subtledoctor

Won't get too much in the weeds of the last several post, but the OTHER major thing you have evidently missed is that Roxanne has not been banned anywhere, she has not been made unwelcome here. Her so-called "exile" is entirely of her own doing. And, by the way, it is to the detriment of those "noobs" you say she is so nice to. I have seen numerous occasions on which Roxanne has given advice or answers which are flat-out wrong, and bad for the player even if it seems helpful by intent. She could give better help if she engaged and collaborated with other modders to find solutions; but she refuses to do that. She refuses to participate on these forums and instead has her own little fiefdom where she can deceptively speak from various different personas, and ban anyone who might disagree with her. (And no wonder it seems so cozy there!) It has been stated on numerous occasions that she would be quite welcome here, to participate in the community with other modders for the benefit of all. Only that she should do so with a single username, and it would be nice if she took down stolen work from her site. Such terms don't seem very onerous to me! But she refuses them, and it is 100% her own choice. Does she get criticism here, in her absence? Yes, and I can see why that, taken on its own, rubs you the wrong way. Your reaction is natural and fine - just not fully informed. But for her part, in making a choice to refuse to engage with other modders, in choosing to ultimately be less helpful to noobs than she could be, because retaining the ability to deceive people and retaining and sharing her stolen work is too important to her? By such a choice, she pretty well validates the criticism...

@modtester Thanks for the detailed info, I'll take a look at all that when I get a chance.

This is the rub. How do you disable the use of an item in a way that it can be enabled later? MnG does it with opcode 319 effects on items, and SPECIFIC values applied to thieves. But this is not extensible, unfortunately: a given creature can only have one SPECIFIC value at a time, so if you use the same method it will be incompatible. If that's okay with you, then of course that is one route you could take. Possibly better, if you are limiting this to scrolls which are a single item type: enable use on scrolls in the .ITM flags, and apply opcode 181 effects to all thieves preventing the use of that item type, and then use opcode 321 to cancel the 181 effect at level 9. (This would be EE-only.) I tried that, once upon a time. One problem I ran into there was that some scrolls are meant to be used by thieves, like certain green scrolls. And all blue divine scrolls are meant to be usable by cleric/thieves, but preventing trueclass thieves from using all scrolls will also prevent cleric/thieves from using them. And of course mage/thieves should be able to use arcane scrolls but not divine scrolls. You could go the way the original Refinements mod did: make two kits, which are identical except that one can use scrolls and the other cannot. At level 9, you script a kit-change and your character can suddenly use scrolls. Of course you still have the problem of which method to use to do it, and how to address trueclass thieves without screwing with multiclass thieves. And of course if you allow use of scrolls by thieves in the .ITM flags and then apply some effect from your mod that prevents all but your kit from using them, it would prevent my feat from working, and prevent the Refinements HLA from working. And likewise, is somebody installed MnG or Refinements along with you mod, it would prevent your kit ability from working. Because in those cases there would be two different effects suppressing scroll use, and each mod would only remove one. Realistically, the best way to make this work and be broadly compatible is to simply use the exact same code. That's how I make sure Refinements and MnG don't interfere with each other. If you simply grab the code from Refinements, and change the HLA into a spell that is auto-applied at level 9, then it should be fine. Of course adapting someone else's code is not always the easiest thing to do, I don't know if you're up for it. In in ideal world I would pull that code out and make it a portable function, so that anyone could use it by simply dropping a file into their mod folder and typing "LAUNCH_ACTION_FUNCTION ~subtled_umd~ END" or something like that. I've done that for a few other things, like custom HLA tables and 3E-style Evasion. But unfortunately I just don't have time to do that sort of thing right now.

Item Revisions and Scales of Balance also have components to allow casting/thieving in armor, and both mods have settings that allow you to tweaks the various values of penalties associated with it. Klatu tweaks also has a component for this, I believe, but I'm not familiar with whether it applies counterbalancing effects.

This just makes me think I should break out my Magic Fang and Animal Growth spells as distinct tweaks rather than being integrated in Faiths & Powers. That way if people have problems with the SR version, a quick solution would be to simply overwrite it...

@hippofant thanks for the feedback! Stuff like this is always valuable. I'll address a couple things: Good to know. And super annoying. In general the opaque and sometimes haphazard rules for what the game engine does to characters who leave and rejoin is super annoying... Huh. That may be a circumstance I didn't test... TBH I didn't know it was even possible to cast the spell but not set the contingency. This sounds like an oversight that should be easy to fix. I think the issue here is with Scales of Balance: it changes the entire proficiency system, with basic rule changes like fighters -> 5 stars non-fighter warriors -> 2 stars everyone else -> 1 star to fighters -> 4 stars non-fighter warriors -> 3 stars priests and rogues -> 2 stars wizards -> 1 star Now some kits have different rules, like some cleric kits in FnP can get specialization instead of proficiency. But that is based on the base game rules. SoB comes later and changes it, but the FnP description can't know whether SoB will be installed later, and SoB can't know which kits have been installed, and it can't really apply generalized kit description patches because various kit describe proficiency limits in different ways - never mind in different translations of different languages! The best I can think is that SoB can sketch out the base system more clearly in the general class descriptions; and kits can try to be more general about how they describe proficiency limits (i.e. instead of saying "can reach specialization" say "can reach one level of proficiency higher than most clerics"). But even this has limits - for one thing, I am not the author of many kits, even within FnP; and for another thing, consider that FnP's proficiency limits are meant to be user-configurable. It's not the most user-friendly thing at the moment, but you can go into the FnP class .tpa files and set every kit to whatever proficiency level you want for every weapon, to have complete control over how those rules are implemented in your game.* There is no way to allow SoB to handle kit description patching for all of these eventualities. * (As an aside, this is really the broad direction my mods have taken: to allow these systems to be user-configurable. Which sphere system do you want? Which spheres do each kit get? Which proficiencies? Etc. To really give each player the ability to set up the rules and act as their own DM.) Another solution is to change the SoB proficiency system again, and maybe tone down the extent to which it deviates from the base game. I'm still not entirely happy with it... It cannot give you an extra pip in the normal proficiency screen, but it can do so by dialogue, and I think what it does is give you an innate ability, just like the NPC_EE ones. I think there was an issue with it not giving you the ability, and I think I fixed that recently... I'll double-check. Note, even by dialogue, it cannot give you more stars than the proficiency system itself gives you fighters. So with SoB, you cannot use this to go above 4 stars; there is, after all, no benefit to going above 4 stars. The Weapon Focus ability is essentially mean to allow certain rogues to reach the same proficiency level - in one weapon - as rangers and paladins. You'll still have rogue thac0, but you'll have ranger/paladin APR, which should hopefully stake out a nice middle ground in being more combat-capable than other rogues, but still not usurping the place of non-fighter warriors. You mean certain NPCs? Or certain proficiencies? The nature of it is, if you choose a proficiency at the level-up screen, it cannot be removed. So if you recruit Minsc, level him up and have him go from one star to two stars in maces, and then use the NPC_EE ability, those stars in maces will not be removed, while his other proficiencies in 2-hand swords etc. will be removed. To avoid using this as an exploit, the nest practice is to always use the NPC_EE kit-change ability immediately after recruiting someone. Not sure what's causing the issue in the first screenshot, because my mods don't use the proficiencies for long sword, short sword, etc. They do use the 'club' proficiency, and that value in the EEKeeper screenshot, while it looks weird, is numerically valid. Don't mess with it! (Well, if you want to increase your club proficiency by 1 I'm pretty sure you can just make that number 1 higher, and it will work fine. But, try not to mess with it.) Thanks. I have changed the NPC_EE script recently to add the ability to change ability scores (!) and I'm pretty sure this was fixed in the course of that. But I'll double-check. This has already been fixed in the most recent versions. Yup. Starting at level 20 you get HLAs, which are like Uber-feats. (I understand that ot's not always level 20, but I use the Tweaks Anthology mod to make it level 20 for every class, even multiclasses. I think making this change at level 20 is most in keeping with the spirit and written rules of the 2E system, so that's what the feats system uses as a cutoff.) Saved for last because the reply is going to be long-winded: I want you to change the way you think about this: those values are actually just numerical; the category of "morning stars" or "large swords" is just a gloss that was added by ShadowKeeper and Near Infinity. So what the mod really did was change bastard sword from category 20, to category 22. Doesn't sounds as weird now, does it? Now, what are those categories, really? Behind the scenes, they do two things that I'm aware of: 1) they work with opcode 181 to allow category-based usability exclusions applied by spell or script, instead of by .ITM flags; and 2) those with values above 29 cannot be used for dual-wielding. FnP wants to use opcode 181 for real kit-based item usability exclusions, for hundreds of kits instead of just for the three kits with .ITM flags. But the problem is, long swords/bastard swords/scimitars/katanas are all bunched together under category 20 ("large swords"). In order to do this, we need to find three new category numbers for bastard swords/scimitars/katanas... and those categories have to be below 30, since they are all 1-handed weapons. We clear two categories by moving spears and halberds to values above 30; this doesn't matter for them since they are 2-handed weapons and cannot be used while dual-wielding anyway. For the third category to free up, we can move morning stars; they don't need their own category since they share a proficiency, and the goal is to have a category that lines up with each proficiency. So we move morning stars either to the flails category, if IR Weapon Changes are not installed, or the maces category if IR Weapon Changes are installed.** ** As you might guess, this hints at the solution to your problem: just install IR before FnP, since FnP is reactive to IR but IR is not reactive to FnP.

Allowing your thief kit to use them would mean allowing trueclass thieves to use them as well. "Allow this custom kit to use a narrower selection of items than the base class" is pretty easy to accomplish. "Allow this custom kit to use a broader selection of items than the base class" is complicated, and generally involves making compromises that some may find unpalatable.

Okay, I finally managed to nail down the inventory screen crash bug: we were using a UI modification to allow the vanilla identification process work with a divine spell in addition to the usual arcane spell. This allowed clerics to cast 'Identify' in the same way as vanilla mages. But the method used to enable it apparently no longer works in EE v2.6. Since I didn't implement it and don't remember how it was done, I ultimately just ripped it out, and instead I have added a new 2nd-level spell, "Legend Lore," (real original, I know ) to the knowledge sphere. This new spell is identical to the 'Revised Identify' spell from Tome & Blood: you have to cast the spell in the main screen instead of right-clicking in the inventory... and it will let you identify more than one item with each casting: two items at level 5, three items at level 9, and four items at level 13. Version 0.79.25, which can now be used with the EE 2.6 patch, can be found here. Cheers.

You were indeed on the right track, but I was ahead of you. This and most of my other mods have been updated to fix this install problem on 2.6.

I'm guessing it is something like: if aTweaks Expanded Services is installed that equates to 1, which means 1x1000 i.e. 1000gp for Mass Cure. Whereas, if aTweaks Expanded Services is not installed it equates to 0, which means 0x1000 or 0gp for Mass Cure, because without the aTweaks component Mass Cure won't be available so... don't change it. Something like that, maybe?

Wow, very nice. Want to clarify something though: I see stuff like this in several places. Does this mean your version is only for the EE games? Or are these kinds of patches implemented conditionally, so that your version can still be installed on pre-EE games? EDIT - yeah, amazing, comprehensive work though. Great job.

Select a BAM file in NI and click "Edit BAM" at the bottom, it will bring up the editor window. Then go to "post-processing" and it will let you do all sorts of stuff like rotate, flip, invert colors, change hue, change brightness, change contrast, etc.

My advice, just finish your run. I never change out mod versions in the middle if a run.

Indeed. Not for nothing an established tactic is to cast the spell “Magic Resistance” - which is a buff meant to increase your defense - on bosses to reduce their resistance. People argue whether this is a “cheap” tactic, but really it’s just bad boss design. In a game that already has resistances and saving throws, MR is duplicative. If it functioned as it sounds - as a resistance, reducing the damage/duration/intensity of hostile magic (think how it works in Oblivion) - then it would be cool. But in BG2 it is poorly done and overused. I mod it right out of my game.

Thank you! So the 2.6 inventory system doesn’t like something about the sphere system itself. That’s extremely helpful to know. Of course, off the top of my head I have no idea why the sphere system might interact with the inventory screen. This is not like an interaction with another mod, where I can look at what the mod does; Beamdog changed the source code of the game itself. It would be helpful if they explained somewhere what changes they made to the inventory screen, but apparently Beamdog isn’t into that sort of thing...

The generalized IWD-style “evasion” function, which is used by several psionic abilities, needs to be updated. I’ve got a working version locally, just need to find the time to clean it up and upload it.

Iiiinteresting. That narrows things down in the other direction - unfortunately. The next obvious way to narrow it down further would be to try 1) the sphere system but no new kits at all vs. 2) no sphere system, but all the single-class kits. It could conceivably be something about the new spells; or something about the way the kits are coded. (Maybe the fl#add_kit_ee function needs to be updated for 2.6?)

Incidentally, if anyone with 2.6 has time and inclination, the first obvious thing to check is whether the inventory bug happens 1) when the item usability component is installed, and 2) when the item usability component is not installed. That’s an obvious way to narrow down the issue, and give players a way to use 90% of the mod while waiting for a fix.

In my experience the best way to do this is with 326, not 318. Make a subspell for each effect, (each percent chance) and in the main spell, have a separate 326 effect for each INT score, pointing to the relevant subspell. (A range of INT scores might lead to the same subspell, but still give each score its own 326 effect. This greatly simplifies what you need to add to SPLPROT.2da: a single line for [ INT = x ].

Install HLAs on a class-by-class basis, and skip the thief HLAs. Install thief HLAs from Rogue Rebalancing instead. This sort of thing is very much the kind of reason I made this 4th version of the mod. Alternatively, you could go into the mod's weidu script and excise the stuff relating to Use Any Item... but I don't recommend that unless it's something you are already familiar with. Just use the RR thief HLAs instead of these. In fact I tend to think of it a different way - RR is my default option. Instead of thinking "Refinements for HLAs, but use RR for thieves in order to preserve UAI," the way I consider it is: "RR for thief HLAs, and only add Refinements' thief HLAs if you want to get rid of UAI." You could make a new spell, a permanent passive version, in Near Infinity or DLTCEP, and give it the same filename and then drop it into /override. But, again, this is not something the average person is adept at. I personally agree, but that HLA was the creation of a different modder and I won't eliminate their work. This mod is really beyond the point of adding new features... there are plenty of new mods being made, this sort of thing is best left for a new project. Not in a satisfactory way - i.e. you could give bonuses against this or that creature type(s), but it would not show up on the record sheet the way the vanilla favored enemy does. The vanilla favored enemy mechanic is very hard-coded, and not very amenable to modding. Best thing to do IMHO is to rip it out completely and re-create it in a more modular fashion. (Which, incidentally, is what one of my other mods does.)

You're not being clear enough. In "emptying their repertoire and giving them spells one-by-one through special events," then yes, you do want to take away/change their spell progression -- their known spell progression. That has nothing to with their spellcasting progression, which is governed by MXSPLSHM.2da. SPLSHMKN.2da governs how many spells they can choose through the spell-picking UI, for each spell level, and when the spell-picking UI is invoked. You can leave that in place and give them select bonus spell on top of that (modifying the progression as desired); or you can remove the spell-picking UI altogether and give them select spells via your new method, whatever it is. From what you wrote, I understood you to desire the latter: This is how to do that.

At any rate this is still 2E: neither paladins nor rangers have a “spellcasting stat.” With this mod they both can cast the same number of spells; and which spells they get access to is dependent on their spheres, not the class. They both represent warriors with some access to divine magic; the only difference is in their kit abilities, their sphere access, and that some can use stealth while some can turn undead.

Magic Resistance is a % chance that any magical effect, of any sort, will simply fail. (It is a stupid mechanic, and wildly overused in these games considering the Dungeon Master’s Guide literally says “don’t use this too much!”) Magic damage resistance is a reduction in the amount of damage taken from “magic damage” sources, e.g. Magic Missile. Sarevok has the former, not the latter.

This shouldn’t be necessary - the actual wizard spell is the same, only the effects are different. So a script does not need to change to invoke the spell; you only might want to alter the triggers. (Since it will do nothing against Blur and Mirror Image.) This is generally how I do spell tweaks: when my readme says something like “Mantle is replaced by Iron Skin,” it is really the same spell - WIZARD_MANTLE.” It’s just that the effects and description have been modified. Where spells change levels, as noted above for Symbol Fear et al., they get a new RES and ids name. In such cases any HaveSpell and similar triggers will need to be altered. Might want to look at TnB’s ‘Level 1 Cantrips’ component too, since it moves a couple 1st-level spells to 2nd level.