Miloch

The file is over 16MB and can't be handled by COPY_EXISTING; I think it works with --biff-get.

Well... that extracted all the .tis files, but seemed to output exactly the same thing as NI. A closer look shows they seem to be missing the .tis header (0x18 bytes) and just start with the actual tile data. What's up with that?

Create a cache directory, if it doesn't exist.

Huh... well I guess it might've helped if I'd fired up Torment on this machine at one point...

 

Got a little further but bombed on 1 file at least:

Copied [AR0104.TIS] to [1pst/AR0104.TIS]

BIFF may be in hard-drive CD-path [C:\Games\PST\cd2\/AR0105.BIF]

BIFF may be in hard-drive CD-path [C:\Games\PST\cd2\/AR0105.BIF]

BIFF may be in hard-drive CD-path [C:\Games\PST\cd2\/AR0105.BIF]

BIFF may be in hard-drive CD-path [C:\Games\PST\cd1\/AR0105.BIF]

BIFF may be in hard-drive CD-path [C:\Games\PST\/AR0105.BIF]

BIFF may be in hard-drive CD-path [./cache/AR0105.BIF]

BIFF may be in hard-drive CD-path [C:\Games\PST\cd2\/AR0105.cbf]

[C:\Games\PST\cd2\/AR0105.cbf] decompressed bif file 19110848 bytes

[./cache/AR0105.BIF] 19110848 bytes, 5 files, 1 tilesets

ERROR: BIFF [./cache/AR0105.BIF]: unable to extract tileset 0

Stopping installation because of error.

 

ERROR Installing [uncompress Areas], rolling back to previous state

[1pst/backup/0/UNSETSTR.0] SET_STRING uninstall info not found

Will uninstall 5 files for [1PST/SETUP-1PST.TP2] component 0.

Uninstalled 5 files for [1PST/SETUP-1PST.TP2] component 0.

ERROR: Invalid_argument("String.create")

Guess I don't need that one - maybe I can just skip it (I just used a C_E_R on all .tis files).

Eh, the one good thing about SHS's upgrade is the ability to collapse text and even images in spoiler tags, but these are cropped so small they're probably not spoiling much. Anyway, don't read if you don't like spoilers .

 

 

 

If it's a sub-area (like a cave) you don't need to patch the worldmap. You just need to patch its parent area. There's a function (and even documentation) here for that. Aurora's Shoes adds several such areas that way without ever patching the worldmap.

 

Edit: for the cave, you can just swipe one from one of the IWDs, BG2 or even PS:T, or mirror one like joshuar9476 suggested. To make it real, you'll need to add a BAM to the parent area for the cave entrance. I guess I could help with that if you can kind of point to where you want it and what you want to use for the cave.

For BG2, your best bet is asking for advice on SHS - many mods there add new WMap areas, and might even provide you with compatibility code for the Worldmap mod.

I updated SConrad's worldmap-patching function for an as-yet unpublished mod. (Possibly he pinched some code from you since there's tb# variables buried in it too.) I guess I could post it somewhere if you want to include it in WeiDU. (I'd rather *not* do the documentation for this one though, since I'm not absolutely sure how it works myself, just that it does seem to work, but I guess I could be conned into it if no one else will do it... can't be harder than the area-patching documentation, can it? .)

 

Doing a new area involves a lot more than just patching the worldmap though - you have to design the area actually, or at least pinch it from another game.

 

Not sure if xvarts would have a fortress though. This if from the 1st ed. Fiend Folio (the only reference on them I could find):

Xvarts are mediary between goblins and kobolds and will generally attack the latter. They fear humans and will only attack a human party if the xvarts are greatly in the majority... Xvarts delight in taking prisoners for torture or ransom (or both). They have been known to assist or be assisted by wererats in these endeavours. Their lair is usually in an underground cavern or deep in the heart of a forest.

Doesn't say anything about gnolls and I doubt they have any real relations with them (just happen to be in the same area). There's already one xvart village sort of in a forest, others in caves - another lair kinda seems excessive.

There's also the spanish tra stuff from Lord Psion (which may have acquired charset issues during a board update).

Yeah, it did. I had grabbed it prior to that, but then I copied it from a Linux to a Windows machine which had the same effect of botching the accented characters. I know marginally enough Spanish to correct it, but since most of these strings appear in the command window, they'll have to be converted again. Luckily, I've got a translation table for that as well:

Win: Ç ü é â ä à å ç ê ë è ï î ì Ä Å
DOS: €  ‚ ƒ „ … † ‡ ˆ ‰ Š ‹ Œ  Ž 

Win: É æ Æ ô ö ò û ù ÿ Ö Ü ¢ £ ¥ Rxƒ
DOS:  ‘ ’ “ †• – — ˜ ™ š › œ  ž Ÿ

Win: á í ó ú ñ Ñ ª ° ¿ r ¬ ½ ¼ ¡ « »
DOS:   ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª « ¬  ­ ® ¯

Despite the "code" tags, that looks better if you copy and paste it into a fixed-width font text editor.

 

I grabbed the French translation but haven't checked it yet to see if this applies to it also.

In the end, whoever codes it up will do what he wants.

If it's up to me (and I'm digging up my old code now) I would do what you want with your NPCs, with extreme reluctance and advice against multiple components per NPC. But it's not clear that's what you want, because in this post you say:

Edit: Combined SoA and ToB... why pick everything twice?

So why combine SoA and ToB but not BG1? And indeed, why pick everything twice? It's a lot of effort. But if you're sure...

By that logic, mods that add BG1 NPCs to BG2 should be lumped together with their BG1 counterparts.

You're saying that like it would be a bad thing. Makes sense to me. By the same logic, mods that add SoA NPCs to ToB should be lumped together. And indeed, this is what jcompton plans for Kelsey. Ideally, the mod detects whatever platform you've got and installs the relevant components. Plus it saves the modder time since you've only got one mod to maintain instead of two.

I acknowledge that my preference is based on the fact that I do see BG1 and BG2 as two separate games, I play them as two separate games using Tutu and BG2

In a rare fit of chaotic imp logic, Jarno makes the completely valid point that in your scenario, you would be installing the mod on two separate platforms and could customise your NPCs separately as you please...

my opinion is that all NPCs should be treated equally unless there's a valid RP reason (e.g. Khalid comes back to life in BG2, with his consciousness transferred into the body of a gnome). If support was to be added for allowing different choices for a character's BG1 and BG2 incarnations in a BGT game, I'd prefer that it be optional, so BG1 and BG2 incarnations would be modified simultaneously unless the user said otherwise. This could be done using additional components and GROUPs or by altering the existing components.

Now this might be one of those rare occasions when I'd be inclined to agree with you. The reason being the existing mod is this way from all I can tell: there are single components for "Jaheira" and "Viconia" despite being present in both BG1 and BG2. But in the case of mod-added NPCs, I guess it should be up to the modder who wants them available in L1NPCs, particularly if they're providing code (which, incidentally, I think berelinde provided for Gavin and perhaps even Haldamir some time ago, but I'd have to double-check in my copy). I do think if the modder wants separate components for BG1/BG2 versions of the NPC (this being kind of a unique case) it would expedite matters to have an option such as:

Install component: Gavin (BG2)

1) Assign proficiencies?

2) Copy from BG1 Gavin? (this is autoskipped if BG1 Gavin isn't present or hasn't been assigned L1NPCs proficiencies)

But frankly I wouldn't plan on coding that myself (if for no reason than it would complicate matters unnecessarily) but if one of you wants to do it and test it, be my guest.

 

[Edit due to berelinde's ninja-anony-stealth-edit: don't think there is a "current maintainer" in the absence of Nythrun nor would there be even if she reappeared, since last I talked to her, she didn't have a copy of her work saved locally, so it's up to y'all to figure out what you want. I'm willing to fix-up-quick what I've done and upload it (as long as it doesn't involve a lot of mind-bending coding) but would not dare to assume any sort of "maintainer" role... probably a reason most semi-sane folks are shying away from that too with 13k+ lines of code to deal with .]

The primary moder I believe is still Azazello

Eh... what? He never modded anything, as I'm sure he'd be quick to tell you if he were around (and not just perma-ghost-logged into SHS for the past several months). I think he was just the one to suggest "hey wouldn't it be cool if someone updated Blucher's Level 1 NPCs mod?" And the person who did that of course was Nythrun. But yeah, erik has been doing recent updates. I added most of the existing NPCs in this thread locally but may have done so with an earlier edit of erik's so I'll have to dig it up on whichever backup device it's on and diff it.

This is possibly the final update to this mod.

There's no such thing as "final" in modding :\.

Well, those variables can have 9 letters as the pdialog.2da is a text file from where the variables are taken, as the variable is not a file itself within the game.

Huh, they're death/scripting variables? For some reason I thought they were dialogue files, though as I've said before, I'm not a dialogue whiz. In that case then they could be 32 characters instead of 8, yes. But then I also recoded it not to use the pdialog values due to errors with it being biffed, so I'll have to double-check the .dlg or .cre names anyway (which can only be 8 characters max).

as the WeiDU already has the .are identifier which makes the game_is(x) -function flag CA, it could work well...

I coded such a check already even before I requested the GAME_IS WeiDU addition for CA, so that should work the same. But I did notice that some of the variables you provided can't possible be right. TCAESDALE and TCALEIGHA for example, are 9 characters whereas the maximum is 8 in the game engine. I suspect cutting off the last character would produce the valid names, but I'll double check in CA unless you want to save me the trouble.

Well I'll probably have to do DSotSC at least, since I'm the only one with the current Tutu sourcecode (something else I should do something about I suppose). But I think Jarno should code the CA and BH NPCs, since he suggested it .

if you've already done the work, why not just combine everybody's stuff, test it, and present it as a gift to the mod maintainer?

Well like I said, I haven't done all the work. I did most of the earlier NPCs but not the DSotSC, Bonehill or CA ones. Though it appears I did add them to code structures such as fj_join_dlg_xp. So it's mainly a matter of coding the NPC components at the end. If you're bored and want to code those, be my guest . I'm being summoned to the beach anyway, so it's not something I'm gonna get done today even if I put it next on my project list.

I added the code for most "approved" mod NPCs locally, including Gavin etc. but I don't think I got through all the CA NPCs. Think I changed the pdialog.2da check to something better also, but all that was with a previous version, so I'd have to diff and merge my changes with erik's version. Shouldn't really be that tough, but I'd have to dig around a bit.

Are you saying you have a French translation? If so, just attach it here (or if G3 doesn't let you attach things, you may have to upload it elsewhere and post the link). You could just post it in a codebox like above, but some browsers will mess up accented characters (for example I see "versión" instead of "versión" above).

Anyway, the items may be necessary for NPCs that use custom items based on their kits. So that, if the kits are changed, the item usabilities can be changed as well

This is easy enough - in fact it might already be coded to do this for all NPC items automatically (not positive though).

And dialog files for dialogs that reference the NPC by class??

This on the other hand is not. It would involve not just modding dialogue but looking up and potentially changing a bunch of string references (and strings within string references) where we don't even know the absolute textual values or offsets. The last time I tried to do that sort of coding, my brain went all mushy, so I say we just skip it .

You can use the pdialog.2da variable as a predicate for the component...

Probably cleaner to use MOD_IS_INSTALLED or FILE_EXISTS_IN_GAME but it's all the same I guess.

I have asked, and Sir BillyBob said we can make L1NPCs able to modify the CA's characters within CA.

I guess that means we have to include Fabio from Bonehill too .

Well, digging through this mess and the other related posts suggests there is either express or implied permission to enable custom kitting for Keto, Kelsey, Solaufein, Valen, Finch, Indira, Tiax, Xan, Iylos, Angelo, Gavin, Haldamir and all of the DSotSC NPCs (Bardo, Bub, Conchobhair, CúChoinneach, Ferthgil, Jet'laya, Keiria, Skeezer, Thorfinn).

 

Are there any other NPCs folks know of? The tp2 filename, component number and CRE names should suffice, unless Nythrun or someone else materialises with an item_mod or dialog/script_mod component hitherto unknown.

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

Well that's easy enough to change...

STRING_SET ~Play Baldur's Gate with the new enhancements introduced by the Baldur's Gate II version of the engine.~ ~Yada yada yada, yada yada yada.~
STRING_SET ~baldur's gate~ ~whatever~

Now if you want to change its graphical appearance, that'd probably require some GUI hackery. Maybe you could get away with overwriting a BAM or two, dunno. If you want to skip it entirely, that might require another level of (perhaps .exe) hackery. But the OP just said "change" so...

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.

This is already in Borsook's Mix-Mod too (and there's a big ranty thread here about it).

 

As for the Tutu screen, isn't that just a one-time thing? Can't remember offhand.

 

Random encounters would just be a matter of scripting, of course.

ETA should be July 13th by 5pm CST.

 

To be honest, I only declare the ones I need in any particular mod, to keep the bloat factor/download size down. (Also when I'm squashing bugs, which is frequently, the fewer lines of code I have to tear through, the better.) Though I do consult the BG1 NPC lib and other mod libs pretty frequently for reference.

Who could update Level1NPC mod with Lord Psion's Spanish translation ?

cmorgan perhaps, if he isn't too busy... erik has done a lot of updates, and I've offered to update the readme, but I can't upload stuff here.

I too look this time to time... now, if the areas could also have a listing of their original BG names, it would be just a tiny bit better.

I didn't bother with that since you can just change the Tutu FW prefix to AR for BG areas. Or if you prefer, the IESDP has a (non-graphical) list.

 

Incidentally, I'm using FW2900 (SE part of Larswood) for some fairly major stuff, though I may move it to FW4300 (NW part of N Nashkel Road). Also FW4800 (Nashkel, central part) for some minor NPC placement (for now).