1. Is there any difference, regarding protections, resistances, saving throws and most importantly limited/exhaustable protections, between applying several effects directly from within weapon attack or applying 100% probable non-saveable non-resistable spell within weapon attack, which in turn contains exact same effects?

 

2. Which is the better setting to ensure utility spell, which is merely a container to certain effects, always deliver these effects: "natural/nonmagical" or "not dispell/bypass resistance"?

2.1 Am I getting this right that if a target has 50% chance to ignore the effect, this chance will still be applied even if the effect is delivered to the target not directly as the attack effect but wrapped in such utility spell?

Today we welcome a new modder many of you may already know: Artemius_I - the author of companion mods, various tweaks, kits and many more. Many of those, who use Enhanced Edition games probably heard his name before. From now on you'll find his mods hosted here, at Spellhold Studios.


Joinable Companion Mods:

Sirene NPC for BGEE, SoD, BG2EE (forum│download)
A lawful good female tiefling paladin of Ilmater. Banters, friendship, romance for both genders and a custom-designed kit. Sirene exhibits many of the typical qualities expected of a paladin; she is kind, dutiful and faithful. However, beneath her calm exterior lies a hidden temper owing to the fell blood which flows in her veins.

Drake NPC for BGEE, SoD (forum│download)
A neutral good male human priest of Tyr with an irreverent and sarcastic attitude who serves the Order of the Radiant Heart, sent to investigate the iron crisis in the north. Banters, friendship and original voicing. BG2EE portion of the mod is under development.

Pai'Na NPC for BG2EE (forum│download)
A true neutral female half-drow hivemaster. An expansion of the original BG2 minor character with banters and friendship. Personality-wise, she can be moody, unsociable and temperamental, but she isnt that bad of a person if you get on her good side.

Aura NPC for BGEE, SoD (forum│download)
A lawful good gnome artificer thief. Banters, friendship, quest, new items and hints towards a romance with a female PC. Aura is kind and idealistic at heart. She can be rather shy and socially inept when interacting with strangers, but easily turns peppy and excitable when the topic strays into her fields of expertise. BG2EE portion of the mod is under development.

Most companions written by Artemius include crossmod banters between each other as well as with other companion mods like Fade (BG2), Verr'Sza (BGEE), Will (BG2EE), White (BG). Sirene also reacts to some quest mods, G3 Romantic Encounters and some more. You may expect even more crossmod content in the future.


Tweaks, Rule Changes and Additions:

Shadow Magic for BGEE, SoD, BG2EE (forum│download)
Adds a new school of magic to the game. Play as a Shadow Adept with a selection of 100+ exclusive Shadow Weave spells, some with similarities with Weave magic while others are completely original. Shadow Magic is more powerful than regular magic but also dangerous as it drains the user's life force. Includes new kits with exclusive spells, items and familiars.

Artemius' Tweaks (forum│download)
Assorted personalized tweaks that might interest many players. You'll find here components like: Expanded Racial Enemies, Expanded Shapeshifting, Expanded Racial Bonuses, Cloak of Dragomir only decreases stats in daylight, new kits and many more.


We're also happy to welcome some new kit mods written by Artemius:

The Artisan's Kitpack (thread│download)
This mod adds a collection of custom-made kits and reworks of existing kits for various classes.

Bardic Wonders (thread│download)
This mod adds new bard kits with specialized bard songs to the game, as well as a new merchant to Baldur's Gate II who carries new bardic items.

Warlock Mod (thread│download)
This mod adds a version of the Warlock as a kit/pseudo-unique class.

As you can see, many new mods joined SHS today. We encourage you to check them out! Enjoy!

P.S. Spellhold has opened a new subforum dedicated for kit mods. It's a communal subforum where kit mods of various authors could be hosted, so any kits of a good quality are welcome.

Well it's clearly error on Sandrah part - that mod relies on the old and unsupported version of NTotSC - so it has nothing to do with NTotSC and should be reported on Sandrah's forum.

I get the impression the Rouge Rebalancing v4.92 is missing the Setup-......exe file.  Any chance to find it with another site?

Just take any other setup-X.exe and rename it to setup-rr.exe, you are all set

So I cannot figure how to create the setup-rr.exe file.

Setup-*.exe in every mod is the same WeiDU exe renamed to follow given mod's name. Thus all you need to do is to download ANY mod where setup-that_mods_name.exe is present and RENAME that .exe into setup-rr.exe.
Now of course there's different versions of WeiDU exe, like, v.1, v.2 and so on up to v.230 or whichever is the latest, so you should preferably get your donor .exe from the mod updated/release in this year, just in case (as Jarno said), but with RR being as old as it is you would do fine even with .exe version of 2015 or something.

I've moved the discussion from BWP18 to here because it was getting all the more offtopic there.

Regarding starting your modding career it would still be offtopic both here and on BWP18 thread , so you might want to start a proper thread in IE Help subforum to increase exposure, but I won't split it further unless it blows off proportion here as well So, I don't know if my experience could be considered mainstream, but when I started modding I first figured what I want to do and then peeked at other's mods dabbling in the chosen genre learning how they did the same. Unless you're a programmer by trade you might want to stick with older mods at first because they used much simpler weidu back then, and when you are comfortable with the general concepts expand your study to modern things like LPF. That's what worked for me anyway. There are also places with tutorials on this and that (1, 2, 3 and 4 comes to mind), but even with these it's worth it to decide what do you want to do first

EvilMax, you might find some useful info in this thread and this post in regard of ever-running scripts and what to do with these.

We are happy to announce that the mod Test Your Mettle! is now available on SHS. This mod provides you with an adventure that has been tailor-made for the intrepid adventurer. You have the opportunity to meet exotic races, uncover a devious plot, or simply enjoy battle with an endless stream of monsters.

Mod authors and supporters: Argent77 (writer, coder), typo_tilly (proofreading) and Jastey (additional help).
The mod is available for BG2:EE and EET, patched to 2.0 or higher.

Forum
Download

Heya, congrats on the update! I always held ARP as a must have mod even on a minimally modded game, so I'm glad it's still being updated.

We are happy to announce that NPC Interaction Expansion Project (IEP), a grand endeavour to uplift non-romancing relationships with Bioware NPCs to the high quality standards set by modern mods in regard of depth and complexity, has been expanded once again now adding Valygar to its fold.

 

An old La'Valygar project got revived, enhanced, edited and renamed by fluke13, Lava Del'Vortel and Jastey, turning into a full-fledged Valygar Friendship.

With this mod installed, you should be able to experience up to 12 dialogues in SoA and up to 5 dialogues in ToB. Note that the mod has changed greatly when compared to its previous incarnation. The most prominent changes from La'Valygar project are additional proofreading and editing, new talks, and improvements to the old ones.

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Forum

Hello Miriamel, this subforum is fine as far as asking this on SHS is concerned, but you might want to also ask that on EET forum here.

Whenever I try to put bam into resource field of #215 opcode (Graphics: Play 3D Effect), if there's vvc with the same name NI changes resource from bam to that vvc upon saving. Either a bug or intended behaviour which I disagree with

Ah, I wasn't aware of that, great to know, and thanks for the explanation

Starting from its latest version G3Fixpack started handling basilisk's petrifying effect, so I need to rewrite my code for it to work with both not fixpacked & fixpacked games. To do so I need to be able to adjust saving throw bonus of all effects of a given spell, like this:

COPY_EXISTING crspl005.spl override
	LPF ALTER_SPELL_EFFECT
		INT_VAR
			match_opcode = -1
			savebonus = savebonus+2
		STR_VAR
	END

No doubt you have noticed a line that would not work . I'll try to study tomorrow myself on how should I change this code for it to work (I feel there will be a healthy dose of dreaded "read_byte" which I understood once, about 10 years ago, and forgot completely by now ), but if someone would lend me a hand with that it would be ever so cool!

 

Bonus question: if I accidentally alter save bonus for an effect having no saving throw at all, I won't screw anything, right, this save bonus simply will be ignored by the engine?

I was afraid of that. Guess I'll have to learn that old trickery once again Thank you Gwendolyne!

That's a generous offer I wouldn't miss for no hurry in the world I'll drop you details in PM shortly.

Using VEF files is an awesome way to play complex visual effects with opcode #215.

Thank you for mentioning that Gwendolyne! I am building a (relatively) complex animation right now with the use of multiple nested effects, and I had no idea there's already a format just for that. However there's no single VEF in BG2, do you know where I could get one to use as an example and template?

Great tutorial, thanks for the link!

I have no idea about romance cheat. Installing "Adjust XP" second time might very well work, you just had to keep in mind that current, already adjusted, amount of XP will be treated by installer as 100%.

Sam., can you please explain why would one want to compress bams at all especially considering hindrances you mentioned in the readme? Bams that are bmps made with photoshop and converted with Miloch's BAM Batcher, are they not compressed? Is it a bad thing? Why?

Thank you for this exhaustive explanation Sam!

You will find here why you can't download it anymore.

Or you can grab it here

 

As for Sandra, BGT version was thoroughly removed by the author from SHS downloads, even archive versions (a feat I thought to be impossible). You could find few of 1.06 beta releases still available here or may be someone has 1.11 stored and could share. I have some odd 1.10/1.09 versions on my HDD, never cared for it enough to grab 1.11 when it got released.

I have an effect for which I chose sphlysmt.bam as its graphical representation. Upon testing I noticed weird thing: it plays only in about 60% of times when the effect is used. I'm sure the effect itself happens as the second bam launches each time. The way I understand either the bam is broken and shouldn't play at all or it's fine and will play each time, thus I'm baffled by this random faultiness of sphlysmt.bam and would welcome any ideas on how it's possible at all?

Rylorn is here (or here for that matter) but far as I see it doesn't have version number in tp2 and marked as being 1.0 in readme, so I'm not 100% sure this is exactly what you're looking for.

One bam and one vvc/bam. I've just started testing visuals so haven't get to tidy them up yet.

 

Hmm, while we're at it, do I get it right that 1 tick of effect's delay (timing mode 3) equals one second and thus equals 30 ticks of vef's delay?