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Finally *playing* this mod


Meira

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Well, that is good news and bad news -- the good news, on EasyTutu this seems to be a random game error (either a program running in the background, a communication difficulty, perhaps some glitch with virus protection on install, perhaps the planets were out of alignment) -- but I can sleep a little better!

The bad news - we are not able to replicate and therefore track this difficulty, and are back to Microsoft Tech Support 101 -"reinstall and reboot while swinging a chicken over your head and dancing around chanting 'WeiDU Good! Bug Bad! WeiDU Good! Bug Bad!' and throwing scraps of shredded computer manuals in the air" :)

Well, more good/bad news however you want to view it. I was able to replicate my latest issue somewhat. Perhaps it's always been there, I just never noticed it before until I scrolled back in the log and look at what Gorion actually says during his battle. (It's not audible or visible otherwise - you only find it if you scroll back.)

 

I installed the following (latest versions of all) on a "clean" install (BG1 and BG2 are there, fully patched, otherwise untouched):

> EasyTutu

> EasyTutuHotfixes

> EasyTutuDegreenifier

> EasyTutuNPCKits

> Tutufix (recommended components only)

> Tutusounds

> BG1 NPC

 

So in other words, vanilla Tutu + PPG fixes + BG1 NPC v12b3. This time, I go to Gorion and we leave Candlekeep - his presence at the gate and dialog all seem kosher for now. Before with my "kitchen sink" install, he wasn't saying anything until the "You're a fool..." line.

 

*But* the first line in the battle is still:

Armored Figure- You're perceptive for an old man... <snip>

Wasn't Gorion supposed to have a line of dialog that's "perceptive"? After that, everything looks ok... I hear him tell me to run, but at the end of the battle there's this in the log:

Gorion- Critical Miss

Gorion- I cannot tarry about for idle conversation. As a knight there are many tasks that must be looked after!

Armored Figure did 16 damage to Gorion

Gorion- Death

Your journal has been updated.- The Friendly Arm Inn

Imoen shows up but I haven't gone much further with her yet, as it's apparent there's something messed up with Gorion from the get-go. I never knew he was a knight!

 

I'm an obvious neophyte with this but I'm gonna try to grep the code for some of these strings and see if I can notice anything you experts missed. BTW I have nothing running in the background, no anti-virus, Internet, nothing. Any other ideas?

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Dunno if this is significant or not, but I compared the original BG1 dialog.tlk file with the EasyTutu/BG1 NPC version.

 

Original BG1 dialog.tlk:

[GORION 2] Run child, get out of here![GORION 3] Wait!  There is something wrong.  We are in an ambush. Prepare yourself![GORION 4] You must learn to be patient child.[GORION 5] Everything will be explained to you in time.[GORION 6] -cough- -cough- I'm too old for this.[GORION 7] We have very little time![GORION 10] Listen carefully!  If we ever become separated it is imperative that you make your way to the Friendly Arm Inn.  There you will meet Khalid and Jaheira.  They have long been my friends and you can trust them. [GORION 11] Let's hurry child!  The night can only get worse so we must find shelter soon.  Don't worry, I will explain everything as soon as there is time.'
[GORION 12] You're a fool if you believe I would trust your benevolence.  Step aside and you and your lackeys will be unhurt.[GORION 13] Awake my adopted child.  Awake and face the terrible tests ahead of thee.

EasyTutu/BG1 NPC dialog.tlk:

[GORION 2] Run child, get out of here![GORION 3] Wait!  There is something wrong.  We are in an ambush. Prepare yourself![GORION 4] You must learn to be patient child.[GORION 6] -cough- -cough- I'm too old for this.[GORION 7] We have very little time![GORION 10] Listen carefully!  If we ever become separated it is imperative that you make your way to the Friendly Arm Inn.  There you will meet Khalid and Jaheira.  They have long been my friends and you can trust them.[GORION 11] Let's hurry child!  The night can only get worse so we must find shelter soon.  Don't worry, I will explain everything as soon as there is time.'
[GORION 12] You're a fool if you believe I would trust your benevolence.  Step aside and you and your lackeys will be unhurt.[GORION 13] Awake my adopted child.  Awake and face the terrible tests ahead of thee.

What happened to "[GORION 5] Everything will be explained to you in time."? Maybe it was removed due to redundancy, I dunno. There's a lot of other weirdness going on in the Tutu version, like the fact these strings appear several times under mysterious circumstances, in one case nailed in to the apparent description of an item.

 

I'm going to regress to vanilla EasyTutu and see if any of this was introduced by Tutufix or EasyTutu.

 

Why did the BG1 developers decide to cram all the dialog and descriptions into a single file? I guess maybe they didn't expect people would come along after the fact and try to patch that file, introducing potential for all sorts of conflicts...

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Nm... found it sandwiched somewhere else...

[GREATER DOPPLEGANGER 01] Appearances can be deceiving, monkey![GORION 1] Ahhh my child, I am glad I have found you.[GORION 5] Everything will be explained to you in time.[GREATER DOPPLEGANGER 03] Time to fillet some MEAT!Seek my comfort, will you? Aye, I'll show you a sweet and silent comfort if ye'll let me, wasteling.

If someone could reproduce my dialog errors though, I can at least verify it's not something wacky on my own installation. Just wait til after Gorion's battle and scroll up to see what he 'says' during the battle, especially around his death. You may have to have subtitles on to see the text.

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EDIT: The "you are perceptive for an old man" line responds to Gorion's spoken cutscene line "wait a minute - it's an ambush!". On my EAX - enabled install, this line is pretty much drowned out by the positional sound, as Gorion has moved away from the initial sound point and appears to be throwing his voice back to the initiation point :)

 

 

I think I know what this is-- this might be the same thing that got me involved in the whole modding side of stuff! Drop Macready a line, and reference this post. I bet that this is the ".cre is created on a different version" problem that the Caravan Bandits had when we used a .cre built on a different installation.

 

Short synopsis:

  • When you create a creature, it uses numbered strings to indicate what lines to reference. These lines are specific to *your* installation.
  • These string references ("strrefs") are portable (usually) for BG2 modders, but not for Tutu modders, because Tutu is actually a big huge mod of BG2.
  • With BG2, the string references are relatively static, but not always; SoA and ToB may have some differences that are pretty well hidden. With Tutu, they are basically mod-added strings created on top of SoA or ToB; "dynamic sttrefs". That means that line 3478 (or whatever) on my install of Tutu based on SoA will not be the same as 3478 on my Tutu based on ToB.
  • The common identifier of this problem is the harmless but disconcerting problem of an NPC blurting out a hideously wrong string when hit (Instead of "ouch" or "", Baronious' Sorceresess last version talked about the Grand Dukes, and BG1 NPCs v11 Caravan Bandit displayed weird strings each time a hit registered on the .cre or she initiated discussion). Both Baronius on his TGCep1 and BG1 NPC fixed this by recreating/reassigning all strings associated with the .cre on install, as the fix really is just using TRA to identify specifically which strings you want to reference.
  • Unless your dialogue.tlk is really truly scrambled (as tested by uninstalling everything, deleting everything, reinstalling a clean EasyTutu version, and opening the .cres in override in NI to see if wierd behavior has crept into .cre referenced sound related strings), I bet that the "drag and drop" behavior of Macready's installer drops a completey repaired Gorion creature in the override folder, which is perfect for one installation (either SoA or ToB). We can add a sriong repair for this into BG1 NPC pretty easily, using a ToB .cre and Baronius' tools (or NI and some checks to build a quick soundset "stringfixer" for the SoA installs), but the simplest thing to do is check with Macready and see if his SoA distribution works the way I am saying. He is incredibly rapid in response and has great troubleshooting skills.

By the way, if I am wrong on this, I do apologise - I have definitely tested this problem and cannot replicate it on my install without doing a new full install on my test bed with a SoA-only install. I need to keep working on the fixes rather than replicate :)

 

The modders note is that rather than building a .cre using traditional tools, we probably now need an "industry standard" which involves creating a blank creature file with no soundset strings, and patching the references on install. BNOT0 is your friend ;)

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After some tedious regression testing, I verified this is a bug present in core EasyTutu without any mods/fixes present. I reproduced it with 3 different installations (EasyTutu alone, EasyTutu + fixes, EasyTutu + fixes + BG1 NPC).

 

When Gorion scores either a critical hit or critical miss in his battle*, he will 'say' "I cannot tarry about for idle conversation. As a knight there are many tasks that must be looked after!" Which is actually one of Ajantis's lines. I verified in DLTCEP this string is assigned to soundset slot 31 SELECT_COMMON6 for GORION.CRE.

 

See third line of text on screenshot right after Gorion's battle:

gorion01.jpg

 

I'll report this on PPG as well. It seems like a pretty minor thing in itself, but I can't help but wonder whether this sort of thing is more widespread, perhaps leading to dialog corruption in other places? I certainly experienced some serious dialog loss with Gorion when installing other mods - still trying to figure that one out.

 

* You'd think this'd be a simple 1 in 10 chance (1 or 20 on d20), but of course it took me absolutely *ages* to reproduce this when I *wanted* to. It cropped up all the time when I wasn't paying attention.

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This was probably never reported because it was part of a cutscene, either completely or mostly inaudible, and for some reason, cutscene dialog does not always show up in the dialog box. At least I don't recall ever seeing it, even *with* subtitles turned on.

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This was probably never reported because it was part of a cutscene, either completely or mostly inaudible, and for some reason, cutscene dialog does not always show up in the dialog box.

 

Either that, or the problem is restricted to certain distributions of BG1/TotSC and/or combination of EasyTutu (ToB rather than SoA or the other way around and so on) - I've messed around it with the initial phases of Tutu more than most and have never seen it, and I *always* have subtitles enabled.

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Either that, or the problem is restricted to certain distributions of BG1/TotSC and/or combination of EasyTutu (ToB rather than SoA or the other way around and so on)
Probably applies to both. Macready confirmed the error over at PPG. Maybe Mac is different? :)

 

I've messed around it with the initial phases of Tutu more than most and have never seen it, and I *always* have subtitles enabled.
I don't think you have to have subtitles enabled, but you would have to

a) Have Gorion score a critical hit/miss during his battle (and he only really gets one melee shot in), and

b) Scroll up to see the text after the battle (you can see the text during the battle in BG1 but EasyTutu disables this for some reason). It is otherwise inaudible from what I can tell, as berelinde suggested.

 

Both of which are fairly unlikely to happen. Well at least this one wasn't introduced by BG1 NPC and probably doesn't affect it greatly. But I encountered other dialog weirdness I'm going to try to reproduce.

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Probably applies to both. Macready confirmed the error over at PPG. Maybe Mac is different? :)

 

It shouldn't be, in the sense that all the relevant files are the same. Who knows, it could be a matter of the Mac port of the BG2 engine being less likely to "use" just that slot, or one of a hundred different things. It's somewhat interesting though. :)

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...or one of a hundred different things...

 

Actually, me not having seen it must indeed have been pure coincidence. I did some "stresstesting" (CTRL-Q Gorion, had him go beat up some noblemen and then read the transcript :) ) and had the string appear three times in two turns. So, nothing to see here.

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It's returning:

 

In the CoastWay, after recruiting Xzar and Montaron:

 

Montaron: Hey, hold me large knife half a tick, will ye?

Imoen: What a harrowing experience it must have been for all of you. Please, what can I do that might be helpful?

 

NO VALID REPLIES OR LINKS

 

Of course, I just installed Gavin, so who knows.

 

Edit: I had also just uninstalled and reinstalled a mod, so scrambling is much more likely than anything NPC-Project related. Never mind.

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Yes, we are playing a multiplayer game. :) Sorry, if I wasn't clear enough about it.

 

Last time we played an Imoen initiated banter (with Minsc) worked just fine, but when Dyaheir initiated one to Imoen it terminated after Dynaheir's line. However, the protagonist died soon after and when Dynaheir initiated that banter again with Imoen it worked flawlessly. So, it's not even consistent. I wonder if it's a some sort of multiplayer quirk...? Though I'm not sure why it would be, since I don't recall noticing that kind of behaviour before, neither with modded or original banters.

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I don't think it's a multiplayer quirk. I play on multiplayer all the time and only had it happen the once. I think it's a dowload glitch.

 

Get this: after confirming your report of missed banters in my own installation (on multiplayer), I went and wiped my installation. No, I didn't do anything weird. It was deliberate. So, with the clean slate, I installed the same original download: still no Imoen Banters. Determined to find out what was going on, I downloaded a fresh copy and installed again, same version, same multiplayer game, and everything was fine. Go fig.

 

I've had download hiccups before, where it installs OK, but something inexplicable happens. When I try to troubleshoot, I can't see anything wrong. When I do a fresh download and install, everything is fine. Could this be the case for you?

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