Any idea what the limits are for what files can be opened in NI? I've been having trouble loading savegame files from a heavily modded game... I noticed that as the game progressed it became harder to open the savegame. Eventually I could open heavily modded savegames in an instance of NI attached to a game with no mods installed - I could not follow any resources but at least I could see what effects were on a character. Now my savegame will not open in any instance of NI.

 

The .gam file is quite large, at 10 MB, compared to <1 MB for the average unmodded .gam file.. On the other hand, my computer has 16 GB of memory so 10 MB is really not that big.

 

Is the file size an issue, or could it be down to something else? (E.g. number of effects on the characters, or something like that.)

Here's a question, before I upload that:

 

Would it be worth it to separate wands and scrolls and handle them separately? I guess it would be fairly easy, now. I don't have a particular use-case... maybe some kind of technologist or luck-based kit could use wands, but actually casting spells from scrolls would still be out of bounds? Or maybe priests of Oghma or Deneir could use arcane scrolls, being so studious, but would not go around flashing wands at people?

 

Hmm. I suppose why not?

Incidentally, I might be going back to using op181 for Use Magical Device, instead of setting SPECIFIC values. Even with workarounds to make the SPECIFIC thing work with SoD and such, I've still had occasional intermittent problems with characters using scrolls and wands. Op181 is not perfect, but if it has problems in-game, those problems will tend to be smaller and more manageable.

 

The method I've landed on at the moment works like this:

 

• -- Any wands that are normally usable by non-wizards (with the exception of the Wand of the Heavens) are changed from type 35 to type 13. Type 13 is labeled "Food" and is used for e.g. the Goodberry consumable item. Type 13 "food" items can have charges just like wands, they are used from item quickslots just like wands. If you change the Wand of Magic Missiles to type 13 you can use it until it has 1 charge, then sell it to a store and buy it back, and what you buy back will be a wand with x charges, where x is determined by the .STO file's setting for how many charges it gives wands. (And this is responsive to mods like Low Magic World which change .STO files to sell wands with fewer charges.) The mod changes all stores and containers to buy/sell/store type 13 items if they already bought/sold/stored type 35 items. One unavoidable consequence of this is, if you use a Wand Case mod, you will be able to put Goodberries and other type 13 items into a wand case.
•  
• -- Any scrolls that cast spells but are not arcane scrolls you can also learn spells from, are changed from type 11 to type 8. Type 8 is labeled "Keys" and includes mostly just various keys. Even though most in-game keys don't do it, type 8 "key" items can cast spells and be used from item quickslots, just like scrolls. They of course do not have scrolls' hardcoded inventory UI function to learn spells, which is why the only scrolls being changed this way are green "use by anyone" scrolls and blue "cast a priest spell" scrolls. The mod changes all stores and containers to buy/sell/store type 8 items if they already bought/sold/stored type 11 items. One consequence of this - and admittedly it is slightly more consequential than the first change - is that you will be able to put keys into a scroll case.
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• -- Once the wands and scrolls already usable by non-wizards are separated into their own categories, the leftover wizard scrolls and wands are made usable by anyone. Then, for party members, every joinable non-wizard/non-bard NPC gets a permanent op181 effect making them unable to use type 35 and type 11 items (wizard-only wands and scrolls). For Charname, this is applied by script in the various areas that start each campaign in BGEE, SoD, BG2EE, ToB, EET, BP1, BP2, and IWDEE. A spell with op321 and op206 canceling and protecting from the "don't use" spell is added to every wizard kit CLAB table, so that anyone with the op181 spell who dual-classes to wizard will gain the ability to use arcane scrolls.
•  
• -- Finally, that same spell in wizard CLAB tables can be applied anywhere else in the game - as an HLA in Refinements, as a combat skill in Scales of Balance, as a kit ability for priests of Mystra in Faiths & Powers, etc.

 

The one limitation this adds compared to the current implementation is that divine wands and scrolls will still be governed by their usability flags. A thief with UMD will not be able to cast Restoration from a scroll. The rationalization for this is that arcane casters are deemed to have in a sense "hacked" some secrets of the universe, and do magic by intelligence; there is no god around to stop a wizard from doing their magic. By contrast, divine magic is a direct grant of power from a god, and those gods will not extend this grant to faithless thieves who happen to have figured out how to operate a wand. (To apply this to divine items as well would require a new item type(s) and I'm not sure there are any more that have the required characteristics... I think type 0 would work for divine scrolls, but I'm not sure about wands, and anyway there are a LOT of type 0 items in the game so the mish-mash of what fits in which container would become more chaotic.)

 

I've externalized this into a portable .tpa file that can be easily used by all different mods. I haven't pulled the trigger and actually uploaded release versions with this change, yet. I will either a) install and test it on my own game, and see how it performs myself - which may take weeks or months, since I am in the middle of an EET game with the old method - or b) make beta "pre-release" versions that other players can use and, essentially, test, at their own discretion.

It's my oversight from PR https://github.com/U...inements/pull/4. I've send a new one, tested BG2EE installation, hopefully this will fix it.

 

Merged the new one.
 

2) I don't have the files handy so I cannot check. You could quickly install the mod and look at them in NI, though.

 

4) Don't quote me on this (see below), but it sounds like "physical protections" means spells with the "combat protections" secondary type, e.g. Shield, Stoneskin, PfMW, etc. "Specific protections" might reasonably refer to spells with the "specific protections" secondary type, e.g. Protection from Fire, Protection from Magic Energy, etc. And I would guess that "magical protection" then refers to spells with the "spell protections" secondary type, e.g. Spell Deflection, Globe of Invulnerability, Spell Trap, etc.

 

1), 3), 5) - I am not the author of any of this and so I am not qualified to make editorial comments about how or why things were set up the way they are. I only took over basic maintenance of the mod to get it installing on BG2EE and to allow installation of HLAs for individual classes.

The best you can do is to try out AstroBryGuy's NI package for macOS, which solves at least some of the issues (see this discussion). That package installs NI like a regular app in your system's Applications folder, so it won't really solve your particular issue. But you can use NI's bookmark feature to quickly switch between games.

That's what I'm using... maybe the macOS installer installing it at a low level like that is the reason it isn't detecting the local folder - I just duplicated the app from /Applications into each game folder, and then trashed the original. But each instance might be glomming onto something where java is in the OS and therefore running independently? Hard to say, this gets outside my area of expertise. Maybe I'll try the OS-agnostic version rather than AstroBryGuy's Mac installer. Eh, I'll experiment when I have time. But thanks for pointing out the bookmarking feature, I hadn't noticed that. Should help in the short-term.

Okay I finally updated from the old 2018 build I was using to the most recent 2022 built for MacOS. It's very nice, lightning fast, etc.

 

EXCEPT this: you can use it to view files from different games in different directories. That's a nice option, but every time I start NI it remembers the last game I was working on, instead of the current game I want to work on. So I could be in my IWDEE directory and when I start that instance of NI, it is showing me BG2EE files from a different place.

 

When I'm in the IWDEE, I want NI to show me the IWDEE files. When I'm in the SoD directory, I want it to show me the SoD files. I don't want to have to mouse over to the File menu, click "Open," naviagte to the correct chitin.key file in the dialogue box, and only then get working. It is an onerous thing to have to do every time I open the app.

 

Is there any way to have it default to opening the game with the chitin.key file in the same directory as the NI executable, the way it used to?

Whoops, and version 4.32 also has updated French and Russian translations!

Updated to version 4.31 with updated handling of the SPECIFIC.IDS table for the Use Magical Device thief HLA.

This is a PSA: if you use Spell Revisions, then you should NOT install Klatus Drop Equipment On Disintegration/Petrification/Freezing components. Spell Revisions already includes that functionality; installing it from Klatus in such a case will not help you and could cause problems.

Ah - I think I see now - FILE_EXISTS would work if it looked for ~override/clabma01.2da~

FYI this mod seems to be overwriting CLABMA01.2da, which is causing mods installed earlier not to work.

 

I'm not sure why this happens - the only relevant part of the mod that I found is in "spells_base.tph" where I see this check:

ACTION_IF (NOT FILE_EXISTS ~clabma01.2da~) BEGIN

... and then it generates and copies in a fresh version of the file. On its face, that looks like it should work - maybe. I don't know why it is using FILE_EXISTS instead of FILE_EXISTS_IN_GAME; if I was going to write that code I would write the condition as:

ACTION_IF NOT (FILE_EXISTS_IN_GAME ~clabma01.2da~) BEGIN

There was definitely a copy of clabma01.2da in my override folder when I installed the mod; I would expect both versions of the code above to return false given that circumstance. But maybe the latter version is safer? I don't know. All I know for sure is that several lines of the .2da file from another mod were missing after this mod was installed, and those lines were present in the version of the file in this mod's backup folder.

 

So, just FYI.