subtledoctor

Is this possible? I vaguely recall that if you create a Simulacrum of someone, the simulacrum has no script name by which to refer to it. I would like to create an NPC that. matches the PC - race, sex, hair/skin color… well hat’s really it. The same sprite, basically. I guess this is done in Durlag’s Tower, and in Spellhold, and in the ToB spirit temple… does anyone know if I can generate such a clone without showing the cloning process, and have it appear in a different area? Or maybe better to cheat? Just have a bunch of different .CRE files, and have the area script check Charname’s race and sex, and spawn the most appropriate NPC? What about the BG2 dream sequence where dream-Charnane blasts the vampire/lich/pit fiend? Does anyone know if that sprite matches Charname’s? I don’t have a computer handy to look at those cut scenes, but if anyone has advice, it is appreciated.

You are assuming that stuff in UI.menu can be responsive to detectable conditions in-game. Which... well it may or may not be the case, I have no idea. But I am not optimistic. We went 20 years with a strong wall between things that can be done via spells and things that can be done via script. Now, the UI stuff is a third category, and I am not confident it can be integrated with the first two any more than they can be integrated with each other. But scripts can detect various aspects of the game's state, and respond with scripted events or spells. So if the combat triggers work, it would be fairly simple to add a block to BALDUR.BCS applying a spell disabling the inventory button for PLAYER1-6 whenever they are in combat. Spells can, to a lesser degree, detect game conditions. (One way to do this would be a repeating spell on all party members that disables the inventory button for six seconds, every six seconds; and have a second repeating spell that blocks the first one, but has the "non-combat only" flag. This should be effective, but applying the spell to all party members would be way more fiddly.) The only attempt I've seen at detecting game conditions and responding with a UI effect is yours - and if failed. So unless I hear otherwise, my assumption is this is simply cannot work.

Basically what I am (clumsily) describing. I already have (in fact, have already started working on) what I think is an interesting idea for the BG1-BG2 transition…

That has the unfortunate consequence of being punished by muscle memory, though. And, more importantly, is it any more doable than disabling the button? Could the inventory button itself be reconfigured? EDIT - oh dude, I never realized there is this: (Emphasis mine.) Could you just script in BALDUR.BCS a spell to be cast upon entering/exiting combat, which would use op144 to disable/reenable the inventory button? EE-only of course, but that's okay. I love this idea. If DavidW decides not to, I will take a stab at it.

Possible, but that would mean taking bare maps and completely building up the content in them. By cannibalizing ToB a lot of the work is already done. Just need to change the story that winds its way through those maps. At any rate, it is possible. The basic outline of the plot I have in my head would still work with different maps and characters. Though, in that case it would be even more useful to use Watcher's Keep for it. After all it never made that much sense for WK to be on a Prime planet full of bumbling villagers and adventurers. It makes much more sense for it to be a planar stronghold. Latest idea: Sarevok was an extremely intelligent expert on Bhaal and Alaundo, and he thought the way to quicken the divine essence in his blood was by starting a war. After all Bhaal was the god of Death and people are dying, and even being murdered, like every day everywhere on the planet. To make a noticeable difference would require death on a much more massive scale, and some kind of ritual and special location - like Sarevok had set up in the old Temple of Bhaal in the Undercity. I've been thinking about SoD lately, and how imperfect it is - not as bad as ToB, but still not great. Since both SoD and ToB involve war... why not smush them together and make a single larger story about that? Instead of a weird Bhaalspawn murder round robin, have several powerful Bhaalspawn trying to do what Sarevok could not: trigger a massive war and ascend that way. That, at least, gives due deference to the plot of BG1 and Sarevok's. And all the pieces are already there: maps, factions, NPCs, armies. In an EET mod you could even go back to the BG1 areas, to the campaign could stretch from Amkethran in the South all the way to Baldur's Gate - and, of course, Boareskyr Bridge. You could have Yaga Shura's army marching north after demolishing Saradush, Balthazar's monks and mercenaries trying to stop him, and Caelar Argent with an army from the north deciding to simply exterminate all Bhaalspawn to remove the prophecy's threat. A combined force of Suldenesselar elves, Amnian soldier and Cowled Wizards, and Flaming Fist mercenaries could be recruited by Charname to protect the Sword Coast (or, if evil, act as your army so you can ascend). Mel would be a player manipulating things behind the scenes, with a trail of breadcrumbs that only Charname knows about. Ostensibly to bring Bhaal back, but really to take power for herself. You would always be one step behind, and at the end she would in fact ascend to the Throne - leading to a desperate rush through Dragonspear Castle to Avernus, and from there through a gate to Gehenna (protected by Belhifet), and then, if installed, through The Crucible to the Throne of Bhaal, where you can finally challenge her. Would be a metric ton of work, though. Would need all-new versions of Nashkel and Beregost (maybe Baldur's Gate would just close the gates again, and no let you in - you could meet up with the Flaming Fist forces outside the city), in addition to tearing apart and rewriting most of both SoD and ToB.

Okay it seems like the problem may be here: ...seems like maybe HasDLC("SOD") is returning false in my game? Quite weird. Could it be a bug in my hacked-up version of EET? My only hacking was to merge parts EET v12 that work with BG2EE v2.5 with parts of EET v13. Was this a bug in EET v12? Why did this work in my last install? Maybe something to do with Transitions taking over the process? Hm. Well, I'm going to simply delete the 2nd half of that script, and change the first trigger from HasDLC("SOD") to True(), and see if it starts SoD for me. I don't need that trigger, I know I have SoD in my game. EDIT - that did the trick. I wonder why that happens. And, where is that script even from? I think it is BDSODTRN.BCS… which sounds like a vanilla BGEE script. Maybe EET or EBG1 needs to handle it differently… or maybe this is just something idiosyncratic about my install.

This is the same thing that happened in my game with phantom Illasera from Black Hearts. I don’t have Transitions installed so the source is different. But it sounds like the same kind of dialogue error.

Uh-oh, bit of a problem. I finished Korlasz’ crypt, then went back to the palace and talked to Belt, told him I needed to rest for a bit. Sirene, Brandock, Neera & Imoen all told me they were going to go off on their own. Okay, here we go, time to start SoD! Right? Right? Well, not exactly? The screen faded to black but instead of waking up to the attack on Imoen, the game just kicked me out to the main menu. I want to be like, “excuse me? This is EET! I don’t do main menus.” Sigh. This transition is so fraught every time I play. What’s going to happen to my companions? What’s going to happen to my equipment? Will anything be lost? Do I need to do anything to prepare? Last year I installed both Transitions and EndlessBG1. That time it was complicated and nerve-wracking and buggy. I only installed EndlessBG1 by itself this time, hoping it would be simpler and more reliable. But perhaps not… Oh well. All the more incentive to make my own transition mod. EDIT - okay there is an auto-save and a ‘final save’ in my savegames. The sequence seems to be, I tell Belt I want to rest, the screen fades, there is an invisible area transition, then my party members say a line and leave the party, then a script is running which I presume is supposed to trigger waking up to the assassination attempt. But it doesn’t happen and I am kicked out to the menu. If I load up the autosave, I am in one of the top-floor palace bedrooms and everyone is still in my party. Whatever script has them leave seems to be interrupted when loaded this way, because everyone just stands there doing nothing. I know there are more than one version of these areas; I don’t know which one this is. Need to dig into the scripts and dialogues to figure out what is breaking.

Playing the end of Black Hearts, then The Undercity/Sarevok, then Korlasz’ crypt, feels a bit off. Black Hearts does such a great job adding some meat to the end-game right before Sarevok, it makes me want to move Korlasz’ crypt to the same place in the sequence. It’s a bit weird that I give Sarevok’s sword to Belt, and then I am searching for that sword not five minutes later. And the plot point of “clear out the remaining former followers of Sarevok” is weak. And, finally, the way you save the Dukes even though you are a wanted murderer, and Belt immediately forgives you and teleports you to the thieves’ guild, has always felt unsatisfying. And suddenly I see a way to improve the sequence: have Belt say he doesn’t know where Sarevok went, and you’ll need to ask around a bit to find out. And after a rest a messenger can tell you they have located one of his followers, and send you after Korlasz. And only after defeating Korlasz do you get Sarevok’s location, and maybe a magical ward to open the way into the (otherwise inaccessible) maze and Undercity. Would just need a few altered dialogues and global variables. Then back to the palace, and then the “Champion of Baldur’s Gate” sequence, and then the transition to SoD. I also had thoughts about whether and to what extent the dukes should really trust you, keeping in mind that eventually you will need to leave the city in disgrace. And maybe we should keep it a bit ambiguous, even at this early stage. And then I had a devilish idea to take some threads from The Calling mod, and the Brandock mod, and Durlag’s Tower, and spin them together into a little thing. And then I started thinking about what the transition to SoD would look like in this scenario, and in my head I ended up rewriting, like, all of SoD. Because the whole “Caelar starts a war and causes untold death and misery and famine, and risks an invasion from hell, to save her favorite uncle” is in fact pretty damn weak. Maybe better to make the Crusade a bit more directly tied to Sarevok, and make it less Hephernaan’s plot and more Irenicus’ plot. And then that got me thinking about this idea - you could basically slash SoD in half, make it a shorter transition to SoA, and use whatever was cut out of it in a mod to improve ToB - to bring the dumb ToB storyline a bit more in line with the Sarevok story from BG1. Maybe in fact make it one big story instead of two disjointed ones, and bring SoD into it as well. And now my brain is spinning. In short I have two small ideas for mods, and two or three rather huge ideas. The big ones still need fleshing out, and maybe never will be. But maybe the small ones will materialize.

That's not MR, that's 80% plot armor...

That link actually says the drow should have no MR at all if they have been out of the Underdark for more than 8 weeks… (Also a 20% XP penalty and limited to level 12. Just to nitpick a bit.)

Using different poisons that you can unlock in any order is the perfect application for a ‘ki pool’ group of innate abilities.

I spoke too soon! Had a scripting bug in the last interaction with Illasera. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll just say that a green circle turned blue, and I did not get a final dialogue for the mod. So that’s a third bug. But to be honest I can’t say for sure it wasn’t due to some mod interaction in my fairly aggressive install. And honestly I was perfectly satisfied with the mod having been finished at that point. So, still A+, best mod in the list. Those three bugs are totally fixable, I could probably even do it myself with a spare hour or two. Yeah, well, I didn’t want to use this space to point fingers, but yeah, Lava’s mods are among the worst offenders in this area. They are very creative, but their sense of how to balance loot is quite bad. There is one BG2 mod where after leaving the tutorial dungeon, without a single combat, you can go through a couple dialogues and get a dagger +4. Like, the excitement of finding a good magical dagger is basically removed from 80% of the game. I know it’s not intended this way, but it actually sucks fun out of the game. Like I say, I am at the point of making my own personal mod to tone down Lava’s items. But I don’t want to focus too much on Lava. I’m pretty sure some of my other OP loot comes from other mods. I have, like, half a dozen +APR items. I hate it. I firmly believe all +APR items should be purged from the game. Including Belm.

Langchek.tra only needs a single string, @10, which should be the word “Duration” as it appears in spell descriptions in each language. I noticed it has many more strings, but those are not necessary and I think I deleted them in the latest commits.

Yes but those issues with Transitions are predominantly issues it has with EndlessBG1. Which is fair criticism! (As I said I choose to only use EBG1.) But that is different from saying “it’s buggy and should be avoided.” (By contrast, I think it is totally kosher to talk about Transitions bugs in that mod’s forum where they are relevant and can be addressed by the author.)

Just that any doofus like me can, with Weidu, get the benefit of that without even trying. Whereas, with another language I would have to intentionally set that up, and 1) hopefully I don’t forget, 2) hopefully it’s not too much extra effort, and 3) hopefully I don’t screw it up. That’s a lot of hopefully!

Finished Durlag’s - was fine. As I mentioned elsewhere, some mods really add a crap-ton of OP equipment. Between that, and my added caster flexibility of 5E spellcasting and unlimited 1st-level spells, I could do the entire dungeon without resting. Sigh. I wish it was easier to get the experience of modders’ wonderful creativity, while somehow preserving the scarcity of magical artifacts that originally helped make BG1 fun. I find it is mostly quest modders who introduce these bad items. Just an example of meddling in areas that are not where their strengths lie. Maybe I’ll make a meta-mod specifically revising the item from certain mods… (Actually, I’ve already started that, it is in my personal end-of-order “finish up the install” mod… I just haven’t published it.) I also finished Black Hearts, and it is So. Damn. Good. The work on the astral fortress is fantastic, the writing is great, the fights are very good. I love it. I think it has overtaken BST to become my single favorite BG1 mod. Normally I hate the conceit of “you are a bounty hunter/assassin, go fight things for money” but Black Hearts minimizes this to the point that I didn’t mind it. And, shockingly, I quite like the magic items added by the mod. The only issue is all the Thayans who carry droppable Rings of Protection, magical armor, and magical weapons. I would remove the rings, tone down the armor, and just make them higher-level or give them some interesting abilities. That, and fix the buggy scene with Nerys and phantom Illasera… aside from those things, I have no notes. It is damn near perfect.

My guess, without looking too deeply into the code, is that doing so would take some amount of time and effort, which Lauriel does not have to put into making such improvements.

I think you are a bit unkind to Transitions, because it competes with your mod. Every mod has bugs. Every one. Have you seen the SCS boards? I don’t think a reasonably bug-free version of SCS has existed since v31, or maybe v28. Are you going around telling people not to use SCS? I’ve played with EBG1 and Transitions together, and my take is, the combined juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. As in many other instances, you have two mods affecting the same parts of the game; players should probably just choose one or the other. For me, I have chosen to install EBG1 and not Transitions. But I won’t trash-talk Transitions. Lauriel has some goods ideas there, it’s a shame they aren’t around that much to continue to fix and perfect the mod.

AL|EN you are being very coy here… the thread is already on the third page.

I believe it is an average of your classes. So, yes, dual-classed characters get screwed, especially if you do a very early dual. (Doesn’t particularly bother me, since dual classing is so brokenly powerful.)

For whatever it’s worth, I just fought Aec in my current game. I have Spell Revisions, SCS General AI but not Smarter Fiends, and aTweaks PnP Fiends but not Fiendish Gating… and Aec went down just fin. SR may have affected the combination, though.

Against all logic and caution, I moved the .BIF files that are in the /data folder, out of the /data folder. And now it works fine. Weird. Dunno if the game will start this way, but that's not the point of it anyway...

Anyone know if NI works with Planescape Torment? I have it installed from GOG games, and the file setup looks pretty weird. Lots of .BIF files are no in the /data folder, but out in the main game folder. The upshot is, NI cannot load any of the .WED or .TIS or even .BMP files, which means I cannot view the .ARE files. (I own PSTEE on iOS but I guess I was too late to download the .ipa file so I cannot access the files. And I'm not about to pay full price for another copy of the game that I already own twice, just to inspect the files. )

But it’s not just area graphics that are taken from other games. The entire NWN story, and characters, and .dialogues, are protected IP. IMHO you are either in the “some mods just shouldn’t exist” club, or you are okay with modders doing what they can with what resources they can, as long as no one is harmed by it. In case it is not clear, I think the “your mod shouldn’t exist” mindset is an extremely shitty attitude. Not for nothing, there are lots of tutorials for the kind of modding that I have done (and I’ve written some) but I don’t see a single tutorial on making/using area graphics. Which means a lot of potentially great writers are not equipped to make mods, or are limited to writing NPCs os something. And the flip side of the coin, modders who are equipped to make new areas end up publishing big splashy quest mods even though they… may not be the best writers. Given that area graphics, in particular, are generally considered to be the hardest and most onerous part of making mods, being overly critical of modders who scrounge what they can risks veering into a gross kind of clubby gatekeeping. tl:dr: help, don’t hinder, people making fun new stuff. Neither here nor there, but this conversation has wandered quite far afield, and should probably be split into its own thread, so that this thread can focus on issues pertaining specifically to the NWN mod.