Lurker

Last(?) conversation with Aaron: Aaron: "Hello, <charname>." 1: "I'm afraid we have to talk about Marina, Aaron. Marina was a ghost. We had to destroy her." 2: "We just wanted to see how you fare." [Choosing this just closes the dialog, leaving option 1 available.] Aaron [responding to 2]: "Destroyed? Oh no... my poor Marina. (sobs)" [Continue] Aaron [continued]: "I only hope she did not have to suffer for too long." [End Dialogue] When next talking to Aaron: Aaron: "Hello, <charname>." [End Dialogue] The journal entry for "A failed picnic" doesn't change after this. I had (and still have) three entries up to this point (newest to oldest, abbreviated): A Ghost in the Cloudpeaks Aaron gave us the solution. [...] A Ghost in the Cloudpeaks? Some farmers report to have seen [...] Mrs. Brunnstein in Nashkel misses her Son I agreed to look for Aaron [...]

Will do later; also need to check how far back I've saved games available. In the meanwhile, need to get David Warner's voice out of my head when thinking about BG+modding.

Well, the quest already seems very complex as it is, especially when considering cross-mod compatibility and so on. From my current charname's point of view, proving Brage's innocence is of no concern, obviously. Especially considering that Brage has no one left who'd care... (But I really hate unresolved quests in my journal... *sad face*) But providing another, more tragic resolution would really make sense, for a more nuanced player. Like: lawful stupid / low wisdom charname killing Brage "for justice" OR low int charname doesn't solve the riddle and has to fight him returning Brage's dead body (does it matter if garrison (no more hanging required) or temple (why not raise him, since body isn't chunked), or is it just player preference?) later getting the letter from the bandit camp, causing regret, confronting Borda, clearing Brage's name (or even paying for his resurrection) Laryssa should care if still alive Hmm, which brings me to the point, that my evil charname could still be confronted by Laryssa (still alive) after all of this, and mock her out of spite or also just kill her... Perhaps it might help if you'd draw a quest path, just for better visualization; makes me wonder how Brage even deserves all of this effort.

I was pleasantly surprised when the Family Treasure Quest more or less auto-resolved by passing by the area again, after keeping the necklace. That was one instance where I'd already given up on the quest to provide an evil path. If that's on you, I'd like to express my gratitude.

I didn't address you at all in those last two paragraphs. Those are meant in a more generalized way, based purely on gut feeling, and eased by use of a winking smiley. That was at least the intended way that I was trying to express myself... *sigh* Now I don't know if you are a cute pouter, or an angry pouter, but since I didn't intend to be confrontational, I'd like to explicitly compliment you for addressing the issue which I expressed in my generalized statement (providing an evil path). I wouldn't make the effort to report bugs or even minor issues if I wasn't interested in improving the quality of a mod. And I sometimes like (or at least try) to express myself in a way that's supposed to be entertaining, but perhaps I'm overestimating my grasp on the English language to get this right. Sorry. *sad face* Please consider perhaps adjusting your way how you want to interpret a bug report? Like "If in doubt, think of it in the most positive way." While modders (disclaimer: generalized statement ) do provide a service for players, and without a doubt invest more time and work while creating mods compared to players "just consuming them", please don't underestimate the time and effort it takes for players like me to playtest them (identifying which mod I'm currently dealing with; trying out different ways to address the problem; not knowing how to do that in the first place because I don't have a script that explains what and when things should happen etc.). From a players point of view, all those things are disrupting the gameplay experience, and can sum up to even drain the will to even continue playing on in the worst case. When I got back into BG early this year, I wanted to play the game; I'll better not think about all of the time I spent in setting up the game, identifying bugs and incompatibilities, signing up here, trying to provide useful feedback... I hope you get the picture. (tl;dr) We're all friends here, together in the same boat. When I'm back at my gaming machine, I'll try to give you a bit more feedback.

Yes, that is what it looks like if I returned the dead body to the temple. There's a different journal entry for returning the body to "the garrison", which really means Oublek. Then the quest stalls; Oublek has an reply option "About Brage...", with no further content, after also handing him over the letter. Nalin just has his default priest dialog, and shows no interest in any of the swords. EDIT: If it's of any relevance, I had killed Borda and so acquired both the letter and original sword before the encounter with Brage.

@jastey A question and perhaps small bug report for "A Feast for the Gnolls". Same setup/environment/other circumstances like in my recent bgqe bug report. I have killed the ghost at the waterfall in Dryad Falls, because 3000 XP + keeping the ring was too good to be good. When I report back to Aaron and tell him I had to kill his dead ex (again), he's like "Oh my.", and that's it. The quest doesn't resolve, Aaron just keeps greeting back when talked to again. If I instead hand over the ring to the ghost, the quest resolves, the ghost dissolves. I kind of get the impression that if modders don't like to play evil, that path just doesn't get enough attention. (...and have to admit, this early in the story, evil usually just feels mean. But that's also the issue with the base game(s), and also other RPGs in general.)

@jastey I think I've run into an issue with the component "Brage's Sword". I'm currently not on my gaming computer, so this is all from local memory (the one between the ears), and therefore perhaps a bit imprecise. Environment: EET, current bgqe, installed after bg1npc (don't know how that happened...), no "Brage's Redemption". Charname is CE, with strong tendencies for murder hobo style. I completed the quest the nice way at first, just for the experience (my own, not charname's XP), up to what I guess is the optimal ending for Brage (take back your sword and use it, you sissy... erm, sorry, murder hobo just called... - oh, and Borda is obviously dead, anyway; should have taken a clue from what happened to multiple dozens of Xvarts). But when I now return to Nashkel with Brage's (dead) body, the quest "Brage's guilt" or whatever it's called, cannot be resolved. Laryssa was allowed to stay alive (think of dessert), I answered Brage's riddle, and then let him experience the answer first hand. When I return to Oublek, he first takes Borda's letter, then Brage's body, then I get a journal entry that I need to find Brage for questioning or some such. If I drop off the body at Nalin's, Oublek wants proof from Nalin that the sword is cursed, but cursed Nalin doesn't care. The journal entry for the original Brage quest gets resolved and closed, the new one rests in limbo. I even console-teleported to the bandit camp (while not even having completed the Naskel mine quest), to get Borda's letter, which makes no difference. I didn't try the subtle evil approach of handing over the wrong sword, because subtlety is so much not the way. If this report somehow might give cause to trust my sanity, to my defense, I spent way too much time with Xzar in one hell of a party. 'Tis might have been disturbing to my demeanor.

Beregost always gave me the vibe of more of a small, rural town. With an unreasonable amount of inns and taverns, for its (single map) size. Strange enough, the thought of it also housing a (small) thieves guild didn't bother me, but the thought of a "City Watch" somehow is just too much...

@CamDawg @DavidW I'd like to recommend updating the mod's landing page and the linked readme to disclose the compatibility issues with Ascension. While the landing page doesn't mention Ascension as of now, the readme even recommends to have Ascension installed. This should prevent further and unnecessary user frustration, which in turn prevents complaints, which in turn prevents pissed-off modders.

Dew it!

This topic can make one lose one's drivers license.

I'd be interested in your WeiDU.log, dear guest, or at least like to know if your installation include(s|d) the Transitions mod?

@subtledoctor From a quick web search it looks like zsh doesn't like bashisms, sorry. I use them for some string formatting operations, to minimize external program calls (the parser script already runs quite sluggish as it is...). The parser script can read an existing WeiDU.log, and outputs lines that the installer script can then source from a file, and in turn feed to weinstall - basically modname + a list of components per line. The installer script also has a debug option (more like a dry run, really), which just echoes all commands to stdout. I've provided some examples in this topic's first post. It's all pretty basic, but get's the job done. Mods still need to be downloaded and moved to the game directory manually, beforehand. mickabouille's "modda" (linked in first post) can also manage the downloads and more, but is binary-only (source code is available, just to clarify). As long as a mod neither has whitespace in its name no weird character encoding in paths and filenames doesn't need manual input doesn't throw warnings (which can be ignored via option) and also follows best practices regarding directory structure (there's a "workaround" section in the installer script which should make this more clear) an installation should complete without any further handholding. I'd say with the skills you've / need regarding IE modding, you'll get along just fine.

@suy I'm not sure how to reply to this. I have left the Windows cosmos since around 2006, and never looked back. Also, as of now, have never used EEex or mod components that rely on it. Doing a whole setup under Wine isn't different from Windows, I guess - but it's definitely slower, and very much so. The game itself runs fine, and my scripts at least make (adapted) reinstalls very fast and comfortable on Linux (with native weidu) - well, at least from my point of view / habitus. Although I've to admit that I'd hoped that more people would find this usefull. @subtledoctor I guess this should be working on Macs, at least without too much hassle, if the external progs that are called by the shell script are available and use similar parameters. The bashisms might be an issue. The native file system on Macs (HFS+? / don't know about A(P)FS) is case insensitive + case preserving from what I've read in the past, so no need to increase sloppiness like on Linux.

Finally got to try out XFS, out of curiosity. Filesystem created with "-n version=ci", same SSD, but without loop-around, using "--reflink" (copy on write, cow), same payload (but this time including the interactive components, because of patched-out-interactiveness). real 24m1,528s user 19m47,363s sys 3m49,642s And it also results in a working installation. Not much difference regarding performance, but this also includes the cow overhead, and misses the overall savings in time, space and convenience from having a cow setup. Bye bye loop setup.

The "(non-cumulative)" part of your example above confused me (well, still does) when I was trying to understand how that mod from Skills & Abilities works, because the individual effects do stack; else the component wouldn't make much sense anyway. I guess that "(non-cumulative)" in context of OpCodes can be somewhat counter-intuitive for the layman. I'd expect a static attribution in a non-cumulative way would be rather explicit and simple, like 18 -> +1; 19 -> +3; 20 -> +4 and so on. This I can relate, somehow... You're welcome. (A shame that I was ignorant of DeepL until today yesterday; that might have given better hints compared to Google Translate. And the UI is much better.)

@jmerry Thanks for the explanation. @Alywena I don't know if you noticed, but I've attached the modified description.tra to my first/original posting in this topic. While I still like the idea of this mod very much, and its handling of Skills & Abilities caused me to look into the translation for a bit, the item descriptions, when using the appropriate components of Skills & Abilities, can become very unwieldy. Long story short, I don't like to use both together. Perhaps you could implement an optional component or ini tweak to address this? So that not every 2H weapon has a line for every individual strength bonus, and the same regarding every heavy armor and the appropriate proficiency. I'm also wondering if or how the bits and pieces behind AutoDescription could be used for debugging and/or (semi-)automated testing...

That's the reason I spent last night with vim and Google translate as an advisor. The strings that I changed I mostly picked from the *items-diff.html. And as long as we can trust your mod to correctly interpret item files, it's a great way to finally get reliable item descriptions, or to identify errors without even running the game. Btw, I sometimes noticed what seems like off-by-one errors when comparing the before and after of item descriptions. A repeating pattern is "15% chance [to something]", which often becomes "16 % chance [to something]"; off-by-one, and with an unaesthetic whitespace. Obviously, I don't know if the item is wrong, or the generated description.

@Alywena I've started to put some effort into the English translation. Neither English nor French are my native language, but Google translate is a thing, and since some of the previous text already seems a bit heavy-handed, the results shouldn't be completely terrible. I'm not active on Github, and trying to generate a patch in unified diff format borks the character encoding, so I'd attach a gzip compressed version of the complete description.tra (based on the current release) here, if that's okay. The side-by-side comparison in auto-generated html is really cool. I'm using mods that heavily tweak proficiencies and abilities, so item descriptions can become quite verbose.

I was able to finish this game. If I remember correctly, it's just the third time that I've completed ToB. I had to use the console to emulate the Pocket Plane ability right until just before the final fight, when finally the normal dialog option was working again. The Jaheira romance went on completely mute (some might consider this an improvement?), but the music kicked in. I also dropped Imoen at some point, since she desperately tried to initialize dialogue and stuttered when near my PC, which also caused her modal action to turn off.

@subtledoctor Although it's a bit late on my part, thank you. I'm finalizing a new setup, where this hotfix fixes a lot.

Thanks. I was already aware of that topic (apart from the currently not accessible SHS link). Maybe this is a misunderstanding? When you mentioned "Transitions", I was thinking you meant the so named mod? But that's not mentioned in the topic you linked; Draax is just referring to the transition from SoA to ToB in EET? Since the original topic is rather old, I was somewhat sceptical if such a gamebreaking bug in EET wouldn't be widely known or even fixed by now.

To clarify, I only added EDIT2 as information. The choice was intentional. Reasoning was, perhaps having chosen a less popular option might have had unexpected side effects. Which might also include playing ToB in general. Do you have any pointers regarding Transitions and the PPA bug?

Hi. I'm on EET, recently started the ToB part. I got the Pocket Plane ability (PPA for short) after the first challenge, and later (after several reloads) noticed that the PPA was missing. After killing Gromnir, Melissan didn't appear, so I consoled her in - her dialogue was normal, then. If I use C:Eval('ActionOverride(Player1,AddSpecialAbility("SPIN649"))') to re-add the PPA, activating it only shows the animation, but does nothing. So I use the console to teleport to AR4500, where I then can exit to the area outside of Saradush just as usual. Since the workarounds are working so far, not totally game breaking, but I'd like to understand what's going on. Web and forum search were inconclusive, but helped to gather my party and venture forth. So far. (EDIT: WeiDU.log removed due to space constraints. Version of "Transitions" I had installed: v2.4) /* (tl;dr) part starts here */ Some more information on this particular game and setup; don't know if relevant. I continued the same save on slightly different mod setups (please only start throwing stones at me after ensuring that there are no women here today), mostly to change tweaks. Things like mismatching strings on objects in already explored areas or items are expected and no biggie. The Jaheira romance needed some consoling to progress at various stages, also the De'Arnise keep stronghold. Usually, I just had to manually spawn a missing NPCs, like with Melissan. I also used EEKeeper to fiddle with NPCs and changed classes and kits from time to time (poor Valygar had several identity crises). The biggest content change I'd say was the removal of Wheels of Prophecy (buggy with Ascension), but that happened before I started the ToB part of the game. The mod setup is stable since beating Irenicus. I then did the TotLM section (no gameplay bugs), the Watcher's Keep, then transitioned to ToB. Since I can't pin down the PPA issue, I'm starting this topic in the General Mod Discussion. Please move this topic to anywhere more appropriate, if necessary. Thanks for reading. EDIT/ADD - EET related: I didn't care for Rasaad in the BG2 part, and didn't have him join my party and therefore also didn't do his quest in BG2. Is it intentional that the fate spirit treats him like dead? EDIT2: I chose the dialogue option after reviving Sarevok with a fraction of my PCs soul that causes him to leave permanently.