Lightbringer

WOW! I'm really glad I found this thing, it's exactly the kind of mod I go for. I'm currently in a megamod-EET-SCS run, so this will have to wait until my next go around. I've loved SCS's changes to things. I removed the level caps so the extra megamod xp helps me to handle the increased difficulty. It sounds like MiH fills in a gap by adding additional/more interesting creatures all over the place. Like Arthas, I feel vanilla BG1 is a little boring on the monster/item front, and use mods like this to up the curve a bit. Looking forward to see where you take it with the new versions.

Idea to consider: retain an Imoen-related reason to go to Spellhold. Some of the compatibility concerns revolve around removing the dialogue option to say you are going to spellhold to rescue a friend. I do know that many NPCs react differently to you if your are motivated by revenge against Irenicus instead of a desire to rescue. We already have Shadows over Soubar losing the whole mod and Fading Promises losing content choices. I bet there are other mods where content is substantively altered or cut off without a "compassionate" motivation for the PC. Perhaps, instead of removing dialogue that refers to charname being motivated by a rescue, instead keep it but let it be altered just a little. There could be a simple dialogue once Imoen is returned to you in Athkatla where she says she can feel a pull on her soul. Perhaps during her Chateau residence, Irenicus started the essence-theft but didn't finish it. Imoen can feel that she needs to get something back from Irenicus. The PC is still motivated to help a friend. The PC needs to help that friend by going to Spellhold -- where Irenicus is. At Spellhold, of course, Irenicus takes Imoen, finishes the job, steals the essence, and we're at normal vanilla content. In a way, this actually helps improve the consistency of the entire BG2 SoA plotline -- Irenicus stealing from charname and Imoen. There are many ways this could be implemented. You already have a way to identify the offending dialogue lines. You could replace the word "rescue" with the word "help" "I'm trying to help a friend who was taken by the Cowled Wizards" "I'm raising money to help my childhood friend Imoen, who was wrongly imprisoned by the Cowled Wizards" She was taken and held, after all -- just for maybe a day and not for many months. This would allow the "rescue a friend" dialogues to remain almost entirely intact and maintain compatibility with charname motivation/morality checks in other mods.

The reward sword at the end, the Warblade of Twilight, has some errors. The +5 damage to CE (similar to the Holy Avenger) is actually applied only to the wielder on equip. I went into NI and fixed it, recreating the +5 to CE on hit. I also went ahead and removed the Berserk chance and the Dex penalty. From what I've read, the spellcasting effect doesn't work properly, so it's not quite as unbalanced as it seems. Right now it's kind of a Holy Avenger-Lite. If these things interest you, please see the attached file. Drop in your Override folder. ALSO... If providing the file is inappropriate or a violation of etiquette (it's not my mod, after all) please let me know and I will take it down. va#calan.itm

Just finished it. No problems. A few graphical glitches, but nothing remotely breaking. The mod recommends levels 11-13. I had all multiclass characters around level 12 (and a Paladin at level 15 -- can't multi) and found the challenge appropriate. XP was right on target. It was fun, short enough for an excursion, and has earned a solid place in my install list. To note, I didn't install the optional extra encounter with the owner of the tower (you mean he's not dead?), so I can't comment on its balance. The adventure felt just fine without. There is a sword at the end that is quite powerful. It's Carsomyr level power, though it has some fairly serious drawbacks to mitigate. Not cursed, at least. If it seems too much, you can always discard. My pally is wielding it now, though she will swap for Carsomyr once I acquire it. I may go into NI and remove the drawbacks, 'cos that's just the kinda guy I am .

Well, I can comment on Tower of Deception, as I have it installed as part of my EET setup. Oddly, it's readme (v4.01) makes no mention of EET compatibility. Yet, I was pretty sure that everything in my install list was good to go for EET. As a test, I went ahead and started it just now. The quest initiated, transport to the Tower was successful, I am several floors in, everything seems to be working -- from journal entries, to friendly NPCs, to all of SCS's antics with spellcasters. I'll report back if I discover any problems, but so far, I would assume it's good to go.

I came here to award the internets to Subtledoctor and to chew gum, but Alien, DavidW, and Glam Vrock stole my gum...

There are 2 different kinds of banters. Some are situational and require a trigger like finding a particular quest, or entering a specific map, or defeating a particular foe. These are largely unaffected by speeding up tweaks and will all occur when the requirements are met -- from flooding the Cloakwood Mines to finding Sarevok's Journal, and from emerging from Chateau Irenicus into Athkatla to defeating Firkraag. Sometimes these appear as interjections -- an existing dialogue occurs and the NPC adds their comment to the mix. The second kind is timed. These are the ones you can speed up, via various tweaks. There are a set number of them, varying between the Bioware banters, NPC Project banters, and mod NPCs. Some NPCs may have only a few, others may have dozens. If you have, say, 10 banters, having one banter occur every minute will have you run out in about 10 minutes. If you have one banter occur every hour, it'll take 10 hours to see them all. There are a few blended types, like requiring staying at an inn, but only if you're in a romance, and it's been at least an hour since the last banter -- but those are infrequent and highly mod-dependent. The vast majority will be of the above two types.

Fascinating observations. There is a known consequence of speeding up banters: you get a burst of them early on, then folks run out of things to say, and you wind up with a quiet game. Another situation where that can appear is in a heavily content-modded game. The length of the game (often particularly the latter parts) is extended considerably, and the otherwise well-portioned pace of banters runs out of steam. This is because such a mod setup turns (say) a 100 hour game into a 120 hour game. If you have 100 hours worth of spaced out banters, then you'll have silence for the final 20 hours. Just example numbers, I don't know what the real figures would be. Glad to hear you're enjoying yourself!

Something definitely went wrong there. You'll want to ask Roxanne for help on her forums ( baldursextendedworld <dot> com ), since she's the mod maker.

Well, I'm pretty stoked that: Isra in BG2 has retained the stat book increases I gave her in BG1, because EET makes them the same character. Same with Imoen, after I rescue her. Furthermore, the spells I taught her in BG1 remained in her spellbook for BG2. Not including proficiences, custom class/kit changes, etc. Having just finished the D'Arnise keep, I'm ready to go up to High Hedge and have Thalantyr Upgrade some items for me that I lost in Chateau Irenicus. While I'm up there, I'll go ahead and drop by the Friendly Arm Inn to visit the merchant who took a Slow Boat from Kara Tur and purchase some monk gear for my charname. Then I'll go back to Amn. If I had known about the Cowled Menace at the time, I would have reason to go back and forth between Athkatla and Baldur's Gate city. Perhaps there, I could show that I had redeemed Skie's soul and gain clemency. Eventually, I'll be going back and forth from Icewind Dale during my time all along the Sword Coast. All these things require EET to turn the segmented games into one long saga. Not to mention the glorious map that runs from the utter North all the way down to Calimshan... I'm currently on an EET run that I've poured nearly 200 hours into. I'm early in the BG2 portion. I have a multi-megamod setup with a ton of quest mods. I have many NPCs, tweaks, item mods, and SCS. I admittedly am light on things like kits, alternate spell or feats, or other engine and system things. I have had near zero bugs that were not obviously self-induced (i.e. a direct result of my tinkering), from Candlekeep, through BG city, through Dragonspear, to Athkatla. Install with Project Infinity was fairly straightforward, took about an hour per attempt, and took about 4-5 tries to get it perfect. I think I spent about an evening and a half. It doesn't always have to be a big ordeal.

Thanks for the advice. This is kind of what I thought, and might actually be a fairly simple situation. I've already spent a few hours here and there studying the scripts of the various NPC mods, and I'm developing a decent grasp of how they function. I've already had several situations where 1 or 2 of them suddenly had RA switch to 3, and then I had to go figure out why. After resolving the issue, I was able to switch back to 2 and continue. Totally not the way the mods were designed to work, I know. I "voided the warranty" long ago by opening the hood on their inner workings. At least now I think I have a strategy that I should be able to work my way through. Next run will be much simpler! All Bioware NPCs, to make the most out of IWD-in-EET, and only romancing Jaheira.

I'm running multiple mod NPC romances, in order to see as much mod content as possible in a limited number of playthroughs. So far it has worked well. I have made liberal use of EEKeeper and NI to alter variables and scripts as necessary to keep everything going. Unfortunately, I did consider the Bhodi issue until far too late. Apparently, who she kidnaps is determined by which romance mod was installed last, not by party order or anything normally controllable in-game like I had hoped. Obviously, there's more to it than install order, because the kidnapping requires an active romance. If my last installed NPC was inactive, then I assume Bhodi would attempt to kidnap the next one in line whose romance is active. My question is, how does the game decide this post-install? Is there some global or local, or something in a script, that I can alter to steer Bhodi toward a specific NPC? As I consider this, I realize that I could, in theory, flip all the other romance variables to 3 for the graveyard scene, then go back to 2 immediately after. In particular, I'm concerned about Fade. From poking around in her code, it looks like some really important extra story events occur with her due to being turned -- beyond garden-variety vampirism. I gather these events are key to her romance progressing. My current top of the list is Isra -- who has proved to be a fairly easy going mod, so I'm not anticipating problems. I also have Amber -- who is complex enough that I would normally be very concerned, but she has no ToB component, so I'm less worried at that late stage in the game. Only other, then, is Imoen Romance. I'm assuming she doesn't get turned, as Bhodi already stole her soul. Anybody know what specifically is checked to select Bhodi's victim? Or, for that matter, anyone have more specific knowledge about some of the other NPCs I mentioned and how critical the kidnapping is to their romances?

I'm no expert, but I've been around a little bit. The thread linked below has perhaps the discussion you're looking for. Start at the beginning. He has particular requirements that you may find useful, and they seem in line with yours. Pros and cons are extensively discussed. I contributed some of my personal experience in a few of the quest mods for BG1, having just finished a 120 hour heavily modded BG1 leg of EET. As for the tweak mods, the nice thing is that you can pick and choose however you wish. Some are more power hungry, others are simple things like don't display helmets. If you don't want to spend a ton of time, perhaps assume that the game rules work as intended, and use tweaks that sound good to you by their description. If you skip the tweak packs, you'll still get a game that works just fine. Personally, I'm a fan of the EE versions. It's not just the zooming, but the interface and some of the other niceties. Honestly what completely sold me was when I discovered that I could finally dual wield while having a bow equipped -- no longer having to go into the inventory to switch all the time. The real value of the EE games is under the hood. They are thoroughly coded for modding ease. This means that more high quality mods will be available that can do more interesting things. The new join-able NPCs didn't really interest me, so I don't consider them a mark for or against. I thoroughly enjoyed Siege of Dragonspear, for reasons too extensive to delineate here, and I now consider it an essential part of the saga. I believe I am in the minority in that view, in the interest of full disclosure. I was a long time TuTu player who was skeptical of the value of the EEs (after all, I reasoned, I had accomplished it all through modding with TuTu already). I was wrong. Furthermore, EET is EE only. I was sold on the idea of EET when I stumbled upon a google search image of the EET map and saw everything from IWD to BG2-ToB, plus all the mega-mods, all one one, glorious spread. The IWD components are still being worked on, but we all have faith that K4thos will deliver, eventually. Check out Cahir's thread, and you'll probably find some of the things you're looking for.

(Edit: The below reply won't really do much for unmodded vanilla BG:EE. This is primarily for modding issues. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try.) Do you find your party members periodically stopping and facing you or each other, like they're about to say something, but they never do? If so you may be experiencing an issue with a banter script failing to fully execute. In its worse incarnation, it's called the "stutter bug" and can make the game unplayable. In the stutter bug, the conditions exist for a script to fire, but the script fails to complete. The same conditions still exist, so the script fires again. Same non-completion. The effect is an npc who stops every round to speak, but never does. They look like they are stutter-walking. Even if you are not experiencing the stutter bug, it still could be a script issue. I experienced the stutter bug with a mod NPC who I had modded additionally. I (naturally) didn't anticipate the full consequences of my tinkering and caused some script shenanigans. In order to investigate and solve the issue I discovered, I used the tool and discussions here: http://www.shsforums.net/topic/33937-how-to-gather-clues-when-debugging-stuttering/ This isn't a quick and simple solution, and requires a little bit of modding knowledge, use of Near Infinity, and general game-file-surgery. I don't know if it will solve things for either of you, but it might be a place to start. As always, be sure to back up your files before messing with them. Consider this like editing your windows registry. Powerful and useful, but potentially disastrous if you're careless or work without backups. The general idea is to create a small mod yourself that causes the game to display what script is firing when and what block within the script. You then play the game and record the output when you observe the anomalous behavior (stuttering, turning to talk but remaining silent, etc). Then you know exactly where to look within the game's scripts to find the problem. This will tell you where the problem is. Discerning what the problem is -- and how to solve it -- is another matter entirely. As before, hopefully someone else here might have a more direct solution, but this is what I did for my similar-sounding problem.

Thank YOU for going through all of this with the whole community, @Cahir. Hashing it all out like this will help anyone who comes after (for many years ahead) and is attempting to install a large modlist.

Sounds great! I just wish I had known about the SoD to BG2 item upgrade mod. I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. I was going to suggest Skie: Cost of One Girl's Soul, but I saw you already had it. I just finished it and was quite pleased. The bonus item merchant from it is quite nice -- similar to the Joluv and Dierdre bonus merchants. I also just completed everything in Southern Edge and had a lot of fun. Well worth it, especially if you've gone through BG1 -- a few awesome shout outs.

Nice! I'll have to give that a go for my next playthrough

That was my experience as well. I installed SCS, CDTweaks, and ATweaks after EET_end and I haven't noticed any problems.

And so I just spent a moment reading up on Ultra High Temperature processing for milk. Interesting stuff. Over here in the US, we call it "shelf milk", and it's something of a novelty where I live. In areas with frequent hurricanes, it's more of a staple. Incidentally, I've always really liked the taste of it -- rather unique. Heh. Now I finally understand your location under your avatar. I thought maybe you were making some crack about manufacturing really hot things in your hometown -- like how a Texan might joke about making replacement parts for the sun in their town. Didn't make sense for Finland. Turns out it was quite literal!

Mmm? What kind of food?

Very cool! I'm a big fan of what Aquadrizzt (and you, it seems!) did with MOoF. Making it a thief kit opens it up for my own tweaking. My version is thoroughly unbalanced toward other classes, of course, but it fits my purposes quite well.

It was a pretty cool concept. It prevents one of the more common strategies for players whereby they only focus on Sarevok in order to end the fight. The Big Guy instead gets a percent immunity to things based on how many of his acolytes are left. By the time it was down to only one of them (I think it was Angelo, who was by far the toughest minion), the reduction was only 25-30% I think Sarevok may have had a Min1HP effect while any acolyte was alive. It was an interesting strategic problem (and SCS had trained me to think of things as such over 130 hours.) The trouble I ran into was that Angelo cast and recast a protection spell that made him impervious to my attacks -- furthermore, his level was high enough that even my Inquisitor's dispel (un-nerfed) couldn't remove it. Next time I go, I'll need to figure out a way to bypass or take down that protection. He was a very effectively played fighter/mage who summoned one of the magic blade spells and packed a big ol' wallop -- in between Greater Malisons, Horrid Wiltings, Chaos, and all the other greats. I ended up just outlasting both castings of that protection spell before finishing him off in about two hits. Sarevok was dead 1 hit later

It is odd the way these things interact sometimes. It's a shame that everything can't be completely modular, but understandable. We work with what we have, and sometimes that means workarounds. As a great example, the wonderful Monastic Orders of Faerun mod technically doesn't involve monks at all. It creates a thief kit and gives it abilities that emulate a monk. An unintended consequence of that is that other mods that anticipate the monk class don't recognize my Monastic Orders monk. That's because, as far as the game engine knows, she's not a monk -- she's a thief with a kit. Twas a Slow Boat from Kara Tur adds many cool monk exclusive items, but my Monastic Orders monk could use none of them. It took a little surgery in Near Infinity to fix that. Turns out the Kara Tur author had gone above and beyond and nixed usage to anyone who wasn't a Lawful Human, as well as a Monk -- a case of over-engineering that limited the mod's versatility. On the other end, the Monastic Orders mod runs a script that finds all Armor Slot items and attaches a "can't use" effect to your monk character to prevent the "thief" from equipping it. It cast too wide a net and blocked some items that should be allowable -- such as monk robes from Kara Tur. It took some EEkeeper magic to fix that. I've had good success with adding 1 kit to a multiclass with EEKeeper, but I was under the impression adding 2 kits to both sides of a multiclass was a different matter. As Subtle and others have pointed out, it also matters what the class/kit actually is under the hood.

I hope you figure those out, because it sounds awesome! Viconia as a shadowdancer/cleric? Fascinating! I like that style of crafting your own ideas of what classes to give characters.

Let me tell you what I did, so you can decide what kind of filter to place on my suggestions. My playstyle differs from many in the community. It's basically: make me earn big-high power, and get the monsters to keep up with me. It's a philosophy of abundance, as opposed to what I see otherwise as a philosophy of scarcity. There's probably a middle ground, but this is what works for me. I removed all caps, had no reductions, included nearly full scroll/trap/lock xp, and installed every mega and quest mod that didn't seem like total cheese. I skipped Dark Horizons for reasons you're already aware of. I also skipped (I think) Shadows over Soubar and Check the Bodies, as they seemed questionable. Almost every.thing.else though. Really, I'm anticipating this strategy for including IWD-in-EET into the progression. My goal is zero need for XP reduction. This is my playtest to see how it works. I make liberal use of EEkeeper. Everyone gets 18 Dex and 18 Str. Fighters get 18/51, unless I roll higher. I also assign proficiencies as I see fit, not what the game or a mod gives an NPC. I also assign classes/kits to fit my party vision. Imoen and Dynaheir -- Fig/Mag, Minsc -- Ran/Cle, Finch -- Fig/Cle, Isra -- Inquisitor, Charname -- monk/fighter (with full thief abilities added back in). I installed the Max HP for PCs and NPC/monsters (CD-tweaks, maybe?). This was really important, it turns out, as my party became incredibly deadly. Hob elites actually still might take a couple swings by end of BG1. It was a great decision. I also enforced a rule of multi-class everyone. If I could multiclass the Paladin, I would. If Isra (love her!) gets too far ahead, I'll cut her XP. Finally, I rely on SCS to help the enemies keep up with my powerhouse party. So far, it's worked really really well. Interesting note, the first time through, I kept full BG2 xp for spells/locks/traps. I had a created-npc fighter/thief who unlocked every chest in Candlekeep. My vanilla monk actually made it to level 2 before Gorion's death. Due to a few xvarts and kobolds dropping spell scrolls, and Imoen being keepered into a fighter/mage, my monk made level 3 before the Friendly Arm Inn. I felt like I missed some of the fun of the early, vulnerable times. With a better tailored early progression and multiclassing, none of those shenanigans occurred. The vulnerable time was shortened, but it was still there.