ktchong

Because it is a bug, and I was just being direct and to the point. Frankly it does not matter to me whether they fix or not. I am determined to finally finish the original Baldur's Gate anthology FOR ONCE, and then I will NOT ever replay the games. I have way too many games on backlog to go back and replay anything, (all the way back to Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, KoToR 2, Mass Effect trilogy, The Witcher trilogy (prolly should wait for the Witcher 1 remake,) Fallout 3 and 4, Batman Arkham series, etc., etc., and of course, Baldur's Gate 3.) An only feasible plan is to play through all of them ONCE and ONLY ONCE. I have already used EE Keeper to fix the problem for myself, (i.e., removed the active "Kivan and Tazok" journal entry, replaced/swapped the modded "Kivan's bandit hunt" entry with the original entry from BioWare/Beamdog.) So, for me, the problem is already fixed. But the mod should fix and update for people who will play the game in the future after me. If not, that is fine as well. I personally certainly will not benefit from this bug fix because I won't be going back, replay it, and get to install and use the updated version. No time for to ever replay a long game.

After using Charm on Carsa and unleashed (and killed) Kahrk, my journal was updated with the final/last entry for "Madwoman of the Firewine Bridge" in the "Finished Quests" section: However, the previous two entries for the "Madwoman of the Firewine Bridge" were NOT deleted/removed upon quest completion: So, when I opened and read the journal, and clicked on/expanded/opened the "Madwoman of the Firewine Bridge" entry in the "Finished Quests" section, the previous entries also opened/popped/showed up in the "Current Quests" section, (which caused a minor visual glitch in the journal.) I used EE Keeper to check journal entries. All the other quests and entries removed their older/previous entries upon quest completions, and therefore did not cause the same visual glitch in the journal. "The Madwoman of Firewine Bridge" did not remove the older entries when closing the quest.

Just read and checked the readme for BG1 Unfinished Business... "Kivan and Tazok" is a component (no. 6) that belongs to BG1UB. I do not have a user account with Pocket Plane Group, but I saw that you are also a mod over there. So you tell them to fix it.

Upon closer examination of my journal: ... was added to the journal as a completed quest, but it was NOT added under "Kivan an Tazok". Instead, it was incorrectly added under a newly-created "Kivan's bandit hunt" as a completed quest (with the horrible capitalization,) thereby leaving the "Kivan and Tazok" quest active and open, (which should have been closed.)

Continued from the last post... Anyway, I'm gonna use EE Keeper to edit the save file and close the quest. I'll just use the original journal entry from BioWare/Beamdog, (i.e., "Kivan and Tazok: Kivan was unable to avenge his wife. During the fight, Tazok fled and turned the camp on us.") Hopefully the mod is not going to mess around with this quest and journal anymore and then cause more problems later. I think Kivan's timer was correctly turned off.

In BGEE Chapter 3: Infiltrated the Bandit Camp by approaching Raiken in Peldvale and saying my party wanted to join the bandits. Raiken took my party to the Bandit Camp. azok showed up, which caused Kivan got the party into a fight with the Tazok and the bandits. Then, this entry popped up atop the screen: However, this entry was NOT logged into the journal. The journal was NOT update with this entry. Moreover, it broke the "Kivan and Tazok" quest line in the journal as well. When I completed Chapter 3, the "Kivan and Tazok" quest in the journal did NOT update or finish as it was supposed to do. Talking to Officer Vai in Jovial Juggler in Chapter 4 did NOT help at all. The quest remained open in my journal. My guess is: the pop-up above was supposed to be the final entry in the "Kivan and Tazok" quest, but it did not register into the journal.

Okay, let's leave copyright and laws out of this discussion. Let's not even mention that there have been portrait mods there were removed or taken down due to copyright complaints. Here is the one reason alone for why using AI is far superior than collecting "real" arts from the Internet: The AI-generated portraits are simply of higher and more consistent quality than those that were collected from the Internet. The AI artworks have higher and consistent quality, higher resolutions, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, AI portraits can have a consistent uniform style to match the one used in the games. You can NOT get that kind of quality and consistency from cobbling together a bunch of random artworks made by tens if not hundreds of different artists. My game is heavily modded, but I opted NOT to install any of the portrait mods after testing them. Why? I certainly do NOT really care about copyrights in my own private game. The reason why I chose NOT to use a portrait mod is because the quality of the portraits SUCK. The qualities an styles of the portraits were all over the places. Different portraits had different qualities, different resolutions, different styles. Many of the portraits did NOT even fit well with the rest of the game NOR remotely match the portrait style in the game. The styles were all over the places, and they break immersion. I am just gonna be frank here: the two most popular portrait mods, Portraits Portraits Everywhere and the Picture Standard, they both SUCKS. The mods themselves work fine, but it was the portraits that suck because of the differed qualities, varied resolutions, AND different styles, which just killed those mods for me. I do NOT care about if an art is "real", fake, AI, or whatever. I care about QUALITY and CONSISTENCY of the portrait in my game. I want all the portraits in my game to have a CONSISTENT, UNIFORM style. And your so-called "real" arts can NOT give me the QUALITY and CONSISTENCY I want from a portrait mods. On the other hand, AI arts CAN produce hundreds of portraits that all have CONSISTENT and HIGH quality, resolution and style. Good luck getting all that from "real" artists for a portrait mod.

Also, Viconia, being a dark elf, should NOT be waiting inside an inn, (like the Friendly Arm Inn,) where she would be unwelcome. She should be waiting and hiding OUTSIDE Inn with Baeloth. Seriously, the "Send BG1 NPC to INN" component in the Tweak Anthology was just not well designed or thought out.

Not gonna do it unless you are able to get a dozen people to share the loads, with everyone agreeing to use AI to produce portraits with very similar parameters and styles, so all the portraits look consistent. There are like hundreds if not thousands of portraits in Portraits Portraits Everywhere. BTW, I looked at your portraits... they still look very inconsistent. Using AI, it only takes a short time to create a group of images from one set of descriptions and parameters. However, most of my time went into researching and coming up with the descriptions, because I wanted to match the portraits to their avatars and BG/DnD/Forgotten Realm lore. You can have the portraits, but I have not been able to update the zip files here because the sizes were too big. You do not even have to give credits to me because I certainly did not create them.

PRACTICAL and PRAGMATIC considerations: 1. AI-generated arts are NOT copyrighted — because each AI-generated art/portrait is somewhat unique and there is no way to traces their sources. I have used Google Image Search and TinyEye to search for the "sources" of my portraits that were created by AI. Google Image Search and TinyEye were NOT able to find anything even close to those AI portraits. Those "artists" or sources of the AI portraits were untraceable. The portraits were unique. In fact, when I used AI to create portraits using the same exact descriptions and the same exact parameters, the AI never created the same art twice. The portraits and results were always different. If I did not immediately save an AI-created portrait when it was created, then I would never be able to use any AI to recreate the exact same image again (even when I kept reusing the exact same descriptions and parameters.) That means: there is no way to trace the sources or copyrights of portraits created by AI. Portrait mods that include only AI-created arts would NEVER have to deal with copyright issues — or be ordered to take down due to copyright complaints. I understand that AI does not actually create. AI merely alters, combines and mixes pre-existing arts into new ones, but the alternation, combination and mixing are so drastic that the AI-created arts are essentially new ones that are often very different from their original components. Even if, let say new copyright laws pass, and AI-generated arts become copyrighted... you will still NOT be able to trace the sources of AI arts, because no two AI-generated arts are completely the same. They are always different and somewhat unique. How do you even enforce copyrights on AI arts if you cannot even trace their sources or origins? Given that copyright has been the BIGGEST problem with portrait mods that caused them to be taken down, I would say using AI arts to replace all the copyrighted portraits (which more or less violated copyright laws) is a GOOD THING. Portrait mods will NOT ever have to deal with copyright complaints and takedown orders again. 2. Even if you can somehow reach the artists of the portrait and persuade them to let you use their arts, the portrait mods include hundreds if not thousands of images. You are NOT going to reach all of the artists whose images are included in the mods, and certainly NOT all of them would agree to let you use their arts for free. 3. Also, different artists have very different styles. My biggest problems with portraits mods: the portraits came from so many different artists, so many different sources, that they are very inconsistent. Their styles and qualities differ drastically. So, a portrait mod includes so many its portraits that look so different and have drastically different styles. You are NOT going to get one or two artists to produce the hundreds of portraits for a mod, (to keep a consistent style for all portraits.) However, you can use AI to create hundreds and even thousands of portraits that all have the same style. Just look at the AI portraits that I have created that used the same parameters for their style, (i.e., "fantasy, realistic oil-painting, etc.") They all came out very similar, as if they were produced by the same artist. By the way, I actually used three different AI generators, but they all produced images that follow very similar style... as if they were produced by the same artist You are NOT gonna get that result with real artists, AND you are NOT gonna get the same one artist to produce hundreds of portraits for you to use in a mod. Sure, you can complain about "let's use real artists," "let's get their permission," "let's get them proper credit," etc. Let's be realistic here: you know that is NOT practical NOR pragmatic. Let's not suggest to people to do something that is NOT gonna happen NOR produce any result.

I tried to use AI — my favorite is AI Perchance Character Generator but there are better ones out there — to create my own replacement portraits for "Portrait Portrait Everywhere", but it was too much work for one person. I tried to match the portraits to their onscreen avatars (appearance and color schemes) as well as any relevant DnD lore, (e.g., elves do not have facial hair; Phlydia is Halruaan = Arab/Middle Eastern/Persian; werewolves in human forms have glowing red eyes, a gnoll that looks like a proper gnoll and a half-ogre that looks a proper half-ogre, etc.) All these portraits are "original" (i.e., not copyrighted) as they were created by AI that interpreted my detailed descriptions of what I wanted. The few exceptions are what have already existed online. For example, there are lots of Drizzt portaits available, so there was no need for me to generate my own. I grabbed Volo's portrait from a painting that appears in the DnD movie "Honor Among Thieves". So those were not generated by AI. I am not using any portrait mods in my game because, frankly, the quality of portraits in those mods are inconsistent and horrid. The two popular portrait mods just grabbed a bunch of different existing portraits (many of which were copyrighted) from the Internet and packaged them. Of course, those portrait mods were made before the emergence of AI. Now we can use AI to generate and create images that are NOT copyrighted. Anyway, here are what I had created with AI before I gave up:

What exactly does it do? Is it related to any plot or quest line?

Do you know what would be nice? Let say if Khalid, Jaheira, Dynaheir and Minsc are all dismissed to the Friendly Arm Inn. So they all gather in the far upper-left corner of the inn. When you approach them, you can see little text crawling and popping up over their heads: they are chitchatting and having conversations among themselves. Let's add that.

Baeloth would always join regardless of your reputation. Whenever he joins, your reputation is reduces by 2 points. After Baeloth reduces your reputation to 18, you can get Dorn or Viconia to join. Each of them further reduces your reputation by 2 points. Viconia also checks your reputation when you dismiss her from your party. If you dismiss Viconia when your reputation is 18 or higher, (i.e., your reputation increases by 2 points to 20 when she leaves,) she will check your reputation IMMEDIATELY AFTER she leaves your party. She leaves, she checks your reputation, and if your reputation is 20, she will get upset and leave PERMANENTLY. She will disappear from the game for good, and you will NOT be able to find or recruit her again. So, if you want to Viconia in the game, do NOT dismiss her when your reputation is 18 or higher. Dismiss her when your reputation will not reach 20 right after she leaves.

The NPC are spread out in the Friendly Arm and Nashkel Inn, but not in Jovial Juggler. Also, in the Friendly Arm: Khalid and Jaheira should return to their original spot in a corner where they were initially waiting for Gorion's Ward and first introduced. I imagine that is their comfy favorite spot in the inn. Instead, the mod moves them to near the entrance.

I've just checked again. This is the component I installed: ~CDTWEAKS/SETUP-CDTWEAKS.TP2~ #0 #1075 // Send BioWare NPCs to an Inn [DavidW/Zed Nocear]: v16 I believe the other mod that includes a similar component is BG1 NPC Project, but I did not install the one from BG1 NPC Project. WeiDU.log

Some thoughts should be put into the placement of the NPC in inns. Don't just like dump everyone together at one spot. Maybe all the good NPC on one side, the evil NPC on another side, and the neutral NPC in the back. Or maybe all the "shady" NPC (like thieves, the necromancer and the Red Wizard) are hiding in the back. Or all the "honorable" NPC (like the Paladin and Priestess) stay close to Bjornin and Officer Vai while the shady ones stay away from them. NPC that do not get along should not stay so close together in the inns, i.e., Khalid and Jaheira vs. Xan and Montaron should not be so close together. Think about it: wouldn't they have gotten into a fight in the inn if they were so close to each others? Neera is afraid of Red Wizards, so I imagine she would want to stay away from Edwin.

All the NPC are parked on the same one side in Jovial Juggler in Beregost. It is getting difficult to click on a specific NPC from the crowd and navigate a path to reach him/her. The NPC really should be spread out a bit. Some should be parked on the other side, (i.e., the left aisle,) instead of everyone overcrowding on the right side. And I have not collected everyone yet.

There should be a third option. Option three: Kivan uses spears. He has 2 pips in spears. However, this option does NOT replace the two halberds in the game with spears, i.e., in the Dryad Falls cave and Cloakwood Mines level 3(?). i.e., in the case of another NPC has pips in halberds. So Kivan uses spears, and the other NPC can use the halberd from Dryad Falls or Cloakwood Mines. (The one in Cloakwood Mines level 3 is already a Spear +1, no?)

Skeletons should NOT be able to call for help because they cannot speak (as per DnD lore.) There are some exceptions like the floating skull Morte in Planescape: Torment, but randomly spawned skeletons are just regular skeletons.

IMO, the level-1 wizard spell Friend, in addition to raising Charisma, should be able to also target on some (but not all) NPC that have turned from green to red, (due to expired charm or failed pickpocket.) Otherwise, it is a fairly useless spell. i.e., if the spell is targeted on self, it increases Charisma. If it is targeted on an NPC that has turned from green to red, it turns the NPC back to green, (the NPC has a chance to save.) If it is targeted on a green NPC, it does nothing. Of course, the Friend spell would not work on NPC that are scripted to turn hostile, (which is gonna be a nightmare to implement because have to go through all the NPC to see which ones are supposed to turn hostile and which ones are not.)

I remember there was a mod component that turned off hostile reaction after charm, but I forgot which mod. However, I did NOT install that component. The reason: some NPC, when they were charmed, would say something like: "I know I am under a charm right now, but as soon as the charm wears off, I am gonna attack you." An example: Black Lily under a charm would say to you: "As a good friend, I must warn you: Magic use isn't appreciated in the guild, especially if it's used against guild members. I'll likely have to kill you once this parlor sorcery wears off." So it would not make sense to turn off the hostility for those NPC. The only purpose of Charm spells seems to be for combat. The spells turn some enemies to your side during battles. Unfortunately, they were not designed to offer any role-playing purpose outside combat. There are a few exceptions: the charm ability of Algernon's Cloak or Nymph Cloak does NOT turn its target hostile when its effect wears off.

You should not. Non-joinable NPC would turn hostile when the charm inevitably wore off. Which was why most players did not think of using charm on Carsa as a solution, i.e., my party did not go around charming people left and right = picking fights with random NPC. IMO, a number of companion (preferably a magic user like Jaheira or Xan but not Dynaheir who is an Invoker and knows nothing about charms) should have interjected when Carsa refused to turn over the jar. The companion should have offered an advice that Carsa seemed to be under some kind of powerful charm or dark magic, and that they should try to use magic to clear her mind. Otherwise, most players would not have thought of casting Charm on the non-hostile Carsa because we assumed it would turn her hostile later when the charm wore off. And, if the player resorted to taking the jar from Carsa by force, (which would kill Carsa,) then the last journal entry for "Madwoman of the Firewine Bridge" should write something like, "Unfortunately, my attempt to help the poor woman killed her... if only there was another way to save her life, perhaps with magic," or something along those lines. Just to give a hint to players that there is another way.

Something very minor in "Dynaheir's Missing Journal": Drizzt gave the Torn Parchment to my party. I read the parchment and use "copy note" to copy it into my journal. The heading/subject of the journal note just says "Page". Anyway, I open a save file and read the journal entry in EE Keeper. I think the correct heading/subject for that journal entry is "Torn Parchment Page", which is commented inside the square bracket. A minor fix. I just edited it in EE keeper, but you should fix it in your next update.

Anyway, the dialog loop is fairly close to game-breaking as Carsa kept initiating the dialog loop and interrupting my game in Gullykin. I assume Carsa was supposed to have a new dialog or prompt when she was in the Gullykin temple, but the wrong state/trigger/variable was set when she was sent from Firewine Bridge to Gullykin. What is the variable? Is there a way to manually set the variable? Another problem with Carsa: If the "Madwoman of Firewine Bridge" quest was resolved in a different way, (i.e., forcibly taking the jar from her instead of casting Charm on her,) the journal entries for that quest should be closed. If the quest was resolved forcibly by taking the jar from Carsa, then her closing/last journal entry should mention something like, "... maybe there could have been a better way to help Carsa," or something like that to let players know that there is another less obvious way to resolve that encounter.