SimDing0

I don't think that's true. Aren't stats stored as effects? You're thinking of states, which are flags on the creature. There's a theoretical limit of 255 right now, since they're stored in a byte value (possibly internally when you run the game as well as in the saved creature), and of these some proportion are hardcoded to some purpose or another, and the rest are free to use in Detectable Spells. No?

Sim: there can be a workaround by setting the gender to neither, and setting specifics to some custom value, and then patching all true sight effects to destroy that specific type as well. I thought all genders except FEMALE used male casting sounds? NEITHER is silent? The SPECIFICS solution will clash with anything which uses them in scripts (drow/elf battles spring to mind), no?

In the spirit of not making any requests, here are a few BG2 executable limitations for us all to enjoy! "I'm female and created a simulacrum, but it has a male voice." "I'm attacking Irenicus but his script isn't firing so he won't die." "I asked Aerie to cast a spell but instead she started a banter and the casting was interrupted." "I cast a spell and now I've turned green because Detectable Spells was using a stat with an unintended side-effect." "I'm clicking through the Turnabout dialogue really quickly and it doesn't make sense because when you set a variable in dialogue it doesn't immediately get updated."

It's what Tutu replaces the SoA/ToB selection screen with, which comes up every time you load the game.

The ini file records which movies you've already watched, not whether they play. Removing the intro movies is actually just a matter of, uh, removing them. If the engine can't find the file (or finds a zero-byte file), they get skipped. To find which string to change for the into screen text, use Strref On=1 in the ini, then STRING_SET it.

This was never the case. Okay, this is what Baronius will try to explain to you over at BWL, but it's not really true. The very nature of a bugfix is that it alters aspects of the original game data. The BG2 Fixpack does this, and so too does BD-WeiDU. The BG2 Fixpack resolves a greater number of issues, however, which naturally results in a greater list of changes to the game data. There's no part of its design which entails spuriously altering internal variables in a way which BD-WeiDU avoids. Baronius stating that a fixpack "alters depenencies" is nothing more than an awkward way of paraphrasing that the fixpack fixes bugs.

Wow, that's a real action? I've never even heard of it. (And I think I wrote half the action documentation.)

If you're silly with it, at least. It's not an admission that the mod breaks the game or anything like that. Dimension Door gives you the ability to skip over plot-crucial ground triggers. Don't do that.

I appreciate the sentiment and all, but I think that six pages of "and anyone who doesn't use the fixpack is a CUNT!" is starting to look a little silly. Much like modder experience, I'd rather the 'dominance' of the fixpack spoke for itself rather than having to remind people.

Well, I certainly championed the Modder Pack on the basis that it would provide a standard on which everyone could develop. Clearly, for better or for worse, this hasn't happened, and maybe on that basis it would be better placed in individual mods. I don't actually know, to be honest--does it actually break anything that's out there? I can see the argument that a modder depending on it might inadvertently produce code incompatible with the original game, but in practice does this happen? I'd have to say, I think this is more because Baldurdash didn't have the emphasis on community input and scrutiny that the Fixpack does. In retrospect, there is an awful lot wrong with Baldurdash, and while I don't think we can condemn the effort, I suspect that if it showed up now, "here's a tenuous Twisted Rune plot" would receive at least as much stick as "well, some of these alignments seem a bit shifty".

And yeh, as for reliable testing, it'd be nice, but unfortunately the fundamental problem is that testing is really really boring. We can't afford to wait for a select group of people to play through the entire game 5 times to verify it working, and the set of players who will happily step up and say "for sure, I will play through Anomen's knighthood another 4 times with a gnome cleric" intersects with more or less nothing. It's very much about the nature of changes in terms of reliability. With, say, an AI change (SCS, IA), or even a completely new quest (Dungeon Crawl, Tower of Deception), it's comparatively hard to break the game. Sure, you still need to test thoroughly, but if you're patching into complex existing material (Fixpack, QP Shadow Thieves) there's a lot more scope for stuff to go majorly wrong. Especially if you're me. So anyway, I'd tentatively say: cut us some slack. It's not that the fixpack crew are inconsiderate and "mistaking players for testers", but more simply trying to make the best of what is ultimately a fairly daunting task. Bug reports are great--why not keep helping along?

Well, the whole idea is that, based on what we see of the Blood War in WK, Tanar'ri and Baatezu are mortal enemies and their "greater purpose" is to fight each other, and as such that is their priority over slaughtering innocents (which they will also still do). I'm honestly not sure to what degree this is extrapolating, but I think there's certainly some precedent for it without looking to PnP.

DAWWWWWWWWWWWG!

Historically, I've always done "hotfixes" for mods (the QP forums is full of them if you go back far enough). The only reason I don't now is because I don't typically have IE games installed at uni. Indeed, on occasion bugs will crop up which are more sensibly addressed with a new mod version than dropping a file in the override--I think this is more true of AI and tweak mods than it is of, say, quests, where by-and-large you can backtrack to a point where nobody's computer catches fire. The key problem with the method I use (override drop) is of course that it doesn't take great pains over compatibility. However, writing a full WeiDU patch to fix every bug is going to take a very long time, and you'd almost certainly be better updating the mod itself.