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DavidW

Gibberlings
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Posts posted by DavidW

  1. Just to note: this only applies globally. That is: once you've installed *all* of your mods, you can remove the folders. You can't safely remove the folders of the mods you've installed and then install other mods: for compatibility reasons, some mods look at each others' folders. 

  2. 1 minute ago, Angel said:

     I was actually surprised to get that amulet from the yellow at all.

    FWIW, the reason you do is

    (i) there was an unused 'yellow dragon scales' item in the vanilla game, so it seemed natural to make use of it;

    (ii) I didn't like the idea that you only got a reward if you didn't spare the dragon.

    More generally, thanks for the kind words! (And I'd forgotten that Nizi doesn't drop scales.)

  3. A lot of this is personal taste and judgement, of course :my reading of chromatic dragons lets pride, and an unwillingness to believe that they are more powerful than any mere primate, figure in much more strongly as motivation; I also don't have a problem with red dragons deciding to sit back and let 'lesser' dragons do their work for them. And SCS's readme is explicit that the Abazigal component makes more changes than other components.

    There are a couple of factual issues, though:

    1) There is in-game mention of the dragons. Throne of Bhaal is pretty thin on background generally, but if you ask the bartender in Amkethran about Abazigal, you're told

    Quote

    Abazigal? I have heard that name, I am sure. Is it a person? I am unsure... there was a group of captains in here once before, and they were talking in hushed tones about an "army of dragons."

    If you talk to one of the townswomen, you can get this comment:

    Quote

    I was told that there is an army of dragons ready to launch an attack on us. They come from somewhere called Abazigal. Have you ever heard of such a place?

    And if you buy drinks at the tavern you can get this rumor (this is less conclusive, to be sure):

    Quote

    A terrifying sight was reported by several villagers over a week ago... a flight of actual dragons was reported to pass overhead, heading northward. A dark omen, it is said.

    Those vanilla-game references to an "army of dragons" (which the actual enclave doesn't really provide) were the starting point for that component - I didn't invent the idea.

    2) Not all dragons in the vanilla game drop scales - fewer than half of them do. Firkraag, Irenicus's dragon, the shadow dragon, and Abazigal all do. But Fll'yessitat doesn't; Saladrex doesn't; the green dragon in Watcher's Keep doesn't; Draconis doesn't; as you say, Adalon doesn't. (And the Hell dragon doesn't, but arguably that's more a figment or demonic presence, so perhaps it doesn't count.) 

  4. 11 hours ago, Guest BWP contributor said:

    I'm a huge fan of your work, but for Abazigal lair I'm actually not that convinced. 

    It feels like a sore thumb, given that you force the player to go get some rope just to face the dragons. While I think that the encounter with the yellow dragon is masterfully crafted, the rope retrieval is simply boring and the consequence of the retrieval feels out of place.

    I mean, I realize that searching for the rope is your way to force the player to face the dragons, but:
    1) you make Abazigal lair a little more boring\longer (not by much)
    2) You make the player face these dragons, but they not only have weird dialogues, but act against logic (I just killed two and there is a third, wait a forth). If only at least they dropped scales or artifacts that matched their power. None of that.

    I appreciate the feedback (genuinely).

    Let me say a little about my design thoughts for that component (albeit it was ten years or so ago!) The starting point is that Abazigal's lair is supposed to host 'an army of dragons'. So I wanted to up the dragon representation. And dragons are fiddly: they need large areas to fight in, and the entrance to the lair is cool. So I wanted an excuse to use that area for one of the new fights. In terms of actual fight design (this being a tactical mod, ultimately), I was running with two concepts: one was a yellow dragon (as yet unused, but in the game files) who was also an archmage; one was a fight with a significant group of dragons. Since you like Anadramatis anyway, I'll concentrate on the latter.

    Tactically, I'm reasonably happy with it: a sequential fight against dragons hasn't been tried (Ascension Abazigal is a simultaneous fight) and feedback has been good. The reason for not having all the dragons fight simultaneously is practical - they would hurt each other with their breath weapons, and it's too difficult to script so they don't breathe on each other. But I don't find the in-world account implausible- a stronger dragon  might well force a weaker dragon to fight in its stead, in the hope of not having to injure itself in the first place. 

    I'd be interested in hearing more about why you think the dialogs are 'weird'. I've had occasional comments on a similar line before, but no details. I did an editing pass over those dialogs before releasing v32 and tweaked them (they were perhaps a little playful). Mostly speaking, dropping powerful items goes against SCS design principles (it contributes to the arms race where you get cooler stuff from fighting more powerful foes) but I can see a case for green dragon scales - I'll consider it.

    The rope acquisition is definitely the weakest part of the component - it's fairly transparently an excuse to send the party back to Amkethran, and it's a bit implausible that a party as powerful as ToB-<CHARNAME> is stymied by something so mundane. The only thing I'd say in my defense is that it's thematically in keeping with the vanilla lair. ("We can't hold our breath long enough! … oh, we've got some magic to help with that... but we're getting lost in the tunnels! If only we had a rope! … Oh, this monk gave some to us). It's pretty ridiculous, one of the weaker parts of ToB. There's a case for doing some slightly more systematic level redesign... but now we're well out of scope for SCS.

  5. 1 hour ago, subtledoctor said:

    ... but it could not work with enemy casters without MAJOR changes. 

    Assuming you intend a refresh rate slow enough that you don't get a spell back during a battle, it doesn't really matter. The NPCs could go on using the original spells, while the player uses the clones.

    You'd have to pay a lot of attention to opcode 206/318/324 issues, but I guess you're used to that issue already.

  6. It depends on the difficulty setting and your playstyle. If you're on INSANE, that's probably right.

    It is a very long time since I played the chess battle myself, but I don't recall needing to metagame or use the zillions-of-fireball tricks. But perhaps something has shifted that makes it harder; I'll have a look. (And I don't play on INSANE myself - more like HARDCORE).

  7. I've just glanced through the code of NPC Strongholds (a mod I'm not familiar with). My tentative guess is that it isn't modifying very much that SCS modifies, and you ought to be able to install them in either order without bugs. (But it's only a guess - I haven't done an install check, much less any playtesting).

    In general, the reason to install SCS last is that it can react to other mods' content, usually by giving smart AI to them. That applies here too - a few creatures in NPC strongholds use vanilla-game scripts, which SCS notices and uses as a cue to upgrade the AI of those creatures. So I'd lean towards saying 'install SCS last'. But it is not a big deal at all.

  8. 16 hours ago, Hoverdawg said:

    Is the Ascension-Wheels of Prophecy compability fixed now, or should I refrain from using WoP for now?

    I'm sad to say this, but I wouldn't recommend WoP right now. There are a lot of serious bugs being reported (there have been since EE, really). It needs some sustained love; it'll get it when I have a chance.

  9. I could do an ini override if there's demand. But yes, seriously broken!

    There are other mods that make HLAs innate and don't restrict to 1/day. SCS actually pays attention to that setting, so if you install that mod then enemy liches (etc) will also get to do it. Turnabout is fair play...

    (Fun SCS testing/debugging story: I once had someone complain that SCS liches were just permanently casting timestop and never letting them get an action in. It turns out that player had installed a mod where spells you cast returned to your memorized spell list after a few rounds. Liches were benefitting from this too! I suggested that I should probably let the lich pause for a round after, say, the thirtieth timestop to let the damage from its fifty-odd Horrid Wiltings and Dragon Breaths come in, before going around again if there were any survivors...)

  10. Human-readability of the file, basically. If you compile at install time, you can tweak or debug just by editing the text file; if you precompile, editing the script requires you to open it in. Ear Infinity or similar. 

    Also, if you want to include new text strings, compiling at install time is pretty much required.

     

  11. 15 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

    Look, I just work here, okay? :p

    My entire knowledge of modding the Infinity Engine games is based on seeing how the mods I'm interested in tweaking do things and learning from there. IR and SR are the mods I've messed around with the most, and they're both pretty low-tech weidu-wise for the most part, so that's kind of where I'm at (...and most likely where I will stay, since coding is neither my forte, what I enjoy, or my career). SR uses pre-compiled .bcs files for its summonables, so that's what I was editing, haha.

    Fair enough!

    But if you want the low-tech way to implement my suggestion:

    - open the script in near infinity

    - copy-paste it into a textfile, and name it myscript.baf, and put it in mymod/myscripts

    - include COMPILE "mymod/myscripts/myscript.baf" in your weidu

     

    I in turn find Git completely incomprehensible, so I have no idea whether that's easier or harder than persuading git to handle baf files correctly.

  12. 12 minutes ago, Guest fan said:

    How did you realize that? I saw a few people around here that seems to be using still BGT

    It's guesswork, of course, but I read a lot of bug reports over the last couple of weeks, so it's educated guesswork. Most importantly, SCS v32 had a fairly critical bug involving CTD in fights with high-level spellcasters, but very few people reported it over the eight months or so that it was in the wild.

    (I'll admit that EE is also much more pleasant to mod, so that skews my preferences.)

  13. Your code is probably not working because you are removing the lines as you go along. That is: first your code finds row 167, and removes it. Then it checks row 168 - but the old row 168 is now at row 167, because it got bumped one earlier. So some rows are being missed.

    That said, I strongly recommend not removing those entries, as they're there for a reason: they are used by spells in Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition. (And so Beamdog guarantees that if they - or a modder - wants to bring a spell that uses IWD icons over to BG2, the space is there for it and all that has to be done is add the descriptive string).

    I'm not sure what mod you are using* but it ought to be reading statdesc.2da and adding new icons in where there's space, not just assuming that it can start at 166. 

    * and I will look silly if it's one of mine

    EDIT: there is a function in SCS, add_to_statdesc, that does this automatically. It's in stratagems/sfo/general/lib_general.tpa, and anyone is welcome to borrow it. 

  14. 12 hours ago, Caedwyr said:
    1. There are two components in SCS dealing with spell sequencers.  One gives them to all mages and the other one makes them innate abilities.  Will both components install, or does it result in a mish-mash?

     

    The first isn't a component, it's just part of the default spell-system changes. It won't do anything if you install innate sequencers.

  15. 2 hours ago, Drakensang said:

    In 32.6 you disabled the Improved Abazigal's Lair component on non-EE installs due to crashes related to the maps. Any idea if you'll ever re-enable it at some point?

    Yes, but to be honest I'm unsure when - it's fairly clear my player base is mostly EE so this is low-priority. If I do re-enable it, it'll almost certainly not be with the area map changes in the new version, just the caves from the old version.

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