DavidW

Thanks!

Actually, investigating more, it was looking bad for me mostly because I was playing in a non-maximized window (which is obviously good for modding, but not a usual play environment). If the window is maximized, or in full-screen mode, the zoom is pretty reasonable.

As for using zoom settings in cutscenes: as Bubb suggested to me, it turns out that you can do ZoomLock(FALSE) at the start, and then use StoreZoomLevel, SetZoomViewport etc. 

As far as I can tell, it's still the case (not on PST:EE, but on the other games) that whenever the engine goes into Cutscene mode, you scroll right out. Is that right, or is there a setting to disable it that I've missed?

Not sure, I'll check it out. (I'm starting to think this component is more trouble than it's worth, cool though it is!) Thanks for the report.

I don't find the poisoning sequence implausible, either way around.

(i) High-level adventurers are a pain to keep imprisoned, and even more of a pain to transport. It makes sense to let the party make it to Spellhold under their own steam and capture them as late as possible. 

(ii) The ship is a pretty good environment to organize a poisoning. (It's not the only such environment - but then, the plot wouldn't actually go differently if you were poisoned on the mainland, given that the effect of the poison is just to render the party vulnerable to a spell Jon casts, not to knock them out directly.)

As for the risk to Jon, he knows (at least something) about your destiny and is confident you'll make it. (No-one told him about tactical mods or no-reload playthroughs.) But in any case, he's got Imoen! He can hold out for the big prize, knowing he's got an insurance policy. (To anyone who thinks that Jon would give Imoen to Bodhi even if he failed to capture <CHARNAME>: would you like to buy Boareskyr Bridge for the low price of 50,000 gp?)

OK, got it. That looks like an edge case I'm not allowing for: a character who's dual-classed, has the dual-class removed, then dual-classes anyway. Will check it out.

Humm. Are you playing with AI on? If not, try turning it on and seeing if the problem goes away. If it does, turn it off again and see if it's still gone away.

That's Wheels of Prophecy, not Ascension.

I would use the cheat console to spawn Balthazar: do 'CLUAConsole:CreateCreature("balth")'. Hopefully he will reappear and the plot can continue.

5 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Who ever joins Bodhi?    decides to team up with a hot vampire chick?

 

(Not that I ever have myself, come to think of it.)

I doubt it. If two mods both set up special powers for the Shade Lord, they're going to be incompatible. Not all compatibility problems should be resolved. 'Improved Shade Lord' is a discrete component of SCS - if people want the Shade Lord to get the Shadow Magic powers, all they need to do is not install SCS Improved Shade Lord.

This is a long way outside the scope of my minimal little restoration mod, I'm afraid! (And as I say, for my own use i'm happy with the SCS cash-increase component as the resolution to the chapter 2 problem.) But if you want to try working it out, you're welcome to borrow the code in this mod - as I say, on a technical level it's not that complicated to modify the mod to achieve what you want, it's just a matter or working out a backstory and dialog that you're happy with. (Or, alternatively, if you want to write up the dialog and the like, I might be willing to implement and host it.)

(As for where Bodhi and Irenicus got the Lanthorn: Bodhi stole it from the elven temple in AR2500, using the drow attack as cover - Elhan tells you. I don't think it's a good idea to use the Lanthorn as your ch.3 Maguffin - you'd have to mess with the dialog with Elhan to allow for the player knowing what it is already... I mean, that could be cool, but it's getting a bit out of control and a fair way from the original game's story.)

2 minutes ago, Endarire said:

@DavidW
In a minimal spoilerific fashion, what does Roxanne's Lens Hunt quest do compared to yours?  As you said, they use some of the same files.

Mine is described as above. It's hardly 'mine' at all - it's restored content, with a few dialog lines to replace lines that were lost irretrievably from the original.

Roxanne's (on the basis of a quick look through the files, I haven't played it) has Elhan discover, after the Lanthorn is returned, that some lenses were lost when elves chased Bodhi through the Forest of Tethir and the Small Teeth Pass. You have to go and get them; there are a couple of new encounters in those areas. This is almost entirely of Roxanne's creation: it uses a couple of unused item files from the original game, but I think that's it.

GAM contains no area data: it stores party members, globals, and a bit more non-area-specific data. Area data lives in SAV, but that only stores the ARE files, hence only the references to the TIS and WED files, not those files themselves. (In accordance with the principle that it would be silly to put anything immutable into the savegame.)

Did you put the tis file that resulted in override too?

I think the devs regarded the need to collect gold as the reason to do quests in chapter 2; this was supposed to do the same for chapter 6 (the other period where you have free access to the map). And of course my own solution to the problem of why you don't just rush to Spellhold is SCS's increase-the-fee component.

As for moving this to chapter 3: technically it's not too difficult, especially if it's intended as an alternative to the chapter 6 lens quest rather than a supplement. You would need to replace the existing description for c6lens with appropriate text. You'd need to move the existing randomizer script from ar2401 to some other appropriate area. And you'd need to write a few lines of dialog to stich the quest into the new questgiver's dialog. (The existing sage lines would work fine, especially if the magical telescope-or-whatever is elven.) The coding of the .d files would be a little delicate because I generate some of it at install time, but nothing unmanageable.

Conceptually, I'm less convinced. Spellhold is on the same island as Brynnlaw; Brynnlaw is reachable by mundane vessels; it is at least moderately well known by commoners at Brynnlaw that Spellhold is there. I don't find it plausible that an organization as well-connected as the Shadow Thieves wouldn't know where it was already. And that's if you join up with Aran. If you join with Bodhi, she knows where Spellhold is anyway, and by that stage she's probably keen to get you there.

I'm not sure, sorry. Debugging ssl scripts is a bit of a pain even for my own mods.  It certainly looks as if what you're doing should be okay.

6 hours ago, Endarire said:

How does this interface with Roxanne's Broken Lanthorn quest?  What's the proper install order?

Having now looked at this:

- The two quests are conceptually incompatible: they tell basically-inconsistent stories about lenses being removed from the Lanthorn. (Roxanne's is basically a new quest, inspired slightly by unused game files.)

- It looks to me as if they are also technically incompatible - they edit the relevant bits of Elhan's dialog in incompatible ways. In view of the conceptual incompatibility, I'm not minded to find a fix for the technical issue.

Choose one or the other, basically. 

No idea, I’m not familiar with that quest.

2 hours ago, Caedwyr said:

This is quite helpful, as the Oversight version didn't behave nicely with any mods that modified the same CRE scripts in areas where the the lenses were hidden.  Thanks!

Also (see above) the content of the Oversight version is pretty different.

They're seven of the eight stronghold quests (I think the eighth is skipped on realism grounds, as it's almost all in another plane that Bodhi couldn't reach.)

I guess that the Shade Lord, the Unseeing Eye, and Torgal are the endgame bosses of their respective stronghold quests, and so at least moderately challenging - especially to a party who went fairly directly to Spellhold. The others are speedbumps, but I suppose the idea is that if you did the stronghold quest already then you probably killed the lens-bearer, and conversely, if you go to the area to get the lens-bearer you'll probably do the quest while you're at it.

You can get the third option by installing 'expanded' and disabling all the vanilla quests via dw_lanthorn.ini.

A few questions:

Q: What does this do?

A: A certain number of creatures (7 in the classic option, 11 in the expanded one) are potential lens-bearers. The game gives up to 3 lenses to creatures that you haven't killed yet. (If you've killed all of them, there are no lenses and you won't notice this mod at all.)

Q: Which creatures?

A: In the classic option: Torgal, Mae'Var, Mekrath (it's actually in his treasure chest, you needn't kill him), Samia (in Firkraag's lair), a troll in the Troll Mound (near the druid grove), the Shade Lord, and the Unseeing Eye. In the expanded option: also Kangaxx, Layene (the Twisted Rune mage), the Alhoon in the mind flayer sewer hideout, and Koshi (in the Guarded Compound).

Q: How is it decided which creatures have the lenses?

A: At random. (This is about my only modification from the original version, which had a preferred order.)

Q: I hate one of those quests! What can I do about it?

A: Set 'skip_[that quest]' in dw_lanthorn.ini, before installing.

Q: When do I install it in my mod order?

A: Whenever you like, I think.

Q: Do I need to start a new game?

A: Yes, definitely. (If you want to hack it into an existing game, count up manually how many lens-holders you've killed and set the global variable 'LensPlot' to that number.)

Q: Which versions of the game does it work with?

A: All my testing is on BG2EE, but it probably also works on BGT, EET and BGII-ToB.

Q: Install time?

A: About fifteen seconds (in a welcome change from SCS).

Q: Any compatibility problems?

A: It's conceptually incompatible with the 'restored Lanthorn' component of Oversight, and with Roxanne's 'broken Lanthorn' quest. Other than that, not as far as I know: it's pretty compatibility-friendly, since it just reactivates code already in the game.

Q: Wait - Oversight already restores the Lanthorn quest? Why bother with this, then?

A: The oversight version doesn't really restore the cut Lanthorn quest so much as write a new quest inspired by the cut quest. (No dialog lines are reused, the mechanics are different, up to eight lenses might be present, Elhan doesn't mention the lenses, and the actual locations are different.) There's nothing wrong with the Oversight quest, but I was interesting in restoring the original one as faithfully as possible.

Q: Is this actually a good idea? Or did Bioware remove it for a reason?

A: I don't actually know. I was more interested in the technical puzzle of restoring it than anything else, to be honest. 

(I've written a very small mod that restores the extended Rhynn Lanthorn search from the beta version of Baldur's Gate II. I'm probably eventually going to roll it into either SCS or another of my projects, so I won't create a full forum space for it yet - I'll just put details here.)

The beta version of Baldur's Gate II contained a mechanic to expand Chapter 6 (the one where you are looking for the Rhynn Lanthorn). As well as the Lanthorn itself, the thief would have stolen several lenses and hidden them in areas around the game. The player would be given clues to where the lenses were, and would have to retrieve them before the Lanthorn could be used to enter Chapter 7. The lenses were actually placed in several of the stronghold quests that the player can explore in Chapter 2 (and if the player had already done all of those quests, no lenses would be placed). The idea, presumably, was to introduce a mechanic to bind the stronghold quests into the main plot of Chapter 6, just as the need to gather gold binds them into the main plot of Chapter 2.

This expanded Rhynn Lanthorn quest was removed from Baldur's Gate II before release (at a guess, because the clues leading to the lenses were a bit too gnomic for casual players, and there wasn't time to fill in the details.) But almost all the machinery of the quest is still present in the game - the scripts that place the lenses, the lenses themselves, and even the dialog lines that give the clues to where the lenses were. That makes it possible to reconstruct almost exactly how the quest worked.

This mod simply restores the quest. There are two options. The first ('classic') is almost an exact restoration of how the original version of the quest would have gone. The second ('expanded') increases the number of locations in which lenses may be found, to include four extra side-quest regions in the original game not tied to a stronghold quest. You can also customise the installation (via the 'dw_lanthorn.ini' file in the mod folder) to deselect any possible lens location you don't want to use.

Download links

Readme

Do it at the TIS level, not the PVRZ. In NI: export TIS to PNG, edit the PNG in photoshop, re-import to TIS. 

Did turning the AI on solve the problem permanently, or did it recur when you turned it off again?

Before. (Doesn't it say so in the readme?)

Noted.