bob_veng

There's a lot potential here. Could you upscale all the vanilla ToB portraits?

20 hours ago, ahungry said:

Is there a good existing package (a portrait pack, or maybe portraits-portraits-everywhere?) that would want to incorporate these?  ...

I'm a (very secondary) co-author of PPE.  I'll think about this, and if this technique can be conveniently used to create more portraits, which, in fact, could be used for NPCs

edit: I was thinking about BG style AI-generated portraits for a while actually. My main issue is that the style they are generated in is generic Deviant-Art-mostly-fantasy-character-art, which is often "branded" as resembling / being inspired by baldur's gate portraits or is mentioned in some context in conjunction with the term "Baldur's Gate", but the style is not really the one of BG

On 8/21/2022 at 6:50 AM, Pecca said:

What exactly means "downscale them to make sure it falls under fair use" ?

I think it just means "make the image rather small"

Shortening and paraphrasing is needed anyways because descriptions in the books are long and may not match all that well with how creatures are implemented.

On 7/31/2022 at 5:59 PM, CamDawg said:

... For now I've kept the disabled stairs, pending discussion.

I agree that this is the best solution; it could be made even better by adding some kind of text somewhere informing the player that they can't leave (during the fight)

The reason why  I was interested in K4thos' IWD-in-EET is because i had a feeling that it would improve IWD, not so much BG (it wouldn't hurt it either; I think ToTLM-in-BG2EE mostly demonstrates this), because you could play it with the well-developed and familiar BG NPCs; dialogues were written for them too. Basically, it would address what IWD lacks the most—real party members. (I am aware of mods that add NPCS to IWD)

about four bad options, subtledoctor mentions: K4thos seemed to have opted for #5 -- removing references from books, dialogues, item descriptions (there aren't that many) that strongly suggest a timeline discrepancy. basically a "white lie"-style general redaction of the lore.

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

Elemental princes are never summoned by your enemies in the unmodded game (not least because you might accidentally end up with two of them). So the designers can't have intended that you get experience for fighting enemy-summoned princes. The only function that their XP serves is that the player can summon them specifically to kill them. (In BG2EE, they won't even fight back.) It seems really unlikely that that's intentional, especially since the elemental princes are obviously clones of actually-fightable princes and it's extremely easy to see how the XP could have been left in place.

yes, after thinking a bit more, I agree that the summoned princes should never provide xp

in a hypothetical version of the game where enemies could summon an elemental prince (... and while summoned the same prince could not be summoned by anyone else), i would not mind it providing xp, unlike basically all the other summons, and would not see it as a discrepancy, but that's an imaginary scenario

seeing how these are unique, named, creatures, i think that an elemental prince being summoned is something that qualitatively changes the encounter. what if a mage summoned another, named, mage? 

the polygon count and general "graphical fidelity" of NWN models isn't high enough for larger-than-average sprites. The blockiness actually translates even to sprites. 

On 6/20/2021 at 9:15 AM, K4thos said:

fair. I'm planning to release IWD:EE portion of the mod on Github soon (on the fly conversion code). Should have done it years ago considering how things went. And I'm perfectly ok with anyone working on it.

The question now is if it makes sense for me to update this codebase to IWD:EE patch 2.6, open a public beta test and actively maintain it, considering alternative in @tipun's work is already available, being tested and actively maintained for quite some time. It would be 2 mods doing pretty much the same thing, competing for the same audience, so not necessarily a time well spent (I could invest it on remaining work needed for IWD2 side of things instead), especially if tipun would be interested in integrating content prepared for IWD-in-EET by various contributors in his mod (at least @AWizardDidIt writing, if he is ok with it).

Personally at the moment I'm leaning more to taking this opportunity to scale down IWD-in-EET mod content significantly, but the other option is also open. Let's wait for some feedback from community and see what are tipun's plans for his IWD mods in the first place (should have contact him via PM first, now that I'm thinking about it)

this take is also fair. With how things went development wise, having whole dedicated subforum for it seems excessive. Archiving it and moving further discussion to single topic within EET section may be a good idea going forward.

You should release the IWD:EE portion just because of @AWizardDidIt's banters. 

I have a suggestion: very high WIS should provide a bonus to lore gains (enabling you to gain more than 1 point at a time, whenever that is possible, i.e. enabling you to gain lore at the current default rate), and very low INT should disable most lore gains, especially those from books.

edit: and CHA should affect the Party Members Provide Lore Bonuses component, particularly with very low CHA making it impossible to gain lore this way. 

3 hours ago, LichDiet said:

I'm coming in waay late here, as I just joined G3 (but have been lurking for years).  And I kind of picked up that something sour occurred with Roxanne and several others in the SHS/G3 modding community in the past.  I find it sad that she feels ostracized/unwanted over here.  On her site, there is a fairly active bunch of participants, who are mostly would-be noob modders and plain 'ol players looking for help.  I can attest that Roxanne is rapidly responsive to all calls for help, and freely offers assistance to those who ask.  Usually within hours of asking.  

She has single-handedly done quite a lot of work bringing back old mods and helping to make them compatible with EE versions.  And she keeps the BWS function rolling like a champ, so multiple mod install conflicts are taken into account, and the weidu install order is correct.

I'll just say that she is a a great ambassador for the hobby, and honestly, she does not bad mouth or bring anything up about the disagreements she had with SHS/G3 on her site.  It is a crying shame that she feels kicked out of the G3 forums, because she actually cares about the game.  

I'll leave it there.  It is just a game folks.  Don't know anything about alts or such, and kind of don't care.  No need to erect fences, in my opinion. 

She's done bad things and her not "bad mouthing" someone doesn't make those bad things go away.

Imagine stealing an apple. (Person A)

You are caught and people express criticism over this. (People B)

Person C passes by and comments how you didn't bad mouth People B.

Have you thereby been successfully defended by Person C? Your stealing an apple suddenly doesn't matter?

Person C also says how he/she doesn't know anything about an apple being stolen. 

So?

Does that make People B forget about the apple? 

I'll leave it there, you don't have to answer. There are good ways to defend someone and bad ways, and your post is in the latter category. 

On 3/5/2021 at 4:35 AM, subtledoctor said:

At this point I’d be much more interested in discrete adventures - add the IWD main quest and HoW to the BG games in precisely the same way Argent77 added TotLM. Put Hjolder in the Druid Grove after Faldorn’s defeat, and let him Wnd Walk me to the North! IWD, HoW, and TotLM can all be separate adventures, no need for them to hang together as one massive campaign. (For that, we can already just play IWDEE.) 

Alas, I’ve glanced at the TotLM-in-BG2EE code, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. 

As for this project, it kind of seems like it got lost in the attempt to convert to a 3E ruleset for IWD2 inclusion. And even there, we also have the separate “IWD2EE” project, so this again seems redundant...

how is this  different from how IWD-in-EET is already intended to be?

the idea for a mega-campaign in the north was scrapped at the latest after SoD was released and IWD1 main campaign was given a lower priority to IWD2, which can be easily integrated in terms of continuity and timeline, while IWD1 can't be integrated in a no-tamper fashion either with SoD or with IWD2 itself.

is this about the color of a spell icon? i can do it but no ETA

you've already defined a case where relatively low scores matter - inability to cast higher level spells, and concluded that having high scores is better

so i don't really understand the question

is the question: how much does it matter that something is better?

imoen won't be dual-classed upon returning to the first coalition camp, right?

1 hour ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

So what that leaves some that can clearly be justified for use, such are Vocalize, Protection from Evil/Good/Lawful/Chaotic..../Petrification, Farsight, Stoneskin, Oracle, Shadow Door, Protection from Fire/Cold/Electricity/Acid. Mirror Images could be justified, but that's about it.

what does the lich think about this? "wow, there really are some incredibly useful lesser arcane spells out there! indeed, some of them i can cast, but some others i can't... meh, i'll just leave it at that and not bother relearning the rest. after all, why would a lich like me want to round out his spellcasting arsenal and attain the highest degree of arcane tactical prowess, when he has the comforting memory of his former living self being able to cast pretty much all of these fundamental spells. it's not like i'm going to get into actual trouble where i'd have to use them."

Bam Batcher v 2.4. the problem is with several of the indexed color pngs (converted to bmps) where something i did reordered the colors in the table. i would look the bams in BAMWorkshop but simply missed the ones with the issue

@subtledoctor you have a thumbs up from me

also, sorry everyone about the technical faults, and not really reacting. i had to do it all in as short a window of time as possible. 

i'll make a new bam. is there a glitch with any of the other icons?

@Arthas

if best practices in weidu coding are not used by modders, mods will still work and look generally the same to players, but they will lack in some technical aspects (reliability, compatibility, maintainability, ease of installation etc...). these best practices, which are changing and crystallizing over time, are only intelligible to people who have started learning weidu. 

the two files are identical.

i already answered the question in your duplicate thread, so now i will presume that you know how IWD-in-EET story is handled.

i would have liked to turn this around a little and ask you "how you a similar method could be used here", but frankly, seeing how you insist on seeking simple anwers to very difficult questions, i don't believe you're prepared to give us a working theory of BG-PST integration. 

your thread is a duplicate of: 

the official timeline is IWD1 1281, IWD2 1312, BG1 1368... there's no 1000 years gap. IWD starting dates are ignored and not referenced to in any of the in-game texts. 

if you have further questions it's probably best to ask them there.

what has been real problem was integrating Bhaalspawn saga with both IWD1 and IWD2 at the same time. having one or another in EET is not a problem, except a little bit for IWD1 (solvable with a mod after the IWD-in-EET comes out)

PS:T is totally different. as you say it isn't known for much of anything except its writing. Just exploring with all the content extricated from the actual story wouldn't work that well for several reasons: 1) many side quests are tied to TNO's past and would need extensive analysis and changes, 2) traveling between planes in PS:T is tied to the main quest (requiring new content just to enable traveling to Baator for example), 3) some areas don't even have anything to offer apart from serving the main quest