subtledoctor

I assume the issue with ToF and my spell tweaks have to do with my use of the 7 Eyes effect for missile avoidance. (In the revised Blur spell, also in the Gloves of Missile Snaring in my Item Tweaks.) APPEND strikes again, I suppose. I can look into firming it up… though, not immediately.

Was actually just thinking yesterday about adding a Barbarian/thief. But it’s a but tough to balance, given almost all of the Barbarian kit’s disadvantages are meaningless in a fighter/thief. I suppose could say, no Open Locks and no Pick Pockets? And no Set Traps? (Restricting Set Traps is quite annoying, but can be done.)

Just that: This seems like an unrealistic expectation. When you update SCS you tend to improve all aspects of it, even those that are working. You are making the whole thing a more polished product. It seems to me many other modders do not do this, adopting more of an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude. So, as mentioned, there are very many APPEND lines out there that are unlikely to be updated to 2024 standards.

Chiming on solely to note for posterity that all credit here goes to @Aquadrizzt .

I’m not arguing in favor of that. I’m just pointing out that the extant group of mods made for these games over 20+ years has hundreds or thousands of instances of this being done, and most are not going to be fixed anytime soon. Imperfect though they may be, players often make a choice to install those imperfect mods. The only question is whether you would obliterate those mods from users’s games. Fair enough… but… I’ll be honest I have many, many instances of APPEND in my mods (like very very many) often from a very long time ago. It is not ideal… in fact there are very many parts of my mods that are archaic or inefficient and otherwise less than ideal. But once they work, and the bugs get ironed out… I’m not about to take time away from my kids to go back in a optimize things. Nobody here gets paid for this, and most people don’t use it to showcase their work the way you do. I want to accomplish ____, and once I’ve accomplished that I don’t want to spend more time on it. So here in 2024, all those APPENDs I wrote in 2014 are still there, and I expect they will still be there in 2034. If a mod comes in later and threatens to destructively enforce the file format, I suppose I would throw a function in the ALWAYS block as a prophylactic measure. But I’m not about to rewrite 437 instances of kit table patches.

The engine doesn’t care about this any more than it cares about the content of the row headings in column 0. It would be nice if there was a standard, I guess, but the standard is 40 columns, while lots of players and mods assume 50 due to the popularity of extending the level limit. (Not to my taste, but what can you do.) The result is a bit of a mish-mash, which is unfortunate… but that mish-mash doesn’t cause any problems in the absence of your mods. If your mod has more exacting expectations about the files’ layout, why not quickly fix the layout before running your function? Pad out all the rows that have fewer columns than COUNT_2DA_COLS? Doesn’t Camdawg have a function floating around that does that? No technical problems… though, once I realized that column is insignificant I started bring descriptive with it. It has (very occasionally) been useful for troubleshooting, telling a player e.g. “look for the row that begins with ‘D5_PSIONICS’ and make sure you see _____ in the 3rd column” or somesuch… so it definitely removes information that was intentionally added by other modders.

Well, like I say, the only issue I see is the file has a weird icon reference in the five ability headers. I don't think that would actually cause lag; I think this all may be a big red herring. But if it is the problem, correcting the .bam reference (or even just setting it to be blank) is all that's needed. EEKeeper, NI, however you want to do it, that's my prescription.

I made a pull request with my most recent EET Weidu.logs.

Okay I got to a computer and looked at the file you posted, and… it’s mostly fine? The only thing I see wrong is, apparently the variable didn’t resolve properly for the five spell ability headers (is currently “%SPELL_R” instead of “b_c105c”). This shouldn’t really cause any problem, but it’s an easy fix. Just open the spell in Near Infinity and manually change it. That doesn’t matter. It is the .bam reference in the ability headers that needs to be changed. I cannot stress this enough: EEKeeper was designed to, like, give yourself all 18s in a save file. You said up-thread that it is choking on these files. Let it go. If a tool isn’t effective, don’t try to use it more creatively - get better tools. Install NI and you can fix this in twenty seconds flat.

Oh Jesus a temnix mod. Pfeh. Very easy thing to try: grab the file out of the animate dead now backup folder and drop that into your override directory. Dollars to doughnuts the problem miraculously disappears.

You know you are misspelling “Disrupt” - might be affecting your searches. Also I’m not sure what the effect is by removing a file. Like I say, for best effect you can find Sunscorch or another priest spell, and copy it over b_c105. But still, this all sounds very odd to me. Lag is an odd result of a bug, one I would usually associate with game scripts. But game scripts could not affect viewing a spell in EEKeeper. It makes no sense. It sounds like some other mod has altered the spell, or maybe some UI mod doesn’t like it for some reason? (UI mods are temperamental.) Realistically you should run “weidu.exe --change-log b_c105.spl” and also post a weidu.log

Best guess is to look it up in Near Infinity. Maybe export the .SPL file and post it here. Then copy some other spell (Sunscorch is a decent stand-in for it) and rename the copy to the Disrupt Undead filename. (I would not use EEKeeper for this sort of thing. (I mean, I woukd not use EEKeeper for any sort of thing. But especially not inspecting .SPL files.))

That’s weird, I use that spell all the time. I’ll take a look at it when I can.

Probably best to install this before SCS. But, it may not matter and it is unrelated to your issue here. This is a malformed file left over in IWDEE, it is not actually used in the game. Easy solution, remove this from your game before installing. I’ll update the mod to delete this file, when I get a chance.

No, it should be fine to install a tweak like this at the end after everything else is finished.

7eyes.2da can have an arbitrary number of columns, and it seems possible some mod may add more than the base table has if it needs a lot of immunities. Probably best to clean up the table before an APPEND_COL.

So, I was going to mess with this ability in my current game, to test possible improvements, and I noticed that SPCL922 already casts a subspell that applies op116 invisibility detection! Thanks the Revised HLAs in the Refinements mod. So if you install Refinements + Might & Guile (or Refinements + one of the other mods that gives Tracking earlier) then you already have something more useful than the vanilla ability. A Christmas miracle!

I was going to say, don’t get your hopes up. Op172 works worse with 8-letter innates, not better. Maybe it works to decrement spellbook spells - it’s been a long time since I tried that - but spellbook spells decrement themselves already, and most of them have 7-character filenames for other reasons. With 8-character innate abilities, IIRC, op172 removes all instances but they come back the next day. So, if paired with op171 you end up with forever-increasing uses. It’s not clear from the post exactly what you are trying to do. If you want to use innate abilities like Kai with decrementing uses in more flexible ways, my ki pool function might be useful.

You can actually put a ton of tweak mods together with no problem, as long as they don’t obviously step on each others’ toes - for example, all of the Divine Remix kits work great with Faiths & Powers… just, of course, don’t try to install two different sphere systems. A good example of putting a lot of tweaks together is my current install. (Note Scales of Balance has been put to pasture… instead look at SubtleD’s Item Tweaks, SubtleD’s Stat Overhaul, and Combat Skills and Proficiencies.) Your install order is not great up in that first post… look at my order to see how some like CDTweaks and moved around Strategems should be move toward the bottom. I wonder if a dependency snuck into Will to Power… I’ll give it a look.

Like Glam's NPCs, this seems to add a line to PDIALOG.2da without enough columns to satisfy EET_end. I'm not sure how the mod is using that file, or if it is necessary, etc. I just open PDIALOG.2da in NI and find every row with only 1 or 2 columns, and just delete those rows. Then EET_end installs fine.

In many cases where a spell tweak says “not SR,” it is a tweak already implemented in SR. I haven’t looked at every instance, but nothing jumped out at me as being problematic.

Out of curiosity, as I am soon to embark on another go-round, is there a right time to do Black Hearts stuff? Like, I usually head through Beregost before the FAI, and I saw Illasera there, but I’m like “I’m a level 1 noob, no way am I talking to her yet.” Am I right to wait until higher levels? Or is it the lind of thing you start early and it progresses slowly alongside the main quest?

With some recent mod updates, I am putting together a new install. Trying something different this time, really hewing to category groupings to a greater extent. TBH I'm not sure that is the best idea? It looks nice and clean when laid out like this, but I'm worried there are little non-obvious quirks and dependencies that don't care about elegance. And of course, within categories I am not 100% sure of the order. I'm good with items/spells/kits/tweaks, but NPC mods are still a big mystery to me. Very roughly, I tried to install them in chronological order of their creation, on the assumption that newer ones will more likely contain cross-mod content with older ones. But that's a big assumption that may not hold. Here is the new order, if anyone wants to review/criticize/copy/etc. A couple notes, as usual: The bulk of Item Revisions (everything after Store Revisions) should go before Faiths & Powers if you use the normal version or IR or if you use IRR. But if you use my updated branch, as of 4b10sd19 it can be installed later, near CDTweaks. I moved aTweaks Scroll Scribing waaaay early, when I saw that Brandock has some particular coding that only kicks in of he is installed after aTweaks. But it is crazy to install an NPC after the usual aTweaks spot (after SCS, after EET_end), so I moved the aTweaks component earlier. I'm not sure that's a good idea - that means it is installed before any spell mods? Does aTweaks Scroll Scribing need to know about all spell mods at install-time? I don't know, I haven't looked at the code. But, in gameplay I rarely use that ability anyway. So if it is screwy it's not a huge deal. This can be an experiment. I dumped Transitions (tired of the risk it introduces, and not actually sure what I lose by removing it - I guess I will see) and NTotSC (the new rebalanced version is better... but still not great). I added Gorgon's Eye, Black Hearts, and Lava's Ravenloft mods. A bunch of IWD mods were not quite working last game... I have made more tweaks to the installers and I think they should be good now. I'm not ready to jump to SCS v35 - it has a lot of new features and therefore a lot of kinks to work out. Heck, I'm stuck playing on BG2EE v2.5, I'm not even sure SCS v35 works on the 2.5 patch. So, for now at least, I'm sticking with the fairly rock-solid v33.4. (But 33.4 does not work with the 2.6 patch, so this is not an option for most folks.) For

I pushed a boulder up that mountain for a while, before letting it go. Given the variety of poison application in the game, making that work is quite difficult.

When they have components asking how quickly to fire interjections, I always say “no thanks” and leave it at the default value. I tend to play slow, and I often pause the game and step away… but those timers are real-time IIRC, not in-game. So they seem to happen very quickly for me.