temnix

I don't have an area to replace it with. It would be nice, but I'm not up to the task of redrawing the space occupied by the tents in a way that looks natural. All of the NPC will simply be gone (except three cows ). And the music will revert to the usual. AND if I can make the spinning wheels stop, by Gond, I shall!

When people get older, they often do like 13 year-old girl NPC very much.

How does this make any sense, in English or in French?

As a bonus part of a big abilities mod for bards (to be my last mod here), I'm making a long-overdue update for the Nashkel fair. There will be new encounters, a few quests and new music - and probably one merchant fewer, the one that impossibly sells duplicates of the unique items in the game. What I would also like to do is limit the fair in time. It should not go on forever, although the autumn in the game does. I'm thinking that a few tendays is a reasonable duration for that carnival, and that it has been going on for some time down in Nashkel when Charname set out from Candlekeep. I can set a timer in the carnival's area script that will apply a custom spell to make everyone at the fair disappear when it runs out. Even easier is putting that spell OnCreation() for the main area and all of the tents, where the creature-removing effect will use the Permanent after duration timing. One second is 15 ticks, I would just need to decide what duration of a day to take: 7200 seconds or 8640. There are two parallel systems of measurements in the games, you know. If a round is 6 seconds long, then, multiplying by turns and hours, 24 hours is 8640 seconds, but actually the engine uses 5-second rounds and 7200-second long intervals (well, 1/3 of those) when the Rest button is used, and that's hard-coded. Well, I can write in the readme which system I choose there, but either way I would like to let players know for how long the carnival will still be on. For that I can make additions to Nashkel's rumor table so that it displays a text that says that the carnival will go on for five more days, or ten more days, or just one day. The party can drink it up at the inn or the Belching Dragon when they come and find out. My question here is how to do these timers work when used in triggers? Do their values use ticks or seconds? What should I write in "Global("FAIR-LASTS","GLOBAL",...)" before the rumors?

Except that if you also need to send along a non-party NPC and there is no other PC left behind, the area will be disabled and the NPC will stay behind.

Does anybody know why I get two copies of my EXTEND_BOTTOM dialogue insertions? Does anybody know why I get two copies of my EXTEND_BOTTOM dialogue insertions?

Hey, @Ardanis! You might want to know that the trick with using minions to transport characters individually works well enough, only the game crashes if the dispatch is between different master areas. Because the minion is not global, I think, and can't complete the operation when the PC flies out of the area.

I don't know where you found that, you are probably imagining it, but could it be that I overwrote those NPC's dialogues and replaced them with my own ideas of how things should proceed? For instance, in one version they might leave the area, in another they might give a quest. Those renditions are not compatible. You can't watch two movies at once, you have to choose. But, as I said, that's probably something you made up. And @Almateria, this is a board for conversation unrelated to modding, which is what's unrolling here. If you are calling for this thread to be closed because someone is voicing opinions you don't like, then I'll have to be really rude and say it's your mouth that needs to close. Edit: and I want to add this. If the Mad Max line of movies or the Fallouts make some statements about the nature of people, the sexes, their roles and places - which I don't really believe, but contemporary mores are always reflected - and that causes controversy, that is a good thing. It is a sign of relevance and vitality. Baldur's Gate never raises any issues. It is soft like candy for babies. Yes, despite talk about women being counterparts, almost all speaking NPC in the first game are male, the women mostly play housewife roles, except for the occasional sorceress or thief, the "Amazons," and that represents the ideas about gender roles current in the 1990s. But nothing is really made of that, because the Forgotten Realms is a PG-rated setting for teens. The "post-apocalyptic" "genre" (have to put everything in quotes) is much better rooted in a complex reality, which is why I said in the beginning that the Fallouts still ring true while the fantasy IE games show impressive artistic skills but as worlds they are a thing of the past - except Torment, always. Because there is a torment in that one!

You are not permitted to feel sad for me. Modding has been my way of self-expression, and I could have and maybe should have chosen a different one, to be sure. But I've had a million ideas in these five years, only a fraction of which made it into my mods. You are one of the people here who never thought of this business as anything more than adjusting a well-liked old game this way and that to begin with, so you can't understand. I may have gone wrong here, but you never even started.

Thanks for thinking.

@InThePinewaysNo, life is not limited to that. Those are the basics of existence without knowledge and development. Eat, procreate, that's nothing. I take a dump every day, too, but I don't include it in the content of my life - and neither was this stopover at the dentist's today where I asked them about two techniques about restoring teeth, and they didn't know about the first one, or I couldn't find it in the Russian translation on the list, and the second one was terribly expensive, as I had expected. So I've gone there, I got that information, but if the rest of my life will be filled with just that, then I will not have lived at all. On the way back I came past a trio of glorious 18 year-olds, and they weren't running through the same cynical thoughts. They were talking and laughing, and I could see in their eyes they were learning. Maybe what they were learning I had already learned, but even the swallows outside my balcony, when they are ducking and checking the wall for a nest, are doing something meaningful to them - and not lying to themselves. Their limit is simply that, to build a nest, and the limit of many humans is not that much farther out. But nobody is play-acting, nobody is trying to forget his limited nature and pretend the toys are new. They are really all doing it all around. The more complex a nature, the higher its requirements, that's all. For instance, I'll be honest: I haven't actually watched "The Fury Road." Only a teaser with a fight scene, and I saw the posters, and I read about it. And it was enough for me, because I saw it was "The Road Warrior" rehashed, which is not acceptable in any shape or form in my standards. So that one couldn't work for me - and I had objections to the messy fight cinematography, too. What I want is not to be fooled, though, or seduced. The first "Mad Max" (well, it was the second) didn't have to lie to me. It was new, it was inventive, it was sincerely felt. I was sorry for the dog who was shot there. Because death is real enough, love is, a broken leg, the expanse of the desert, the ruminations about the collapse of civilization that had gone into the visual style, all that techno junk - they were real. The heat and the space, the worry was there, the nuclear menace was in the air in Reagan/Thatcher days. And it was the same for the first "Fallouts," who didn't simply steal from "post-apocalyptic" predecessors but dug into that whole rotten 50s optimism lunch box. Those games are as true as the novels of Philip Dick. And that's why I can still relate to them. In parallel there were real and new inventions in the fantasy role-playing genre, which D&D spearheaded for a while. To the extent they are honest, they can still excite. An adventure module where the characters walk through a wood, gathering herbs on the side, and talk to a druid about a task, is timeless like simple enjoyment. But even in a fantasy adventure things don't cycle endlessly. Nobody wants to kill ogres over and again, mostly because after a while you know all there is to appreciate about ogres, their clubs, their smells, their voices - enough! It's then time to move on before sensory deprivation comes in. And with Baldur's Gate and the rest we are all way past the point when they were new to us in any degree - especially if people don't aim high to create new adventures, come up with surprising plots or mechanics. I cannot read about another red-headed scoundrel girlfriend or a dark, doomed hero. Make new magic or disappear - that's what I believe in. And no matter what people here may think about my "leaving" again and again but always staying, I will indeed do that for real soon. I gave five years of my life to modding these games.

Cutscenes and just actions that transport the party somewhere assume that all of the characters are in the same place. Even if they are off in a building somewhere, they will be pulled from there to appear at the destination. And scripts like Garrick's walk in BG1 make the whole party follow to particular spots on the ground. I don't know how a cutscene like that would work if the party members were in a different area, perhaps they are teleported first, but I would like to know how to limit these moving mechanics to party members in the same area or even a small part of an area. Writing a check for every one wouldn't help, because it's obviously not sensible to make scripts for all the combinations. And I myself have made a mod that lets the party split up and adventure in different places on the world map. If they are somehow gathered from miles away and thrown on the same landing bay, that won't be good for suspension of disbelief. This applies to transporting actions in dialogues, too. Let's say I have an encounter in a building (not a separate area, no "you must gather" to enter) that ends with all of the party members there being kicked out. Well, I can put LeaveAreaLUA actions there, but who should they include? It may be just one character who ventured inside, and then I could target LastTalkedToBy, but there may be others with him - or the full party. If I include them all just in case and they were somewhere completely different before, maybe even fighting, and now all appear before the door, that's going to be weird. The only idea I have is putting the action in the script of an invisible minion and throwing an area-of-effect spell on LastTalkedToBy, limited to PC. When the conversation ends, a minion will spring up for every party member there and transport him separately. This is going to come with a delay, though. Any other ideas?

A little extra: <GABBER> can be used outside of dialogues. It is a ready token that can take any object and will be refilled when a dialogue starts. So, for example, if you want to show a piece of text about a frightening vision that concerns a character or object, you can make a string in the script that reads something like: "A swarm of huge leering faces whips you around, and every face belongs to <GABBER>". You'll create this string with TRA reference @1 or another number, and then in the script you'll write: SetTokenObject("GABBER",LastSeenBy) DisplayString(Myself,@1) And so on. This way you can get creatures to shout things like "You think you can take on <GABBER>!?", filling the token with themselves.

Any new information on what these infamous horizontal lines in tilesets? I know they can be the result of converting pictures with more than 256 colors into a TIS, but even if I keep to that palette and make a "classic" TIS, I still get small chinks here and there that blink and disappear as I move the view.

Let's say I want to make a spell that makes damage resistance boosts less effective. I want to lower them all by 30%. How would I do that now? How would I move EVERYBODY in an area 200 points north, because I'm planning a big explosion in the south? The usefulness in adjusting values is quite clear. But you already wrote that useful code, good on you.

EET renames area files (AREs) of the first BG so that they start with "BG" instead of "AR," for compatibility. What about their WED files? Are those also renamed?

Why so self-deprecating? You wrote a useful function, cheers to you! I'll use the old code this time, though. What would be really great for these ALTER functions is a way to increase and decrease parameters instead of setting them. For instance, I know I want to move Zeke at the fair about 200 points to the north from where he's standing, closer to the petrified Branwen, but I don't know his current coordinate. I have to load the area - or look at it in Near Infinity - and search for the Y coordinate at mouse point. Or let's say I want to lower the upper probability threshold in an effect by some number of points. I have to either assume it's 100 or go the PHP_EACH way, read, adjust and reenter the value. And at that I'm not an expert.

Well, yes, matching would be nice. So this code works as written? I'm taking it. Thanks.

That is not called symbolic, it's called an omission. A shorthand for something more complicated. But your point is not that difficult to get. How about mine? A game can't be completely realistic, and shouldn't necessarily by direct transposition in any case, but its designers should be lauded wherever they managed to make the world convincing and believable. The fewer nonsensical details it contains like peasant rooms in a luxury hotel (I had this fixed for inns in one of my unfinished mods) or people walking into small houses to disappear there, the healthier this alternative reality is for living. No? You don't have to want to take it seriously, of course, maybe you want to keep it at arm's length with the "it's just a game" feeling, but then that's the difference between you and me.

The ALTER_AREA_ACTOR function requires the name of the actor to be patched. Yet many areas in the first BG use the same names for all actors of a type, only the coordinates are different. Now I would like to edit one of the "Performer" actors on the Nashkel carnival map, but there are two of them that link to the same CRE file and a third that connects to a different CRE. Plus "Farmer" actors all around. I would never add an actor to an area without giving him a unique name, but Bioware didn't build the game with Weidu. Can anybody suggest a way to zero in on these actors? GET_OFFSET_ARRAY comes to mind, to sort through the properties that set them apart, like coordinates, and editing the ones that match, but this would be complicated and really dull.

I don't know any inns that have one or two rooms. They have either big suites, like Feldepost's, or many small rooms side by side on the second floor. Maybe Ulgoth's Beard inn is a little guilty, but it uses the mansion layout, the same as Degrodel's house. Yes, there is some convention involved all around, but not too much. Mostly the artists and designers put in the effort to make a visually convincing world. And NPC could walk off the map in the Fallouts, why not here? And what do you suggest I do with all these conventions? If nothing is realistic here, how am I supposed to relate to this world?

I love you, man.

They still go to tents, that's the problem. EscapeArea destroys them, so they are not inside. I want to make it so that... ...shit, I'm whipping up enthusiasm here... Doesn't anybody care about trying to make the world more believable? ...I would like NPC to head for the borders instead. This could be done by patching, I think. Only for outdoors areas, because inside there are no borders or it's not worth it. They have to go somewhere. But outside, for each of the map borders that enables travel, there could be a travel trigger the length of the border. It should be a real zone, otherwise they might hover about and stumble, looking unnatural. I tried making a region connected to no area, no entrance, cursor 0. And NPC head off there to disappear, but the party can't see it. So that works. The dimensions could be gotten from WED horizontal and vertical size data. This would also involve disabling the other triggers for NPC outdoors, if that can be done. Those tent and building entrances. Without this they will only walk off to borders if those are closer.

This is not clickbait. I really feel that Fallout 1 and 2, the real ones, have kept better than the fantasy games on the Infinity Engine. The base for the fantasy titles, 2nd edition of AD&D, doesn't evoke any nostalgia. The good ideas in it were mostly from the previous editions, the elves, the dwarves, the ghouls, all that stuff from the earliest days, and even there a lot had been lost. For example, illusionists in the first AD&D were a distinct class from wizards and specialized in many unreal, but very convincing effects. Imaginary fireballs - what can they do? I imagine that the DM had to adjudicate quite a bit for that, but the idea is fantastic. It was a whole parallel system of magic. The second edition "improved" it by conflating them into wizards - just another school. Looking forward along the timeline, the 3rd edition of the game famously made many rationalizations, and as far as the computer adaptations are concerned, the lost charm had failed to carry over from the tabletop game long before. That was their main flaw, if you ask me: that the excitement of playing heroes and finding treasures made it into the computers, but the freedom of imagination did not. The environments of the Infinity Engine games are restrictive, dry and distinctly short of content - with the exception of Torment, which was a work of art, not gaming entertainment, from beginning to end. I like the first Baldur's Gate well enough, but outside of the scattered books about "History of the North" I don't get any sense of a wider reality there. The Sarevok story could happen in any generic fantasy setting. But maybe that's for the best, considering what kind of awful kitsch the Forgotten Realms are, when really cracked open. In short, I just don't get enough information in these games, having played them time and again. I am not attracted to their worlds any more, not excited, puzzled, amused or challenged. My min-maxing ability could be challenged with a combat mod, but what is the point? It is like running around the same room, which did not have very many interesting toys to start with. Fantasy can be real and true and remain fantasy, but that's not the case for these monster-killing, villain-haunted play rooms. I have way outgrown them - not such a tall order. But the Fallouts feel fresh, adult. I've played them plenty too, and I don't want to repeat the same quests, see the same items, temples, military bases, "Kitty's Paw" magazines and bullet clips. I don't want to fight mole rats again. Everything concrete put in those worlds is too familiar. Yet the worlds themselves are not outdated, they still feel like something that has lived and breathed (and died in a nuclear blast). The New Age sequels capitalized on this feeling to make profit, misinterpreting it as a desire to see more of pseudo 50s in sequel after sequel the same way as the movie "The Fury Road" stole everything from "The Road Warrior" and forked over "more but different." That's not what I feel nor what I need. When I say that a world is fresh and relevant, I'm talking about independent potentials within, not extrapolations. I don't exactly know how the Earth of Fallout 2 could develop - and that is the point - but I'm sure it could, really, take off in some direction as unforeseeable as consequences of mutation. The authors of Fallout - or of the Incredible Hulk - did not have to invent huge supermutants, and they didn't have to be green. This was not deducible from the logic of previous culture. But something zinged in their brains, something fluctuated somewhere, and quite out of the... aquamarine popped out these concepts. And this growth of reality from reality can continue; real fiction is born that way. That is why I feel that Fallouts can respond to me, that, were I to live there, there would be occupations for my body and mind - creative ones, not going around asking for errands from wizards and other local Politburo as in all, or almost all, fantasy games. (Some exceptions: Faery Tale Adventure 2, Morrowind.) It is true, asking for errands is the main business of the day in Fallouts too, but out on the sides, on the red travel edges of maps - scrolling into infinity - there is a lurking possibility for more. Before the war, in any case, there was more: science, industry, but complementing that legacy came the fertile chaos after the bombs mixed things up. It is a world of many roles and layers that has enough autonomous existence for me to belong in it - as much as any Hubologist or Ed. Ed's dead, but he didn't die on a treadmill of vacuous escapism. Tolkien wrote that escapism is not a soldier's desertion from the battlefield but the breakout from a dull prison, but this is only true for imaginary worlds that grow on the terroir of surprise. The writer himself must never quite know what he is going to produce. At least the starting concept needs to be news to him, even if he plans out the development, but the very best and rarest stories are rolled out like a carpet with an assassin in it. Then a method may creep in. Some of the finest writers had been convinced to give up on their ad hoc approach, like Leigh Brackett, who started out phenomenal, but settled down to really good. Here, as I reflect, I enter upon some sad territory... Stories must be new, or it's like writing copy. It IS writing copy - of all other mods, for instance. One of the consequences of going after reality in one's life, though, is that it becomes impossible to reproduce cliches. At this moment I myself find me in a situation where I can no longer write dialogues for Baldur's Gate. For the mods. I just can't. I spent about five years in this modding business, I've done a little quest-making, some conversations here and there, they were always possible, never in focus, but now it's come to the point where anything that would be understood and welcomed by this "community," by players, is beneath the level on which I would like to write. I don't exactly know what I would write if I could thrust anything under the spectacles of God's angels, but I am absolutely tired of sending characters on killing missions, to retrieve somebody's items, of powergaming, of imitating a frat boy's sense of humor. I don't want to simplify my language, shorten my sentences, use plain, obvious jokes that will evoke a "ha-ha." The skills are there. I know how to make a quest exciting to what the American film rating system calls General Audiences. I know what buttons to push. I can mystify people, I can confuse them, lead them around by the nose, then blast them with a stupendous battle and reward them with an unusual artifact. I can amaze them with magic from the bowels of this toolset, functions that others are afraid to use. I can make them think a little along the way. All that takes is sitting-down time and attention to detail. And they would be thankful for a good time in the end: a fine mod, a wise mod. But what's in it for the maker? There must also be desire on the creator's side. You must want this. You must believe in this and be into arguments about this. If you are not excited by making or finding a special sword, what are you doing in this biz? That's only half true, though. I think I would be excited by a magical sword, if I were to find it for real, and if around me was a life where swords have a use, and if, let's face it, I could be any good at fencing with it. Instead some people become actors... David Warner and his voice. "To end like this?" And the Fallouts come to mind as something between, the happy hunting grounds between hell and heaven, necrophilia and masturbation... could that be exciting sex? Too bad I can't replay them.

I don't remember ever seeing an NPC walk off the map with the EscapeArea action. In Fallout they did, which was very nice. Here they always head for some door, even when that doesn't make any sense, like when walking into a small tent. You step inside, they are not there. Can this be changed somehow? If the border sides don't count as travel regions, is it possible to patch areas with new regions along every side - regions without a cursor, not usable by the party? Or do the map sides simply need to be tweaked to allow NPC through?