desmond_lochart

Hello,

Today I've beaten BG1:EE with SCS (a mix of Improved and Tactical settings, all tactical challenges except Improved Kobolds enabled), and I enjoyed it much better than the original. There are a couple of things that bother me a little, though:

First, Aec'Letec does not seem to be fully affected by the Improved Fiends component. I didn't see her teleporting around the battlefield, and I'm pretty certain that my difficulty for this component was set to Tactical. It was still a fun battle, but the cultist fight in the previous room posed a greater challenge. On that note, the Demon Knight wasn't teleporting around, either. Is this behavior intended?

My second piece of feedback concerns the chess battle. I had the greatest number of reloads in that place, but there were two scenarios for opponent behavior. If I entered the battle normally, all opposing pieces would instantly aggro, rush forward (within rules, but that's enough to sow chaos and despair) and try to kill my king no matter what. But if I used a potion of invisibility on my main character before the battle began (i.e. while fighting the last elemental warden), the enemies on the chessboard remained dormant, unless provoked according to usual rules (or my main character became visible again). This makes the fight significantly easier for the price of never using your king (to me, it was still a lot of fun). Do both of those scenarios work as intended?

7 hours ago, DavidW said:

If you're getting that error when trying to install that component on a clean install, I'm afraid I can't help you, because on my machine it installs fine, and ultimately I can't fix something I can't reproduce. I think these error messages mean that your OS isn't letting the mod have access to the files it needs to access, but I've no idea why that might be. Maybe try installing the game somewhere else on your HD?... I'm out of ideas, sorry.

Thank you for putting time and effort into trying to solve this issue! Your comment was actually very helpful. After fiddling with mod files for quite a while, editing the one responsible for gtimes.ids and having the installation fail at another place with a similar error, I have finally figured out the cause. Apparently, my antivirus sometimes deletes the files generated by the mod during installation process before those files have a chance to be used. However, it never gave me any warning messages, which is why it took so long to figure out the cause. At any rate, after temporarily disabling it, I was able to install the component without any issues.

Now I'm looking forward to enjoying SCS. Hopefully, AI improvements will provide a greater tactical challenge and better convey a feeling of playing with a cruel, but fair DM. On another note, the Balduran Isle might actually become fun now (I enjoyed the Durlag Tower in original, but the Isle left much to be desired). Thank you very much for creating this mod and supporting it for such a long time!

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

OK. For some reason the operating system (on your system, but not mine) isn't allowing WEIDU access to 'gtimes.ids'. I can't see why that would be, though. At the risk of sounding like every computer helpdesk ever, have you tried restarting your computer? That might break whatever lock it's got. Failing that, try deleting gtimes.ids and replacing it with a blank file. (SCS will fill in all the details it needs anyway.)

I have tried restarting the computer, tried deleting gtimes.ids and replacing it with a blank file, tried simply deleting it and tried uninstalling most of my mods, but no luck. I have even tried uninstalling the game completely and running 'setup_stratagems.exe' on a clean install (only the 'initialize AI components' part of the mod). In all cases, it gives me the same error. However, when I follow the prompts after running 'stratagems-33.5.exe' (not 'setup_stratagems.exe' directly from the game folder), i get a different one:

ERROR Installing [Initialise AI components (required for all tactical and AI com
ponents)], rolling back to previous state
Will uninstall   4 files for [STRATAGEMS/SETUP-STRATAGEMS.TP2] component 5900.
Uninstalled      4 files for [STRATAGEMS/SETUP-STRATAGEMS.TP2] component 5900.
ERROR: Sys_error("override/spell.ids: Invalid argument")

Please find the debug file attached. At this point, I'm not sure what else I can do.
SETUP-STRATAGEMS.rar

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

Still can't manage to reproduce.

Can you find the file 'stratagems.debug', zip it, and post it?

Yes, here you go. The error is on the line number 11264.SETUP-STRATAGEMS.rar

SETUP-STRATAGEMS.rar

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

Odd. I can't reproduce on a clean install with SCS only.

Just a quick sanity check: (i) are you on the latest version of BGEE? (2.5) (ii) did you make sure the game wasn't running while you installed?

If the answer to (i) and (ii) is 'yes', can you find the file override/gtimes.ids, zip it, and post it?

Thank you for the quick response! The answer to both questions was yes. Please find the archive attached.
gtimes.7z