47 replies to this topic

[Qwinn]

Can you post your setup*.debug files, so I can see which mod components you installed, please?

My first instinct was to say that it sounds like an engine bug that happens every once in a while even in the unmodded game, where an NPC in your party just doesn't want to talk to you for some reason I could never identify. Usually, just transitioning to another area fixes it (and if it doesn't, transition again). Never had a case where transitioning to a new area didn't fix it relatively quickly.

But the bit about how she won't talk to you if she's outside of your party - is that correct? - has me concerned. That, I never ran into before. It may be that you just unluckily had her in the state I'm describing above when you went into the crypt and got separated from her... but, I'll take a look.

As I said though, I think it's a bug in the engine, I don't think it has anything to do with my mods. I'll try to verify that though. Oh, and before uploading files, you should try leaving the area and going back in to see if it might still fix her.

If not, then the solution in the end may have to be to go back to a save game prior to going into the crypt, and making sure you can talk to all your characters (by transitioning to a new area and back until they will) before going into the crypt and getting separated from them.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 05 July 2008 - 11:01 AM.

[Qwinn]

Wow, that's really troubling - it won't even chain into her dialogue? Bizarre. Hard to imagine what outside the engine could be doing that.

The only thing I can suggest is that you send me a zipped up save game folder and your debug file, and I'll see if I can find anything. Do you keep a lot of save games, like I do? If so, I'd recommend going back and finding the first save where you have the problem, and hopefully have some idea of what you did in general between the last good save and the first broken save.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Zip 'em up and send 'em to me at pescalona@verizon.net

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Ok, I figured out what's happening, and it's clearly an issue with banters. Annah is having her dialogue file set to BANNAH.DLG (her banter file) during a banter, and it is not getting set back to DANNAH.DLG (her normal dialogue file) when the banter is over. This would explain all the aberrant behavior.

I'd like to ask - does anyone know if this is an issue that can or has ever happened -without- my banter accelerator being installed? Was it ever reported in the last 8 years prior to June? I don't really see how my banter pack could cause it, I checked every call to Annah's banter and they all change it back to DANNAH. BUT, the old original Black Isle method of executing banters (in the engine) is not disabled by installing my banter accelerator. If it's a long standing problem, then it's probably caused there. Or maybe it's being caused by one of my banters and a Black Isle banter happening almost simultaneously (which should be pretty rare).

Either way, gotta come up with a solution. Hmm. I'll get back to you all on that.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 17 August 2008 - 11:08 PM.

[Qwinn]

Alright, I've added scripting to the AI to look for a creature with it's dialogue set to a banter file (i.e. NearbyDialog("BANNAH") and if so, change it back to what it should be - ActionOverride(Annah,SetDialog(Annah,"DANNAH")).

For those of you suffering from the problem, the file BANTER.BAF is attached. Go to the PST-Tweak/banter/baf folder. See the file BANTER.BAF? Rename it to BANTER.BAF.backup, in case you need to reverse this change. Now drop the file attached to this post into the PST-Tweak/banter/baf folder, then run Setup-PST-Tweak and reinstall the banter accelerator.

After that, load up the earliest game you can with the problem (for you, wizzard, it should be before you exhausted Annah's banters) and see if it gets resolved. And if you could do me a favor, after that trigger a few more banters by resting, see if they play correctly, and see if you can talk to the PC properly afterwards? Test it a bunch of times, because the problem I'm afraid of could depend on bad timing. I'll be testing this as well, but I'd like an extra dose of testing if possible on this one. There's a non-zero possibility that it might interfere with a banter while it's executing, and I'd prefer to be comfortable with this before releasing it as standard. And yeah, if during testing you see a zombie suddenly appear where there shouldn't be one, there's a problem.

Qwinn

Attached Files

•  BANTER.rar   1.89K   653 downloads

Edited by Qwinn, 18 August 2008 - 01:43 AM.

[Qwinn]

No, sorry, I'll zip it up for you.

(Another way would be to just cut and paste it all into a text file and save it with the same name, as that's all it really is, but give me a minute and I'll replace it with a .RAR version)

EDIT: Done. File replaced.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 18 August 2008 - 01:44 AM.

[Qwinn]

One suggestion, for anyone following this thread: if you want to repeatedly rest so as to see all possible banters, go ahead, but don't then continue playing with that game, reload to before you did that. At least for now, until this issue is firmly resolved (if it can be).

Explanation:

Talking with wizzard in emails, it seems that he deliberately exhausted all available banters with repeated resting. (Under normal circumstances, there's so many banters that I don't expect this would often happen in normal play). I did anticipate that people -would- do this, and took steps to prevent problems, but a possibility has occurred to me.

The way the banters originally worked, after all of the banters between two given NPC's were used up, it would reset to the beginning and you'd start seeing the same banters again. I personally didn't care for that, because you -would- see that even if there were still previously unseen banters between -other- members of your party, and I didn't want the reruns displacing still-unseen banters. So, my method has the advantage that once you're no longer seeing banters, you can be reasonably certain that you've seen them -all-. Without that change, then with bad luck on the random number generator you could see reruns for a long time rather than still unseen ones. EDIT: It also seems illogical to restart the Annah-Grace banter chain, for reasons that should be obvious to those who've seen the last one.

So, what happens if it goes to kick off a banter, and none are available because I've prevented it from looping back to the beginning? Well, it would keep trying, and this would cause a stuttering effect, where the NPC attempting to banter would stop in the middle of moves and otherwise be hard to control. So I put in code where, after 30 failed attempts to find an unused banter, it will stop trying for 24 game hours (it will then try again, cause you could have picked up a new NPC with new banters). So if you get this state and the stuttering starts, it should stop pretty quickly, within a few seconds.

But, it now occurs to me that perhaps the original Black Isle method of doing banters, which happens in the engine and so I was not then able to disable it, may not be able to deal with not finding a valid banter in a banter file, and perhaps that's why wizzard's Annah dialogue file was not reset back to DANNAH.DLG. I will experiment with this, and if that's the case, I may wind up having no choice but to put them all back on a loop, so there's always a banter available even if it's one you've seen before. Bleah, but can't really help it, I don't think.

In the meantime, I suggest not deliberately running out of banters, at least not without saving before you start and reloading when you're done, and I'll keep investigating this issue.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 18 August 2008 - 07:25 AM.

[Qwinn]

For the version I'm releasing by tomorrow (yes, for sure, even if I have to disable stuff for some translations which really sucks), I am putting the banters back on loops, so as to avoid any possibility of this issue. (Note: Save games where this issue has already taken place may be unsalvageable). Being that the black isle banter mechanism is in the engine, I'm not going to be able to come up with any other fix in time for this release, and I'd like to have the issue resolved for it.

If I can come up with a future version of dealing with this, such as somehow disabling the engine banter generator and letting my accelerator do it all, I will in future versions. But in version 3.0 of the Tweak Pack, banters between any two specific NPC's will restart as they do in the unmodded game.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 18 August 2008 - 04:38 AM.

[Qwinn]

Yep, that's the conclusion, and yep, the new Banter tweak has code that should allow you to talk to her again. Let me know if you get other problems like stuttering and such.

Note that going forward, banters will be on a loop, so that at the end of the banter you mentioned, the "Annah_Talked_Grace" variable would get set back to 0 and you would go through all her banters again. BUT, if you're applying that to a save game where the banters were already all expired, that won't happen. I -think- Annah has 6 banters talking to Grace, and in your save game the variable is probably set to 7 now, and nothing will set it back to 0. To stop the problem from happening again in your save game, you might need to use a save game editor to set the value of that variable back to 0 (or, at least, just lower than it was).

Actually, if you're having the problem of talking to Grace, then it's one of -her- variables that likely expired. Look for variables beginning with "Grace_Talked_XXXX" and lower them by 1 each, at least, in addition to the Annah_Talked_Grace one.

As I mentioned, I think looping banters is silly, -especially- in the case of that particular banter chain. I also don't think looping banters was intentional, i think it was done as a bandaid to fix the bug of the engine banter system being unable to handle not finding a valid banter. As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm hoping that in future versions I can have a patch to the engine that will disable that method of generating banters altogether, so the banter accelerator handles all banters and I can take them back off looping.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 20 August 2008 - 06:01 AM.

[DH1980]

First of all, sorry for my bad english...

My installation:

1. PS:T
2. Patch 1.1
3. Fixpack 2.0
3. Tweakpack 3.0
4. Unfinished Business 2.0
5. Widescreen Mod 1.0

My problem are the accelerated banters in the Tweakpack. With the activated group KI the game isn't playable. When I ordered the character to attack, he only attacked 3x and then did nothing. Then I have to move the character and give a new attack order. This is very annoying.
The solution in the ReadMe with the "T"-button didn't work.
For test purposes I only deinstalled the banters and the problem is solved. Is this maybe a bug with the new 3.00 version?

Edited by DH1980, 20 August 2008 - 10:25 AM.

[Qwinn]

Hmmm. I didn't encounter that with my game, but let me see if I can duplicate what you're saying. Thanks for the report.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Okay, it's not happening in my game. Can you give me some more details? Like, is this a save game you created with my older versions that you just upgraded, or is it a new game you just started? If it's an old save, do you think you might've exhausted any NPC's banters (deliberately or otherwise)? Did it happen immediately after starting up with the new versions, or did it take a while? What NPCs do you currently have in your party.

Incidentally, you don't need to uninstall the tweak pack to turn off banters, if you turn off the party AI that works too, and the only thing it really does is make Grace cast her healing spells.

Qwinn

[Qwinn]

DH1980:

I'd still like answers to those questions, but regardless of how it comes out, try installing this file in the PST-Tweak/Banter/baf directory, then reinstalling the Banter tweak, and see if it fixes the problem.

Qwinn

Attached Files

•  BANTER.rar   1.89K   561 downloads

Edited by Qwinn, 20 August 2008 - 11:41 AM.

[DH1980]

I have a fresh installation with your new versions of the mods. (by the way: great work!!)
Iam just at the start of the game and only Morte is in my party. Another problem with the party AI is when I give the order to talk to other persons.
The nameless one starts to walk to the person and then stops after a while in the middle of nowhere... very strange
When I put off the party AI everything is normal again. But I want to see all the great banters.
What can I do? And why is it only in my game?

Update: Ok, i try it! Thank you!

Edited by DH1980, 20 August 2008 - 11:38 AM.

[Qwinn]

Try downloading the file in my last post, putting it in that directory, and installing the tweak again, see what happens.

Qwinn

P.S. Sorry, just realized it comes up as a text file, I'll change it o a .rar in a sec.

P.P.S. Okay, I replaced it, just extract that into the directory I mentioned.

Edited by Qwinn, 20 August 2008 - 11:41 AM.