Hi Everyone!

Sorry been away for a 3-wk boot camp. Exams are drawing near, but I'll spend some time next week fixing things up & replying to long-due issues.

Meanwhile, if you need me urgently, just add me to msn. Its in my profile. Thanks

Well, something went wrong with my install.  Slowdown again.  It may have been progressive, but I'm not sure.  Became blatantly obvious around the time I went to Larswood to do go through the bandit camp part of the game.  Tried ditching ammo, items, containers, going back to previous saves and replaying, uninstalling improved black talons, and a bit of cussing and vulgar gesturing.  Slowdown still shows up and won't go away.  I'm just going to nuke the whole thing and avoid mega mods like the plague.  

I think I will foolishly try a lightly modded version of bgt and see if I ever get to the end of ToB in a modded game.

Hey Thess, these things can happen, which is why I really prefer to stick closer to erebusant's set of installs. The nerfed armor actually was kinda fun at the start. But seriously, the real good armor that you'll be wearing when you hit lvl 5-6 aren't nerfed at all. So if you had played on, you'll realise that nerfed armor isn't a big deal to spend manual installing. And, you could actually edit the smm-config.xml file using notepad instead of manually installing

Well I was suprised Erebusant and bigmoshi didn't have to run an end biff weidu somewhere.  When I just started the game I could hardly move and I was carrying nothing but a sword and leather armor.  Then my PC would jump 10 feet across the screen.  It sounds as bad as yours, but it actually started right off the bat.  Had to go back and run the biff, then put back in worldmap etc.

Hi Maximus, nopes I didn't need biffing, it ran ok on my laptop & desktop. I managed to find a good round up on biffing by berelinde, and posted it earlier on the thread. Perhaps that may clear things up a little. http://www.shsforums...p...0695&st=40#

Just pmed you about the portraits.

Hmm about the red dragon armor appearance I uninstalled refinements checked it again and it the appearance was the same(also it messed up my Worldmap since it was installed after refinements,got an exception error every time I tried opening the map even in a new game but worked it around and eventually fixed it).Can anyone post me the original item file (without the refinements edit) so I drop it in the override folder and see what happens then?

Hey Valiad, what's the resource file name?  

PS all: Schedule's tight lately, feel free to msn me if you need help urgently. thanks.

Hi! Does he get injured as in his health status becomes near death or something? Or what happens? Nevertheless I'll spawn him and check it out. Thanks smile.gif

injured, to near death, then stays there, no matter what i do, same for the mage, the mindflayer trick in the link works, like in the link, those 3 trolls were immortal as well, but i just ran.

Hi there, the fix suggested by seanus seems to work. You can try the one I just uploaded. The thing is that you have to reload from a saved game from an area before the meeting that unkillable tolgerias. (note: that there are two tolgerias scripts - one in the govt district & the other unkillable one).

To test if that fix really works, put it in your override directory, then spawn "Tolger2" and ctrl+y it after he does the dimension door spell. If he gets killed, then the fix works. Once you're sure it works, go back to your save game and see if it turns out fine for you.

I installed bg2 tweaks v6, which seems to be the latest version. I think I am screwed now anyways. I tried uninstalling ToD and now whenever I attempt to move to a new area the game crashes and says: An Assertion failed in InfScreenWorldMap.ccp at line 2120

EDIT: Ok, reinstalled the world map and now I can move around again. Went back to the save before the zombie farm and it is still off. All the merchants in bone hill are still messed up, so I think it is safe to say ToD was not the culprit.

Ya, I think thats the latest version. I'll probably do an install of the new versions again and play that trungle part to see what happens. Meanwhile, can you double check your notes to see if you can find unusual during your install.

Hi there, I'm not sure if its the original intent, but I just did some testing and the knight kit seems to be affected by the attributes of the stalker kit as well.

As for the ??? in your weidu.log, the reason is because the post-install clearup puts all the modfiles into bg2\mod_postinstall directory. If for some reason weidu is run again after that, it tries to look for the *.tra files in BG2 directory, which it can't find because they are now in the post-install directory. Its okay because the component numbers before the ??? on each line can help you identify the components. If you really don't want the ???, what you can do is to shift back all the files in postinstall into bg2 (which is a bit messy) then run weidu and it'll replace those ??? with the component names. Hope this helps.

Just a couple of strange crashes I had:

At the Den of Seven Vales(or whatever its called one of the 2 next door inns in Promenade) there is this mercenary group on the second floor with the dwarf leader.The mage of the group which has a familiar ,I noticed that as soon as the killing blow is about to hit him the game crashes.The same happened with the mage at the group on the second floor of the Enclave in Temple District(the group where you get the celestial fury katana).In both cases when I tried to kill em normally the game crashed.But it didn't happen when I CTRL+Y them.Not much of a fuss but prolly has smth to do with the xp they give(smth possibly messes up with the xp reduction mod?)Anyway didn't bother much since ctrl+y helped to avoid the crush, just reporting it.And a

newbie question: when we say CTD in here it means a crush or smth, right?

Hey Valiad! Thanks. If you do have a saved game for that, could you post it to me? I'd like to try it out as well. TY

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Anyways, do I have to reload to a point before I go to the lower levels of the de'Arnise keep in order to be able to kill TorGal? The way I played the game, I loaded the area before, then after finding out TorGal was bugged, I went off and did something else, and didn't bother to reload. Now that I've come back to fight TorGal, after putting in the new files in the override folder, he's still bugged So does this mean that I do indeed have to reload to an earlier point?

Also, two bugs - the area description on the world map for the de'Arnise keep is bugged, called "Easiest.", and the 3 areas descriptions of Hlondeth are bugged as well.

Also, the wolfskin bag can hold an unlimited amount of items, not just 10 as described.

Hey Rabbi!

Hrms. It should take effect without reloading to an earlier point. I'll take a look now with your saved game and see if I missed anything out. Previously, I tested by spawning him at Ulgoth Beard, not sure if that made a difference. Edit2: Ah yes, I just realised that you do need to get back to a save before meeting Torgal, ie before AR1301. Alternatively, you can edit AR1301 in your saved game using NearInfinity. Select Torgal.CRE and set his override script to torgal.bcs

Edit1: Using the saved game you sent me, Ibhin just killed Torgal - http://bigmoshi.forb.../torgaldied.jpg.

Ok noted on the area descs, will add it into the issue list, and will leave it alone unless it affects some quest stuff.

Also, the bags in the game are made bottomless pits, but I think not all the desc have been updated by that mod.

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Hmmm. I'm coming across a few problems using the 1.25 version. My install is a bit different, but the order is the same and nothing is added. I only left out a few of the components like a couple portrait changes, proficiency changes, and the redesigned armor system. Nothing I would think would mess anything up.

Anyways, over in the red canyons there is a merchant named Trungle. I think he is from bonehill or northern tales of the sword coast. All his items have no description, no icon, are unidentified and sell for 0 gold. I bought one and it became irremovable and didn't change other than identifying itself.

Later I went up the the farms over chionthar to clean out the zombies. I killed all of them then went over to talk to Wermic. When I talk to him the first time he says "I don't like the look of you, mate. Move along." After this my journal updates with the missing ghostly knight quest from firewine bridge ruins. When I talk to him again he gives me the standard kill the zombies speech he is supposed to and gives me the experience and 150 gold. My journal updates that the missing ghostly knight quest is finished. Talking to him again he says "It's finished, you can take it. The price has changed: 5,000gp" and my journal updates with an entry called You know it's an extremely unique item, don't complain and my map updates adding the forest of the dead.

Another thing is that I was told to take a vial of mysterious liquid to Thalantyr but no option to tell him about it is given when I go there.

Any clue where I screwed up? Weidu log is attached.

Hi Thesslian! Can you check your *.debug files for the keyword "error" to make sure that the installation actually pulled through? Those things you encountered are pretty strange since wenric & the knight quest seem unrelated. Also, I'm not sure if it does anything but you can try uninstalling "~TOD/SETUP-TOD.TP2~ #0 #2 // Encounter with Ustrain" and see what happens in your game.

As for the Thalantyr quest, its a dialogue bug as Ascension64 mentions. If you need more details, the bug list at the bottom of the walkthrough may help.

Continuing on with this install, I made it to bone hill and all of the merchants there were like Trungle in the Red Canyons. Kind of disturbing since they are from different mods. I clua'ed around to the adventurer mart and the copper cornet and all the merchants there seem to be working. A few bugged item descriptions, but otherwise fine. Seems something in my install just hated original bg1 merchants.

You'll probably encounter other issues pretty soon. Actually, it would be best to fix your install before going further into your game.

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i still can't kill tolgerias or his mage, i tried changing rooms, removing the two files from override, deleting the lines, switching minhp for surehp, and any combination of it, ctrl+y doesn't do anything either.

how do i solve this?

Hi! Does he get injured as in his health status becomes near death or something? Or what happens? Nevertheless I'll spawn him and check it out. Thanks

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Thank you bigmoshi.  I have it all installed now with the updated version you posted.  The install process stopped during Setup-BG2_Tweaks.exe at Remove racial requirements for romances and a few steps after that all related to romances.  I selected no changes on all of them and then the installer took off again.  

This is about the best addition to Baldurs Gate modding ever.  Thanks for making it.

Hi Thesslian, the greater part of the effort really comes from those modmakers, so do enjoy the mods!

Hi bigmoshi,

I'm using XP Media Center with SP2.

When I stopped the find processes, the installation continued, and I noticed a find process pop up again in task manager, but this time it was just for about 2 secs and then it went away.

The stall isn't just during the installation of BGT though, it can happen while install SOS, TDD, anything that starts to biff a lot.

Installing everything would really take too long. Another 15-min way to check if terminating find.exe is ok, is to do it only for BGT by terminating the find process. Once BGT is done, stop the whole installation and check the size of the biff files in bg2\data. If they look about right, then I think stopping find.exe could be your solution. Here's a list of the biff filesizes if you need to do a quick comparison.  biff_sizes.txt   10.87K   551 downloads

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Hey Rabbi & Valiad, done with the unkillable trolls. Backup KPTROL03.CRE & Torgal.CRE and download RCT7 resource patch.

Edit: Also, erebusant was spot on. Cromwell (AR0334) ctd fix uploaded as RCT6.

Rabbi! You got a save game that I could test out the arena pit with? Tks!  

Fixes for v0.85:

• Item flag columns when viewing CRE files (NoPick, Stolen, NoDrop) - Avenger
  
• Fixed duplicate file resources index
  
• Brighter area maps (Yes! You'll no longer go blind looking at dark areas)
  
• Added custom are/wed/tis files

See v0.85 - http://www.shsforums...showtopic=31285

Hope this will be useful

I recently noticed that the current Infinity Explorer (0.84) doesn't show all item flag columns when viewing CRE files i.e. it only shows the "Identified" column.

Would it be possible to add three new columns for the other known flags (Non-pickpocketable, Stolen and Undroppable)?

Hey Avenger!

I'll take a look at that bit and see if I can do anything without messing it up! Thanks

Argh!! My post disappeared .. reposting..

no, i was an idiot, it appears that if you make some jokes regarding marriage to imoen, she'll leave, i went back to an old save, and lost the quicksave, but it's just something that was probably intended.

Hey man, no probs. Cheers  

Hello again!

  Finishing BG1 main plot now.Have completed almost everything from the original content and all the extra mods apart from the NTotSC part where u have to return from Candlekeep with the unknowing book(although I got the answers to finish the quest before entering there).Same happened with some parts from the SotB Garrote part.Anyway all works smoothly so far apart from one strange bug I encountered and posting it here just for the record(possible spoilers).

As soon as I entered the DSotSC content with Jet'laya(had a general save prior to this ofc) I noticed that after I killed her sister and the Dark One when I tried to return to Beregost the game would crush while loading the Beregost area(actually at the 20% of the loading bar I heard a windows error sound(ding!) and the screen froze there without being able to alt tab, alt ctr del or whatever.
Tried restarting from my previous save and it all worked splendid on my second run of the forests.Now I don't know if it has anything to do with it but at the first run if I rested at Jet'laya's sister area with a frequence 4/5 times my rest was interrupted from around 10 zombies that spawned.Not peculiar but all those zombies talked to me one after another saying some strange dialogs whichlookedfamiliar..It appears that all of them were the Zombie mayors that u meet at the Zombie town at the Beholder lair from BG2 Cult of the Eye storyline!They were quite hard for my grp so I run away from them.As soon as they were covered from the fog of war they just disappeared On my second run I tried to get to the area at night so I would meet the sister with no need to rest in that place and with no mayors spawned Beregost loaded fine thereafter.Not sure it had anything to do with it just mentioning for the record as I said earlier.
Entering BG2 tonight and wanted to know what stuff gets imported at the beginning from BG1(NPCs e.g. no, but what about items and gold?)Doesn't matter that much ofc just thought I wanted to know prior to ending BG1.

Thanks again in advance for any answers! Have fun all  

Hi Valiad! That crash in beregost could also be due to this http://www.shsforums...showtopic=24121.

Not sure if I get you right, but if you mean you want to use your BG1 items in BG2, then you can do this. When the BG2 episode starts with the blank screen, press pause immediately. Then, press "I" to get into your inventory and drop all your items on the floor. After Imoen opens your cage, you can pick up those items again.

Since I discovered that some of the Trolls are virtually unkillable, I decided to battle Tor'Gal and see if this extended to him - and unfortunately, it does. Tor'Gal is also unkillable. He whittles down to "Near Death" status, but never collapses into a heap to have casters finish him off with acid or flame arrows. I haven't tested this with Crom Fayr or any other insta troll kill weapons yet.

Confirmed. I just clua'ed Torgal and he doesn't even die with a CTRL+Y!! Will check it out. Thanks!

Would someone be so kind as to help me locate 3 files so that I may use the auto installer.  I dread doing manual installs, since I have done many before and almost always end up being hit with a slowdown and the game becomes unplayable.  I would really like to be able to play through a mega mod from start to finish at least once.

The three files I am unable to locate are:

BGT105a_Install.rar
SirensCall_v71_BGT.rar
Ribalds Genie V2.6.exe

I can find newer or older versions of them, but I am having no luck finding those particular versions.  Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hi Thesslian! the mirrors for them are gone. You can try the newer versions for the mods above and edit a little of your smm-config.xml file. Alternatively, you can consider the updated config that I just posted. Hope this helps.

For some reason, the game thinks I have the "/" key held down:
When I make a new character and try entering a name, it'll start filling the field with "/". Backspace and Del don't help, it just keeps filling the field. I can only manage to get 1 or 2 actual letters in.
When trying to save a game, for about 5 seconds I can type, then it'll start filling the field with "/" as above.

Hey billy, it does sound like a keyboard issue Does it still happen or has it been resolved?

I've also got another bug - some of the trolls are unkillable - even though they are listed as "Near Death", they are never knocked down, and they can't be killed with either acid or fire. I know two instances of this happening. The first one is related to Unfinished Business mod, the component in question is the Kidnapping of Boo. Half way doing it, the Pet Shop owner accidentally teleports you to the troll mound/druid grove near Trademeet, and the trolls you encounter there are unkillable. I circumvented this by running the hell out of there, heheh.

The second one was in de'Arnise keep, after opening the draw bridge and going back into the first level of the keep. The single troll at the front entrance battling 2 de'Arnise is also unkillable.

My guess is that it involves some sort of script that is making them invulnerable. I haven't battled Tor'Gal yet to see if he is invulnerable as well.

Yo Rabbi! Thanks on the troll tip. Which maps were those? The one at de'Arnise keep, was it level 1 indoors? I'll try to spawn a couple of them and see what happens.

I'll look for the save game and send you thee save game soon.
Edit:
Hm, I can't seem to find your email address anywhere. You can tell me your email address here or send me one at "rabbi_satan@hotmail.com"

Thanks. My email is bigmoshi08@yahoo.com. But I'll send you an email as well.

Hi bigmoshi

I noticed something...  The find.exe process looks like it was started by weidu (or _weidu).  If I stop the find.exe using task manager, the biffing (or whatever weidu's doing) continues.

I'm using weidu 203.  Any idea what weidu may be forking find.exe for?  I'm worried stopping the process may mess up the install.

Hi Billy! Do you mean that the biffing of BGT stalls because some find.exe proc starts? Haven't tried with 2.03, but i'll try 2.04 and see if the problem persists. Btw, are you on vista or xp?  

Bigmoshi, as for the BG1 walktrough, i was wondering if you could include some extras. There are several characters in the BG1 game that you don't have to fight but their items (or the items they guard) are more than valuable...   Many players would like to kill them but this is not an easy task (insane task i'd say). I'm refering to Doomsayer, Drizzt, Sir BillyBob. Is there an easy way to kill them (without cheating through cluaconsole) and what are the consequences of that? I don't want to break any plot of the game quests. Maybe if you kill them after their quests?     I am mostly concerned about drizzt as he plays a major plot in BG2.

Okay noted, I'll keep my eyes peeled for interesting stuff. But generally I'm trying to avoid jotting notes on how to kill enemies. The walkthru is probably more of a quest guide than a strategy guide. Yeah, I was thinking of ripping SirBillyBob off! He was carrying loads of OMG-type of equipment. I did try to whack him but died trying :'( Anyway, you could try killing Drizzt, as I think at the most he won't help you fight Bodhi. But probably not SBB.

hey, thanks for this great combination, trying it presently.
i seem to have some problem though, when talking to imoen, it used to work fine, but now, whenever i talk to her, she leaves, telling me i've changed.
i'd think reputation, but it's 11, and i have no idea why she would do such a thing.

Hi there! Was it in Bg1 or Bg2, and what does she say before leaving? Btw, if you could you post the saved game somewhere to try it out that would be great. Thanks !

Some updates to how ARE files would feel like. Do let me know if I missed out anything impt as yet. Thanks.

Screens for ARE fileview:






Full map view, floating area tool window to increase viewable area:

You guys might want to datamine the BG1 NPC docs and code - there is a huge amount of stuff hidden in there that has never made it into walkthroughs. Coran's stuff and his Romance, for example, is coded so it is very difficult to get the same results on every replay; there are random calls and all sorts of stuff designed to make things new for several playthroughs even with the own party (hey, he is Chaotic, after all).

Yeah, Coran seems to be a pretty complicated character. And I didn't realise that there are random calls on his quests. Anyway, I decided to keep his thing on hold until after NSTOSC, cos it seems more fun there . Will test out coran and brielbara again before candlekeep.

Waiting that long before I get to play BG2 again? You're killing me here...

How much work would be needed to update this installation? My first thought is that it'd require a full reinstall, and personally I say that's way too much work to bother with...though I guess you'll want to keep updated, and you probably don't do as much random tweaking as I do (finding all the timers and what they mean and the restrictions and all of that can be a real pain, but I find it makes my game play much less frustrating...not item restrictions, just the quest ones, as I've said, I really don't like to miss things). Adding NEJ would be very, very interesting though.

I think cmorgan is right, as far as I can tell the only things really missing from the walkthrough are little NPC quests. But then again, most of those seem pretty random and uneventful, I don't think any really major quests are left out...unless you count those romances, which look like real pains to try to follow

Haha, sorry man. But I think the last time those big mods were updated were last apr or so, so roughly one year more makes it close to spring?
Hopefully by then installing megamods will be simple and we can start focusing on the game play itself

Hello again

After manually installing all the mods with newer versions for some(couldn't open the ruad.exe file with any kind of browser I tried , but I don't care that much atm tbh xD) I have reached the BG city after a few days of playing and it all works splendid so far.I have added Kelsey and Tashia NPCs after finishing the manual installs of all the SMM mod listing and I suppose they will work fine.Still haven't entered SoA though to encounter any big bugs or whatever.I have a few questions though regarding a couple of other NPC mods for the SoA-ToB version of the game.I tried installing that monk mod for ToB Iylos and errors occured during the installation so it was auto-aborted, but I suppose that has to do with the mod in particular.I wanna install Kivan-Deherianna and Solafeiun NPC mods as well.Think this will cause any kind of problems with the other mods installed with the SMM package?I think the Kivan mod is really great story-wise and I always liked Kivan so I would really love to see him again in my full run of the games.Thanks in adnance again for any answers and for giving me the chance to play all that great content in one shot(as bug free as possible)

Hi Valiad, you aren't the only one with the ruad problem. It just acts up with some browsers, but anyway "right-click to save as" seems to work most of the time for me. Will update the docs for this Haven't tried those mods, but NPC mods seem to go well with most things. See this by taltos & kulyok: http://www.shsforums...p...0695&st=40# Have fun!

Hello again Big Moshi,

Completed BG1 already, and starting on BG 2 now. I've encountered a bad bug when trying to fight in the arena in Athkatla, which I believe is part of the "The Darkest Day" mod - or was it "Region of Terror"? Bah, I can't tell.

But anyway, the bug is that when you actually enter the pit to fight, your status "ring" turns purple, making you inactive, thus making you unable to fight in the arena. Your opponent doesn't seem to be affected by this, and will happily slaughter you. Fortunately, or unfortunately in my case, my opponent was too busy being distracted by Aeria, and kept running into the arena pit walls. I experimented by removing everyone from my party and entering the pit by myself, but the same bug still occurred.

Hey, you guys are so fast. Have updated this in the bug list and will check on it.

Yay, just created an account! Huzzahs for moi.

Anyway, quick question - what do I have to change to get spells to give thousands of experience instead of the measly range of tens and 2 digit values?

But in anycase, I've discovered how to install and uninstall individual mods and components. Just copy everything from the MODS_POSTINSTALL folder into the BGII folder, and run the .exe installer in question to uninstall or install the component/mod. Of course, I should think that problems will definitely arise if you install something that doesn't agree with something else.

So from which component/mod is the low exp from spells coming from?

Danke schone!

The experience is from the XPBONUS.2da that is installed by BGT. If you get the latest version of BGT Tweaks, I believe there is a component of it that restores the XP for Traps, locks and spells to the original.

Thanks erebusant!

Anyway, another bug - You can't get into Cromwell's Home in the docks district without Crashing the game. Hope this helps you in quashing those incessant bugs bigmoshi

Could you send me a copy of your save game thru email / msn and I'll try to verify that crash and see how to reproduce it. Thanks!

Hey Cyrus & Mentat!

Thanks for the updates, have added them in my walkthru, but not yet released. Btw cyrus, the current plan for bg2 is to wait for the next round of annual updates for the big mods sos/tdd/rot/etc by kingdiamond. Hopefully it would soon Depending on whether NEJ seems okay by then, it may be added in to complete the full set of big mods . Any thoughts?

I do feel that players who are totally not interested in modding or weidu installs, ought to play mega-mods in the simplest way. Why else were they created for?

To scare people.

Heehee how true.

PS Jarno: Btw, what's the "twin" installation about?

Didn't I just tell you, the idea is to have basically two seperate WeiDU installations, one that can be played before the BG1 to BG2 move, and one that can be played from it. Just like TuTu.
You'll just can just copy the saves, or uninstall the first and install the second...

Oh that was describing it Anyway, your summary is much clearer Thanks!

Thalantyr will take it and will try to concoct an antidote to salvage iron stocks. That would earn you about 750xp, but I'm not sure if it does anything other than that. I think the mysterious vial thing is part of unfinished business

Hello again BigMoshi

I haven't created an account yet, but I will soon, been a busy few previous days.

I've encountered a bug I think, on the vendor that appears after you've killed the Bandit Leaders of the Grey Clan in the Friendly arm inn (The one that look's like Aec'Letec/Tanari), sells bugged items - all of them in fact. I'm not sure if its just me or something with the installation order, but I did the automated install.

Hi Rabbi!

I didn't notice the vendor being there. Thanks I'll check it out and see what he's supposed to do

Also, one other question - can I manually install or uninstall a component of a mod? I'm not so tactics-fu wise in the ways of BG I and BG II's Way of the Tao of Mage Combat, so I'm getting a bit flustered when it comes to mage fights - I HAVE to cheese my way and reload approximately 15 times before I can win, on average. And that's just for ONE mid level mage. I'm currently stuck on the area where there're 2 High lvl mages accompanying the top leader of the Grey Clan, and I simply cannot beat that area because of a component of Sword Coast Stratagems where the mages automatically power up at the start of combat with all their buffs. I've been able to accommodate the other AI changes, and found them to be quite enjoyable (Such as having to take care of Dynaheir for once, and cast mirror image). I've identified the component as part of Sword Coast Stratagems, but I've tried to uninstall it, by copying the weidu installer for SCS and its accompanying files into the main BG folder, running it, and choosing uninstall, but I get errors. So either it's not meant to be uninstalled, or perhaps uninstalled this way, or it has to be manually installed, which to me is quite a daunting task.

The way the game engine centers itself around the dialog.tlk file, makes it hard to uninstall mods in a non-linear fashion. Hence, weidu enforces the checks to make sure that you have to uninstall each and every component in a last-in-first-out manner. That is to say, you have to uninstall all the components starting from the last one until you reach scsII. Then you can tweak that mod, and reinstall all the other mods again.

The other thing to note is that there's a chance that the "string references" in your old saved games would have a mismatch with the new dialog.tlk file. In other words, the old saves would show wrong texts, but still possibly playable.

Hope this helps!

Hey Jarno, nice to see where you are coming from.

Customisation as I have pointed out in my original post is the ideal & yes we should head for customisation. Well then, trial and error does seem like the best solution. But that is a time consuming process. The exclusivity principle would apply because I'd be pointing at the new guy saying "pick up modding if you want to play a megamod". Sometimes it's better to be realistic, not everyone has the aptitude of erebusant, ascension, azazello, leonardo etc etc and the whole chin gang in modding. They took years to master it. Sure, reading the binary code in your IE files is easy, but really understanding tp2 coding is pretty different - thats where the modexperts come in.

Coming from the perspective of a newbie (ie. me), the objective for my first megamod was simply to grab the mod-installation that seemed most right. I just didn't want to have that 'opportunity' to bang my head if my game failed beyond hope after 243.3 hours of playing. Yes, there was a risk that it would screw up, but 1yr++ of testing & over 5k+ downloads did mean something to me. If certain mods had not been included in my installation, it doesn't mean its not good. It was just that I felt no need to go commando.

Hence, I'd like to reinforce the point that I have never said that other installations would "screw up". If such an impression had been made, do forgive me as I have never meant it that way. In any case, I do feel that players who are totally not interested in modding or weidu installs, ought to play mega-mods in the simplest way. Why else were they created for?

PS Jarno: Btw, what's the "twin" installation about?

My sixth sense is telling me that some pple may have misunderstood my intentions for a standardised megamod, and somehow have the impression that I'm telling others my installation is the "best of the best", and anything else is screwed. I'd like to clarify that I have never claimed such a thing. Plainly because there isn't any megamod that can be problem free, since everyone is modding in their own way, at least for the near future. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try finding something that works to an acceptable degree.

The reason why I am reluctant to cross over the boundary towards supporting customisation simply because its beyond my ability to do so. Obviously, mega-mod installation is an extremely sensitive & time-consuming process. The smallest detail can destroy a whole day's effort of installation. Perhaps I'm dumb, but I spent over a week on my first mega-mod installation - just to get it installed right. Not forgetting, there weren't really much instructions then as everyone was just dumping weidu.logs except for a rare few. And, I wasn't prepared to read more than I should. Anyway, when I got into my first "perfectly installed" game, the NPCs in Candlekeep were just not speaking to me. Nice.

So finally, when I finally got my mega-mod working, I was elated. So I thought, hey why not document all these fixes since they were still fresh in my mind. I wrote the manual guide, went through about five more manual installations following line by line of my own documented instructions just to make sure I didn't miss out anything. Otherwise, people would just curse and swear if the last mod just wouldn't install.

Then, problems started arising because ppl started tweaking this and that, and everyone was starting to play a different game again. Problem back to square one. So I decided on X'mas eve to write an auto-installer for dummies. I spent christmas day writing a simple installer with the same intention towards standardisation. Now, translate that 1 week of manual installation time to 2-3hrs, saving almost 1 week of installation time, better spent on finding gameplay bugs --> 100 ppl playing a consistent game = 100 weeks of debugging time. And, you don't have to fix a dialogue bug a 100 times, because 1 person fixes it and everyone gets it. Simple arithmetic.

As for the choices of mods, I wasn't really choosy. I just took the weidu.log that I deemed most stable from my own perspective so that I could play my game as soon as possible before school started. Do not get me wrong that I'm anti-customisation. In fact, I strongly feel that customisation would be ideal. Just that I'm starting to wonder will it happen soon? Even when someone takes time to think through and write a long long problem-solving approach to customisation, no one really bothers.

Now here's a belief. There are tonnes of pple like me who aren't modders. They just want to play something, anything.
I think we should help them.

(sure thing, but it will be some time - cleaning and defregging and doing wekly maintainance before retesting the tool to see if I still have the errors, and setting up for a series of fluid state tests - sorry for the delay!)

Sorry for the silly shortcuts - these are new and more robust replacements for IsValidForPartyDialog() checks, to determine if someone can actually participate or not. An NPC can be in the party and dead, and the game doesn't like making the dead speak out of turn... or at all!

~!StateCheck("myNPC",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)~ returns true if the NPC is fine, not silenced, not dead, etc., etc -
~StateCheck("myNPC",CD_STATE_NOTVALID)~  returns true if they are not fine, or have been silenced, or they are dead, etc.


and you just got the workaround anyway, by allowing a checkbox for "Who is in the party" . Just extend it to

"Who is in the party? Are they alive? Are they dead? Are they Silenced?" type stuff:

Player's Party (Tutu/BGT BG Content):
X  Imoen      X OK  O Dead  O Silenced O Not In Area
O  Kivan       O OK  O Dead  O Silenced O Not In Area
X  SharTeel  O OK  X Dead  O Silenced O Not In Area
O  Kagain     O OK  O Dead  O Silenced O Not In Area
O  Yeslick    O OK  O Dead  O Silenced O Not In Area
X  Viconia    X OK  O Dead  O Silenced O Not In Area

Player Conditions
O Male O Female  O human O etc.,
to preview conditions...

hey, this is just brainstorming, you know - I don't even know ifit is posible to create a simulation routine which would do that; basically running the dialogue with preset conditions. The list

From what I can tell, global variables would be ok at least. As for the more complex triggers, I think it may be easier to start off with some of the simpler & common ones then build from there.

My current vision was to just list all the transitions, and show triggers in a tooltip or in a dedicated 'trigger box' when selection is highlighted. That way, you don't have to worry about dynamics of the dialogue. I'll try and draw some crude pictures in the near future.

Ok, thanks!

This makes my wishlist nearly complete.

Up to this point, I've always used NI or DLTCEP in preference to IE because, quite frankly, IE just didn't have the functionality I needed. I'll still have to use both other tools once in a while for specific tasks, but I've been loving the user-friendly GUI of IE, and now, with XY coordinate capabilities, well, I will foresee much joy. NI won't give you XY coordinates at all, and those produced by DLTCEP are not always as precise as those I could get on a bigger map.

One of the things I like best about IE is the ease with which the user can change installation directories. I can go from Tutu to BG2 and back without restarting the tool, and it accesses mod-added files with equal facility. When one mods both Tutu and BG2, those are important features. Also, it seems to load a lot faster than NI.

Now, if you could just figure out a way to convert WAVC to WAV in IE, that would be one more thing I wouldn't have to use NI for.

Thanks!

Thanks Berelinde, I'll check out how those wav/wavc files work and see how to incorporate them along the way. Also, I'll keep that directory switching feature.

Hi!

Questions, where in the SMM install should I install 3rd part NPCs?

And Yes, I still haven't finished manually installing. Almost done though

Eh.. you mean third-party NPCs? Try at end of the installation. Anything fails, just uninstall. Do note theres a chance that your saved game may not work after that

And I'm manually installing... aw crap!

Anywho, any suggestions for 3rd party npcs to try? Keto? Kelsey? Saerileth? etc?

Personally, I'd go for Keto cos she looks cool but she's only available in SoA.

Cheers to those clicking fingers

Oi! Greeeedric You can tweak SimDing0's xp fixer (which is shown as xpmod in your weidu.log) to 25-50%, which was defaulted it to 75% already. Anyway, the level of difficulty is subjective depending on your playing style.

Stability is the key focus right now for me, as you got to get the pillar right before decorating your house. You can try Ursurper's no reload challenge if you like hehe

Edit: Btw, if you are going to try to tweak that xpfixer, remember to backup your files before doing so (PS: I know you don't have the habit of backing up). Just note that even when you uninstall and reinstall the exact same components, it feels like sometimes your string references can get scrambled.

Wow - if you seriously are rewriting this as a major "everything" editor/viewer, that would be an ideal addition -

being able to see "valid links" or "invalid links" path mapping that way would be invaluable. Don't know how to screen out or deal with the InPary/!InParty or CD_S_NV checks to apply to the dialog, but even if that is not possible and you get the behavior described above, you would save massive amounts of in-game testing time for testing logic chains and viewing ingame dialog behavior. Kind of like having a real "prieview window" on animation tools, allowing changes to show close to what the player sees immediately.

that would be seriously cool.

InParty probably can be solved if the user could input in a textbox or something the npcs you are simulating to be in the party. Have some draft ideas but gotta test it out. As for CD_S_NV, still no idea what this means but will learn along the way.

PS: Btw, could you pass me your weidu.log, cos I'd like to fix that mod-tracker tool and integrate it to trace the history of changes made to resource files during a mega-mod installation. From there, I'll see if any useful features can be added. Thanks

Hi TKATK!

I'll try to recreate the lag you are facing. Meanwhile try one thing - delete the BG2\cache files just in case the cache is corrupted. Thanks