FredSRichardson

Yeah, basically I copied stratagems-34.3.exe to the correct directory for BGEE (Beamdog Library\00766) and ran it assuming the default install directory would be the same directory I was running the installer in. So I didn't check carefully or I would have realized I was installing in the BG2 install directory (Beamdog Library\00783) and of course the code was running correctly for BG2. I was also getting really confused between these numbered directories as to "what is what", but anyway - this is definitely on me for not checking carefully where things were going.

ID10T ERROR: please disregard the above post. I was confusing myself attempting to operate a screw driver while holding the wrong end. Or the equivalent of that. Turns out that installing into the right folder makes a huge difference...

I'm having some trouble installing SCS v34.3 on my BeamDog BGEE install (v2.6.6.0). The game location is like this: c:/Users/%USER%/Beamdog Library/00783/ Apparently the WeiDU version is "24700" The problem is that it appears that the GAME_IS function does not return TRUE for bgee. I noticed this because the following module was skipped over: SKIPPING: [Replace many +1 magic weapons with nonmagical "fine" ones -> Fine weapons are immune to the iron crisis] Skipping this component as it only applies to BG1 The code that generates this message is in the following code block in setup-strategems.tp2 (in the "More realistic wolves/dogs" section): REQUIRE_PREDICATE GAME_IS ~bgt tutu tutu_totsc bgee eet~ @16001 Basically none of the strings in the set matches my install so the component is skipped over. This seems like a WeiDU issue - has anyone seen this before?

Hello everyone who reads this post! It has been a really long time since I last posted here. I mainly wanted to drop in and say "hi". I think it would be cool if someone (*cough* Beamdog) picked up the IWD2 engine and did something with it but I understand the reluctance. The IWD2 engine really is the black sheep, red-headed step child and odd man out of the IE engine family prior to NWN. Converting prior games to IWD2 is not easy or natural - the only real choice is creating new content which might be a hard sell.. Meanwhile DOS1&2 really satisfied my need for a modern party based strategic cRPG and I have really high hopes for BG3 - has anyone played that yet?

Hey Cewander, only four years late, but I have to thank you for trying the mod out! Maybe some day I'll have time to look at this stuff again...

Sorry to be away for so long. I see a post from this year which makes me both happy and sad! Sad because I don't think I can ever realistically promise to finish this mod. My conclusion long ago was that a completely automatic conversion of IWD1 content to the IWD2 engine is impossible. The rule set is just too different to the point where even the game dynamics are different. Enemy AI has to be re-crafted to use new spells and so on. I think where I really got bogged down was when I was trying to re-create the first enemy mage you run into in the tombs, and I couldn't figure out how to do a good job of it. Anyway, hope is not lost, but it's very well camouflaged -Fred

Great feedback Raffin, thanks! I need to get back into modding this stuff. I'm running Vista-64 so it will be interesting to see how all this works. I pretty much left off work on this right after you enter the last tomb at the end of the Vale (Cresselack?). Things will get impossible when you get there.

Hi Cewander, You want to edit the file: IWD1Tutu/iw12/configuration and change the source and/or target directories to whatever you used for installing the games: ~source~ [ ~C:\Program Files\Black Isle\Icewind Dale~ ] ~target~ [ ~C:\Program Files\Black Isle\IWD1tutu~ ]

Yikes! I've not seen this. What do you have installed? I think I have everything up to and including "Tales of the Lure master" on mine.

Yes, you bring up a good point. I was going to try and stick to 3E spells as per IWD2, but contact other plane is a little different. I forget how that one works into the plot, but doesn't it give you some useful information? I'll look into it, it's probably a good idea to keep it as a spell or make some special scrolls.

Well, I'm amazed you went that far. I gave up at Myrkul and stopped there, but I know this is where the conversion breaks down. I'm going to see if I can do something a bit more reasonable with the autoconverter. Otherwise I have to do everything by hand. Quest experience will go up, and though tough guys will give a lot more. I wish I had the lesser shadows cursing on hit, this doesn't seem to happen. Also, the weights should petrify and the ghouls should do something (disease?). I'll look into it. It might be the listen skill that gives the monsters more awareness. I'm not sure skeletons should hear much. They can certainly see. I didn't notice any "help me" scripting (IWD2 has this all over the place). I think lore is still there, but I'll check and make sure. Some items are still being autoconverted which can produce odd results. It could also be that lore is used against the skill check (arcane something).

I'm working on the XP balancing. It's very easy to overdo it. It's also kind of odd to get a lot of XP from killing skeletons. The IWD2 approach was to send horde after horde of low levels things for you to kill and do most of the XP pumping through quest rewards. At least that's what it seems like. I have to choices: pump up the XP reward for quests or pump up the per creature XP (but keep the rest spawns low XP to avoid easy exploiting). I have to do one or the other, or maybe a little of both. The other odd thing I'm noticing is that the monsters in IWD2 seem to have a longer range of awareness. I'm not sure if this is because "random walk" is letting them walk further or because they can see the PC's from further away. I just noticed that I get swarmed from time to time in places I don't expect to.

Okay, I just thought I'd ask

Well, right now I'm a one man team. Progress will be slow I'm afraid. I unfortunately can't do automatic conversions the way BG1tutu can. Now, perhaps your interested in helping on the development end? I can give you some tips on how to tweak things if you want to try them. The problem I have is that I've played through the first part of IWD1 too many times, and it's just painful to do it again. I'm hoping I'll be able to tweak the experience levels and get it right for one last time through. Kresselak's Tomb is where the work is needed now.

I'm playing through IWD2 now to remind myself what the level progression is like. It's not too hard to install IWD1tutu in a seperate directory, though it takes a lot of disk space (I think I can see a way around this), still, if you want two installs let me know and I'll give you the details.

Oh, well that explains your opinion about difficulty: I thought it was kinda easy as well. A lot less goblins at the Kuldahar pass, for instance. Could be because I hadn't reached for level 2 just yet back then. I just started an IWD1 game so I can make some comparisons. I think my party reached level 2 at about the same time as IWD1tutu or maybe slightly sooner. The rogue/bard types hit level 3 some time in the pass, and the cleric hit level 3 in Kuldahar, so things are definitely slower for IWD1tutu after that (I was at level 2 for most of the Vale I think). It'll be a lot of work, sure: Your work is still far from what BG1Tutu was, but I'm confident this will have changed in the end. BG1Tutu is a different story. More people are working on it (naturally this mod doesn't gain as much interest) and the translation is a lot more direct. Converting a 2E system to a 3E system has turned out to be a bear of a job. That being said, I'll have to take a look at BG1tutu to see how they kept the original install (I've found that I have to modify some files that have a global effect on the game). Well, I reckon that if you could change the colour scheme to fit somewhat the original, then I'd be fairly satisfied. I always hated the silvery-greenish outlook of IWD2, while IWD1's brown fit in just about perfectly. I like the idea. This sounds like something that could be done in photo shop. I'll look into it, but it may have to come later. You're welcome. I'll be able to post some more as soon as you can fix Arundel, but until that, I'm pretty much stuck here. Edit: Although I guess I could Dalekeep myself about million more xp and go exploring HoW. Might do that later. I'm afraid this is where you'll be greatly dissappointed. I don't think I've converted any of the later areas of the game yet (and if I did, then they're prone to the same problems you've seen in the main Vale dungeon). Each chapter takes a fair amount of work, so I'm going to try and focus on that next. Make sure you have a save game at the top of the Vale, so that you can pick up where you left off for the next beta release. I better start working on it

Excellent! Thanks for playing through so far! I haven't yet gotten through the vale. I think the early creatures are a bit easy. The tough monsters you're hitting in the main Vale dungeon are ones converted the "old" way. That is, they're way too tough (they use Weimer's heuristics for conversion which leads to some seriously over powered monsters). I finally decided that you couldn't do an automatic conversion in any satisfying way which means a fair amount of custom work needs doing. I'll see what I can do about the sluggish xp growth. I agree that something has to be done. At one point I went through IWD1 and tracked the level progress at each stage so I could try to match that. The party should all be at level 1 (for 6 members) by the time they're finished up in Easthaven and are ready to go to Kuldahar. Making IWD2 still playable is going to need some work, and I think I'll put this off until everything else is done. For now, you can do two installs (if you have the spare disk space). I'll have to see how BG1tutu did this. I agree with you completely about the opening splash and music. I'd love to get rid of that (never liked it). Which parts do you think are too IWD2-ish in general? Do you mean the style of the buttons in the user interface? Any suggestions you have for this I think would be great. It wouldn't be too hard to get some of this over. Most of the major things can't change (like you'll still have feat buttons and the weapon swapping will work the same way, these are the things I actually like). Thanks again for the excellent feedback! I'll try to get my party further along into the vale's dungeon. -Fred

Okay, I'm playing through again. So far I think Old Jed was the only problem, but it's hard to tell since I fixed the problem (this will cause an area crash for areas with CRE's that have no levels in IWD1). The game is pretty easy for a party of 6, at least for the Easthaven areas and the Kuldahar pass. My party made level 1 about half way through clearing the pass. At least things seem to work okay, tuning can come later.

I'm thinking this should really be template based, that is you could specify a template like "townperson" "level3ftr" or something which would set basics (levels, feats, classes, attributes) and then you could overload specific values. The other thing would be to leave something subject to automatic conversion from the original IWD1 resource (scripts etc). I'll have to look into this some more.

Sorry about the confusion. I couldn't figure out how to get the installer to change permissions automagically. I'll have to see about doing that. I figured out the problem with "Old Jed". Turns out he had no levels in anything. I'll have to figure out why the code is letting that happen.

Well damn.... I can't seem to get into see "Old Jeb". I get an error in CRuleTables.cpp (i.e. entering area AR0014.ARE crashes the game). The ARE and CRE check out okay in DLTCEP. I could try deleting things from the area until it works and maybe debug that way. Anyone have any ideas?

I'm not sure what you mean. I haven't figured out how to change the startup screen, though I think something could be done with a little photoshop magic and some file converting. All the transition screens are from iwd1, so that helps a little bit with the "immersion". The music is (or should be) from iwd1 as well. I think I had all this working. I can't remember whats in those bik files (the big download), but I think those are the movies. So, in short, there are some things which look iwd2-ish: the initial game load screen and the load icon which fills up between transitions. Those wouldn't be too hard to change I don't think (but I'm not sure). The general game mechanics (the interface and such) and the way spell type effects work and look reflects the newer engine so those aren't likely to change (and I personally don't think they should).

Ooops! Yes, user name is "iw12" (without the quotes). I'll update the page now. I highly recommend going back to a vanilla iwd1-HoW-ToTLM and iwd2 installs with the patches. At some point I'll see if I can make a version that works with iwd1 but without HoW and ToTLM. I doubt the code can handle mods very well.

Uploaded the latest thing I have bumping the version from beta1.01 to beta1.05 Updated the "Open Beta" page with a bit more info on how to install.

Here's an open thread for anything I can think of about the current beta. Please post any issues (and if possible solutions) you find. I'll try to respond to what I can. I'm hoping I can upload something more recent, I'm not sure what made it into the last beta.