblins, a chieftain (L4, 32+8 HP) is worth 250 and a worg rider (L3, 30+3 HP) is worth 175.

As I say they have the thac0 and AC of a ~2HD creature, but the hp of a ~4HD creature (no CR in 2E, so all this stuff operates by feeling... which tbh is one reason I still love 2E).

Glancing at Near Infinity, I found the early-IWD1 goblins, and they all have roughly these stats: thac0 18, AC6, 36 hp. Marshals have a bit more hp.

I also see some goblins that are pretty clearly for the IWD2 campaign, and those tend to be much more powerful:

• 00GOB.CRE has 50 hp, thac0 12, AC 1, and is worth 200 natural xp (cut to 100 by my mod but we'll ignore that for now).
• 10GOB.CRE has 65 hp, thac0 11, AC 3, and is worth the same 200 xp
• a half-goblin hordling has 62 hp, thac0 11, AC 2, and is worth 350 xp (also, "half-goblin hordling??" )
• a goblin worg rider has 70 hp, thac0 9, AC 0, and is worth 1300 xp

Et cetera. From what I'm seeing, my guess is that tipun hand-tuned the stats of these creatures to match the level at which he expects them to be encountered - he intends IWD1 to be played in mid-/late-BG1, and IWD2 to be played in early BG2. I see stuff in the mod like this table of creatures and their stats, but that seems closer to the original IWD values than the values I'm seeing with the mod installed. I'm not sure if that table is actually used at all, or was just created for his own reference benefit. For the .CRE files themselves, a cursory inspection only reveals COPY and SAY commands, which suggests his altered stats are baked into the files ahead of time.

This makes me a bit concerned about the legions of undead I'm about to face in the Vale of Shadows, which were already hard enough for a party of 2nd- and 3rd-level chumps... It also makes me despair of playing IWD2 straight through from level 1. I might need to apply some kind of creature rebalancing... but it could be hard to do that with broad strokes. Hmm... that .2da table does indeed seem to match the .CRE stats I see in IWDEE, so I could theoretically write a little mod to read the table and write the stat values on the creatures. Though, as with XP awards, this would not help with IWD2 where there is not easy guidance available for conversion. I suppose I could just overwrite a bunch of .CRE files with the ones from IWD1. A crude approach, but it could be effective.

EDIT - for IWD1 at least, it looks like tipun just padded every enemy through Wyrm's Tooth with about 20-30 hit points. It's not really dangerous, my game is going okay... but I'm not a fan of extra-spongey enemies. I'll write up a little weidu mod to de-spongify the creatures, and include it as an option in my IWD Integration mod. (I still need to Weidu-ize the script XP changes as well.)

As for IWD2, that's a completely different story. There seem to be more creature files in that game, and they vary from the expected in more ways. (E.g. there is a creature called simply "bugbear" that is 13th level, has thac0 7 and AC 1, and 85 hp.) I'm not ready to commit to a strategy for addressing that game, yet.

Edited March 1, 2023 by subtledoctor

[subtledoctor]

I went through character generation again to check whether my fixes have been working. Rolled a:

• Weaponmaster fighter
• Ranger/cleric of Mielikki (good with bows)
• Skald fighter/mage
• Northern Druid, single-class
• Cleric of Lathander planning to dual to mage
• Psionicist (psion/thief)

Unfortunately the psionicist is bugged. Creating the character leads to a bog-standard trueclass thief once I’m in the game. Using the NPC_EE mechanism to change kit in-game does not help - it says “changed to psionicist” but I’m still just a thief, with the regular thief CLAB abilities. One weird thing I noticed, when choosing thief skills, for some reason this character assigned skill points singly, instead of five at a time. I’m guessing this is connected to my kitlist.2da problems mentioned earlier. And indeed I found more leftover problems in the “M_KITPRF.LUA” file. I fixed them, but I’m not confident that will fix everything. I’m afraid this will have to be a run without psionics. Which is a shame, because a psionicist could be very useful in this campaign…

So now I have 11 valid characters exported to choose from, but can only use six. I think I will settle on a mix of the two teams:

• Weaponmaster fighter 
• cleric of Moradin
• ranger/cleric of Mielikki (reeeally having a tough time choosing between this and the ranger/druid)
• fighter/thief Halfling Slinger
• mage/thief Meistersinger bard
• cleric of Lathander —> mage

———

Neither here nor there, but the Skald as F/M has always been a bit weird. It’s an objectively powerful and very fun kit, but I keep trying and failing to picture a Skald carting a spellbook around and poring over arcane scrolls etc. Maybe it should be a F/C kit…? Doesn’t have to be tied to a specific deity, could fluff it as a kit for followers of any battle deity - Tempus, Red Knight, even Talos or Umberlee or anyone else who could plausibly represent a combination of music and battle.

(Which in turn makes me think maybe we’ve been barking up the wrong tree all this time, with cleric kits as specialty priests. Maybe cleric kits should be a bit more general, and allow following various deities. Like instead of just “Glyphscribe of Deneir,” maybe a Glyphscribe kit could encompass followers of Deneir, Milil, or Oghma. Instead of “Seeker of Oghma,” a Seeker kit could encompass followers of Oghma, Deneir, Helm, etc. This way kits could focus less on some particular powers granted by a deity, and more on fulfilling particular roles that cut across various faiths. Kind of the way vanilla paladins are set up. This would add flexibility to NPC clerics, because now, for example, Branwen would always be a cleric of Tempus, but that characterization would work well with several giving the character more varied replay value.

Of course, that would entail ripping out a major part of our mod and rewriting about a hundred kits. And leaving behind our commitment to being faithful to 2E PnP material. And sheesh, who has the time for that? Still though, it’s a neat idea for a divine kitpack, and it would be easy to make it work with the various sphere systems already out there…)

[Endarire]

As a musician, I understand what it's like to keep binders and books full of musical notes.  Skald seems fitting as a spellbook user.

[subtledoctor]

Got through the Vale of Shadows. I always dread this. Just ploughing your way through ~200 skeletons of various types. The story is really great - the big misdirection of it is really a clever conceit that fits will in this pint-sized D&D campaign. But still, it fills me with dread every time I play it. I don't know if that's a result of good design - the game is making me feel what that area is thematically supposed to invoke! - or if it's bad design and just not fun. At any rate, it's done.

I seem to be having a problem with enemy archers, again. Some skeleton archers are not firing at me from afar, and they are dropping no-icon/no-name items. I had tried to edit IWDification because I wanted the rare high-quality random drops, but without the archery problems. It seems my attempt was unsuccessful.

Or... I'm not sure what is going on. The skeleton archers in Kresselack's Tomb have a few items on them - SKEL_M1.itm, SKEL_R1.itm, AROW_P1.itm, and RNGP1.itm. These .itm files have no content, so they seem to be designed to be swapped out for weapons? Maybe? And in some cases it doesn't happen? I know IWD was big on item randomization, so all these identical creatures can have distinct weapon sets. I'm not sure what the mechanism is to achieve that, though.