1154 replies to this topic

[Macilrille]

I may be dense, and it is a long time since I did any of this. But it seems to me that Argent's update is not Nearinfinity (I can find no exe file). And it also seems to me that there is no Nearinfinity engine to actually update posted in the first post of this thread.

 

Am I wrong? Is the above update an update or complete?

 

Thanks.

 

 

Edit; I solved it, Chrome... I forgot it does not like JAVA.

Edited by Macilrille, 15 February 2016 - 12:46 AM.

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

When searching flags (0x0010) in a CRE file, it returns results from other sections (?) like inventory items.  Can we get this to exclude anything not from 0x0010's section?

 

Please, can you provide an option to hide all of those "Unused Bytes?" fields in itm files?  I like NI as an editor, and having crap that no one can or will use just clutters up the space.  Maybe a separate "investigative" or experimental fork?

Edited by Fiann of the Silver Hand, 16 February 2016 - 03:46 PM.

[Argent77]

When searching flags (0x0010) in a CRE file, it returns results from other sections (?) like inventory items.  Can we get this to exclude anything not from 0x0010's section?

Can you give me an example to reproduce?

 

Please, can you provide an option to hide all of those "Unused Bytes?" fields in itm files?

That would be a very bad idea. "Unused Bytes?" fields are hints that the resource may contain invalid or corrupted data structures. It would be much more sensible to find the cause for these errors and fix them. If these fields were hidden you could unintentionally corrupt the file further with each save operation without knowing the cause for it. Unmodded or lightly modded games should not contain any or only very few corrupted resources.

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

When searching flags (0x0010) in a CRE file, it returns results from other sections (?) like inventory items.  Can we get this to exclude anything not from 0x0010's section?

Can you give me an example to reproduce?

Yup. AERIE.CRE: select only the "indentified" flag at 0x0010 (because whyever), Find 'selected attribute'. The results include not just CREs with the identified flag, but every single identified item they carry, as separate results.

Please, can you provide an option to hide all of those "Unused Bytes?" fields in itm files?

That would be a very bad idea. "Unused Bytes?" fields are hints that the resource may contain invalid or corrupted data structures. It would be much more sensible to find the cause for these errors and fix them. If these fields were hidden you could unintentionally corrupt the file further with each save operation without knowing the cause for it. Unmodded or lightly modded games should not contain any or only very few corrupted resources.

 I assumed it was just a feature of the latest version. I have multiple (~9) rotating installs, all variants of BGT with 1 or 2 other mods on top. I'll try to narrow down which mods are doing this. Clean installs (GOG vanillas and barebones BGT) don't seem to be affected.

[edit] Yeah. Only a few installs are showing corruption. Interesting.

Edited by Fiann of the Silver Hand, 17 February 2016 - 10:12 PM.

[Argent77]

Can you give me an example to reproduce?

Yup. AERIE.CRE: select only the "indentified" flag at 0x0010 (because whyever), Find 'selected attribute'. The results include not just CREs with the identified flag, but every single identified item they carry, as separate results.

Ah, ok. I assumed you were talking about the Extended Search feature. Find "selected attribute" uses a very generic search algorithm which is primarily based on the field name and type. I can probably add a few more restrictions. (Let's hope that it doesn't introduce unwanted side effects.)

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

I don't even know what those flags do (Identified? Allegiance tracking? Haven't seen those things implemented anywhere else). Being able to narrow the search might help, but this isn't anything critical.

[Argent77]

Near Infinity now has its own Wiki! You can find it here: Near Infinity Wiki

I will probably add more content over time. The current version should cover pretty much everything already though.

 

The "FAQ & Troubleshooting" section is still pretty empty right now. I'm open for suggestions. (Of course, I'm open for suggestions and opinions about the Wiki in general, as well.)

 

[Argent77]

Are you using an older Near Infinity release? NI contained a bug a while ago which enabled the sound button even for stringrefs without associated sounds. The latest release has fixed this issue.

Edited by Argent77, 29 February 2016 - 03:27 AM.

[Argent77]

It looks like sound resources are taken from the english language if none are available for the selected language. I'll try to find a solution for this.

[Argent77]

All Near Infinity releases up until now have been coded to be compatible with Java 6. Since Java 6 is very dated by now (first release came out in 2006) I'm considering dropping support for that version and updating Near Infinity's code base to be compatible with Java 8, which came out in 2014 and is still the most recent version available for all major platforms. Only very dated systems would be left out (such as pre-Windows XP or PowerPC Mac OS systems). If there are no objections I would drop support with the next release.

If you want to check whether you have Java 8 installed on your system you can run this little tool:  JavaVersion.zip   1.74K   196 downloads

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

The errors that show up searching through a base install -- progtes2.bif, etc -- can we get those to show up in their own box, while letting the search run continuously on without needing user action?

[Argent77]

Enabling "Options -> Ignore Read Errors" should suppress the error dialogs.
 

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

Ach.  Tis already there.  Thanks.

[Sam.]

Ok, so I was going through the BG:EE V2 beta looking for corrupt files and such that the ordinary "player" would never be likely to find and report.  In NI, I go to Tools->Check->For Corrupted Files... and among the hits is

AR1010.WED	48d2h	Overlay 0/Tilemap 1847: Primary tile index 1847 out of range [0..1846]

So I go to AR1010.ARE and and on the View tab, click View Area.  It tries, but the Area Viewer never comes up.  I then go to Game->Refresh Tree and go to AR1010.TIS.  Scrolling to the bottom-right of the tileset seems to indicate that the tileset is missing the last tile.  Extracting the TIS and examining the header indicates that the tileset contains 1847 tiles, which is not evenly divisible by the 42-tiles-per-row dimension of the ARE/WED.  1848 is, however, which again indicates a tile is missing.  Now, examining the header some more indicates that each tile in the tileset is exactly 12 bytes long.  So I copy the 12 bytes from the top-left tile to the end of the TIS, increment CountOfTiles by 1 in the header, and put it in the override folder.  Refresh NI, and everything seems to be fixed (and the Area Viewer works now).  Load the game, CLUA to the area and nothing goes wrong and the area looks like it should in-game.

 

Each tile being 12 bytes long indicates that it is a PVRZ compressed TIS that refers to an external PVRZ file.  Is my method of filling in the missing tile a valid one?  Can I reference the same external PVRZ tile more than once from the same TIS file?

 

TIA,

Sam.

[Argent77]

Is my method of filling in the missing tile a valid one?  Can I reference the same external PVRZ tile more than once from the same TIS file?

 

That should be no problem at all. Theoretically you could reference the same tile all over the map without issues. You can also set the "PVRZ page" field of the last tile to -1, so that no actual PVRZ graphics is referenced.

[Argent77]

New development snapshot: Near Infinity v1.37-20160331-devel

Important: Near Infinity development is currently in a state of transition. Aside from upgrading the code base from Java 6 to Java 8 I am currently working on replacing an outdated API by a more powerful one internally. This development snapshot still uses the old API, but already requires Java 8 to run. It also uses a different location to store Near Infinity settings. The preferences from older NI releases will be imported automatically, but settings changed in this and future releases will not be visible in older releases (v1.36-20160214 and older) and vice versa.

This snapshot provides "Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear" support (except for Steam users, as explained further below) and the following improvements:

• Full support of LUA, MENU, PNG and TTF resource types.
• "baldur.lua" can be accessed via Edit->baldur.lua or in the Game Properties (Game->Game Properties...) and pressing the "Edit..." button.
• Home folder name for EE games is retrieved from "engine.lua" if available.
• Savegame folders "sodsave" and "mpsodsave".
• Added new effect opcodes:
  • 344: Enchantment vs. creature type
  • 345: Enchantment bonus
  • 346: Save vs. school bonus
  • 361: Cast spell on critical miss
  • 362: Critical miss bonus
  • 363: Movement rate check
  • 365: Make unselectable
  • 366: Apply spell on movement
  • 367: Minimum base stats
• Updated a number of existing opcodes.
• Added support for stat values 0x115 and 0x116 in SPLPROT.2DA (used in opcodes 318, 324 and 326).
• Added new fields to ARE->Spawn point, GAM, TOH and WMP->Map structures.

 

Important information for Steam users:
Beamdog decided to offer Steam users the "Siege of Dragonspear" expansion as a DLC in the form of a single zipped file named "dlc/sod-dlc.zip". All SoD-related resources have been included in the zip archive, including an expanded dialog.tlk which is used by the game instead of the one found in "lang/xx_YY". The current Near Infinity development snapshot can not access this content. As a result the game will be detected as plain "Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition" with the original resources of the base game. I'm currently working on a solution, but it requires to rework a major portion of NI's code base. I can't estimate when it will be done.

If you need to access resources from the SoD expansion badly, you can do so by manually unpacking "dlc/sod-dlc.zip" into a separate folder somewhere on your system and renaming the file "mod.key" into "chitin.key". You can then select the game in Near Infinity. Not everything will be fully accessible though, as the archive only contains new and updated files for the expansion itself. To reduce the number of inaccessible resources you can manually export the following files from the base game into the expansion's override folder:

Spoiler

MSCHOOL.2DA
MSECTYPE.2DA
STATDESC.2DA
ALIGN.IDS
ALIGNMEN.IDS
AREATYPE.IDS
ASTYLES.IDS
BOOLEAN.IDS
DAMAGES.IDS
DIFFLEV.IDS
DIR.IDS
DMGTYPE.IDS
GENDER.IDS
HAPPY.IDS
HOTKEY.IDS
JOURTYPE.IDS
MFLAGS.IDS
NODECODE.IDS
NPC.IDS
REACTION.IDS
SCRLEV.IDS
SEQ.IDS
SHOUTIDS.IDS
SLOTS.IDS
SOUNDOFF.IDS
SVTRIOBJ.IDS
TIME.IDS
TIMEODAY.IDS
VEFPROJ.IDS
WEATHER.IDS

This release is not available by NI's own update check option.

[Gwendolyne]

It seems the Save type field has disappeared from all effect tabs. The last release I could read it was 2015.10.23...

[Argent77]

Can you elaborate? The Save type field is still present in current NI releases (at offset 0x40 in EFF resources).