DavidW

I assume the NI description is still that weird endless repetition of stuff that you posted a while back.

What language are you playing in?

At what point? When version 32 released, about a year ago (or 18 months ago for the playtest version). 

As for why: there were three design principles driving the redesign of the install system for v32.

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1) Move difficulty-related choices out of the install process and into the game wherever possible, for the reason Fouinto gives (you can change the difficulty on-the-fly rather than having to do a lengthy reinstall). This wasn't possible until EE and ToBEx allowed the hardcoded increased-damage feature of the difficulty slider to be disabled.

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2) When the readme flagged a choice of components as 'not recommended', move the option to choose it anyway out of the main install process and into the ini or the fine-tune-difficulty system, so as to make sure people who don't follow the recommendation know what they are doing and aren't just getting a non-recommended choice by accident. (And so I can make clearer to people which issues are bugs that I will try to fix, and which are 'use at own risk' consequences of exotic install choices.)

For instance:

- I have long recommended that users install the SCS spell-system changes, because those changes are assumed by the AI and not using them leads to behavioral glitches in enemy spellcasting. So in v32 they are installed by default (but can all be deactivated via the ini, if someone knows that they are going against the recommendation and wants to do it anyway).

- I have long advised against giving HLAs to every 18th-level wizard in SoA, but I still used to get complaints that it was unfairly difficult. Now you can still do it, but it's a 'legacy of Bhaal' difficulty, accessible (unless you're playing on LoB) only via the fine-tune-difficulty dialog.

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3) simplify where possible: as Jarno says, the install process had got a bit unmanageable. (But this is relatively minor compared to (1) and (2) ).

I don't think there are any install choices available in v30 that aren't still available in v33, but the default options, given to non-power-users who don't make use of fine-grained customization, are more streamlined and offer less chance of a problematic install. I appreciate your feedback, but it seems to be very much the minority view, so this is unlikely to be reverted.

A couple of minor points:

- it was never the case that changes as specific as the Guarded Compound staircase locking were called out explicitly in the install process. (That particular change came in v32 and was to avoid various reported glitches, but the lich in the Crooked Crane has been doing it since SCSII was in beta).

- I have always had the view that if you don't read the readme, it's your own lookout. That said, the installer's description of 'Initialise AI components' could probably be more explicit that the initialisation includes spellsystem tweaks.

I think that's harmless. No promises though.

I’m not sure I understand the question. Angel’s diagnosis of the incompatibility is correct, but it’s not really something SCS can fix.

(My own implementation of the Lanthorn quest doesn’t have this problem, but that’s a quite different Quest in any case.)

Does GiveObjectGoldGlobal not accept a global argument with a negative value?

Cool. OK, that supports my suspicion that CDIBOMBB is bugged somehow. I'll investigate. (When I get a chance...)

21 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Feedback is good, but please don’t troll. 

It wasn’t trolling, was it? ...or am I missing a joke?

I'm wondering if this is a language-dependent issue. The weirdness originates in the SCS component that dynamically generates descriptions for antimagic spells, and that component relies on search-and-replace moves that aren't always robust on language change. Unfortunately that's very hard for me to sort out, as I don't speak German. I would be interested if it can be reproduced, in a non-English language, on a clean install of SCS.

On 7/9/2020 at 9:55 AM, Nathan82 said:

No they only used melee attacks. I remember one of them had a gas attack in IWD but wasnt sure if it was carried over. Neither type of beetle had any special ability or anything, only melee attack option.

OK. Try removing the file cdibombb.spl from your override and see if that removes the crashes.

I don't really know. The price aTweaks pays for deciding to be installed after SCS and reliant on its structure is that it would need to be updated any time SCS itself updates. And unfortunately it's no longer maintained, so that's not happened. I can't allow for it on my side and I'm not willing to accept the design constraint of permanently conforming to the assumptions about SCS's structure that aTweaks makes, especially since I don't actually know what they are. Somebody would have to go through its code carefully and see just what assumptions it's making and where.

I don't know for certain. But aTweaks makes quite specific allowances for SCS's fiend-summoning structure, and that structure in turn changed quite drastically when v32 was released. So there is a realistic chance of serious bugs... but I don't know if there actually are any.

Have you ever seen a summoned beetle successfully cast its gas-cloud attack?

I see the case for this. But I don't feel confident it's unequivocally a bug or mistake, which makes me reluctant to change it. 

(I also think it's good for the occasional creature to be vulnerable to Greater Deathblow - otherwise why take it? - but I agree that the Drakes aren't the ones I'd choose in my own mod.)

Maybe I'll compromise and tweak this in SCS's version of Improved Abazigal.

14 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

No. SCS makes separate versions of the fiend-summons for enemy mages, who do not need ProEvil. Even if I add the ProEvil requirement for death knights, SCS will have no way if knowing the make the enemy-only version without that requirement. Then SCS casters will be torn apart by their own summons... which would be funny for a few seconds, but unsatisfying overall. 

I don't *think* I edit SUMMON_DEATH_KNIGHT (or the Death Knight script) on an SR install. I think I just use the baseline resource.

Hmmm.

Yes, that was the bug I had in mind. But I'm puzzled that my detector isn't picking up the issue.

Any idea when exactly the crash occurred? Did one of your characters finish a spell? Did an enemy spellcaster?

It’s in the readme.

I'm thinking of the one you posted June 29th.

I don't have any particular knowledge of Revised Battles - sorry.

On an earlier bug you reported:

Could you put the attached folder in your BGT game folder, make a copy of setup-stratagems.exe called setup-dw_387_audit.exe, and run setup-dw_387_audit.exe and install its one component? (It won't affect your install or show up in your WEIDU.log, it's just a research tool). It'll take a couple of minutes to run, probably, and when it's done there should be a file called 387_log.txt in the folder weidu_external/data/dw_387_log . Open it in a text editor and copy-paste its contents into a post.

(This is guarding against situations where some spell/item tries to use the ToBEx Set Stat opcode (318) with an old (value <387) stat, which is what caused some of the crashes I think you reported earlier. That shouldn't happen on SCS, and doesn't on a clean install, but interactions with other mods may be leading to edge cases.)

dw_387_audit.zip

On Revised Battles and Breach:

The version of Revised Battles you are using was last updated in 2008. The 'latest version' of Detectable Spells to which the Readme refers was coded by me sometime during the end of the Bush administration. Best practice for spell detection has changed very drastically since then; it's highly unlikely that a 2008-vintage AI mod will play nicely with anything modern like SCS. My advice is to drop it.

On WEAPPROF:

- Jarno is incorrect: the engine has no interest in whitespace and doesn't care that the top line is misaligned.

- The problem with WEAPPROF is much more straightforward and has nothing to do with indentation (though the misaligned top row makes it a bit difficult to spot): the proficiency slots for BG2 weapon proficiencies for most multi-class characters have been set to '1'. I think some mod in your install order must have done this intentionally. No idea which one. 

6 hours ago, polytope said:

I get an inexplicable parse error when the installation tries to compile certain bafs, specifically those referencing a LONG_BOW as the object:

PARSE ERROR at line 98 column 16-57
Near Text: )
    unknown object CLASS specifier [LONG_BOW]

[ascension/tougher/abazigal/abazdrag.baf]  ERROR at line 98 column 16-57
Near Text: )
    Parsing.Parse_error
ERROR: parsing [ascension/tougher/abazigal/abazdrag.baf]: Parsing.Parse_error
ERROR: error compiling [ascension/tougher/abazigal/abazdrag.baf]: Parsing.Parse_error
ERROR: compiling [ascension/tougher/abazigal/abazdrag.baf]!
Stopping installation because of error.

This is easily "fixed" by swapping LONG_BOW for MAGE_ALL but it still leaves me worried because firstly the engine always recognized arcane casters as falling under the general identifier LONG_BOW and secondly because there was no such parsing error the last time I installed this very same Ascension version.

It isn't about the engine exactly, it's about CLASS.IDS. Some other mod in your install order has removed the ancient LONG_BOW synonym for MAGE_ALL. If you add the string '202 LONG_BOW' to class.ids in a text editor, the script will compile.

However, Ascension shouldn't be relying on that ancient oddity. I'll fix it next time I update.

Noted, thanks. I'm unlikely to be able to get to it soon though, I'm afraid.

PRETTY_PRINT_2DA is actually cleverer than that. It lines up all the columns, but it knows to indent the third line one step. (You can actually give it a variable if you want it to indent a different line.)

I am reasonably confident that the engine has no interest in how the whitespace is arranged, but it doesn't do any harm to throw a PRETTY_PRINT_2DA in there, if only as a courtesy to people viewing modded files in Near Infinity.

You can't add columns that way. SET_2DA_ENTRY edits existing entries, it doesn't add new ones. You would need to use an APPEND_COL to add new column data.

Unfortunately, in this case I don't think it will help you. I'm fairly sure (as Jarno alludes to) that the range in rndmagic and the other BG2-style random-treasure files is hardcoded and won't be changed by editing the files. (I admit I haven't tested it, but that's what IESDP says.)

Assuming you're modding an EE game, you could try using the IWDEE random-treasure system, which is a bit more flexible.

OK, several observations:

1) Don't use the Improved Difficulty System component of BiggTweak with SCS v32 - it's obsolete. Its only function is to work around the hardcoded effects of the difficulty slider, but it's now possible to turn those off directly, and SCS already does that.

2) Why are you using Spell Revisions and SpellPack? They basically do the same thing - rearrange the spell system - and I'd have thought they're incompatible, conceptually and probably technically. (You can't really edit the spell system piecemeal - spells react to one another.) I strongly recommend using one or the other - and that being the case, I strongly recommend that the one you use is Spell Revisions, because it is currently maintained and SCS actively allows for it.

3) In any case, the change-log tells us that there is an incompatibility between the changes that SCS makes to Breach and the changes from Spell Pack and/or Spell Revisions. (It is not a bug with the SCS component itself, since I do an install test with BGT and Breach is working fine on an SCS-only install.) It's 99% likely that the incompatibility is with Spell Pack, since (a) it was installed later than Spell Revisions, and probably overwrites rather than patches spells; (b) SCS is explicitly aware of SR and allows for it, and I do SCS+SR install tests that seem ok. (Not on BGT, to be sure.) To test this, uninstall Spell Pack, reinstall SCS component 5900, and see if the problem recurs.

4) Assuming the issue is an incompatibility with Spell Pack, I'm not really interested in trying to fix it. Life is too short. It's not currently maintained; its latest version is many years old and only installs because of various third-party patches. (And compatibility with spell-system patches requires active design work mod-by-mod, it can't just be done by intelligent code.) My advice is to uninstall it. If you really want it for some reason, deactivate SCS's modifications to breach (via stratagems.ini; see the readme for details).