subtledoctor

Yeah, several other other mods also use nonexistent items as table entries to create the possibility that the creature will have nothing. So I don’t think it’s that. At any rate, I have cleaned up the RNDTRES table, and removed the repeating .EFFs from 13,000 CRE files (the .EFFs were having no effect in 98.5% of cases anyway), transferred everything over to the iPad, and I am moving on. I also disentangled the combination of druid shapeshifts, spirit animal summons, and Samurai ki abilities. It’s a bit if a mess, but only because I am developing the character in such a weird way, and I think it is fixed locally. At some point I will do a major revamp of the ki points system to cover edge cases like this. I’ve got Safana in the party while Imoen shelters with Firenose Elvenknees through this dangerous bandit-hunting stretch. Charname hit level 4 as a druid, and we are now going east, to Gullykin to find Thantyr’s bracers and to Adoy’s Enclave for Neera. Will stop by the Ulcaster and Firewine ruins as well. Then on to the Bandit Camp.

Huh. The only things off I see about RNDTRES.2da are: some rows don't have enough columns - seems like the default version in IWDEE has 20 columns, but my copy in EET has 40 columns. Mot sure if this actually harms anything, but it's an easy fix if so. Some entries look like: "dw#ptn52*2" ...I assume that means the creature gets two potions, but I don't see anything about that notation in the IESDP. Again, not sure if it causes any problems, but easy fix if so. Some entries look like: "DW#BLANK" ...and there is no DW#BLANK.itm in the game. Not sure if this is a placeholder entry for SCS that is supposed to be scrubbed or replaced, or what. It doesn't seem like a great thing to have in the table. Unless pointers to nonexistent files are intentional and are designed to represent a creature that has no item in that slot? Which is fine and fits with the design intent. Even if this was problematic, I'm not sure why it would only cause problems when the creature dies. In fact the more I think about it, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. What I'm seeing is: middle of a fight, a creature dies, the game freezes I reload to just before the fight: I try again, maybe the game freezes again I reload to just before the fight: this time I get through the fight, all the enemies die, but the game does not freeze If the problem had to do with RNDTRES.2da, why would reloading make any difference? I loaded a game in the same area, the creatures were already loaded into my savegame, the RNDTRES substitutions should have already happened and reloading the save should make no difference. Hmm. I'll fix those three things in the 2da table, but maybe it's time to look at the area and creature scripts.

Ah, that could be. I’ve seen these guys use potions, even though the .cre file has no potions in the inventory. I thought the randomized item replacement was occurring upon their death and was causing he crash; but from this I infer that the random item replacement occurs earlier, maybe when the .cre is loaded? Which, on reflection, is a good way to diversify the capabilities and behavior of otherwise identical creatures! So kudos for that. And maybe the issue is, an item is being placed that shouldn’t be, maybe with a broken .bam or something, and so causes the crash when it is dropped. Or something. Or maybe a relevant row of the table is missing, and the dummy items drop, and they cause a crash. So maybe a fix looks like: install SCS on vanilla BG2EE, and look at the differences between the random tables there and in my install. It’s been a while since I looked at them… I think this system refers to RNDTRES.2da. Or, if recreating a working table is too onerous after the fact, maybe those dummy items should simply be marked as undroppable. If they don’t drop when a creature dies, they shouldn't cause problems. (Unless the replacement item inherits the undroppable flag, which presumably would be undesirable.)

I’m getting crashes when enemies die, and it is SUPER annoying. And quite random, very hard to reproduce. I have to restart the app, which, with an override folder of 130,000 files on an underpowered iPad, takes a long time. Just happened twice with “charmed pirates” on the nereid coast Someone a few months ago ( @jmerry?) raised the idea that it might be due to repeating .EFFs, but the only repeated effects on charmed pirates are the ones added by my own mod, which I’ve been playing with for years and I never had this before. The only other thing I noticed about the charmed pirates is they possess three items: DW#RND06.itm, DW#RND12.itm, and DW#RND22.itm. The items are empty files which are presumably replaced with random loot by… script? This must come from SCS but I don’t know how it is supposed to work. Even when the game does not crash, I am not finding any random loot. So something is misfiring, and… maybe it should be safe to simply remove all of those .itm files from all creatures? One possibility: maybe SCS is trying to use the IWD random loot mechanism (otherwise unused in BGEE and BG2EE)? And one of my mods replaces the default IWD random table for use in the IWD campaign added by tipun’s mod (and tipun’s mod itself probably replaces the table before my mod). Knowing that SCS is hyper-sensitive to preexisting .2da table format… this is my current hypothesis. Question is whether it’s worth fixing, or better to simply rip it out and move on.

Okay, as promised, here is version 5.8. This adds two new kits. First, the Ironsmith is a pure fighter kit, very similar to the 'Dwarven Fighter' in Ascalon's Breagar mod, but with a few extra bells and whistles for fun. There is also a component to optionally apply this kit to Breagar himself if you have that NPC mod installed. Second, the Barbarian/Thief is pretty much with it says on the tin, a fighter/thief kit with the characteristics of a Barbarian. The thief side is a bit limited, with no access to Pick Pockets or Open Locks (rage out and bash 'em). And it is limited to armors no heavier than studded leather, same as Stalkers. The French translation is updated, and the kitlist.2da table-fixing problem should be fixed now.

I know I said I was going with the "less is more" approach here, trying to hew to Aquadrizzt's original vision for the mod. But I am adding a component: component 95, 'Multiclass Specialists,' will make the specialist wizard kits available in all of the appropriate kit menus for fighter/mages, cleric/mages, and mage/thieves. Please note that, in an otherwise-unmodded game, this will only affect elves and half-elves. If you install mods that expand racial options to classes and kits, component 95 should be installed after such tweaks. (You can install this one component later than the rest of the mod.) Get version 1.1 here. Also worth noting: version 1.1 adds a French translation thanks to @mickabouille! Thank you!

Wanna know what's crazy, in all this time I never even knew you could play Wheels without Ascension. I always thought it was one of those Acension add-on mods. I guess now I've stopped using Ascension, I'll have to finally give Wheels a spin (ha ha) in my next install!

Yes, that component would stay and continue to be supported and updated.

I only mean the pure-class bard kits. Right now Might & Guile adds: — Jongleur, Meistersinger, Loresinger, Gallant …while Song & Silence adds: — Acrobat, Luring Piper, Chorister The overlap is kind of ridiculous. The only differences are minor matters of naming/implementation, and that S&S lacks the equivalent of a Gallant kit. But for the most part they all hew pretty close to the original Complete Bards source material. If the Gallant moved to S&S, you could still get effectively the same four kits, from one place and requiring less upkeep.

Heh, that sounds like something from the Dashing Swordsman prestige class “Thrust! Parry! Quip!” At any rate, I am not too interested in making more bard kits, as I have ripped that class out of my game and I give bardic abilities to other rogue classes. I have proposed to merge (some of) my bard kits with Song & Silence, to minimize overlap between mods. I’ll report on the status of that plan when I know more. Meantime, I have been focused on beefing up the availability of fighter kits — on which, more info soon.

The only point of it is to prevent the malformed .2da file from tripping up mods that need to read the file and use COUNT_2DA_COLS for column count (will return ten columns) and then iterate over rows in the file, leading to odd behavior or outright install failures because they try to read entries in rows where entries are missing. For an example, look at how some recent bets of SCS/ToF have been tripping over other misshapen 2da tables. Kitlist is in incredibly important 2da table - it contains and connects a LOT of data important to various kit and rule tweaks. So I figure it is particularly important to clean up this file. I didn't realize my fix wasn't keeping up with the numbering. That's not ideal; I'll take a look at the code by my inclination is to set the missing entries to " * " (the table default) or, maybe, something like 0x00004000 (a meaningless "no kit" value). In either case it will not have any effect on the kits themselves - if they could function with no value there, then they can function with an arbitrary value there. (And TBH the way it is now may be completely harmless - I'm not sure. But I would like to avoid doubled entries, to stay on the safe side.) Good catch, thanks for mentioning this! And good timing too, as I am currently prepping an update!

I gather there is no appetite for improving his kit... so based on this post, would it be okay to make an altogether new kit in a different mod, and add a component to that mod asking: Give the Ironsmith kit to Breagar? Sounds like it would not be a problem, I just want to confirm before stepping on the toes of another modder.

Really, 1) at the time my tweak was created the only extant version of Faerie Fire was the one from SR; and 2) I don’t know what SCS’ Faerie Fire looks like from a structural perspective, and patches designed for the SR spell likely would not work on the SCS version. EDIT - crap, I didn’t realize this was off-topic in someone else’s thread. Sorry.

Yeah but that’s the issue, right? The hard-coded ranger mechanic is limited to the ‘race’ field. Why I say, rip it out root and stem. @moog I talked myself into liking this idea, enough that I’d be happy to collaborate. I’ve got Weidu code that could be pretty easily adapted to turn a 2da table into various kit-specific dialogues; then you could do the creative work of 1) what are the categories, 2) which kit gets which categories as options, and 3) making the .SPL files to apply the bonuses. (The SPL files are probably best created in Weidu, given there will be many similar ones that differ slightly.)

Progress: So I went back to level 4, stayed on as a fighter up to level 6. Thanks to my modified XP tables, that was quick, at 22,000 xp instead of 32,000 xp. Getting to level 7 as a druid will take longer with my tables, though - 50,000 instead of 35,000. God, the vanilla XP tables are so weird. A 10th or 11th or 12th level ranger needs four times the xp of a druid at the same level. A ranger with the same xp as the druid would be three full levels behind. That is utterly bonkers! Somehow the AD&D 2E writers took the wacky 1E xp progression and... decided to make it even weirder? Huh? Anyhoo. So Jaheira and Khalid came and went, Minsc and Dynaheir came and went, and I am back to a variant of the former party: Charname is currently a 3rd-level druid, Imoen is a 6/6 M/T Jinxer; Littlun is a 6th-level Stalker specializing in crossbows and short swords; Breagar is on melee duty with axes and hammers; Brandock is a C/M Seeker of Oghma, on identification duty and casting a huge swath of spells; and we just picked up Neera who stays a wild mage. We're about to do the Black Hearts fights and then go to Larswood/Peldvale/Bandit Camp. (I never mind doing the Bandit Camp twice!) Also will pass through Firewine Ruins on the way to Adoy's Enclave, and I have tweaked things so that Wild Mages actually cast spells better in wild magic zones (I mean, better than other mages - she should have like a 40% chance to cast successfully) so that should be fun. Here's an even more annoying thing about Breagar: in order to enforce his lack of shield-fighting for plot reasons, the mod puts an invisible item in his shield slot. So you can equip anything there, which is fine and correct. BUT, the game is hard-coded to read that slot when applying fighting styles, so even though he put pips into single-weapon style, and he is fighting with a single weapon, the game thinks he has a shield and gives him no SWS benefits. Which are important benefits at this point: a thac0 bonus, and +APR! Indignity upon indignity! This won't stand, I think I am going to modify that and just be on the honor system to not equip a shield. EDIT - on the bright side though, I gave Breagar a 'Resounding Strike' ability to spiffy up his kit a little bit, as well as a 50% chance to evade the effects of Chant, Command, and Power Word spells.

The revised Ironskin spell here will not work on oBG2, it requires EE opcodes. I’ll look into the other thing, thanks for mentioning it.

Yes Conjurers get screwed by this, a bit, and there is a thread about how to address that. There are still several options available to Conjurers: Oracle cast by someone else should make someone visible (but it’s possible Nondetection blocks that, in which case you need to bring down the Nondetection with Spell Thrust..?) Glitterdust can make someone visible and can be cast by Conjurers, and Faerie Fire can as well. My ‘SubtleD’s Spell Tweaks’ mod has components that beef up those two spells in this context. It also has an invisibility overhaul that generally improves this. It also has a component that lets specialists use low-level spells from opposition schools, which would allow Edwin to cast See Invisible (which is allowed per the actual AD&D rules). Of course Glitterdust and Faerie Fire don’t work on liches, or someone with spell protections. I don’t think Oracle works on liches, notwithstanding your recollection. Liches are supposed to be very dangerous, even to high-level wizards like Edwin! Someone like Edwin challenging a lich should 1) be very high level, and 2) chuck pit fiends at the lich and drop Death Fogs and Acid Clouds and Firestorms and Meteor Swarms in the lich's general area. If you install IR as well as SR (they are designed to complement each other) then Edwin can use Potions of Sight to very easily target invisible enemies. He can also use Wands of Spell Piercing since wands can target invisible enemies. And summons distract enemies, wasting enemy spells and attacks and gaining you a resource advantage. They are extraordinarily useful. So while the situation is not perfect, there are still options here.

1) Oracle is a 5th-level spell and liches are immune to 5th-level spells. I assume that immunity is defeating Oracle in this instance. More generally, with SR you want each spellcaster to have their own way to see invisible creatures. Oracle in particular allows one caster to reveal targets to other casters, but you have the problem of Oracle being 5th level. There have been talks about how this system disadvantages Edwin and what to do about it. The short version is, for now, have Edwin do things like chuck summons at the lich (he is a Conjurer after all) and have Nalia be the one who directly targets the lich with spells. 2) I'm pretty sure PfMW has indeed been turned into protection from all weapons. Maybe? I know that's how it is in my game, and I like it better - bypassing an archmage's protections with a common chair leg is honestly a dumb workaround in the vanilla game. 3) Prismatic Mantle does not protect you, rather it kills enemies who attack you. I don't love this - my mod "SubtleD's Spell Tweaks" has a component that changes this into a souped-up version of Stoneskin. 4) No, I don't think it anything is broken, instead it is encouraging you to engage with the game's systems and Breach them. (Or, wait out the PfMW which only lasts 4 rounds.)

Yes. Spells’ filenames or IDS names can be added directly to the various sphere system documents. Each has a list of the available spheres at the top of the file. I don’t think we made a way to add spells to the system from other mods, which on reflection would be nice… but OTOH this mod is already so damn complicated, I don’t know if we should be adding more systems to it! (I had a thought the other day to moving the druid and shaman components to a new mod, for the sole purpose of simplifying and slimming down this one.) For kit mods, you grab the fnp_compatibility file and INCLUDE it in the kit mod, then run the spheres-defining function like so. Most deities and ranger kits already have defined spheres in the sphere system files, so you can just specify the kit’s deity like that one does; or you can do it the more involved way per the linked instructions. Just a caveat, defining spheres “the more involved way” requires defining them according to the original FnP sphere system, and the spheres don’t always line up to similar spheres in the “2E” or “Nu FnP” sphere systems. Assigning a deity makes sure the kit gets appropriate spheres no matter what system is used. And even if a deity is not there, you can just assign a deity with similar domains. Like if you make a cleric of Amaunator you could just assign “lathander_spheres” or for a cleric of Jergal or Myrkyl you could assign “bhaal_spheres” or “kelemvor_spheres”

It would still be super kludgy. Your character sheet would say “favored enemy: doppelgangers” and you would have a silent bonus against werewolves too? Kind of weird. And maybe hard to communicate the categories adequately to the player. My mod adds variants of the Trueclass ranger, and conceptually says “these Trueclass ranger variants are true rangers, and other kits are more like pseudorangers.” Archers, Stalkers, Justifiers, Forest Runners… nothing about those kits implies specialization with singular target species. And the mod expands but controls favored enemies. Because the vanilla game’s choices are kind of dumb. Why would a Mountain Ranger be able to specialize in killing snakes? Why would a Forest Ranger or Beastmaster have expertise in killing elementals? Why would anyone have expertise in killing vampires or fiends at 1st level? It’s hard to see that “conflicting” with other ranger kits if the player chooses that concept. I struggle to envision a kit specifically designed to lean into the vanilla game mechanic. BUT I could totally see wanting to overhaul the mechanic itself. And although DavidW apparently hates it, I think the best way to do this is with an in-game dialogue. Basically you would: — Zero out HATERACE.2da just like I did, and then give all rangers the same innate ability — The innate ability summons an invisible creature that starts a dialogue with the ranger. The ability would remove itself with op172 and prevent itself from working twice, with op206. — The dialogue would present various categories to the player: mammals, spiders, giants, corporeal undead, whatever. They could overlap if you like, some could be broad and some could be narrow, whatever. — Each category choice would cast a spell with various op178/op179 effects for bonuses against enemies in the listed category. — The dialogue could be tailored such that each kit could have its own list of options. Snakes could be excluded from Mountain Rangers, yetis and winter wolves could be excluded from Desert Rangers, etc. — You could have more limitations too, like gating certain options by level - so you could choose fiends in an SoA start (maybe gained expertise by defeating Aec’Letec) but not in a BG1 start. Sky’s the limit here, it would be very flexible. — Give each 178/179 spell a custom portrait icon… they could be visually identical but with different strings, so you would have an indicator on the character sheet. — You could even have certain game events allow rangers to change their favored enemies, or even add a second category. It would make a good feat or HLA. (I would certainly tie this into my ‘Combat Skills’ feat mod.) Install this “Favored Enemy Overhaul” mod after kit mods, and it could contain a simple 2da table of all extant ranger kits and which favored enemy categories each kit has access to. Broad or narrow access for certain kits could be a de facto kit advantage or disadvantage. And it would be human-readable so players could change kits’ access if they wanted. All of this is totally doable, if you can tolerate using a dialogue to choose favored enemies. (I used to prefer GUI modding but have since come back around to preferring dialogues, which are straightforward, comprehensible, and more broadly compatible.) I have code snippets in the CSP mod which could be easily adapted and could reduce the time and effort needed.

I feel there are two categories here: 1) basic tweak mods that, like EET Tweaks says, must come after other mods that add ITM, SPL, EFF, BCS, and DLG files; and mods that really want to be installed very late, after SCS. The first category is, basically, game tweak mods, and I would install them right before or right after EET_end. But before SCS. Most of these mods could be installed around the same time as Tweaks Anthology, except the few that really do need to be after EET_end. (EET_Tweaks claims to need to be later, but a lot of that mod can be installed earlier and in fact a lot of it does not relate to EET at all. I kind of hate that one for not being what it says on the tin.) The second category is things that really want to be installed very late, after SCS. Most people think this includes aTweaks, and if you are likely to uninstall/reinstall the lighting/shader pack I would install that one dead last. Here is my current order, if it helps as a point of comparison.

Thanks for the report, I’ll take a look at it. Really need to get 4.19 out as a proper beta/release. Incidentally, if you are playing the EE games you don’t need that component - The EE engine already fixes MI IIRC. But the SR main component ‘unfixes’ it, and thus requires the MI fix. Again, IIRC.

This is basically what I do with my “Regional Rangers” component. Unfortunately what you have to do, basically, is zero out the normal favored enemy choices and directly apply bonuses for the kit. Which can conflict with any other mods that touch favored enemies. Avoiding doing that, you could give your kit extra bonuses against some group of enemies, like giants or lycanthropes… but they would also get to choose from the list, and they could choose something unrelated to or even inappropriate for your kit. The mechanism is quite hard-coded and anything you do kind of has to be a kludge.

That’s just the same old IWD2 game - 3E, single-platform, loading screens and everything - but with a broad-ranging fixes & tweaks mod applied. In other words it is not any kind of enhanced edition, it’s just a mod some people made. Seems to be very comprehensive, a lot of work went into it. Tipun’s mod for EET shoves the game into BG2EE. This changes a lot - it converts the game from 3E to 2E - and it is still beta quality (a bunch of items don’t work… I’ve heard of scripting problems in Dragon’s Eye, though I didn’t make it that far when I played it recently). And it is geared for playing at high level, within BG2. But on the bright side, it plays on the modern EE 2.6 engine, and can be played on any platform that can play modded BG2EE. And within that EE, 2E context, my integration mod changes it to what it originally was, an independent campaign you play from level 1. So each version has its place. If you are a 3E aficionado and want to play the best version of IWD2, get the original and use that new mod. If you want to play the campaign with 2E rules and/or on a platform other than Windows, use tipun’s mod on EET.

I like this mod, I always use it, it’s kind of a convenience tweak. The ProNM thing is not a bug per se, but just how that spell works: it doesn’t actually have anything to do with missile enchantment, instead it just blocks the projectiles of the nonmagical missile weapons. It’s a fudge, but it works in the vanilla game because the ammo for those projectiles is unenchanted. With this mod - and in fact with vanilla EE 2.6’s Enchanted Weapon spell - those projectiles can carry an enchantment… but they are still blocked by ProNM. I don’t think that can be fixed - the projectile-blocking effect cannot filter by enchantment, and the enchantment-blocking opcode used by ProMW/Mantle cannot filter melee vs. ranged. My advice, adopt the Spell Revisions rule changing Pro Normal Missiles into Pro All missiles, then the intersection of these rules will be in agreement.