Sam.

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.

5 hours ago, polytope said:

A relatively low level spell shouldn't counteract a HLA, but, you know, a 20th level fighter could fail their save against Hold Person from a 3rd level cleric.

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:

17 hours ago, Sam. said:

23 hours ago, morpheus562 said:

don't understand the idea of an elite, olympic level athlete who perfected their agility and ability to move to all of a sudden lose it if a Breach is cast. Characters, in my opinion, should not lose their skill nor their physical training because of a Breach.

This.

4 hours ago, morpheus562 said:

don't understand the idea of an elite, olympic level athlete who perfected their agility and ability to move to all of a sudden lose it if a Breach is cast. Characters, in my opinion, should not lose their skill nor their physical training because of a Breach.

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. 

1 hour ago, ahungry said:

Some sort of grep for all ".+\.itm" matches?  (assuming scripts reference with the .itm tag)?

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

On 9/9/2022 at 6:10 AM, argent77 said:

[BG2EE] One of the Frost Salamanders in Abazigal's Hideout (AR6005) is on impassable terrain

The Frost Salamander closest to the dungeon exit portal is placed on impassable terrain. As a result the creature cannot move and is therefore an easy target for the party.

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.

5 hours ago, Guest Morgoth said:

Sometimes, even with 2.6, there are lines between the sprites of the monsters. Can something be done for that ?

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.

52 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I feel like if you backstab a beholder it should pop like a balloon and go “wheeeeee!” all around the dungeon. 

+1

On 7/3/2022 at 9:19 AM, Guest jastey_at_holidays said:

Yes, we are still discussing whether we'll call this user group "Little Troll Club", "Look Who's Posting", or "Noober's Friends". [...]

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?

On 6/1/2022 at 7:01 PM, markzaku said:

The Oxford comma is probably the most well-known example of this. If one style guide supports using the Oxford comma and another doesn't, that doesn't mean one guide is "right" and the other is "wrong";

Just saying...

7 hours ago, jmerry said:

That change was intentional and discussed during the 2.6 beta.

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

32 minutes ago, Parys said:

Do you have plan to remade inventory icons from bg 1&2 enhanced editions/1pp.

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

1 hour ago, Andrea C. said:

Would the BAM converted to PNG still have a green background? A PNG picture should be able to have a proper transparent background, and I don’t believe AI scalers can accept BAM files as input.

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.

59 minutes ago, Andrea C. said:

Interesting. Might be worth trying one icon just to see how it turns out. 

Please do.  I'm very interested in the result.

51 minutes ago, Andrea C. said:

If I understand correctly, AI scaling would simply upscale the icon, say, 4X then you’d downsize it to fit your purpose (in this case, 125% of the original size). There shouldn’t be a need to handle anti-aliasing separately at all.

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.

6 hours ago, Andrea C. said:

How about using AI scaling for the icons, rather than just resizing them? The latter is bound to make them overly pixelated but AI scaling should make them look spiffy.

The only problem is that when I last looked into it, I could not find a way to feed the icons to a scaler in batch. It had to be done one by one, which would have been vexing.

@Leiluwhat did you use to upscale game areas? Does it allow for batch processing of multiple items at the same time?

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

On 5/3/2022 at 3:35 AM, argent77 said:

That one has already been restored by the 1pp mod (ishld17.bam).

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.

On 5/16/2022 at 1:36 PM, lefreut said:

I don't know if it's the right place to post this, but the BG2EE Conjure Lesser Fire Elemental scroll icon (scrl6x) colors seems off compared to the same icon in BGEE/SoD or to the other Conjure scrolls.

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.

2 hours ago, TyrionBean said:

Hi there!

I’m currently using the Tweaks mod and I have the option 2 installed for proficiencies (BG Proficiencies with Styles, I think it’s called). Basically, Long sword, Short sword, Blunt, Spiked, etc…

I’m wondering how do I edit my 3 pips in blunt to change it to spiked? I tried with NI in effects but it wasn’t reflected in the game. I *could* change the two hands proficiency, but was unable to change from blunt to spiked. When I change my spiked proficiency to blunt (and i also tried others like shortbow just to test), nothing showed up in my character. I mean it was as if the three pips in any category was erased aside from my dual hands proficiency.

So I’m just wondering where do I find the thing which can change proficiencies to from, say, blunt to spiked using NI?

Thanks in advance for any info!

In the CHR->CRE file itself, starting from offset 0x006e.

5 hours ago, Luke said:

Psionic / Monster / Supernatural / Other (f.i. cutscene) abilities instead should ignore / bypass all checks.

I'm uncertain in what context you mean this, but at face value I find it to be troubling.  There are items and spells in the game that specifically state that they protect from psionic attacks, the gaze of umber hulks, the gaze of basilisks, etc.  Just because an effect comes from a creature itself and not a cast spell or divine prayer doesn't necessarily mean it should pierce through all magical protections.  Having protection from level drain (whether from an item, spell, innate ability, etc.) should protect you from having your levels drained, regardless of whether the attack came in the form of a creature's bite, an enemy spell, or an enchanted mechanism like a trap or the Machine of Lum the Mad.  If you have magical immunity to hold and paralysis, you shouldn't be affected by that ability of carrion crawlers just because the effect came from a creature and not a spell.  Further, at a minimum I would argue that creatures with innate magic resistance (think Viconia for being Drow) should have an innate resistance to magical effects, not just magical spells.  I can see where people may argue magic resistance artificially boosted by an arcane spell would be more suited to resisting arcane magic, but I don't necessarily agree and I don't think that would be reasonably possible in the engine anyway.