I played it (vanilla) about two years ago up to when your camp gets attacked. It bugged out there persistently, so I didn't get to see the big siege or ending. Maybe some other time.
But my main gripe with it is the absurd amount of railroading. The IWDs are also linear, but they don't take your agency away in dialogs. Or at least not so blatantly.
It was kind of odd finding a piece of gear for each (new?) kit.
Why do you keep moving the goal post?
And no, modding has nothing to do with the authors economic circumstance or fundraising skill. I guess the exception are paid mods, but that's out of scope here.
Voicing work, obviously. Modders do pay voice actors for that now and then. The fact that the product is available free of charge doesn't change anything in that regard.
The fact remains that this is taking work away from voice actors (original or not), so damage is being done regardless of any jurisdiction's opinion or actual enforcement. It might be a negligible revenue stream, but it is one.
This differed between the games, so we have several mechanisms. The damage opcode can toggle this, spells can set an extended state, but both are to prevent waking up. But also the sleep/unconsciousness opcode can toggle whether to wake up or not. So what I'm saying is that it's completely data based right now, well in the realm of mods to tweak.
Pretty sure that's hardcoded. In GemRB we added a 2da to map them and their special behaviour, but I'm not sure that'd be enough, the items themselves might have restrictions on them.
I very much doubt you can use two songs at once, which would also explain the spam (keeps switching between one and the other). At least without making merged songs. However, since it's only applied once per round, the fact that it keeps switching is mostly not noticeable. You could try the message suppression opcode, but I'm not sure that works for modals as well.
Creatures have several script slots that are executed in a defined order. Override takes maximum precedence, so I'd use that only if necessary — eg. other slots do not fit.
In bgs areas can override script assignment, so you can have one generic CRE file and then the area embeds let's say 5 copies. But you can then specify different names and scripts for them. However, I think in pst that isn't available, but you have the simpler option of editing area INI files (eg. ar0208.ini), where the spawn points are defined. Look up the format on IESDP, there's a lot of useful info there.
Nice idea! For monsters to use spells, you have to teach it to them, it's not enough that they know them. This means that you have enhance their AI script with decision-making for when to cast what spell, instead of attacking, moving, etc. Cranium rats are one example that already does that, though it's more complicated, since they count.
I don't know what you mean by cache there, but if you did install by vcpkg, maybe specify the path directly. Our appveyor build for example adds:
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:/tools/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET="x64-windows" -A x64
Effects — there could be some modifying variables via 0x109 https://gibberlings3.github.io/iesdp/opcodes/bgee.htm#op265
Oh, you can make the process faster by not converting all dlg and bcs files. I had to do the same for 10pp and first check for a rough match in the non-decompiled file:
https://github.com/lynxlynxlynx/gemrb-mods/blob/bf997587928686f8cc3b5f5b57e77ebebf152060/10pp/setup-10pp.tp2#L68
While bad, since they could've just shipped it like all the other libraries, you just have to install that specific old OpenSSL and it then runs. Not trivial, but doable.
Graion: cool, I'm happy on behalf of others. But a minor Android API bump is likely a trivial patch and rebuild away, not something substantial. Could make modding harder though, if the previous versions were still on the API that allowed external storage.
Tooling is still regularly updated and perhaps you saw that recently a weidu GUI was released.
Beamdog got acquired and downsized, so the chances of further updates are even slimmer.
You can't, you have to build it yourself.
I don't know of any build bot services that provide images with Windows RT nor would it be a sensible use of ours and theirs resources for something so rarely used.