1168 replies to this topic

[Salk]

Hello again!
 

That feature doesn't exist yet, but I'll add it to my todo list.

 
Much appreciated. 

[Sam.]

For those who are interested, the latest version of Hide NI DOS can now be found on GitHub, along with the Read-Me.  More details can be found at the bottom of the OP.

[subtledoctor]

Okay I finally updated from the old 2018 build I was using to the most recent 2022 built for MacOS. It's very nice, lightning fast, etc.

 

EXCEPT this: you can use it to view files from different games in different directories. That's a nice option, but every time I start NI it remembers the last game I was working on, instead of the current game I want to work on. So I could be in my IWDEE directory and when I start that instance of NI, it is showing me BG2EE files from a different place.

 

When I'm in the IWDEE, I want NI to show me the IWDEE files. When I'm in the SoD directory, I want it to show me the SoD files. I don't want to have to mouse over to the File menu, click "Open," naviagte to the correct chitin.key file in the dialogue box, and only then get working. It is an onerous thing to have to do every time I open the app.

 

Is there any way to have it default to opening the game with the chitin.key file in the same directory as the NI executable, the way it used to?

Edited by subtledoctor, 01 November 2022 - 10:19 AM.

[Argent77]

Is there any way to have it default to opening the game with the chitin.key file in the same directory as the NI executable, the way it used to?

That should still work. The default behavior of NI to open games on startup hasn't changed. I assume you're using NI on macOS? That platform has always given me some headaches, such as options not saving correctly and other problems.

The best you can do is to try out AstroBryGuy's NI package for macOS, which solves at least some of the issues (see this discussion). That package installs NI like a regular app in your system's Applications folder, so it won't really solve your particular issue. But you can use NI's bookmark feature to quickly switch between games.

[subtledoctor]

The best you can do is to try out AstroBryGuy's NI package for macOS, which solves at least some of the issues (see this discussion). That package installs NI like a regular app in your system's Applications folder, so it won't really solve your particular issue. But you can use NI's bookmark feature to quickly switch between games.

That's what I'm using... maybe the macOS installer installing it at a low level like that is the reason it isn't detecting the local folder - I just duplicated the app from /Applications into each game folder, and then trashed the original. But each instance might be glomming onto something where java is in the OS and therefore running independently? Hard to say, this gets outside my area of expertise. Maybe I'll try the OS-agnostic version rather than AstroBryGuy's Mac installer. Eh, I'll experiment when I have time. But thanks for pointing out the bookmarking feature, I hadn't noticed that. Should help in the short-term.

[Argent77]

Update: NearInfinity v2.3-20221108

Full Changelog:

• Added partial support for the non-interactive Baldur's Gate demo.
  • Relevant IDS files must be provided by the user.
  • Required files: action.ids, align.ids, astyles.ids, class.ids, damages.ids, ea.ids, general.ids, hotkey.ids, object.ids, race.ids, scroll.ids, spell.ids, time.ids, trigger.ids, weather.ids
• Added check option for illegal soundrefs in strings.
  • Found under menu Tools > Check > For illegal SoundRefs in Strings.
• Added option to override UI scaling.
  • Overrides the system's global scaling of UI elements by a specified scaling factor, which may be useful on high dpi screens with a global UI scaling factor to display graphics in their original size. Works well in combination with the "Change Global Font Size" option.
  • Requires Java 9 or higher to be effective.
• Completely redesigned the effect opcode handling.
  • There may still be bugs found because of the huge amount of changes. Please report them if you encounter one.
  • Fixed and/or updated several opcode definitions in the process.
• Improved Mass Exporter.
  • Added shortcut Ctrl+M.
  • Added more export options: Trim spaces (all text files), Align table columns (2DA): compact or uniform.
• Improvements for the Bookmark feature.
  • A confirmation prompt is shown before opening a bookmarked game.
  • Added shortcuts for bookmarked games: Ctrl+Alt+[number] for the first 10 games, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+[number] for games 11 to 20.
• Improved text resource features: Trim, Align, Sort.
  • Improved sorting feature for TRIGGER.IDS: Bit 0x4000 will not be considered by the sorting algorithm.
• Improved EEex detection for EE games.
• Updated ARE location flags for PST(EE).
• Updated "face target" field in PRO resources.
• Various internal updates.

[Salk]

Thanks for this new release!

 

I put the new check for illegal soundrefs in strings functionality to immediate use and discovered four mistakes in assigning the wrong filename to four voiced strings. 

[Jazira]

Thanks for your work.

 

I'd like to report a small bug concerning NI audio player (when selecting a .wav for example).

 

When I click (or spam) the play button while some audio line is already played by NI, there is an audio artifact that keep up in the background, like a metronome. Until the app is closed.

 

This is not necessarily linked to the new release, it is long-lasting (1+ year).

 

Can anyone reproduce it? Or is it just me, locally (audio driver for example)?

Edited by Jazira, 13 November 2022 - 10:58 AM.

[Argent77]

I'd like to report a small bug concerning NI audio player (when selecting a .wav for example).

 

When I click (or spam) the play button while some audio line is already played by NI, there is an audio artifact that keep up in the background, like a metronome. Until the app is closed.

 

This is not necessarily linked to the new release, it is long-lasting (1+ year).

 

Can anyone reproduce it? Or is it just me, locally (audio driver for example)?

I can only party reproduce this issue. Audio is garbled or chopped when multiple sound clips are running at the same time. But it stops when sound playback ends or is manually stopped. The lingering effect might be a local sound driver issue.

 

In any case the current mechanism has some flaws. I'll see if it can be improved.

[Salk]

Argent77,

 

could you introduce a proper text conversion for escaped characters? At the moment \[ is correctly displayed as [ in-game but NI's strings include the escaped character as well.

Edited by Salk, 01 December 2022 - 12:22 PM.

[Argent77]

Argent77,

 

could you introduce a proper text conversion for escaped characters? At the moment \[ is correctly displayed as [ in-game but NI's strings include the escaped character as well.

Can you be more specific?

[Salk]

Yes, of course.

 

After installing Rogue Rebalancing, for instance, I can open Near Infinity and start the StringRef Lookup window, searching for "\[". Near Infinity finds all those lines that contain those two characters. There are several such ones coming from Rogue Rabalancing's game.tra file.

 

In the game, the first character is correctly escaped so that it is not displayed. What we see is just the squared bracket (I tested it, because I was not aware of this nice functionality).

 

Ex.

 

@9001 = ~\[Intelligence\] I resent those baseless accusations. Or do you forbid your customers from inspecting the wares before making a purchase? Here, have your petty trinket back.~

 

is one such string. In the game, it is displayed as:

 

"[Intelligence] I resent those baseless accusations. Or do you forbid your customers from inspecting the wares before making a purchase? Here, have your petty trinket back."

 

but in Near Infinity it is imported exactly as it is written in the .tra file.

 

My suggestion is that Near Infinity automatically handles the special characters so that the string looks just like it looks in the game, without the "\". 

Editing the string directly inside Near Infinity should not be a problem. A user that types in a special character should have it escaped automatically by Near Infinity.

Edited by Salk, 02 December 2022 - 05:24 AM.

[Argent77]

My suggestion is that Near Infinity automatically handles the special characters so that the string looks just like it looks in the game, without the "\". 

Editing the string directly inside Near Infinity should not be a problem. A user that types in a special character should have it escaped automatically by Near Infinity.

The whole mechanism is a bit more complicated than this. Square brackets and angle brackets have special meanings in the game. Text in square brackets is invisible to the player (it's used quite a lot in IWD). Angle brackets are used for tokens.

You can apparently escape these special characters with a backslash, so that they are shown in plain text. But that's only the case if the "Has token" flag (bit 2) is set for the string. If the bit is not set then special characters are always shown in plain text.

Hiding escape characters in NI is not a good idea for the reasons given above. The best I could do is to add an option which allows you to filter escaped characters in certain views, e.g. in the "View" and "Tree" tabs for dialog resources.

[Salk]

Interesting. I had no idea about the Has Token flag... I understand why what l suggested isn't any good now. But the filter option is a rather good idea.

[SpeJoe25]

This is a really nice tool.

 

I extracted TIS area background files from PSTEE. Then I applied AI to upscale to 8K backgrounds.

 

Couple of questions:

 

1) When I import a PNG file that is not the exact pixel size as the original, even if it is correct aspect ratio multiple (e.g. 11712x11712 or 12288x12288), the end result shows up all garbled in the game (both with legacy TIS or PVRZ-based). Why is that?

 

2) Must backgrounds be scaled back down to original pixel size? Is there any way to maintain pixel size greater than original?

Edited by SpeJoe25, 28 December 2022 - 04:49 PM.

[Argent77]

Couple of questions:
 
1) When I import a PNG file that is not the exact pixel size as the original, even if it is correct aspect ratio multiple (e.g. 11712x11712 or 12288x12288), the end result shows up all garbled in the game (both with legacy TIS or PVRZ-based). Why is that?

TIS files are merely collections of tiles. They don't store width or height, and don't even have to be laid out sequentially. That's all provided by the associated WED file. In NI's TIS viewer you can adjust the desired width by a slider or input field to fix the distortion in the viewer. For the game you have to adjust the tile mappings in the associated WED file, but that's a lot of tedious work to do it manually. I'd recommend to use the same scale and layout of the original tileset instead, if you just want to improve the tileset graphics.
 

2) Must backgrounds be scaled back down to original pixel size? Is there any way to maintain pixel size greater than original?

Yes, the backgrounds have to match the scale of all the other graphics in the game to work correctly. The game graphics is purely based on 2D assets, so the size of everything (tilesets, overlays, sprites, as well as interactive regions or coordinates) must match. It is theoretically possible to upscale the whole game (PST uses a different scale than BG or IWD), but it would be a huge amount of work and would possibly be limited by several hardcoded assumptions.

[SpeJoe25]

Couple of questions:
 
1) When I import a PNG file that is not the exact pixel size as the original, even if it is correct aspect ratio multiple (e.g. 11712x11712 or 12288x12288), the end result shows up all garbled in the game (both with legacy TIS or PVRZ-based). Why is that?

TIS files are merely collections of tiles. They don't store width or height, and don't even have to be laid out sequentially. That's all provided by the associated WED file. In NI's TIS viewer you can adjust the desired width by a slider or input field to fix the distortion in the viewer. For the game you have to adjust the tile mappings in the associated WED file, but that's a lot of tedious work to do it manually. I'd recommend to use the same scale and layout of the original tileset instead, if you just want to improve the tileset graphics.
 

2) Must backgrounds be scaled back down to original pixel size? Is there any way to maintain pixel size greater than original?

Yes, the backgrounds have to match the scale of all the other graphics in the game to work correctly. The game graphics is purely based on 2D assets, so the size of everything (tilesets, overlays, sprites, as well as interactive regions or coordinates) must match. It is theoretically possible to upscale the whole game (PST uses a different scale than BG or IWD), but it would be a huge amount of work and would possibly be limited by several hardcoded assumptions.

 

 

Thanks that is helpful. 

 

When I changed some PSTEE area backgrounds and imported them again, there is an issue with a black box appearing where doors are supposed to be (another minor issue is some line seams that appear on certain backdrops). Do you know how to fix that?

Edited by SpeJoe25, 30 December 2022 - 06:59 AM.

[subtledoctor]

Any idea what the limits are for what files can be opened in NI? I've been having trouble loading savegame files from a heavily modded game... I noticed that as the game progressed it became harder to open the savegame. Eventually I could open heavily modded savegames in an instance of NI attached to a game with no mods installed - I could not follow any resources but at least I could see what effects were on a character. Now my savegame will not open in any instance of NI.

 

The .gam file is quite large, at 10 MB, compared to <1 MB for the average unmodded .gam file.. On the other hand, my computer has 16 GB of memory so 10 MB is really not that big.

 

Is the file size an issue, or could it be down to something else? (E.g. number of effects on the characters, or something like that.)

[Argent77]

There are no artificial restrictions involved when opening save files in NI. The number of substructures NI has to parse from the save file will affect loading time, and there's always a chance with big files that they may contain corrupted data. Does the debug console show anything unusual?

Apart from that, available memory for the Java VM is the only hard limit I can think of. Are you still using a 32-bit Java version? In that case memory will eventually be an issue. The System Information displayed when NI starts up can tell you which Java VM architecture is used.

[Insomniator]

Hi subtledoctor

Now my savegame will not open in any instance of NI.

Is the file size an issue, or could it be down to something else? (E.g. number of effects on the characters, or something like that.)

Savegame or some resource file can be corrupted, NI may hang on it, some time ago i have similar case, there was error in pocketplane/familiar stuff inside *.GAM, just as example.