Rhaella

On 1/27/2020 at 5:33 AM, Psionica said:

As far as crossmod, when u get around to adding it to her, was u considering adding some between her and Fade?

You know, I don't think I've ever written crossmod with Fade for any character. I suppose I could at some point, now that I think Lava is maintaining her.

11 hours ago, Isewein said:

That's great to hear! Does that mean Kulyok herself is still at it, behind the scenes? That would certainly make me feel far less confident about sharing my ideas.

I'm not actually sure! It's possible to get a hold of her to run banters by her, but beyond that I couldn't say. 

13 hours ago, jastey said:

The Ajantis BGII mod does not change (only add to) the original encounter including additional reply options to Garren's dialogue, but even those lead back to the original dialogue states so none are skipped and it sets the original variable (Global("DomainPaladinBattle","GLOBAL",2)).

Good to know! I haven't tested the interjection myself, so it's entirely possible that it's broken on my end.

On 12/4/2019 at 7:02 AM, Isewein said:

Oh, I realise I never replied to this. The reaction to the Windspeed illusions indeed never fired - maybe a problem with the Ajantis mod? And the language question makes much more sense then. Despite my unfamiliarity wit the setting, I suppose it should have been obvious to me on second thought that Elven language isn't shared across the planes, but I do think a little conversation on that linguistic difference could make it more clear.

I'll write up some ideas on Xan crossmod during my next playthrough. I think I've played with him often enough to be able to capture his voice. Seeing as Kulyok has retired, do you think she'd theoretically be fine with you adding it to Evandra?

I actually added some Xan crossmod in the most recent version, though if you have additional ideas, you're welcome to share them! 

On 7/11/2019 at 2:02 AM, Vlan said:

Kivan, Coran and maybe Minyae from the Beaurin Legacy might be worth mentioning.

Coran as an elf, with his usual ladykiller banter, and maybe some talks about Evandras former "home"

Kivan as an elf, about Evandras home, and a quick mention of Deheriana

Minyae on the search for power (tome) getting some wise suggestions from Evandra

Something like that...

Yeah, those are definitely all good options, except that I'm not sure if Domi is still around at all. I think she has an open crossmod policy, though.

On 7/11/2019 at 3:22 AM, Lava said:

Feed is super simple. You post the news (with a proper prefix, like G3: Evandra v2.2 Released) and just write info on what is the mod about and what is new in this version and then links to forum, download and website. The pattern is there. And ten the system does the magic, posting copies of the news at SHS and every other website that use the code of that specific feed.

If you'll decide that you want to write crossmod with any of my NPCs, just let me know

Absolutely! Though right now I don't seem capable of even writing messages here without serious delays, so it'd be best to wait at least a couple of weeks.

On 7/6/2019 at 3:15 AM, Lava said:

Yay! You should let others know through the feed or something It's so great to see more and more from you, Rhaella

Oh, I am around. Just... not very around, haha. Now I can try to focus on getting a new project finished before 2024.

I'm not sure how the feed works, though.

On 7/6/2019 at 7:25 AM, Vlan said:

for the Crossmod banter

Of course! I'd have liked to write more of it, but I didn't want to sit on what I did have for another six months.

Actually, if you or anyone else wants crossmod with a specific character, let me know.

Heads up that a new version has been uploaded which should correct the problem with some of the epilogues.

Crossmod has also been added for Adrian, Isra, and Xan.

The problem is that you're setting a LOCALS variable in your kick-out dialogue, and checking for a GLOBAL variable in the rejoining one.

On 5/25/2019 at 11:36 AM, Isewein said:

I finished a little BG2-only playthrough with Evandra last month to try out the romance (I usually play female Charnames in my longer runs). Loved the slow progression and generally low-key character of it. It feels very fitting for Elven courtship. Couldn't get enough of her interjections; both her anecdotes from Krynn and astute observations of Faerun were really interesting to read. I agree that as limited as they currently are, they are maybe making her appear a bit on the superficial side. I wish there had been more opportunities to explore those more deeply in PID, but I realise all this exposition must be rather tedious to write. Especially Suldanesselar, rushed as that portion of the game may be, could have used some more interjections qualifying her initial dislike for Elhan. I had only the vaguest idea of Dragonlance before this mod raised my curiosity, but now I almost feel like I should read those novels. So I'd say you needn't worry about it being too niche a character concept.

I did promise you a longer response when I got back! I'm not sure when I'd get around to doing a substantial update here, since I've got multiple other projects I'm working on, and I would want to translate the whole thing first anyway, but I think anything more in the way of exposition would have to take the form of PID. I'm open to suggestions on that front, but don't hold your breath on it getting done anytime soon.

On 5/25/2019 at 11:36 AM, Isewein said:

It would have been nice had she been able to detect the illusion in the Windspear Hills, or at least hint at it, considering how it's her specialty and all. Another minor nitpick is that I don't really like how she sometimes "translates" Elven expressions to an Elven Charname. I realise it's hard to write around it, but it breaks the Fourth Wall too easily. I would prefer if she either just used those words where their meaning is apparent in context, or if there was a lovetalk acknowledging and discussing the differences between Faerunian and Krynn Elven dialects. (Heavens, that makes me sound incredibly geeky.)

Quick question here: did she not respond at all to the illusion in the Windspear Hills, or are you just saying you'd have preferred her to realize that something was up? Because unless the interjections are broken, she's irritated and intrigued about not being able to detect those illusions. (I think they're dragon illusions anyway, and Adalon is way out of her league too, so not picking up on it makes sense as well.)

Regarding the elven language issue, that word is specific to the Dragonlance elven languages, so a PC wouldn't know it. (I think it only happens once? I don't remember using the language in any other context.) I thought I had made that explicit, but looking back, I guess it's a bit unclear if you're not familiar with the setting, so I will fix that. Eventually.

On 5/25/2019 at 11:36 AM, Isewein said:

I fail to understand the criticism levelled against the voice acting above - I thought it was absolutely phenomenal. Of course the technical quality won't be on a professional level, but the delivery absolutely is!  It's really great that you included more than the usual soundset as well. Some voiced interjections really made Evandra come to life. The one before the final fight against Irenicus was nothing short of epic. In general, Evandra sounds sufficiently distinct from Isra that I wasn't quite sure initially whether you recorded it yourself again. Do you have acting experience or just play a lot of P&P? Honestly, I can only say it with Xzar's words - your voice is ambrosia.

Hahaha, thank you. No, I don't have much in the way of acting experience, but I'm a bit of a mimic so tried to use the pseudo-accent I'd picked up in London with Isra. Evandra is closer to my actual voice, which made it easier to voice her. (Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to voice a third, since I don't have another accent sitting around, haha.)

On 5/25/2019 at 11:36 AM, Isewein said:

If you feel inspired to work on this again in the future, I would absolutely love to see the Spelljammer Drow quest expanded a bit more. I think it's great when NPC mods tie into lose ends of the original game, and you show how well you are able to do that with the Jysstevs in the Isra mod and the Solamnic Knights here, but as it is the Spelljammer questt felt a bit bare-bones. Why was Philomena kidnapped in the first place? How did she manage to escape and hide at the gnomes', who fear the Drow so much? Shouldn't Evandra be more shocked to find a compatriot in such an unlikely place, and one she happens to have encountered before at that? How on earth does my Charname even know what a Spelljammer is - I don't think that's common knowledge even in Candlekeep. I loved how you made use of the Ust Natha map though - it's my favourite in the game, and mods which extend the stay there are far too few. I also thought the character development the encounter lead to for Evandra was really well done.

Yeah, this I will probably do if and when I expand more fully. I'd originally implemented the quest, but it was on the farfetched side so I removed it. I put it back in after Jemapa's comments, since I thought the character development was worth a bit of suspension of disbelief, but yeah. I will need to see if it cannot be refined a bit more.

On 5/25/2019 at 11:36 AM, Isewein said:

That aside, I cannot but reiterate that Evandra is in dire need of crossmod with Xan. They are so compatible in character that I could see them actually becoming friends. I'm sure you don't need any inspiration for that, but if you do, I did make some notes here and there (what can I say, it's Xan).  Interaction with Xulaye in the Underdark or Irenicus from Longer Road could be very interesting as well, although I realise those mods seem less popular these days.

I know nothing about the Longer Road, but Xulaye is definitely a possibility. And would be very fun. And of course Xan.

Psionica: No, there's currently no crossmod, though I need to get around to working on that once I get home.

Isewein: I'm going to wait till I have a keyboard to respond to you in more depth (Thursday, though possibly Wednesday if I'm not horrifically jetlagged), but yeah, I agree that Xan crossmod is obligatory. That's why I haven't released what little crossmod I have managed to write yet.  You're welcome to send me your notes, if you'd like.

53 minutes ago, Vlan said:

Nice. Keep up the good work!

Adrian truly is one of the best BG2 companion mods out there.

Haha, he was a lot easier to write banters for, at the very least! You can get a lot of mileage out of a character who indiscriminately hates everyone. 

Not at the moment. I've actually written some, but I was hoping to get crossmod done for other mods as well before publishing it. I'll need to put some real effort into getting that done once I get home in June.

Yeah, right now she doesn't, since like you said, there's no committed romance yet, and honestly, she can't fault anyone else for bad taste. It's a very appropriate place for a comment, though, so I'll need to consider it for the next update (whenever that ends up happening).

Thank you for your comments!

To answer your questions about NPC interactions, none of them are disabled during the romance, so you should have theoretically been able to see them all, if the engine was cooperating. As for Neera commenting on the red robes... I think Neera is clever enough to know that they don't always mean Thay, but there's another NPC who isn't. And yeah, you want Nalia for a discussion about the differences between magic in the two worlds. 

I will need to consider more EE specific comment for the Red Wizards. She's an isolationist, but does find Thay pretty interesting. Or at least she does when it's just Edwin around. With Neera's whole quest line, she may be more troubled by Thay.

Yeah, it looks like there's a wrong variable there somewhere. I'm out of the country until June with no PC, but I'll take a look when I get back. Thank you!

20 hours ago, f0calizer said:

Thanks, Rhaella. Your suggestion worked! I fought Bodhi again, resurrected Evandra at the Statue of Amaunator, then saved & reloaded. I spoke to Evandra & got her dialogue "By Lunitari, never in my life have I had such strange dreams" & she rejoined the party. Looks like the romance is back on track.

*phew* I thought I'd failed a Test of High Sorcery or wandered into the Shoikan Grove or something equally dire.

I'm really enjoying this mod, BTW. It's very well crafted, & I read the Dragonlance Chronicles+Legends series as a kid, so this is an added delight.

Oof, sorry! You didn't need to go all the way back through the Bodhi fight again, unless you didn't have a later save. But as long as it's working again, that's all the matters.

I'm glad you're enjoying it! I wasn't sure how much of an audience something this niche would have, since I don't think Dragonlance is all that popular anymore, but I was always a fan and it was something I really wanted to see in the game. (Though I'm not sure if it's a tribute or a critique, haha.)

On 3/16/2019 at 6:35 AM, f0calizer said:

Possible bug:

I'm romancing Evandra and after I return to Athkatla from Spellhold/Underdark, Bodhi is supposed to kidnap Evandra when I go to the Graveyard because she's my PC's lover, correct? 

When that happens, Evandra's equipment drops to the ground, she's removed from the party, but her character remains standing still, and I can't talk to her. If I CTRL-Q Evandra into my party she has no more sounds/dialogue.

When I go down to Bodhi's lair Evandra has been changed into a vampire, and I kill her as per normal. When I pick up Evandra's body and resurrect her at the Statue of Amaunator, her character reappears but she won't talk to me. Again, CTRL-Q-ing Evandra into my party after her resurrection also means she has no more sounds/dialogue.

Please advise? Thanks! 

Thank you! Have you tried to save the game after summoning her at the Statue of Amaunator, and then reloading? I didn't realize that this was an actual bug and not some strange quirk, because I hadn't noticed her not disappearing at the Graveyard and reloading in the temple always made the problem go away. There is a missing script, though.

I'll update the mod with a fix, but I don't think you need to do more than reload after summoning her to solve the problem on your end.

25 minutes ago, rossbach451 said:

OK, it looks like the issue is with all Evandra/NPC interactions, as it locked up after she tried a conversation with Edwin.  Not sure what to do, and not sure what you need to see to diagnose a cure. 

Is it crashing to the desktop or is it just the dialog that gets cut off? I suspect the problem here has something to do with your installation, given the issues you had installing in the first place. Did you ever try deleting BG2EE and reinstalling it completely? You'll almost certainly need to start a new game if you do that, but I think whatever is going on here is bigger than the mod itself.

2 hours ago, rossbach451 said:

Question: I have a dialogue which is crashing my game. It is the one with Evandra talking to Viconia about not believing the Underdark existed, but now having seen it, yadda yadda yadda.  I get there, and I crash. Is there a way to EE Keeper past this before it hits? What would the variable be? I have looked through the variables, nothing jumps out as obvious. Thanks for any help you can throw my way!

 

That's very strange. You get through the whole dialog and then it crashes? The variable you need is:

C:SetGlobal("rh#EvaViconia5","GLOBAL",1)

19 hours ago, cmorgan said:

Cool stuff - and good to think about. And my stuff was *definitely* not giving legal advice - it was completely my own speculation and example! And I am going to go look up Fair Use Exception, as that sounds like something I would like to know more about...

Oh, I'm technically an attorney, though not a practicing one. That means I'm neurotic about accidentally giving legal advice because of professional responsibility issues and potential liability, so I always put the disclaimer.  

18 hours ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

But see, they kinda did.

See BG2Fixpack for example... not that it really matters that much, as they also took a bunch of the modders on their payroll and transformed the games engine, while using the resources that were available for them. Yes, the new kits for example used weidu to incorporate themselves into the game libraries. How I know this is, is because of... a preset number in the tool.

Also in legal matters, it's usually about money. The damage needs to exceed a set amount of income to be relative as a legal case vs the company.

Yeah, I remember using Weidu when I was scripting for Beamdog. It seems to have been released under a GPL license, though, so there's no problem with using it for commercial purposes. The various fixes and tweaks are interesting, though--I always assumed that they had sought permission to implement that stuff.

I imagine that's a greyer area than grabbing an NPC or quest mod and implementing it, though. A modder can't really get away with implementing fixes to a game and then telling the company that it can't fix those errors itself.

3 hours ago, cmorgan said:

And the only phrase I would probably change is change "anything they want with it" to "anything they want with it as long as no one is restricted from using it behind a paywall, no one makes any money off of it, and they assume any and all liability when an angry company comes hunting for copyright infringement and cash."

But truly, almost any license you use is just about the same as just admitting "I can't stop you from ripping off my stuff because I don't have money for lawyers, and even more importantly because while I worked my butt off and the creativity and work is mine, I was doing it on an already copyrighted piece of intellectually protected code without paying a license fee or even asking their formal legal permission to write my fanfic into a commercially available product".

This is not legal advice, but intellectual property law is really trickier than that. I think a lot of modding would fit under the Fair Use exception--these are transformative works, and in our case at least is if anything providing an economic benefit to the copyright holder, since it helps maintain interest. That works in our favor.

Copyright protection is a real thing, though, even for us. Not primarily against each other, but against the companies themselves: if Beamdog had decided to incorporate mod content without permission, they would have been risking potential legal problems. (And there are legal activists out there who would help you: see the Organization for Transformative Works.)

Anyway, the only time I used a CC license on a mod was when I'd incorporated CC-SA (share alike) music into it, so that license carried over into my own derivative work. Technically that means that the rest of the community can do basically whatever they want with it as long as they credit me, which goes a good deal further than just writing crossmod content without permission.

If you're incorporating your own music or artwork into a mod, though, it's probably a good idea to put a copyright notice of some sort or another on it. (Again, not legal advice.)

On 1/27/2019 at 4:22 PM, Psionica said:

This all has to be done before you head to Spellhold?

Yes.

7 hours ago, Psionica said:

What is the 13th friendship dialogue, I don't want to miss it so I can start the romance?

She asks you if you've visited any of the elven kingdoms.

Just a heads up that a new version was released (technically back on Monday). The major change is a quest that's been implemented that was left out of the first version. A bug preventing installation on non-EE versions of the game has also been fixed now.

15 hours ago, Isewein said:

That sounds really interesting! Although it is hard enough to make room for one new NPC in the SoA party, two of them should be a whole different challenge. I never tried Kivan and Deheriana for just that reason. I take it you have a special interest in unusual paladins, then?

Haha, yes. I really like paladins in general... paladins and mages, apparently. (I've decided to recycle the portrait I'd had made for the paladin, actually, which means that the next project I'm toying with also fits into the "unusual paladin" category. I enjoy the crazy things that BG2 lets me attempt, haha.)

35 minutes ago, cmorgan said:

Please tell me more about this vanished mod... PM is fine... you do great stuff. No pressure. 

 

(pressure pressure pressure pressure )

Heh, it started back when I was researching the more unusual paladin orders and found a throwaway line about paladins of the Harmonious Order (Milil) traveling around with bards despite their alignment differences. I was infinitely amused by this, and I think was talking about it with Berelinde at one point, ended up tossing in the Khalid/Jaheira married couple dynamic from BG1, and decided to run with it.

It mostly worked out, except that one character was much easier to write and ended up overshadowing the other one a fair amount. I got it into beta, but was told that the second character would need a couple more dialogs. Which I was going to do, but then started scripting for Beamdog, so anything related to the Infinity Engine turned into a chore instead of a hobby. I tried to finish it up twice after that, but my first return to modding was short lived, and the second time around was more interested in this project instead, so the old one ended up perpetually on the back burner. I was considering releasing it anyway for a while, but kind of ended up repurposing bits and pieces of it for other projects instead. Those are still in early stages, though.