familiar for other than Player1?

[subtledoctor]

I apologize if this has been discussed elsewhere, but the search algorithms seem to be failing me, I get too much noise and no signal.

Is the mechanism understood how Beamdog enabled any party member to cast Find Familiar in IWDEE? Is it hard-coded? I understand the game is not set up to let more than one familiar in the party... but is there a way to mod BG2EE to work like IWDEE, such that the one familiar could be summoned by any party member?

The BG limitation that, for some unexplained reason, only Bhaalspwns raised by Gorion are allowed to cast this spell is really bothering me. (If that's the case, then they should have removed the spell from spell lists and made it a scripted event.

In fact, that would dovetail with a mod idea that has already been kicking around the back of my brain...

Thanks for any relevant info!

[Bubb]

op192 is hardcoded to only allow itself to be applied to Player1 unless [engine.lua]->engine_mode = 2 (IWDEE).

[subtledoctor]

18 minutes ago, Bubb said:

op192 is hardcoded to only allow itself to be applied to Player1 unless [engine.lua]->engine_mode = 2 (IWDEE).

I guess that is not moddable? I don't see engine.lua anywhere, it isn't exposed in NI... and I don't suppose it is something you could drop into /override or /data.

Really frustrating that Beamdog went to the effort to make it work for IWDEE but didn't externalize it in BG2EE in any of five patches across eight years... just more evidence of their penchant for donkey balls, I guess...

[jmerry]

NI can get at engine.lua; it's just under the "Special" tab instead of "LUA". Here's the entire (vanilla) content of engine.lua for BG2EE:

engine_name = "Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition"
engine_mode = 1 -- 0 = BGEE, 1 = BG2EE, 2 = IWDEE

 

[subtledoctor]

12 minutes ago, jmerry said:

NI can get at engine.lua; it's just under the "Special" tab instead of "LUA".

Veeeery interesting. Would it be outrageous to try to edit this in a Weidu mod? I don's suppose M_xyz.LUA files can work for this kind of setting - are they only for stuff that affects UI.menu?

This is clearly way outside my area of expertise.

Of course, even just for my personal uses, getting a modified version onto iOS is probably not easy. (Mmmmaybe? Huh, will look into it.)

Thanks gentlefellows!

[Bubb]

engine.lua is read before the engine has even loaded in the normal game resources, so yeah, engine_mode has to stay in engine.lua to have any effect.

Also, bear in mind that changing engine_mode will tell the engine to act like IWD:EE in all respects, (which includes over 100 special-casings in the code) – so there would be many side-effects, many of which probably breaking a non-IWD:EE game in some way.

[subtledoctor]

5 hours ago, Bubb said:

bear in mind that changing engine_mode will tell the engine to act like IWD:EE in all respects, (which includes over 100 special-casings in the code) – so there would be many side-effects, many of which probably breaking a non-IWD:EE game in some way

Well then, in that case I guess I’m glad my attempt to get the file onto my iPad mid-game failed…