122 replies to this topic

[SergIS]

Yep, if I uninstall BG1 animations, everything works fine.

Ok, cheers. Erephine in fact fixed this already so it'll be in the next version, but it is taking me a while to update the code (it also involves switching everything over to ANSI so we don't need to switch codepages during installation).

Glad to here that! And yes, much thanks to you both!

[Andrea C.]

Quick question: in a modded game are mod-added characters supposed to get a BG1 animation as well, if the BG1 animations component from IA is installed AFTER the mods that add said characters? The reason why I'm asking is that a bunch of druids added by the BG1 NPCs mod showed up with their BG2 avatar instead in my game, and I was unable to determine whether this was a bug or the intended behavior.

[SergIS]

Quick question: in a modded game are mod-added characters supposed to get a BG1 animation as well, if the BG1 animations component from IA is installed AFTER the mods that add said characters? The reason why I'm asking is that a bunch of druids added by the BG1 NPCs mod showed up with their BG2 avatar instead in my game, and I was unable to determine whether this was a bug or the intended behavior.

AFAIK if they have Two Weapon Style proficiency, they are *problematic* and are not patched during installation on default.

[Andrea C.]

AFAIK if they have Two Weapon Style proficiency, they are *problematic* and are not patched during installation on default.

Does this happen regardless of your selection of "3. Patch all without prompting for problematic characters"?

[SergIS]

AFAIK if they have Two Weapon Style proficiency, they are *problematic* and are not patched during installation on default.

Does this happen regardless of your selection of "3. Patch all without prompting for problematic characters"?

I meant BG1 Animations for NPCs component (not BG1 Animations for exported PCs), which offers 4 choices:
1. 25% of relevant creatures
2. 50% of relevant creatures
3. 75% of relevant creatures
4. Most relevant creatures

So even selection of "4 doesn't patch ALL creatures. For example: I always choose that options and even tho Jaheira and Khalid are not patched. I change them via ShadowKeeper manually after joining.

Edited by SergIS, 09 August 2011 - 11:41 PM.

[Andrea C.]

Hi SergIS,

you're right, I confused the two components and the relative installation options I had edited Khalid- and Jaheira's weapon proficiencies with SK prior to installing IA and they were patched (same applies to Minsc). As for the druids, I guess they were proficient in something that prevented IA from patching them, so all is working as intended.

[SergIS]

As for the druids, I guess they were proficient in something that prevented IA from patching them.

I think, it's Scimitar proficiency. At least it mentions while you patch your exported PC's, that have it.

[Miloch]

It skips any animations with a scimitar, katana or two weapon proficiency. Technically we could patch those with scimitars and katanas, but they show up as longswords on BG1 animations, which I think is suboptimal. It looks stupid to see a druid wielding a longsword, but not a scimitar.

[Andrea C.]

Technically we could patch those with scimitars and katanas, but they show up as longswords on BG1 animations, which I think is suboptimal. It looks stupid to see a druid wielding a longsword, but not a scimitar.

It's quite unfortunate that BG1 animations are so limited - before I tried IA, I had never really paid attention to how much better they looked than their BG2 counterparts.

Edited by Andrea C., 10 August 2011 - 08:34 AM.

[SergIS]

Technically we could patch those with scimitars and katanas, but they show up as longswords on BG1 animations, which I think is suboptimal. It looks stupid to see a druid wielding a longsword, but not a scimitar.

before I tried IA, I had never really paid attention to how much better they looked than their BG2 counterparts.

Definitely! So am I. And I'll never come *back* to BG2 one's.

[Miloch]

Yet IA's readmes mention some changes to the paperdolls and animation fixes for humanoids. How are these changes compatible with 1pp's current work which includes avatar, animation and paperdoll overhauls?

They should be compatible - I think Erephine would've avoided redundancy in her own work. 1PP is mainly applicable to BG2 animations; IA adds BG1 and, obviously, a lot of other animations. It doesn't do anything major to the existing BG2 animations that I know of offhand.

Despite the inferiority of BG2's avatars compared with BG1's - I'd like to stick to the BG2's for exotic weapon compatibility. If I only wanted to use IA on monsters, would I just avoid the components that patch BG1 animations onto PC's?

Yes. It will avoid exotic proficiencies though even if you install the BG1 component on PCs (or at any rate, you have only one option to 'force' installing for PCs that have 'exotic' or 'problematic' proficiencies - it will skip such characters otherwise).

[Andrea C.]

They should be compatible

I confirm that they are. I followed the installation order suggested on the G3 forums and everything worked perfectly: 1PP affects BG2 stuff, whereas IA restores BG1 stuff (of course, you could use 1PP to restore the paperdolls from BG1 rather than to have the BG2 ones reworked, which is what I did; whatever the case, these mods are perfectly compatible and non-redundant).

Edited by Andrea C., 18 August 2011 - 12:33 AM.

[i30817]

I dislike the redundancies, it's the same with the fixpack, the fixpack to the fixpack and the fixpack to the fixpack to the fixpack.

It might be psychological, but i don't think a mod (or any piece of software) can be effectively maintained if the people working on the same areas, in the same software don't collaborate. Invariably mistakes get introduced like this, even with the best of intentions.

ie: i'd like if someone found a bug and a fix, allow the project to be updated by someone else after leaving forever, or at least make mods get deprecated, and the components moved to currently maintained, equivalent mods.

Edited by i30817, 24 August 2011 - 12:26 PM.

[Miloch]

I dislike the redundancies, it's the same with the fixpack, the fixpack to the fixpack and the fixpack to the fixpack to the fixpack.

It might be psychological, but i don't think a mod (or any piece of software) can be effectively maintained if the people working on the same areas, in the same software don't collaborate. Invariably mistakes get introduced like this, even with the best of intentions.

ie: i'd like if someone found a bug and a fix, allow the project to be updated by someone else after leaving forever, or at least make mods get deprecated, and the components moved to currently maintained, equivalent mods.

Sorry, but what the hell are you talking about?

If it's about modding maintenance philosophy in general, maybe this isn't the right topic - there's a Modding Discussion forum. (Also, Erephine and I are still around, but good luck in general finding knowledgeable modders to take over maintenance on old mods - a task that will only get harder as these games get older and fewer people are willing to learn modding other than 'plz help make my char an NPC'.)

If it's about alleged 'redundancies' in this mod and 1PP, see previous post.

whatever the case, these mods are perfectly compatible and non-redundant).

[i30817]

Not trying to offend, i just think it would be better for end users (and maybe modders) if there was just one tweak pack, one fixpack, one animation pack etc.

[Miloch]

I wasn't offended - I genuinely didn't know what you were getting at .

We talked (vaguely at some point) about merging 1PP and IA but the main problem would be merging all the various components of 1PP first. I offered to help, but I think Erephine wanted to sort out some stuff first and anyway, I'm already stretched a bit thin with all the mods I'm helping with.

IA is at least one mod. Well, maybe not if you consider all the animation modules, but those aren't separate mods, just plug-ins to the main mod. I don't know if there's any benefit to rolling everything into a multi-gigabyte download if everyone doesn't need all that data (and would be horrendous for maintenance, since we'd have to re-upload all that data every time we wanted to make a miniscule change).

As for fixpacks, I think it makes some sense to have different ones for different purposes. The BG2 Fixpack can't possibly hope to address all the mod issues the BiG World Fixpack does, by the very nature that it's installed first. Also, it's designed to fix bugs in the vanilla game - fixing all the bugs in mods is an unbelievably huge task best left to the individual mods - the BWFixpack is really just a band-aid approach, but a necessary one since a lot of those big old mods are out of active maintenance.

As for tweaks, we talked about that too, with several in favour of merging various tweak packs. But that would also be an unbelievably huge task and a nightmare for maintenance. I know just from trying to merge some of my own small mods that there are tons of trivial details to address, like renumbering .tra (translation) files, just for starters, including all the other references to those strings in other files.

[i30817]

I see. It would seem that Big World Fixpack is quite a important project - pity it is unmaintained itself now.

Though i suppose, if the mods with problems are still supported, it is preferable to fix them directly.

I think many of these issues can be due to the rarity of BGT installs compared to plain BG or Tutu. Even with BWP a BGT install is a long fiddly process.

It's encouraging to see IA being used by large mods like vecna - maybe this will lower the cumulative download time and (more important yet) install time.

I actually think that if that tool i wrote about in the "topological sort" thread could be created, it could lower the install time for BWP by itself a little.

Consider, that different invocations of Weidu take longer than if you install all the components you want at a time.

To accommodate incompatibilities, BWP tests if the incompatible mods are in the SoA folder in a bat file, thus it needs to divide the Weidu invocation in two or more.

Now if the tool *created* the install order bat file (or just did it), some of these sequential invocations could be merged because the tool would know before hand the incompatible mod isn't there.

I guess this could be done in the bat too (by testing at the start), but it would complicate it even more).

But maybe i'm just grousing due to needing to use virtualbox to use BWS/BWP (it's slower).

Edited by i30817, 26 August 2011 - 02:26 AM.

[Miloch]

I think many of these issues can be due to the rarity of BGT installs compared to plain BG or Tutu. Even with BWP a BGT install is a long fiddly process.

Believe me though, BGT is the much more common install these days than BG1 or Tutu, and BWP the most common version of a BGT install. No one plays BG1 anymore and Tutu is largely a relic by comparison. I still code for both BGT and Tutu but decided I'm largely wasting my time for BG1 coding, since it is largely a) really difficult to make it work with BG2-based coding and b) largely irrelevant and obsolete.

[Ayrus]

I think many of these issues can be due to the rarity of BGT installs compared to plain BG or Tutu. Even with BWP a BGT install is a long fiddly process.

Believe me though, BGT is the much more common install these days than BG1 or Tutu, and BWP the most common version of a BGT install. No one plays BG1 anymore and Tutu is largely a relic by comparison. I still code for both BGT and Tutu but decided I'm largely wasting my time for BG1 coding, since it is largely a) really difficult to make it work with BG2-based coding and b) largely irrelevant and obsolete.

Vanilla BG1 is indeed dead, a waste of time to mod, but (Easy)Tutu is still useful. Especially since the author just updated it a bit. One good thing about it is that it can be installed and played without spoiling the experience. If you install BGT or megamods, you are going to get spoiled about the plot, since all those mods and their descriptions reveal almost everything, and you really need to read the readme-files. Of course, this assumes there are people who haven't even played BG2 yet (I haven't (!)).

I try to just use anything related to Easytutu and ignore BGT/BWP for now, I can install that later.

And Easytutu is somewhat easier to newcomers when installing it.