Sensible entrance points, new for v12

[jastey]

Thank you! I sent you the link via PM.

[Wisp]

Oh, right, of course. It's because the coordinate point in the match string is not escaped.

 

This will work:

 COPY_EXISTING ~ar0903.bcs~ ~override~
               DECOMPILE_AND_PATCH BEGIN
                 REPLACE_TEXTUALLY ~CreateCreature("C#KNIG05",\[820\.1500\],8)~                                 ~CreateCreature("C#KNIG05",[1548.1500],8)~
                 REPLACE_TEXTUALLY ~CreateCreature("C#Ajan\([01][0-9]\)",\[1730\.400\],0)~ ~CreateCreature("C#Ajan\1",[638.400],0)~
                 REPLACE_TEXTUALLY ~CreateCreature("C#KNIG07",\[500\.410\],8)~            ~CreateCreature("C#KNIG07",[1868.410],8)~
               END

Edit: however, with facing 8, he ends up looking away from the door. He should probably retain facing 0.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Wisp

[CamDawg]

There are... other reasons... why you might want to prep these mods for a flipped NORH.

What are you referring to?

And since Trent showed a screenshot at PAX, I no longer have to be subtle--the flipped NORH will be standard for BG2EE.

[jastey]

And since Trent showed a screenshot at PAX, I no longer have to be subtle--the flipped NORH will be standard for BG2EE.

Cool!

 

Teaser!

[AL|EN]

ERROR: Failure("DECOMPRESS_BIFF could not find biff area090a.bif")

Sensible Entrance Points (BG2 Tweak Pack) was not installed due to errors.

This error is present because i didn't start the BG1/BG2 before BGT/BWS installation and I was having wrong path in baldur.ini file. I'm posting this for the other people that will encounter this.

Edited February 8, 2015 by ALIENQuake

[ithildurnew]

Anyone else getting the old entrance point in Beregost when going there from the temple?

[Periel]

Sorry for the incredible thread resurrection... but my simple question is probably better to add to a relevant thread than make a new post.

 

Brand new player here (yeah really! There are still a few people who've never done BG before...) so I'm having to spend a LOT of time working through the mod descriptions to work out what'll work and what might be useful for a first playthrough, and make sense of the uber-picky mod ordering. (I've never previously had to spend more than a month researching such an old game's modding before I can ever setup/play my first game. :/ )

 

Anyway, the question: reading the Tweaks Anthology 4 readme, this component confused me. Although five of the new entrance points seem to be in the BG1 part of the game, the readme suggests only ONE is changed for BGT, and the others are not. Is the readme wrong, is there a restriction I can't understand on this for BGT, or is it just badly phrased? The line in question:

 

BGT only gets the aforementioned Beregost change while the other BG platforms also get changes to the zombie farm, farm north of FAI, shipwreck and lighthouse areas.

 

The problematic word there is "only". If BGT gets all the BG1 changes, not just Beregost, couldn't this be rephrased to be clearer? If BGT doesn't, why not, please?

 

 

BTW, can I make a request to ALL the mod-hosting sites out there, such as SHS and yourselves, that'll REALLY help new players/modders like me and save us a VAST amount of time searching forums for often heavily outdated information... In your download sections, make clear when old mods, especially tweaks, have been superceded by or rolled into newer ones. When all the ancient tiny tweaks are listed with the same priority and no indication that they are now long deprecated, it bloats the listings and makes selecting mods for newcomers INCREDIBLY difficult.

 

I am very grateful (and relieved) that here every deprecated fix/tweakpack download page has been helpfully updated with a note about the Anthology - I have to say that it's mostly SHS that is terrible in this regard... eg. you just have to look at the flat crosslisting of EVERY old outdated component version of 1pp to see that there's no attempt there to guide new modders to the newest, more comprehensive v4 ANYWHERE. Or the old Ascenscion64 engine fixes, long ago rolled into the fixpacks. Couldn't the community make an effort to move these and many others to specific sections for deprecated mods, noting their replacements clearly, if they must remain listed, to help everyone browsing the lists and reduce noise?

 

Thanks for listening. /rant

[CamDawg]

Welcome! I'm pretty envious,as you've got a lot of fun ahead of you...

 

BGT only gets the Beregost change because BGT already changes those other four areas to good entry points--in other words Tweaks' changes aren't needed for those four areas in a BGT install. I'll see if I can phrase that better in future readmes.

 

Tweaks is kinda unique in that it's been around forever, does everything, is referenced a billion places... and I recently pulled the rug out from under everyone by making it a new mod.

[Jarno Mikkola]

... and I recently pulled the rug out from under everyone by making it a new mod.

Well, to be truthful, you just recorded at least 12-year-old mod for the third time.. for the third-fourth iteration of the game. So. But then you are involved in the game too, and the previous iteration of the Tweaks. So.

Iterations, yes. The first being the vanilla BG1&BG2, the second is the BGT->Tutu/BGT-weidu(moded) one, the third is the EE, and now the EET being technically the 4th.

This mod... first gen is the Easy-of-Use, the second is the G3BG2Tweaks while the others also had their own specific tweaks, and third-fourth is the Tweaks Anniversary/Anthology, into which you have tried to stitched the others together, cause things had spread in a little too many places. If you want to ask, I can give multiple name, but that's besides the point.

 

...

Well, there's such a thing as BiG World Setup tool, that allows you to just skip manual mod install and have nearly every kind of mod under the sun in a single install. You have not either heard of it, which means you have not asked in the right place, or that you have ignored the answers, just cause it's at a thread that's hundreds of pages of forum about it, while this is just the 4th page here. And it's in a forum called Mega Mod Help. I wonder where you fell. Not that this is large failure on your part, as there can be reasons which will preclude people from finding this info, such as silence.

Edited January 16, 2018 by Jarno Mikkola

[Periel]

 

...

Well, there's such a thing as BiG World Setup tool, that allows you to just skip manual mod install and have nearly every kind of mod under the sun in a single install. You have not either heard of it, which means you have not asked in the right place, or that you have ignored the answers, just cause it's at a thread that's hundreds of pages of forum about it, while this is just the 4th page here. And it's in a forum called Mega Mod Help. I wonder where you fell. Not that this is large failure on your part, as there can be reasons which will preclude people from finding this info, such as silence.

 

I don't want to start multi-forum flame wars with you, Jarno, but maybe you can take the hint that I'm not interested in random unsolicited (and irrelevant to the topic) opinions. And neither might other forum users want you spamming threads with them either.

 

Whatever your personal need to proselytise BWP, you can't just assume I'm unaware of it. Or assert that I've deliberately ignored threads about it. SInce you're effectively stating I'm ignorant, you're being incredibly offensive, although I'll allow you some latitude in lack of first-language comprehension that you might not appreciate that. Are you deliberately trying to turn away new players from asking questions?

 

If you actually READ my original comment I said I've been researching modding BG for over a MONTH now, before being able to play a SINGLE game. It's sad, but it's largely inescapable for new players, since the scope of the various fixpacks, BGT, IR, extra quests, NPC additions etc., pretty much make Megamodding the only way to go, which means that EVERYTHING you might want to include has to be in place (and working) before you start your game. It's a HELL of a steep learning curve just to play such an old game. That means there are a LOT of forums to wade through comparing mods and discarding irrelevant and outdated advice (which is why your 20,000 posts REALLY don't help as much as you seem to think they do).

 

I'm well aware BWP is one way to go about it, but frankly I've seen as many bug reports and cries for help in those forums as people finding it plain sailing, so ignoring the fact that as a sane, security-conscious computer user I don't particularly want an untrusted VB script and multiple unattended batch files trawling over my computer, it doesn't look such an attractive option to me. I'd rather research heavily then install carefully by hand using the excellent PDF guide. Plus I'd note that even to such a new forum user as me, I can notice recent comments about the maintainer disappearing, see the holes in his own mod version compatability matrix on the German site it is linked to, and see where the guide has not been updated for the most recent components. So please don't claim it's the ultimate panacea for new modders, because it is clearly not, for everyone.

 

My apologies to Cam for the off-topic reply in this thread. Thanks for your helpful reply, though. I'm glad I've been of help tightening up the readme.

Edited January 17, 2018 by Periel

[CamDawg]

My apologies to Cam for the off-topic reply in this thread. Thanks for your helpful reply, though. I'm glad I've been of help tightening up the readme.

No worries. I'm so used to the idea that everyone looking at mods has played at least once that the readmes are written at that level, and I doubt mine are the only ones based on that assumption. At any rate, I'm happy to help with questions on this or anything. The learning curve is steep, but there are folks willing to help.

 

And at the risk of keeping the thread off-topic I'm also going to take a moment to defend BWP. It does a very good job, especially considering its mandate is a Herculean task even under ideal circumstances. I also can't give it grief for its originator moving on as, sadly, that's now the norm for the community and no longer the exception. None of that means it's necessarily the right mod for any given player--no mod universally satisfies that condition--so the standard YMMV applies. (Speaking to the general 'you' and not you specifically Periel, as you've already done your research.)

[Jarno Mikkola]

And at the risk of keeping the thread off-topic I'm also going to take a moment to defend BWP.

Erhm, but that Project is dead... been that from September so to speak. I am not saying that Leonardo can't come back, but the BWS no longer use that option even in it's "BWP" setup.

What you should be talking about is the tool people can use to do the research with by reading the tools content and test drive it a few times to get their preferred game. Not of research by reading readme's that actually have no real considerations of testable facts. Things such as install order is ingraned into the BWS. The user has no need to understand it at all, so to speak. Months worth of research of a wheel that already exist, is for nought. By just running the BWS, one only needs to read about the options in it ... and you should have your first install done in a bout 4 hours... unless you like to take everykit and their mom, that slows down the SCS and other such things.

Edited January 17, 2018 by Jarno Mikkola

[CamDawg]

I know, I know, I use BWP and BWS interchangeably when I shouldn't.

[carian]

Brand new player here (yeah really! There are still a few people who've never done BG before...) so I'm having to spend a LOT of time working through the mod descriptions to work out what'll work and what might be useful for a first playthrough, and make sense of the uber-picky mod ordering. (I've never previously had to spend more than a month researching such an old game's modding before I can ever setup/play my first game. :/ )

 

Lucky you, I wish I could forget all my playthroughs and start afresh - so much fun to be had

 

I'm sure you considered it, but I wonder why are you trying to mod your game on your first run. BG is perfectly playable without any mods, or even fixpacks (perhaps with the exception of widescreen mod, for modern monitors). From my experience adding mods will inevitably lead to complications - a chance of some random bug or crash somewhere during the game rises expotentially with every mod installed, even with best intentions and knowledge (not to mention that you may spend more time modding than actually playing the game - that's my constant problem). At least you'd have a point of comparison for your second try.

 

Anyway, have fun and enjoy the game, no matter how you're playing it!

[Periel]

Carian (and Cam), I'm not a committed gamer, so I guess I like to mod any new games I try to a best "modern" standard (widescreen/hi-res, high-quality texture updates etc.) with all necessary bugfixes and restoration of omitted content (eg. Unfinished Business, Almateria's mod, NPC dialogues), but not adding massive non-original mod quests (like Shadows over Soubar or Northern Tales, which appear to be still a little buggy). That, and BGT, would be my absolute baseline and should be solid. I think I'm capable of then tweaking the game balance I want through research - for instance I can already tell that SCS is likely too hardcore for me and Spell Revisions is too far from vanilla, while I'm liking the look of Rogue Rebalancing and some of subtledoctor's melee/NPC balancing work - plus some reasonable ease-of-use/tweak mods to make play a bit less restricted (eg. Pack Mule). But like most normal people I don't want to commit large amounts of my life to playing a single game, so I'm more of a "play once or twice and move on" player, which is why I'd rather have an optimal, satisfying game first time than going back repeatedly trying different rule and playstyle combinations... That might change if I get immersed in BG's role-playing, of course, and I have been a low-grade modder before for other games I've really gotten into (Morrowind).

 

Normally that level of basic refurb for modern play wouldn't be too tricky. From my perspective as a new non-EE BG player, though, it's like following the White Rabbit down the rabbithole: to know what mods you want, you really need to play the game, but to play a game you have to have a far more than minimally modded game to start with. Unfortunately BG seems to be an anomaly in the pack, in the sense that it's so old as an engine plus being a hackjob bastardisation of multiple versions of paper D&D for the computer - the fact that it has been so actively modded with so many approaches to rebalancing suggests how broken the original implementation and balance was. A few fixpacks, widescreen mod and a little restored content just won't cut it! And then there are the mod order intricacies to work out, with so many important subcomponents needing to be added at different points in the installation. I don't remember this level of complication making PS:T fit for modern play. :/ Indeed, I'm astonished that the state of the fixpacks is still so fluid after all this time; it's hard to believe that there could be so many engine/text bugs still left to find after so many excellent modders have spent so many years on it...

 

The problem then becomes picking your way through this vast minefield of strongly held personal opinions over the "best" mods for setup and balance and their installation order, when the forums date back to 2005, mod quality has changed massively and the majority of info is now almost all outdated (even in pinned topics). Especially if you haven't been following this modding scene for all those years and know exactly where to start, since there's no obvious "absolute beginners guide" at the top of any of the forums, that I've found. (Just random posters shouting at you to "just use BWS" as if it'll solve everything with a single click, when you STILL need to understand just what that's installing in order to use it properly.)

 

Above all, CamDawg especially as I can see how involved you are in multiple critical active mods, I want you to be sure that I am grateful that there are still modders working actively on this. SInce thanks are all you get for that work, you can never have enough encouragement. (And yeah, I'm sucking up now in case I get an itch to start modding and need someone to bug and hand-hold. )

 

OK, I guess we're done derailing this thread.