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Posts
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About CamDawg
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Profile Information
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Gender
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Mods Worked On
Technical Design: Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate (including Siege of Dragonspear), Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment
Author/Co-Author: BG2 Fixpack, Tweaks Anthology, The Calling, IWD-in-BG2, BG1 Unfinished Business, Divine Remix, G3 Anniversary Mod, IWDification, IWD Fixpack, IWD Unfinished Business, SP Collection, IWD Item Upgrade, Bardic Appraisal, Lore From Learning
Contributor/Maintainer: BG1 NPC Project, BG2 Unfinished Business, Sword Coast Stratagems, Item Upgrade, Under-Represented Items, Quest Pack, Oversight, Song & Silence, Amber, Moinesse's Avatars, P&P Celestials, Sword and Fist, Tutu, BGT, BGT-WeiDU, aTweaks, 1PP, Rogue Rebalancing, WeiDU
Tools: BG2 Creature Inventory Checker, G3 Debugging Suite, IWD-to-BG2 Opcode Utility, EE Soundset Tool
Contact Methods
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Discord
https://discord.gg/yTzjMTb
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Website URL
http://www.gibberlings3.net
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CamDawg's Achievements
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Geez, just because I'm single-handedly holding up progress, everyone's unhappy... j/k Seriously, though, I've caught up on PRs. The ones left are marked as in-progress or I need to double-check something first.
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Pretty much. Let me give you a concrete example from BGEE. Let's say I make a mod with a small area with a kitchen, to which I add a male creature named "Cook". In English, WeiDU looks in the tlk and sees the existing string "Cook" at 32197. (String 12895 is also "Cook" but WeiDU selects the last matching string.) However, cooks in the French version are "Cuisinière" (32197, female, used by fcook2 e.g.) and "Cuistot" (12895, male, used by mcook) for cooks. So WeiDU either decides to use 32197 on the French version, which isn't correct for French players, or adds a new string to all tlks, which introduces redundancy (at best) or bugs (at worst). lynx is correct in that this can be somewhat mitigated by modders--since "Cook" is an existing string I should be using a direct string reference in my installer (in this case, 12895) rather than introducing the name like it's a new string.
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No, mainly because of the subtle way WeiDU interacts with dialog.tlk. When a mod uses a new string, WeiDU looks in the existing talk table for a matching string; if it finds a match it uses the existing reference instead of making a new tlk entry. If it doesn't need a new entry in English, but needs one in French, you're already in a conflict since a creature or spell file can only reference one of those values. So you either force the French tlk to use the English reference value or force the English tlk to make a new entry for a redundant string. The former is bad since there's no way to know if the forced French string is a good match, and the latter is bad because if it's a feedback string for a spell (think of something like "level drained" or "held") then everything that might block the string now requires an update--and mods that come after won't know it's there at all. And all of this is a best-case scenario, where you're talking the first mod on a clean install--it will get exponentially worse as you add more mods.
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There's no CDALL folder, but otherwise for the GOG version I have 185 biffs in the game root and another 188 in the data folder.
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It's working on mine--NI v2.4-20231231 on Win 10 with the GOG version of oPsT.
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Honestly, we're about 15 years too late for a switchover. Most old mods are lucky to get maintenance (including WeiDU itself); realistically there's no way they'd be migrated to a new tool. So we're already starting from a point limiting any new tool: it would have to be backwards compatible, which is already a lot of extra work and design constraints.
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There's no upside to changing the component number of a mod once it's released, only downside, and that's true regardless of whether LABELs are being used. There's no queue of modders desperately wanting to change component numbers, being held at bay only by downstream compatibility concerns. There are several good use cases and benefits for using LABELs. This is not one of them.
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The claim is that it frees us from the tyranny of fixing a DESIGNATED value, which is nonsensical, as that's the whole point of DESIGNATED. It's like arguing that by using DESIGNATED it frees us to change LABELs, an equally nonsensical proposal. DESIGNATED was created so that mods with multiple components (e.g. Tweaks) could present the components in a sensible order in the installer without causing massive compatibility headaches down the line. Prior to DESIGNATED, WeiDU simply numbered components itself starting with 0, so if you wanted to add components they had to be at the end of existing ones. Tweaks is barely manageable as it is; I want you to imagine the horrific mess it would be if it was organized in a purely chronological order of the components by creation date. With fixed DESIGNATED values I can freely add components where I think they fit in the order, move them around, or do whatever without making David and other modders having to constantly shift around their compatibility checks. AL|EN's doing a little not-so-subtle lobbying here: no one is using LABELs to check against other components--at least not yet, and this paradigm shift was proposed three years ago. Keeping your component numbers DESIGNATED is more important, and I don't foresee that changing any time soon. This isn't to say that LABELs aren't useful: they very much are, and you should use them, and they'll become even more useful is we ever get a new version of WeiDU with the proposed changes to LABEL handling. I'm simply clarifying that DESIGNATED is still relevant and not to be discarded, and that changing a DESIGNATED value is exceptionally bad practice.
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DESIGNATED is important and should still be used in conjunction--WeiDU still uses component numbers for command-line installs as do some other tools. I'd recommend new mods use DESIGNATED from the start. The important thing with DESIGNATED is that its entire purpose is to lock a component to a number, so changing the DESIGNATED number of something undermines the entire purpose. IOW once you set a component a DESIGNATED value, don't change it. Like, ever.
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No, this is a design decision.
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Ooh, this one is subtle. The game is expecting an integer number or an IDS reference--it's not properly recognizing the hex number as a number and treating it like it's a symbol. Swapping it to "3" or "MASK_EVIL" makes it work.
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The BD fix is to address a slightly different issue. If you already have a pelt in your inventory when you first chat with the merchant, they will simply take it as if you already heard his request. As you've already touched upon, many (if not most) BG quests were fragile in that dialogues assumed an order of events and broke easily or skipped major sections if anything was out of sequence. BD had to do a lot of cleanup to add flexibility to them.
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Ages ago I coded Tracking to be a level one, at-will innate for IWDification. I didn't release it as there's only tracking info for ToB areas--having a ton of "no info" as you wander around BG and SoA seemed fairly pointless. It will be in the next IWDification release since @Lava wrote up a ton of nice, IWD-style tracking blurbs for all of the BG areas.