Changing NPC kits messes up quests... why?

[subtledoctor]

So a "bug" in my mod has been brought to my attention: if you give Aerie my Fastpaws of Baervan Wildwanderer cleric kit, her quest in the Circus Tent behaves oddly. She doesn't join the party, but instead goes off to confront Kalah on her own. When the player follows and kills Kalah, the game reportedly gets stuck in a cut scene.

 

I patch the Aerie6.cre file with a few WRITE_BYTEs and WRITE_SHORTs to drop Aerie to level 1, reduce a few stats to level-1 levels (max hp, lore, one of two other.), and give her the kit from the value in kitlist.2da.

 

All of the .cre patching *works* in the common sense; the NPCs have the new kits and level up in accordance with their XP and they are totally fine in a functional sense. But some parts of some quests, or dialogues maybe, seem to be tripping over my changes.

 

I've only ever modded rule & stat tweaks... I have no idea how quests and dialogues work, or even where to look to investigate. Can someone point me in the right direction (in NI?) so I can try to find out what's going on?

 

Thanks all

 

EDIT - To be more specific, what I do apply a handful of patches to kivan.cre, and then use that file as a basis with which to overwrite kivan2.cre, kivan4.cre, and kivan6.cre. For those other files I only need to patch a single field, the XP. Likewise I patch aerie6.cre. and use it to overwrite aerie7.cre, aerie9.cre, and the rest.

 

But perhaps the first file is different - perhaps it is not the player-joinable one, and it has different dialogues and quest triggers, and I am overwriting the player-joinable NPC files with the no joinable ones. Does that sound plausible? Once again, how/where can I check this?

[Jarno Mikkola]

Does her scripts get changed ? Cause that's a NOoooooooooooooooooo...

[subtledoctor]

No, I only patch stuff like HP, lore, thief skills when appropriate, etc. Not even thac0 or saves, since that stuff resolves itself when you level up. I only patch a few really simple fields.

 

But, see my edited post, I feel like I may have hit on the problem...

[CrevsDaak]

I'd recommend to check the .dlg and .bcs files associated with the quest to see why it could be failing.

[subtledoctor]

I guess that's what I'm asking - I can open up the NI files in the BCS category or DLG category, but is there a way to sort through the and easily find which ones are associated with which quest? Or, which are associated with which .CRE files?

[Mad Mate]

EDIT - To be more specific, what I do apply a handful of patches to kivan.cre, and then use that file as a basis with which to overwrite kivan2.cre, kivan4.cre, and kivan6.cre. For those other files I only need to patch a single field, the XP. Likewise I patch aerie6.cre. and use it to overwrite aerie7.cre, aerie9.cre, and the rest.

 

But perhaps the first file is different - perhaps it is not the player-joinable one, and it has different dialogues and quest triggers, and I am overwriting the player-joinable NPC files with the no joinable ones. Does that sound plausible? Once again, how/where can I check this?

I think this is bad idea. If you open in NI (vanilla BG2), ie, aerie(6,7,9,10,11,12) you will notice that some carry different scripts and other properties, so you can't just overwrite them.