DavidW

Longer Road

LR interacts quite significantly with Ascension, and there will definitely be problems - but it's too complex for me to realistically do much about it, and its current maintainer (Roxanne) doesn't participate on these boards and has a history that makes me reluctant to reach out. It seems to have been updated to allow for 2.0 but I'm not in a position to comment on whether those updates are successful.

Best guess at current status: I don't know. (But install Ascension first.) 

Wheels of Prophecy

This is a bit of a mess. WoP (which I also wrote) is a horrible mess of spaghetti code written when I had much less idea how to organize complex mods. There are clearly significant bugs in its logic but I can't tell which are internal to WoP and which are clashes with new Ascension. I need to do some serious surgery on it; it's at the top of my to-do list but it's difficult to find time.

Best guess at current status: Use at own risk. (Install Ascension first: Ascension itself will enforce this.)

Iylos

Iylos is now updated to be fully compatible with Ascension 2.0

Iylos interjects into a couple of Balthazar's dialogs if Ascension is installed. That's done by hardcoded dialog numbers, which worked fine when Ascension was a big hardcoded block, but doesn't work for Ascension 2.0: some the dialog numbers have changed, and they aren't guaranteed to be the same on every install (install order may affect them, now that the main component is broken down into smaller pieces).

If Iylos is installed first, Ascension actually adds those interjections back in itself; this seems to work fine (it does assume that the player has not removed the Iylos folder from the BG2 directory after installing Iylos, but I think that's a reasonable assumption). If Ascension is installed first, I suspect Iylos's existing hardcoded interjections will come out wrong. (They're all Interjects, so I don't think they can break anything else, but they might happen in inappropriate places.)

It shouldn't be too difficult for Iylos's maintainer (Jastey?) to borrow Ascension's code to allow Iylos to interject into Ascension if installed after. (It does require one of Ascension's function libraries, though.) Let me know if this is of interest and I'll talk you through it.

Best guess at current status: Compatible if Ascension is installed first (and Ascension will enforce this order).

Imoen Romance

The most recent release of Imoen Romance should be fully compatible with Ascension 2.0.

This is a bit complex because it redirects various of Imoen's dialog lines in finsol01.dlg to new lines. If Ascension is installed after Imoen Romance, that's not a problem: Ascension 2.0 uses interject-copy-trans and works around it fine. But it's a problem the other way around: if you install Ascension first then in some circumstances Imoen's new dialog lines are skipped. Specifically, if Balthazar (or, as of 2.0, non-in-party, good-aligned Sarevok) interjects, and the next interject should be Imoen, you get the old version.

This is being addressed by the Imoen Romance maintainer.

Best guess at current status: Fully compatible; install in either order.

Edwin romance

I think that as of its current version, it doesn't do anything in particular to clash with Ascension.

Best guess at current status: Fully compatible; install in either order

Here's a thread to track my current state of knowledge of compatibility between the current version of Ascension and other mods. Currently I'm discussing:

- Edwin Romance

- Imoen Romance

- Iylos

- Wheels of Prophecy

- Longer Road

By all means let me know of other mods that seem to have compatibility problems. Potential compatibility issues will arise for:

- any mod that explicitly tries to allow for and interact with Ascension

- any mod that modifies Chapter 10 (the final battle at the Throne of Blood)

- potentially, any NPC mod that edits the final conversation with the Solar too enthusiastically (because Ascension patches conversations with/about Balthazar, Sarevok and Bodhi into that conversation).

'&' is intended notation, and works as you suggest. '*' I don't know about. That character doesn't appear in BAF scripts, normally - it may be that SSL's parser is just ending its script read at it. Or it may be some subtler bit of functionality I've forgotten about.

Belatedly seeing this - I'll have a look. Clearly there are cases I wasn't considering.

Play in windowed mode, and slide the window over so that the button is off-screen.

Or wait for SCS v33, which applies to story mode - in accordance with SCS's "fight fair" philosophy, all enemies will also be invincible.

That's interesting; thanks. This is my relative inexperience with NPC mods showing up - I guess what makes sense for the banter file isn't what makes sense for the main NPC dialog file. And I didn't know that about Interact() being interruptible.

But wouldn't it make sense, in that case, to set the Interact() to repeat on (say) a 12-second timer until the dialog fires, rather than just having it trigger constantly? Stutter bugs are quite serious, after all - I'd rather code in a way that's properly proofed against it.

(EDIT: and no, it doesn't come across as patronizing.)

On 9/27/2019 at 5:43 PM, Arthas said:

I don't know if you can do anything about it... but know that

The new Ascension v2.0.6 is not compatible with Iylos, Edwin Romance, Wheels, Longer Road because these mods want to add content to BALTH2 from Ascension v1 that is no longer existing in Ascension v2.

This isn't a compatibility problem exactly, just a communications issue.

BALTH2 is the combat script used by Balthazar if he is on your side in the final battle. It's still in Ascension - but this version of Ascension splits the "You can recruit Balthazar" part of Ascension's main component into a separate component. So if you install "Rewritten final chapter" without "Balthazar can be redeemed", you don't get BALTH2. 

In general, mods that do things differently according to whether Ascension is installed or not may get a bit confused if you install some but not all components in the "Ascension" section of the new version. I can't fix that inside Ascension; the mods need to be edited to make finer-grained allowance for which bits are installed. (In Wheels of Prophecy that's my problem too, of course.)

In the meantime, the workaround is pretty simple: if you're using one of these mods, either install all or none of the components in the 'Ascension' subgroup. (Actually, I suspect that 99% of problems will be solved by making sure you don't install 'rewritten final chapter' without 'Balthazar can be redeemed'.

On 5/9/2020 at 1:17 PM, Austin said:

Hello! Found a bug while installing Ascension 2.0.8 and the Imoen Romance 3.9.6 mod. There is a condition in the bimoen25.d file that starts a conversation with Imoen about the forces of Bhaal (dialogue number 91)

ADD_STATE_TRIGGER bimoen25 91 ~Global("YagaShuraHeart1","GLOBAL",2)~

But in Imoen Romance, this dialogue is tied to Gromnir’s death and is forcibly started 15 minutes after his death (in bhaaltalks.d file). At this moment, the value of the variable YagaShuraHeart1 can in no way be equal to 2. And if both mods are installed at the same time, then the dialog tries to start, but cannot. The dialogue freezes, there is a problem with the movement of the player and Imoen, it is impossible to save and relax (the game constantly remains in the dialogue mode, but it cannot start). The second check of the variable in this file (for dialog 100) also causes a conflict with Imoen Romance.

To do this, you need to replace the lines in the bimoen25.d file with these: 

ADD_STATE_TRIGGER BIMOEN25 91 ~Dead("Gromnir")~
ADD_STATE_TRIGGER bimoen25 100 ~Dead("Yaga01")~

And also replace the verification data in the imoe25.baf file.

In this case, the conflict with the "Imoen romance" mod will be resolved (even while installing the Romance and the component "Improved Imoen-Player interaction" from Ascension).

In the attachment, these two files are modified (ready to be replaced).

Ascension fix Imoen Romance.rar 1.17 kB · 1 download

Firstly, this isn't a bug in Ascension. "YagaShuraHeart1" is set to 2 when you retrieve Yaga Shura's heart from the brazier in the fire giant temple; that's Ascension's condition for when Imoen's second special dialog is set (and has been since the mod was released 20 years ago). I've just tested it; it works fine. Similarly, Ascension's condition for the third talk is that the party have met Balthazar (which is when "MetBal" is set). This is a compatibility issue with Imoen Romance, not an Ascension issue per se.

Secondly, this proposed fix removes the conflict, but at the cost of modifying Ascension so that Imoen's dialog lines play earlier. I'm not willing to do that, as it's a change to Ascension developer intent and that's outside the scope of what I'm willing to do when maintaining someone else's mod.

Thirdly, the problem is occurring with this version of Ascension and didn't occur with previous versions. That's because previously the dialog blocks for Imoen could play just by chance, potentially very (unrealistically) early in the story. I added a gate to prevent that happening: I check for YagaShuraHeart1 and MetBal in the dialog file, not just in the script. Imoen Romance assumes those blocks are just there, and tries to call them; since it's trying to do so slightly early, and keeps doing so until it succeeds, the game stutters. Since this was my change, not in vanilla Ascension - and since Imoen Romance's preferred trigger points are only slightly earlier than mine - I'm happy to edit bimoen25.d to use Imoen Romance's slightly earlier checks. I believe this will avoid the incompatibility without the need to change imoe25.baf.

Fourthly, thanks for the research! 

EDIT: Just as a coding note, someone paying attention might wonder why this doesn't lead to a compatibility problem in Ascension itself: when Ascension calls for these same dialogs slightly later than Imoen Romance, doesn't that cause the same hanging? No, because Ascension's blocks have a variable which guarantees they only fire once. This is probably good practice if you're writing blocks to call a conversation, especially a third-party one that might have been triggered elsewhere. (I'm not showing off my own coding competence: I took it over verbatim from the original Ascension.)

@Liliana: thanks, that's reassuring.

@4udr4n: I have no idea: as you say, it's not my mod, and I'm not at all familiar with it.

...okay, going through this, the only significant reproducible bug I can find is that the Slayer power gets granted (and regranted, and regranted...) if you go to Watcher's Keep in SoA.

I've fixed that locally, but I'm wondering if I'm missing something - various people on this thread suggested that there are much more serious issues than this. eg. Oob: "more than a dozen bugs",  "Just trying to say that Ascension 2.0.9 has quite a few nasty bugs right now". Any thoughts? 

I'd rather work with the latest official release, not prerelease edits - so I'll use Austin's link. Thanks to both.

OK, I have the following list of issues culled from this forum and Beamdog:

Bugs:

Main character gets transform power before SH (main thread: Christian, 8/12)
Imoen keeps repeating her 'almost jumping at player's throat' and 'becoming the reaper' conversations (main thread: Drakensang, 8/14)
Non-EE install: warning because SPERMEL isn't being modified (main thread: Heeb, 2/15)
Improved Slayer transformation gets granted 52x/day (main thread: InKal, 3/2)
Very weird install-time problem with iconv (31315-installation-error)
Are we shipping the W64 exe, and if so, do we need to? (30891-win32)
Some challenge rewards may not be being granted (beamdog thread: histaminii, August 2019)

Probably not bugs:

Can't find splstate (main thread: Guest vic, 12/19) - probably too-early a version of EE

Compatibility:

Problems with Iylos, Edwin, Wheels(!), LR being unable to find BALTH2 (main thread: Arthas, 9/27)
Issue with Imoen Romance (main thread: Austin, 5/9)
Install issue with 'cdheld.eff' missing, on a stack of mods (30894-installation-error)

If you read this in the next day or two and see something I've missed, call it out.

Also, if someone who uses Imoen Romance can give me a reliable URL for the current (or latest) version, it would be helpful (I recall previously having some trouble working out which it was).

That's a Wheels of Prophecy issue, not an Ascension issue. (Also, I haven't managed to reproduce any of these issues, because the 'window in the next few days' has only opened a few minutes ago :) )

I don't think this can be anything to do with Ascension - moving it to SCS thread, as it might be that.

Ignoring this one, as there's not enough information to reproduce it.

On 4/24/2020 at 2:30 PM, Guest Guest Oob said:

Sorry that sounded harsher than I meant it. Just trying to say that Ascension 2.0.9 has quite a few nasty bugs right now and can't be left in a state like this for so long, being one of Baldur's Gate's main mods. Since the author has much better shit to do right now, it should be up to *other people* to at least provide a lab branch for Ascension so that some people can fix and eventually use it, but more importantly so that David Gaider will only need to verify and pull the code changes with little effort when the time will come. I don't think we should expect parenting a newborn not to suck out energy and most modding time for the next two years, especially since there are other things more important than modding responsibilities when a break can be taken from both kids and work, namely taking care of the couple, friend relationships and generally changing pace.
As an outsider with little involvement in this and no trust from the author, it's not my place to take an initiative, but I would contribute reporting and then fixing the bugs I noted down in a way the community feels like it's the right approach.

I'm not David Gaider. (He led the team that wrote the mod, but hasn't been involved in maintaining it for about 20 years.)

I may have a window in the next few days to do an Ascension fix. No promises though. Just going through the buglist now. (The more egregious bugs here are with Wheels of Prophecy, which of course is also my mod but which is going to require a rather more systematic set of fixes.)

Sorry, new baby > work responsibilities > updating mods. See you at some completely unspecified point when I have a chunk of spare time.

Don't do the change-log on my account.

See if you can reproduce it with just SCS. And let me know exactly which spells you're casting.

Ease-of-use AI doesn't use stealth at all, so I don't know what's going on there.

I've seen that report from several people, so it's not just you. I think the RNG trick I use generates the same number for multiple creatures spawned at the same time. I'll think about whether there's a good fix.