Does anyone know the current status of the BWS?

[Ser Elryk]

 

 

 

 

 

so is bws still being worked upon, or is it forgotten?

The last update was made yesterday.

 

 

Do you think there's any good chance of someone (or someones) resurrecting it after IWD-in-EET is released?

 

Do you have any trouble using BWS (aside from SCS)?

 

I think I might have just misunderstood you. When you said "the last update was made yesterday" I thought you meant "last" as in "the last one ever, and it's now officially retired." Did you mean "last" just as in the "most recent?"

 

My latest install (using BWS) had no problems. These problems I hear about SCS, are they only related to the A.I.-related components? Because I selected the Recommended tweaks components of SCS, but not the A.I. ones and it seemed to install fine.

 

Unrelated question: Would you recommend against installing DSotSC, NTotSC, and The Darkest Day for a first-time complete playthrough? Or do they change so many things that it would be better to just wait for a second playthrough? Right now I don't have them installed, but I'm worried that by the time I finish my first playthrough that BWS will no longer be supported or function.

 

What about installing the big mods and deciding in game whether you follow their threads? There is nothing that forces you to do any quest or visit any area from these mods. Unlike e.g Dark Horizons which places some assasins on your main road through the game, everything in the three mods you mention is optional. You can have them installed and never see much about them - you see the quest givers but you can say just no and nothing will happen.

 

About SCS, I have no problem with it, I normally pause my BWS for it and install manually. More than that I cannot say about it.

 

And - the most recent update to BWS was done two days ago adding Yoshimo romance and the Vault to EET.

 

 

Thank you very much for all the info! =)

 

I thought I read somewhere awhile back that The Darkest Day changed the transition from SoA to ToB. I think I also read that EET also changes the transition? As I said, I've never played that far. So I'm clueless. I didn't know if The Darkest Day in particular changed any of the main quest events or not.

[Roxanne]

 

 

 

 

 

 

so is bws still being worked upon, or is it forgotten?

The last update was made yesterday.

 

 

Do you think there's any good chance of someone (or someones) resurrecting it after IWD-in-EET is released?

 

Do you have any trouble using BWS (aside from SCS)?

 

I think I might have just misunderstood you. When you said "the last update was made yesterday" I thought you meant "last" as in "the last one ever, and it's now officially retired." Did you mean "last" just as in the "most recent?"

 

My latest install (using BWS) had no problems. These problems I hear about SCS, are they only related to the A.I.-related components? Because I selected the Recommended tweaks components of SCS, but not the A.I. ones and it seemed to install fine.

 

Unrelated question: Would you recommend against installing DSotSC, NTotSC, and The Darkest Day for a first-time complete playthrough? Or do they change so many things that it would be better to just wait for a second playthrough? Right now I don't have them installed, but I'm worried that by the time I finish my first playthrough that BWS will no longer be supported or function.

 

What about installing the big mods and deciding in game whether you follow their threads? There is nothing that forces you to do any quest or visit any area from these mods. Unlike e.g Dark Horizons which places some assasins on your main road through the game, everything in the three mods you mention is optional. You can have them installed and never see much about them - you see the quest givers but you can say just no and nothing will happen.

 

About SCS, I have no problem with it, I normally pause my BWS for it and install manually. More than that I cannot say about it.

 

And - the most recent update to BWS was done two days ago adding Yoshimo romance and the Vault to EET.

 

 

Thank you very much for all the info! =)

 

I thought I read somewhere awhile back that The Darkest Day changed the transition from SoA to ToB. I think I also read that EET also changes the transition? As I said, I've never played that far. So I'm clueless. I didn't know if The Darkest Day in particular changed any of the main quest events or not.

 

The TDDz version you use for EET does NOT change the transition, this was the case for the original mod but has been altered. TDDz does not change main events, everything is optional.

[Ser Elryk]

As always, thank you for educating me

[Lightbringer]

My own playthrough of EET has NTotSC, DSotSC, Stone of Askavar, TTDz, Fishing for Trouble, and the Colors of Infinity series (plus a few others).

 

I am currently in SoD, having taken a break, but I'm likely to resume quite soon.

 

I can say that playing EET through BG1 with the big mods was lots of fun. I had never played any quest mod before, and it was great to see all the new content. None of it was crazy overpowered, though a good bit was endgame-BG1 quality (maybe a couple early SoA level items). I kept trap and scroll xp consistent per BG2 values, but multi-classed all characters possible to compensate. I am currently around level 9/9 multiclassed characters, 10 Paladin, and 11 Monk, post 1st SoD dungeon.

 

My party is currently about as powerful as I would expect a vanilla BG2 party to be after clearing a few choice strongholds (fighter, druid, paladin), plus as much Athkatla stuff as possible (bridge, slavers, etc). Most of that is due to gear. Against my earlier judgement, I will be allowing it to disappear in the SoA transition, to allow for all the new stuff in TTD, FFT, and others to feel like shiny new things again

 

So yes, it is quite viable, Ser Elryk

 

Edit: This, of course, assumes that one has played BG1,2,ToB, etc already -- which I think is a good assumption for anyone here. As for a first EET playthrough, I've enjoyed mine immensely so far. Now to see if it holds true with TTDz and FFT.

[Lundar]

Sorry for asking

(I'm not allowed to post in Sandrahs Forum)

 

Roxanne, can you please give me/us some hints for Shauana ? (Spoiler alert !)

I "rescued" her, but there are no hints, the shaman is no help either and minsc is gone ....

What about the dead body ?

I am clueless....

[Roxanne]

Sorry for asking

(I'm not allowed to post in Sandrahs Forum)

 

Roxanne, can you please give me/us some hints for Shauana ? (Spoiler alert !)

I "rescued" her, but there are no hints, the shaman is no help either and minsc is gone ....

What about the dead body ?

I am clueless....

Not so sure where you are in the plot

 

 

Shauhana was captured again with the staff when you tried to leave Clan's land - Sandrah gave her a potion for survival, right?

You returned to rescue her in the jail, killed the jailor, found her equpment and the staff?

You took her mentor's dead body from the bed and have it with you.

You leave the jail and confront the shaman. On his body you find the Sharkta Fai Jewel.

Sandrah and Shauhana had some conversations about Brage's book and what it means.

You return to the map where Shauhana was captured and she starts a conversation about what to do with the body.

You get a message that *The road to Sharkta Fai is now open in the north.* and find a new transition on the northern edge of the map,

When in that area (CVSha3) you may check those globals

C:GetGlobal("SanSharkta","GLOBAL")

C:GetGlobal("Shauexit","CVSHA3")

 

 

[Lundar]

Thnx Roxanne,

 

seems, I have to learn how to put up spoilers, too ....

I didnt get the conversation about the body, strange....

and now I am back in Athkala

The Shaman did say something cryptic and now I am searching for Minsc ...

(he's not in CC anymore)

Sandrah or Shauana dont tell me something either...

seems now, that this Quest is broken ?

 

sorry for OT.....

[SCO]

The 'problem' with BWS and the reason it has no future in its current incarnation is it using a godawful script language (Autoit). It's not exactly surprising that as soon as the primary maintainers leave no one wants to work on it.

 

It serves it's function well as fair as i can tell as a equivalent of mlox, but it's far far less maintainable. Ideally some very smart person would do a grammar for a script language specialized for WEIDU components, with some escape hatch for pure code scripts, make a 'stable sort' like mlox that operate on that grammar and spits out a valid mod order that doesn't contradict all the incompatibilities and makes all of this maintainable.

 

Also create a tool to convert current data into the new, hopefully more easily understood format.

 

I was thinking long ago of combining the netbeans platform + groovy interpreter + a specialized groovy grammar that would define rules for weidu components. It would be a combined 'mod order rule editor' and mod selector/installer

 

The idea was to combine netbeans support for autocomplete and highlighting with groovy support for ad-hoc maps (the data structure) to spit out a script language.

 

The grammar was supposed to work like this:

 

modname.version = # (required version for these rules)

modname2.version = # (required version for these rules)

modname.component# requires modname2.component#

modname.component# conflicts modname2.component#

modname.component# and modname2.component# "warning" (warns if both are enabled)

oneof modname.component# modname.component# modname.component# (deselects the others if one of these is selected)

modname.component# before modname4.component#

modname.component# pinto modname4.component# (this is a stronger form of the above that goes right behind it)

 

 

and finally for those really fucked up mods:

modname.component# {

//groovy code that modifies the install *at the moment before this is installed goes here*

 

}

 

 

The advantage of a autocomplete and specialized grammar was that these 'modnames', component numbers, or names, or even 'allowed selections' could be picked up directly from weidu files in the game dir, simplifying the work of the rule editor. I had the plan of doing a self contained ruleset for each game and the app be able to create new rulesets at will, and even 'propose' commits automatically to a central repository (after all, netbeans already has git/hg/svn libraries) and show the diff from the central to the local rules files.

 

But honestly, i melted my mind trying to do the antlr grammar for this, and the netbeans libraries blew the rest of it with extreme abstraction. I never got far into the concept, and never got anything working. I never even got it straight into my mind how the sorting was supposed to work. I even forgot that WEIDU is supposed to have a uninstall function (it would be cool to be able to upgrade the datafiles and the game at the same time without necessarily uninstalling everything, 'just' the segments that need reordering and can't be accepted by the new rules and upgrades).

 

So yes, even if you don't go overboard with features like me, you kind of need a dev to start from scratch and at least replace most the program, and ideally reuse or convert automatically the existing data to the new program.

[lynx]

The data is stored in a machine readable format already, but like I said, reinventing the wheel is pointless. This is a solved problem and has been solved in many different ways for ages.

[SCO]

Solved problem eh? I've been using BG1 & 2 on linux for nearly a 7 years and BWS never worked on wine. Ever.

 

Not very surprising since it's a visual basic app wrapped with its own arcane and buggy script language on top. You might say it 'works fine' but the first time you're forced to edit the big world bat file and transplant a minimal mod order (because of course, even the fucking pdf bat file doesn't work out of the box), i think you'd reconsider what you consider as a solved problem. And no, virtualization is not a solution. Especially now that the games have linux versions too.

 

WEIDU always worked on linux somewhat fine, it's all the other tools in infinity engine mod community that are amateurish piles of cmd line hacks that break easily.

 

edit: eh, i'm being too harsh. There probably is a 'way' to run BWS on wine, with a bit of more specialized winetricks knowledge. But a real portable application instead of a vb6 app would be better.

[jastey]

Watch your language and tone, please. There may be valid critiques with existent IE tools but we are still talking about fan made projects that help a lot and consumed a lot of free time of the ones who did them.

[lynx]

I'm also a linux user, but I wasn't talking about running BWS. I was talking that the whole packaging and dependency resolution is a solved problem and it would be silly to start from scratch.

[Jarno Mikkola]

I'm also a linux user, but I wasn't talking about running BWS. I was talking that the whole packaging and dependency resolution is a solved problem ...

You might want to use a few more qualifying words than just "it's solved" and "it works" in this case. Like, what was solved, what it involves and so on. Do you mean the dependencies involving weidu's working as meant to on Linux, in Wine environment, in BWS or in Wine AND BWS, cause I don't see the two last ones happening.

As generally I see, "starting from scratch" to other people, usually still involves using weidu, but a different coding languages involved between weidu-mods and their install to the games, starting from a GUI that downloads the mods and installs them ... there's a whole lot of dependencies other than installing one mod, their install order, install success etc... what if the mod compilation includes a mod that messes up the .2da table so that the next mod using the tables won't install but errors out, the current BWS has various fixes in the BWFixpack that during the install/setup fix this and all sort of other problems. But it only works on Windows. Because it's originally .bat install based. That's the dependency that everyone else is talking about ! Because there's hundreds of them, all fixes. That's megamoding and the reason why the problems won't show up usually is that no one can write a perfect .tp2 that can't fail, and the problems crop up only when there's more than a few mods installed on top of each others.

 

Go ahead and make a script on Linux that can install these .patch -files(yes, they are located in their own subfolders) to already extracted mods on the game folder, aka it just inserts the +text and removes the -text, that would improve their compatibility with each others by a large portion.

And then you might also want to include a script that runs them and so forth...

 

OK, yes, that's slavery, but that's part of what is talked about the dependency that's not resolved yet.

[lynx]

Oh Jarno ...

[Jarno Mikkola]

Oh Jarno ...

Yes ?

 

Aka:

I was talking that the whole packaging and dependency resolution is a solved problem ...

By what ?