Neverwinter Night for Baldur's Gate mod

[Morgoth]

Posted by error.

Edited March 15 by Morgoth

[Acifer]

12 minutes ago, Daulmakan said:

I'm sorry I can't allay your fears, but I won't lift an eyebrow based off of the opinion of some random gaming journalist.

Then I expressed myself incorrectly: I'm not concerned about a gaming journalist writing something, but about the quite obvious, objective problems of this mod that he addresses.

12 minutes ago, Daulmakan said:

IMO, Microsoft has bigger stuff to worry about and probably doesn't need the extra negative points with their own public that go along with persecuting non-profit modders.

Well, it's your decision, but if I'm going to invest a lot of my free time into something, then I want to make sure that someone else can't undo my work with the snap of a finger if they feel so inclined.

[Daulmakan]

Just now, Acifer said:

Then I expressed myself incorrectly: I'm not concerned about a gaming journalist writing something, but about the quite obvious, objective problems of this mod that he addresses.

Then you have several more concerns as well, because as I expressed earlier, there are many other mods around that use other games' assets.

Quote

Well, it's your decision, but if I'm going to invest a lot of my free time into something, then I want to make sure that someone else can't undo my work with the snap of a finger if they feel so inclined.

Heh, if I was as great as you at creating areas, I wouldn't reuse assets from another game either.

But still, to my knowledge, since I've been around (says 2007, was a lurker before), no mod has been "undone with the snap of a finger".

[paladin84]

If somebody wants to redraw some (or all) areas from the mod, I will gladly replace the existing ones taken from other games. But honestly, I don't think it is possible, there are 351 areas and probably around 300 of them are not areas taken from IE games.

[subtledoctor]

3 hours ago, Acifer said:

And making NWN available for BG2 is basically a good idea.

But it’s not just area graphics that are taken from other games. The entire NWN story, and characters, and .dialogues, are protected IP. IMHO you are either in the “some mods just shouldn’t exist” club, or you are okay with modders doing what they can with what resources they can, as long as no one is harmed by it. In case it is not clear, I think the “your mod shouldn’t exist” mindset is an extremely shitty attitude. Not for nothing, there are lots of tutorials for the kind of modding that I have done (and I’ve written some) but I don’t see a single tutorial on making/using area graphics. Which means a lot of potentially great writers are not equipped to make mods, or are limited to writing NPCs os something. And the flip side of the coin, modders who are equipped to make new areas end up publishing big splashy quest mods even though they… may not be the best writers. 

Given that area graphics, in particular, are generally considered to be the hardest and most onerous part of making mods, being overly critical of modders who scrounge what they can risks veering into a gross kind of clubby gatekeeping. 

tl:dr: help, don’t hinder, people making fun new stuff. 

Neither here nor there, but this conversation has wandered quite far afield, and should probably be split into its own thread, so that this thread can focus on issues pertaining specifically to the NWN mod. 

Edited March 15 by subtledoctor

[Acifer]

7 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

IMHO you are either in the “some mods just shouldn’t exist” club, or you are okay with modders doing what they can with what resources they can

You're right, the discussion is drifting. Just to add that: Between "You are not allowed to do anything" and "You are allowed to use 300 assets from another game", there is still a modest middle path that almost all modders I know follow.

And this would also be my advice to stay on this path and not to overdo it. 

[paladin84]

Here is the new release: https://github.com/abalabokhin/NWNForBG/releases/tag/0.97, alternative link is https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ts7Uu0nXNwQJmzS22V1KV691Ws7mzQMu/view.

No big changes, but may small fixes. All the details are in README, as usual (https://github.com/abalabokhin/NWNForBG/tree/0.97?tab=readme-ov-file#version-history)

[lynx]

I'm trying to install the latest version (doesn't appear to be significantly different from the last release). It breaks, maybe it's some linux corner case — I'm not sure anyone else tried yet.

Latest weidu, bg2, fixpack and ia, but the error is clearly from within the mod itself — it breaks when compiling dialogues:

Quote

 

Compiling 5 dialogue files ...
ERROR: No translation provided for @3

[NWNForBG/dlg/nwpickp.d]  ERROR at line 21 column 1-15
Near Text: @3
        Not_found
ERROR: parsing [NWNForBG/dlg/nwpickp.d]: Not_found
ERROR: compiling [NWNForBG/dlg/nwpickp.d]!
Stopping installation because of error.

 

Both files are there in the source, but when investigating, weidu_external/lang/nwnforbg/english/ has only 491 files, while there are 574 tra (and d) files in the source. So the needed tra didn't get loaded and the error likely refers to install.tra, since it only goes up to @2 before a big jump in numbers.

The only thing that's different on linux is that we need to run tolower if not on a case-insensitive filesystem, but in this case the filenames still match each other and AUTO_TRA should have picked them up. All the other string ops before it (like item patching) worked fine. So I doubt it's related. Stracing was useless with no relevant failed filesystem lookups.

The missing 81 tra files are:

Quote

nwaarin2.tra nwaelaih.tra nwagnes.tra nwalhelr.tra nwaribe1.tra nwashira.tra nwavista.tra nwbfish3.tra nwblaskr.tra nwbo2609.tra nwbriley.tra nwbrun.tra nwcommo1.tra nwcust12.tra nwcust28.tra nwcusto7.tra nwdruid3.tra nwdydd.tra nweisnf.tra nwerik.tra nwfestia.tra nwforlon.tra nwftobe2.tra nwgeth.tra nwgirlc3.tra nwgrimg0.tra nwgrimgj.tra nwgrimgw.tra nwgrunt.tra nwguardn.tra nwhaedr3.tra nwhector.tra nwhelmi2.tra nwhenna.tra nwhojg01.tra nwholga.tra nwingo.tra nwissabn.tra nwjailgr.tra nwkarats.tra nwkellii.tra nwkipp.tra nwlinap.tra nwlizsl1.tra nwluce2.tra nwluskad.tra nwmage10.tra nwmary.tra nwmcust6.tra nwmeldct.tra nwmoosed.tra nwmooses.tra nwmooseu.tra nwmorag1.tra nwnoblen.tra nwoleff3.tra nwpalla.tra nwpeasaf.tra nwpickp.tra nwplscrl.tra nwporta0.tra nwppf0.tra nwpris1.tra nwrefug1.tra nwrevat.tra nwrolgan.tra nwsedos.tra nwserva2.tra nwsetara.tra nwshald2.tra nwshamat.tra nwslave6.tra nwsnowob.tra nwthoms.tra nwtowng1.tra nwtrankr.tra nwulfnog.tra nwwittin.tra nwzed.tra nwzoogud.tra setup.tra

I know some of them may just be old unreferenced cruft and perhaps some would get copied in later, but there's clearly a problem. They're all from the main tra dir, no other pattern. Of the 5 dialogs it starts with, only this one's tra file is not copied by that time and it's likely the second one parsed. I see no notable difference between the files.

Any ideas how to continue debugging?

[mickabouille]

I just did an install on Linux (hadn't tried yet), and it worked ok on bg2ee.

I chose the english version and didn't install the last component (install as standalone campaign).

On the other hand I use ext4 with casefolding, I don't think I'd notice case sensitiveness issues.

[lynx]

I doubt it is one, but you're on bg2ee anyway.

[paladin84]

Unfortunately, I have no experience installing mods with native weidu on linux. I tried to install the mod on oBG2 with wine - everything works. Then, I downloaded linux weidu version from here: https://github.com/WeiDUorg/weidu/releases extract it into oBG2 folder and run "./weidu NWNForBG/Setup-NWNForBG.tp2". It doesn't work with the error:

ERROR: Unable to find CHITIN.KEY in:
       .
       .
       ..
       ../..
       ../../..
       /

So, I got stuck at the very beginning. What is the standard way to install mods with native weidu on linux?
 

[lynx]

You have to run tolower afterwards (comes with weidu), so all the files and chitin.key references get lowercased to be consistent.

[mickabouille]

> I doubt it is one, but you're on bg2ee anyway.

Ah sorry I didn't notice you were trying on obg2 (I didn't even know it was supposed to support it )

[mickabouille]

So I tried with obg2 (still on ext4 w/ casefolding),

I obtain

ERROR: error loading [WeiDU.log]
ERROR: Unix.Unix_error(Unix.ENOENT, "stat", "weidu.log")

If you replace in the TP2
ACTION_IF (GAME_IS ~tob bgt~) AND NOT(FILE_CONTAINS ~WeiDU.log~ ~INFINITYANIMATIONS\.TP2. #[0-9]+ #0~)  BEGIN

with

ACTION_IF (GAME_IS ~tob bgt~) AND NOT(FILE_CONTAINS ~weidu.log~ ~INFINITYANIMATIONS\.TP2. #[0-9]+ #0~)  BEGIN

You get a different error

ERROR: Failure("INFINITYANIMATIONS is not installed, install it before NWN For BG.")

which I guess suggest the test now works correctly (as I didn't install IA).

 

IIUC FILE_CONTAINS is case insensitive on the second argument (the searched string), not on the first one (the file name).

EDIT: nope, as I didn't have any mod installed before this one, weidu.log simply didn't exist (which make the above test fail)

 

Still concerning but no the same issue you have

Edited May 20 by mickabouille

[lynx]

Did you enable casefolding for that dir?

I wasn't using the same method, but I didn't have to edit the source and got much farther.