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Usability flags


IchigoRXC

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I have been tweeting with Trent Oster, one of the lead designers on BG:EE, and I asked him about usability flags.

 

"@IchigoRXC We've had a few conversations about the usability flags. No easy fix without reprocessing all the data and breaking mods."

 

I wondered how badly this would break existing mods, and how easily fixed it could be. I know a lot of people have had frustration with usability flags, looking through various topics on here and many other forums focused on games such as Baldurs gate

Would it be worth the hassle to fix these mods if it gave use that extra freedom to add usability to more than just 32 kits/classes. How much do you think the modding community would benefit from it. If the consensus is pro changing this from the modding community, maybe it could be brought to the designers attention.

 

It was just a thought

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There is no space in ITM file format to include new flags, besides three byte fields marked as unknown in IESDP. If those bytes are used for something, there is literally no way more flags could be added without altering the format, and then you'd have to update >90% of all the existing mods. It could have been done (probably!) back in 2002, but not in 2012.

 

Modders can survive the change, but never mere players who simply want to download a mod and play it, without getting into the pitch black forest of technical details.

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actually they could reduce the stack amount field in size from 2 byte to 1. the max value is 65535 currently. there is a non-crashing but annoying gui glitch with equipped stacks greater than 999 in size. Whenever used the item disappears from quick slot control bar and has to be re-equipped to show again & ranged launchers fail to show up on the control bar except directly after equipping them.

 

weight is also 4 bytes long. surely it doesn't need that much (unless IESDP has it wrong -- always a possibility i suppose). they could shorten that field down a bit too and use some of that free space.

 

Tho I'm not too sure why any more usability flags need to be added except to add support to more kits perhaps.

(said as much over at SHS too)

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Use the space at 0x002a to hold another bit field. If bit0 is unset, act as normal. If bit1 is set, read the usability from kitfix.2da:

 

             ItemType1    ItemType2    ItemType3    ItemType4...
KitId1
KitId2
KitId3
...

 

Though I agree that updating Can't Use Item Type to red-out the unusable item type (perhaps only if param2=1) would be a simpler option. As a minimum it would allow item-type usabilities to be defined in-game ("Now you've had some training you can use a throwing dagger"). The better question would pehaps be to soft-code the extra affects associated with the usabilities (e.g. fewer thief progression points).

 

I think there are other things that would be more worth the time to improve though.

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