193 replies to this topic

[Ascension64]

Yeh, it's nice to see you're taking my suggestions under such serious consideration...

Sorry SimDing0, I can't be on for very long and more recent posts somewhat blocked out your posts. But I have to say it is very hard for me to comprehend absolutely what needs to be done for BGT-Tutu because I have extremely little knowledge of how Tutu works and what it actually achieves. Therefore, however valid your argument for Tutu is, I am currently not exactly in a position to argue either way, due to my lack of understanding of Tutu. The reason why BGT-WeiDU is my platform at the moment is that this kind of build is all that I know, and it is a better learning experience for me to 'master' WeiDU rather than go jack-of-all-trades and try out Tutu. Again, they may be fully interchangeable with each other, but I just don't know that.

[SimDing0]

Ah, I apologise if I sounded abrasive: I'd thought you were ignoring me. Thanks for the response.

I don't think it'd do a great deal of harm to take a quick look at Tutu, however. It's... under 1MB, I think, so even the slowest of connections should be able to grab it. To summarise, the basic situation is that Tutu places the BG1 and BG2 resources side-by-side in BG2, with little to no overlap, meaning that all you have to do is literally slap the transition on top. That wouldn't really be any harder exercise in WeiDU than converting BGT, I shouldn't imagine.

[Ascension64]

Ah, I apologise if I sounded abrasive: I'd thought you were ignoring me. Thanks for the response.

I don't think it'd do a great deal of harm to take a quick look at Tutu, however. It's... under 1MB, I think, so even the slowest of connections should be able to grab it. To summarise, the basic situation is that Tutu places the BG1 and BG2 resources side-by-side in BG2, with little to no overlap, meaning that all you have to do is literally slap the transition on top. That wouldn't really be any harder exercise in WeiDU than converting BGT, I shouldn't imagine.

It sounds extremely easy from the way you describe it, but I guess there may be complications (hell, BGT-WeiDU had complications). I will take a look at it though when I eventually get the time.

[Offkorn]

Ah, I apologise if I sounded abrasive: I'd thought you were ignoring me. Thanks for the response.

I don't think it'd do a great deal of harm to take a quick look at Tutu, however. It's... under 1MB, I think, so even the slowest of connections should be able to grab it. To summarise, the basic situation is that Tutu places the BG1 and BG2 resources side-by-side in BG2, with little to no overlap, meaning that all you have to do is literally slap the transition on top. That wouldn't really be any harder exercise in WeiDU than converting BGT, I shouldn't imagine.

What I'm wondering is:

If that's all it does, why can't you start a new BG2 game with it installed?

[King Diamond]

That sounds good.  Maybe you could just give me a file list of the WAVs since I already have a large WAV folder and my batch just copies it all over and BIFFs it straight away.  I guess the .bat will do if you are willing to send it over.

See attachment

For now I separated clearly BG1 stuff from Ascension/Baldurdash resources to make life easier, 'coz we can borrow that stuff from SoS/TDD Horred's install (he did that twice for now - proper Acs/BD-weidu for those 2 mods  ). That will save a little time and efforts IMHO as well.....

Again, could you give me a filelist?

That would be much more difficult...
Right now I'm going to sort out another thing: it looks like BGT contains not only Asc/BD, but some other mod trace, 'coz it updates various parts of BG2 sometimes even without any background and not providing necessary recources to those modifications (areas, dialogs, scripts, items..., f.e. something like 'Dart of Ctrl+Y' for ar2900 that is absolutely pathetic IMO or Cromwell & Cespenar smithy additions). So i'm trying to remove all unnecessary things right now but it slows the whole process a little.... When I'll finish that inspection I'll give you a filelist for BGT-only contents.... B) But it will TAKE some time...

On another note, the game has some trouble running.  KD, you might know something about the game freezing on the LOADING AREA screen.  It seems to happen with all the BG1 areas I try to CLUAConsole into (and starting a new game) so I suspect it might be some mismatch with tilesets or WEDs or something, but I need some suggestions here.

I'm not sure there... If you left areas installation part untouched (there's nothing to do in that direction right now I think) it should work well....

Oh yes... And what I realized is that Horred's new mods don't fully install Ascension or Baldurdash. So that should be solved (or just left) as well.... I'd prefere an idea of making the existing Asc/BD mods to install itself properly instead of including them into every larger mod.

Edited by King Diamond, 08 February 2005 - 10:45 AM.

[Ascension64]

On another note, the game has some trouble running.  KD, you might know something about the game freezing on the LOADING AREA screen.  It seems to happen with all the BG1 areas I try to CLUAConsole into (and starting a new game) so I suspect it might be some mismatch with tilesets or WEDs or something, but I need some suggestions here.

It seems that the TIS header confusion screwed up the install, so I had to start again. Graphics look fine now and I can start the game properly. I can't remember about TIS headers, but I can't seem to BIFF the following files without causing problems (likely due to the header problem which I can't remember):

AR0015.tis
AR0072.tis

Both of the above are in the BGT package in .tiz.

flame1.tis to flame4.tis - in the BP-BGT-NeJ Patch 313 package

What do I need to do to be able to BIFF these without problems?

[King Diamond]

AR0015.tis
AR0072.tis
Both of the above are in the BGT package in .tiz.

flame1.tis to flame4.tis - in the BP-BGT-NeJ Patch 313 package

What do I need to do to be able to BIFF these without problems?

tisunpack -h -s -o WTLAVA2.tis WTLAVA2.tiz

tisunpack -s -o ar0015.tis ar0015.tiz

With '-h' - for biffing, without - for \override\.

Flame*.tis are already in the main BGT package, so the ones from the patch are not necessary at all.

Ar0072.tis is already in \override\ after ToB installation and can be removed from BGT install as well.

So if you have some .tis in \override\ and want to biff them. You have to TIZ them first (tispack.exe) and then untiz them with '-h' option. As BP does when it's biffing everything in the end. Just add few lines in your .bat....

[SimDing0]

If that's all it does, why can't you start a new BG2 game with it installed?

Because the New Game button takes you to BG1. Prior to the fixpack, you could install Tutu and start a new game in ToB. You could also CLUA to SoA and sorta play that, although some things wouldn't work entirely right. The fixpack removed the option to start in ToB.

[Offkorn]

If that's all it does, why can't you start a new BG2 game with it installed?

Because the New Game button takes you to BG1. Prior to the fixpack, you could install Tutu and start a new game in ToB. You could also CLUA to SoA and sorta play that, although some things wouldn't work entirely right. The fixpack removed the option to start in ToB.

Then the new question becomes: Why remove it?

[SimDing0]

The two games stand better on their own than they do when mashed together with a mediochre-quality transition. It'd take a lot more than BGT does to make it worthwhile in my eyes. However, some people like the BGT transition, so I have no objection to somebody else throwing together a similar thing for Tutu (well, as you can see, I'm even encouraging it). Hell, I'd probably try to help out a bit, even if I'd never be likely to play it.

[EDIT] Or did you mean "why remove access to ToB?" In which case, it's because giving access to BG1 and ToB without SoA is pretty daft. Yes, we could've solved it by allowing people to play SoA too in the same way BGT does, but having part of the game started through the Tutorial button is messy (and that'd mean a transition, which... see above). Again, it boils down to the games being better separately.

Edited by SimDing0, 08 February 2005 - 10:24 AM.

[Offkorn]

The two games stand better on their own than they do when mashed together with a mediochre-quality transition.

Somehow I think the whole uninstalling/installing/uninstalling would get incredibly tedious after a short while.

That's the whole reason I deleted it and got the bp-bgt-nej mod, I had no desire to go uninstalling things whenever I felt like playing SOA, or installing them again when I wanted to start from the beggining.

[SimDing0]

Multiple installs really are so ridiculously easy to set up. It's a fairly good all-round solution. You have a separate install for BG1 and BG2, you have a separate install for Tutu and BG2. Same difference, and no added tedium.

Edited by SimDing0, 08 February 2005 - 02:14 PM.

[NiGHTMARE]

Well, except you still need BG1 installed even after installing Tutu, so you'd actually have one BG1 install and two BG2 installs.

It'd be nice if someone made a program (even just a .bat file) that removes uneeded BG2 files after running the Tutu process. It'd really help out those unfortunate souls with small hard disks .

Edited by NiGHTMARE, 08 February 2005 - 02:23 PM.

[SimDing0]

Yeh, that'd probably be something useful to have. Maybe if someone* gets together a list of BIFs which can be safely removed, Japh or someone else could put it together.

I should also note that there's been some speak in chat of hacking together a Tutu->BG2 transition fairly quickly, although nobody's actually started doing it yet.



* NB. Not me.

[Ascension64]

Right now I'm going to sort out another thing: it looks like BGT contains not only Asc/BD, but some other mod trace, 'coz it updates various parts of BG2 sometimes even without any background and not providing necessary recources to those modifications (areas, dialogs, scripts, items..., f.e. something like 'Dart of Ctrl+Y' for ar2900 that is absolutely pathetic IMO or Cromwell & Cespenar smithy additions). So i'm trying to remove all unnecessary things right now but it slows the whole process a little.... When I'll finish that inspection I'll give you a filelist for BGT-only contents....  B)  But it will TAKE some time... 

I noticed that too from the line-by-line 2DA and IDS compares that I did. However, remember to be careful about the transition from SoA to ToB because I don't exactly know what happens there (something about talking to Mary Magus I recal). Sure, take your time with it. That is the important part apart from the bug-fixing that I am doing at the moment.

Oh yes... And  what I realized is that Horred's new mods don't fully install Ascension or Baldurdash. So that should be solved (or just left) as well.... I'd prefere an idea of making the existing Asc/BD mods to install itself properly instead of including them into every larger mod.

Absolutely. I don't know exactly what has been changed in Asc and BD so that doesn't help me in terms of rooting out these files from BGT.

Edited by Ascension64, 08 February 2005 - 04:22 PM.

[Ascension64]

Progress update:

1. 99.999% of extra files due to Baldurdash fixes and the Ascension mod have been removed. Huzzah!

2. Knowing the size issue and the slow server issue, BGT will get WAV and MVE resources off BG1 again (just like normal)

3. Currently, the game works quite well. Some of the joinable NPCs have weird soundsets and portraits but that can be easily fixed

4. Size reduction is the matter of the day, and the fact that BioWare left many BG1 resources in BG2 means that I can utilise this. Currently, I'm checking through scripts and remove redundant ones. While doing this, there are some leftover BP only files, so they are being removed as well.

5. One final idea is to extract and rename .tis, .mos, and area .bmps from BG1. This would greatly reduce the size but I don't know if it will work or not. KD, does this work at all (also remember that the .are will NOT be imported from BG1)?

6. GUI still needs to be changed, and there are still some IDS entry not found errors in dialogue and scripts, but that is a minor issue.

Edited by Ascension64, 08 February 2005 - 09:06 PM.

[bpfan]

This process for extracting stuff from BG1 for BGT...any reason to believe it wouldn't also work for IWD2?

Geez, I hit a wall in testing NeJ2, so I was gonna go ahead and install BP-BGT-etc; now everything's changing, and I'm not sure whether to sit tight for a couple of weeks, or go ahead and jump into a new game I won't have a prayer of finishing....

[Chevalier]

bpfan,

You mean you have finnished a bp-bgt-NeJ game??

[King Diamond]

5. One final idea is to extract and rename .tis, .mos, and area .bmps from BG1.  This would greatly reduce the size but I don't know if it will work or not.  KD, does this work at all (also remember that the .are will NOT be imported from BG1)?

This won't work unfortunately, 'coz BG1 has absolutely different water (lava, mud, etc.) overlay realization ('green' water on main tileset) + BGT's WEDs were built for BGT versions of TISes so they have corresponding extra tiles indexing that doesn't match the one from BG1 TISes....

[Ascension64]

5. One final idea is to extract and rename .tis, .mos, and area .bmps from BG1.  This would greatly reduce the size but I don't know if it will work or not.  KD, does this work at all (also remember that the .are will NOT be imported from BG1)?

This won't work unfortunately, 'coz BG1 has absolutely different water (lava, mud, etc.) overlay realization ('green' water on main tileset) + BGT's WEDs were built for BGT versions of TISes so they have corresponding extra tiles indexing that doesn't match the one from BG1 TISes....

How about .mos and .bmp but not .tis?

UPDATE: the .mos and .bmp work so we can import that, but here is a breakthrough...using the BG1 WEDs with the BG1 TISs allows the areas to load properly. Will this cause any other problems that I am unaware of? If not, then this is a great way of reducing size.

Edited by Ascension64, 09 February 2005 - 02:49 AM.