Sam.

I knew your were series, but somehow I didn't fully believe you until you did it lol. Well played, sir, well played.

This went so long without a comment I just figured everyone silently passed on it. For the record, the animation shadows on the wyvern use the normal pure black in palette slot 1 (counting from zero) which the engine renders as semi-transparent (probably ~50%). When rendered over a white/light background, it looks grey. The 70% vs 80% is referring to a scaling factor on the height of the shadows.

The difference is the save. With Hold Person, you get a save which means the greater the disparity between the levels of the low level caster and high level target, the less likely the target is to be affected. The mechanic is fair. By contrast, Breach (as one example) bypasses MR and gives no save. That's fine for affecting abilities/spells at a similar or lower level than itself, but the mechanic becomes unfair if it works equally against the highest leveled abilities and spells that a mortal or demigod can obtain. Doing so invalidates the level disparity, which seems broken to me. Keep in mind that my view that HLAs shouldn't be trivially counteracted by comparatively low level spells isn't the primary topic at hand, nor was it my primary argument for why Breach specifically shouldn't work on Hardiness. This was: This.

This. Separately (and I recognize this part isn't overly fixpack material), I've always been a bit skeptical of HIGH LEVEL abilities being dispelled/removed by comparatively low level spells. HLAs in general seem to represent the pinnacle abilities and skills (whether physical, magical, or divine) achievable by (demi)human(oids). These shouldn't be trivially overcome by mid-level spells or opponents with a fraction of the experience required to use these HLAs.

It doesn't. You could try searching for TakePartyItem, tho.

For whatever reason I was under the impression that the first X dialog.tlk entries between BGEE/SoD and BG2EE were "theoretically" supposed to be the same (in other words the BG2EE dialog.txt started with the BGEE dialog.txt, and then added its new entries from there). A quick test of using WeiDU to traify the DLG files and diffing the two shows this is absolutely not the case. Is my original assumption completely wrong, or is my method flawed?

@Jazira Personally I like the idea of BGEE/SoD vs BG2EE overlapping texts being unified, but I also don't consider myself an authority on what the "correct" wording is. I could probably provide technical details like a list of which StrRefs are binarily different, but I'm not sure where that gets us. If there are as many differences as you suggest there are (and I don't doubt there are), I struggle to envision a method of presenting the differences between A and B in such a way as to be easily digested by the masses so as to form a consensus. Moreover, in many cases I doubt the "best" wording is either A or B, but some combination of the two. Sure if "technical" descriptions differ but the underlying ITM files are the same there may be one correct answer, but this surely won't be the case for many of the discrepancies. I'm willing to help, but will need suggestions on how to do so.

You are amazing, thank you!

Since http://baldursgatemods.com is currently (perhaps indefinitely) down, do any fellow pack-rats have a copy of BAMWorkshop v0.0.0.2a? For reference, it was downloadable here. Some time before that, the download link was http://www.teambg.org/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=downfile&id=37. I could swear I had a copy backed up somewhere on an external HD, but I can't find it. @CoM_Solaufein if you're still around I bet you have it somewhere. Thanks, Sam.

W_PackMule

I don't suppose there is a way to test for such cases programmatically? I ran through a quick mental exercise and figured it would be more or less straightforward to cross-reference ARE based CREs against the search map, but things quickly became non-trivial if you include other blocking regions, script and DLG based summons, etc. Maybe there is a way to leverage already existing architecture (such as NI's ARE Viewer) to minimize the additional effort required for such an endeavor?

Not having read through the debug log, it sounds to me like an antivirus program may be interfering with NI's ability to access/edit files in your Documents folder, including the savegames.

This should already be addressed and fixed by [Bug] Multi-part creature animations show visible lines Let me know if I've missed any.

Can the spawns be enabled in such a way that they are tied to the game difficulty, thus getting the best of both worlds? Gameplay at normal difficulty modes remains as intended / verified by QA, but the underlying error gets corrected and is exposed to maybe Insane and HoF difficulty modes.

+1

This should be a thing, and my vote is "Noober's Friends". Moreover, is there a way for a forum member to wholly and completely block another user's content from being seen? I have found the "ignore user" option in the forum software to be largely inadequate. Perhaps through a browser extension such as uBlock Origin or the like?

Just saying...

Do you mind providing a link to that discussion? I'm interested in the reasoning behind that decision.

All yes plus oBG2, with the caveat that I make no promises on time-frame.

Transparent pixels in an PNG still have a color. They would either be transparent green, or default to transparent black. I use ImageMagick which for most resizing operators use anti-aliasing. My solution is to make the background transparent black, resize it, and then threshold the transparency: any pixel with transparency below a specified threshold become the background (green) color, and any pixel with transparency above the threshold becomes fully opaque. The best threshold varies from file to file, and the results aren't perfect. IFF the AI scaler supports transparency, you might could do something similar. There are other techniques you could employ, but they become increasingly complex. Also keep in mind that part of the magic of how the IA scaler produces such good results is by injecting more colors than were in the original image. For a BAM, you'll have to axe them back down to a total of just 256. Please do. I'm very interested in the result.

Unless you can disable anti-aliasing, the colors of the icon will blend with the background color (green) to detrimental effect, i.e. your new icon will have a halo of non-transparent green pixels around it.

Handling anti-aliasing with the background color may be non-trivial. How does the AI scaler handle transparency?

Thanks! I hadn't considered 1pp being an intermediate source between the originals and the corrupted EEs, but I should have. I'll factor this into my process. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best place for it. I'll keep it it mind. I've finished processing the BAMs from oBG1 (TotSC). Attached is a thrown together test mod that lets you compare the various options. The first component has three options: 1) the EEs use the large icon with no shadow for the "small icon", 2) the EEs use the original small icon for the "small icon", 3) the EEs use the original small icon resized at 200% for the "small icon". Of these, I personally prefer #2. If anyone wants to see #3 at some other scaling factor (like 150%), that can be easily done. The second component creates items using the aforementioned icons, and adds them to a custom bag of holding. CLUA in the item "psitmbag" to easily test them in-game. Whatever the community consensus is based on these is how I'll proceed going forward. The shadow offsets I have used for these BAMs are the most frequently used offsets and size I computed for the oBG1 item icons. I can provide more details upon request. TestNewItemIcons.rar Edit: If you find anything I've ducked up, please let me know!

I'm not against many of these, but a common counterargument I've seen come up over the years is that the party's reputation shouldn't be penalized because a Neutral's AI script had them randomly walk into an area of effect spell like Cloudkill. Thematically, that would be on them, not you.