5286 replies to this topic

[The Imp]

Thoughts?

Well, really, the only ones opinion that really matters would be Leonardo Watson's, and Vlad's.

So make sure you test those puppies out ... in game and eventually with other BiG World mods.

[Nightfarer]

Thoughts?

 

Although it would be interesting checking them out, I'm on the same way of Micbaldur.

 

However, all in all, Imp is right about it.

Edited by Nightfarer, 26 July 2015 - 08:07 AM.

[dreamer2007]

Ok I got NeJv701, TSv705 and BDashv170

 

I have been thinking about the situation here - maintaining compatibility for the old versions of NeJ seems redundant with the new version out. Like cmorgan suggested, I too feel that we should drop all NeJ variants and redirect players to Vlad's PM thread so they can get NeJv7 if they want.

 

Thoughts?

Waiting for the public release seems like a good idea, so they can be integrated properly into BWP, and be installed successfully with BWS. But if you want to check them out and help Leonardo with the fixes that are needed once they go public, that would definitely speed things up

[Lollorian]

 (more Vlad's info here)

Well that's depressing af to read

 

Also, yeah, I asked Vlad about a public release and that link just justified his reasons for not releasing in public (it won't be happening soon)

 

Also from what I understand from Vlad's reply, NeJv7 is not in late beta now - it is stable and this announcement is, technically speaking, a public release (albeit with private distribution )

[Lollorian]

Ok I think I worded it wrong a bit I don't care which NeJ is included in the BWP/BWS... Let me put it this way:

- Suppose one fine day, some bug comes up in random mod #1 and we derive a fix for it

- My usual next course of action is to check every fucking mod in the BWP for symptoms of the same bug

- Now with 3 versions of NeJ, this is extremely redundant because I may find that it is fixed in one version but not in another

 

What do you propose I do? I am not too keen on making 3 versions of the same fix for technically the same mod (also keeping in mind that the bug in question might already be fixed in v7)

 

To make the BWPFixpack easier to maintain, we should ideally stick to one version of NeJ (preferably the latest one - v694) but seeing that v7 may contain stuff that is fixed from v694, it is redundant to make fixes for v694 specifically unless we are going to backport the v7 fixes into v694 (which I am not going to take up )

 

The same problem happens with:

1) TS-BP and TSv704 (and now TSv705)

2) Imoen Romance v1 and v2

[Nightfarer]

Technically speaking yes, it is a public release but you can't pretend people to ask Vlad for a download link just to have TSv705 and NeJV7.

 

IMO, best would be to only keep the latest "real" public releases (TSv704 and NeJv694) until people would be "allowed" to download the so-called public releases via private distribution.

 

This is not an indirect request to Vlad to make them available, it's Vlad's choice.

 

This is about BWP and Fixpack. If a choice has to be taken... that should be TSv704 and NeJv694. The reason is that one can't pretend/expect people to ask for. Not everyone has the will to and, according to the fact that BWP and BWS are available to everyone, so should be the mods added to.

Edited by Nightfarer, 26 July 2015 - 10:41 PM.

[Vlad]

Okay, you asked me to comment here, and I'll comment. My long-time opinion is that 1) modding should be creative, and 2) time is valuable. When Horred tried to combine 3-4 mods, it was okay. But combining all the stuff together and then solving compatibility issues for years 1) is not creative; and 2) wasting time.

 

As a side note, I don't know guys how you can play the game with so many NPCs and plots. I can barely handle 6 NPCs in one game. Are you changing them every five minutes like gloves?

 

Finally, about creativity and one of the reason I don't like begee. People invested a lot of money, time and efforts, but in what? Not to make a new creative game, but to revive the old one with some minor modding and aggressive marketing, just because money makes money.

 

Imagine, all of you who spent so much time and efforts on making many mods working together - to spend the same time and efforts on making a new game.

 

Sad, very sad.

[The Imp]

What do you propose I do?
To make the BWPFixpack easier to maintain

If you find it in the NEJ 6.94, you fix it in there, and if not, just leave it out.

And if it's fixed in v7... then you copy it from there.

[The Imp]

But combining all the stuff together and then solving compatibility issues for years 1) is not creative; and 2) wasting time.

1) Well, there are other types of creativity.
2) Then let us waste our time so you don't need to. Aka, make the release public and allow us to sort the thing out. Lollorian will be obliged to report his findings and thus the fixes, and he'll be happy to do it. ...
 

As a side note, I don't know guys how you can play the game with so many NPCs and plots. I can barely handle 6 NPCs in one game. Are you changing them every five minutes like gloves?

It's not so much the amount of NPCs as it's the amount of possible content... you can play the BGT as if you played the BG2 - ToB, by just starting at Irenicus dungeon instead of the Candlekeep. You basically don't need to do any of the other custom content either, and you can select to not even install 490 out of the 500 mods.

Yes, yes, double post.

Edited by The Imp, 26 July 2015 - 09:05 AM.

[Usurper]

As a side note, I don't know guys how you can play the game with so many NPCs and plots. I can barely handle 6 NPCs in one game. Are you changing them every five minutes like gloves?

Yep! At least thats what I do in my Let's Play. Every time someone dies, they get some R&R at the central inn and are replaced with the next-most-popular person.

[Vlad]

Lollorian will be obliged to report his findings and thus the fixes, and he'll be happy to do it.

 

No, thanks. I'd better do some new stuff, which I'm now working on. I'm creating the "Third Path" inside Keldorn's Romance. The player will be able to eliminate both vampires and thieves and still reach the Spellhold.

[dreamer2007]

Imagine, all of you who spent so much time and efforts on making many mods working together - to spend the same time and efforts on making a new game.

 

You may be right in some way, but people enjoyed doing this, and a lot of people appreciate the effort and the project as a whole. BWP brought me here in 2007, and here I still am, after so many years, thanks to Leonardo Watson, and all the nice people helping the project grow over the years, with BWS and bug fixes.

 

BWP exists, it works, its great, a lot of people love it and come back to it after so much time, so why not support it?

 

I personally didn't get the chance to play NeJ yet, and planned to do it in this install, but like Lollorian says, its hard to maintain compatibility between so many different NEJ versions. So maybe, pretty please, you could release v7 publicly? It would help us BWP fans a lot in the long term.

Edited by dreamer2007, 26 July 2015 - 10:08 AM.

[cmorgan]

EDIT:\ 

 

I am having memory problems - I just made Vlad into the wrong dude - my apologies - between this and swapping Safana with Shar-Teel this morning, i am having a red letter day - going to stop pontificating and go back to my own stuff and mess that up instead

 

*  "conceptual" incompatibility is a real thing, so a good use of even tools like this is to pick and choose smaller groups of mods that work to form a cohesive game rather than trying for everything all at once.

 

and

 

* on both "technical" and "conceptual" compatibility, the modder is the one who should be making the choice. It is their content that they are letting other folks use.

 

We have different approaches on that last one - I say "if it was created solely by me take it and use it how you want because the fun was in creating it", and he is specifically asking that in order for someone to use his mod, he would like "payment" in the form of direct feedback.

 

I say that is modder choice. So for whatever reasons he cites, I say don't include it as a "standard" mod. People who get the mod from him can add it as an expert mod if they have gotten a copy from him. For the same reason, I really hope you folks don't include Improved Anvil Lite - that is an unauthorized use of someone else's work.

 

I think there is a solution, though it is bound to make Lollorian's life hell - have an incompatability check that warns a user that they can't install both the "Currently Available" NeJ2 (the most stable and technically compatible old version) and the "private reserve" one. Then just support the one that you choose, Lollorian.

 

Hey - I am very supportive of what you folks are doing, because I think you are having fun and opening up content to new folks. You are certainly providing feedback and bug reports to modders, which is awesome - you are adding language support - the list of things that are positive with this are HUGE.

 

But just so you know - modders in general incredibly wary about efforts like this. Lol had to basically rebuild Ninde's ending to tie in with TDD. In the old days, doing that to someone else's work without permission of the respective authors would result in a serious flame war - and get you perma-kicked off of SHS, G3, and PPG to boot. "You don't mess with someone else's work - only with BioWare™ stuff" is the Big Iron Curtain in the i.e. community - and the new BeamDog forums codified that into this next generation of modding here : https://forums.beamd...opyright#latest . The person who decides what is and isn't "messing with their work" is... the modder who created it. Not the folks using it - the person who wrote it.

 

So when folks are working and a modder asks for specific handling of their material, it really is good form to stick to what they want. All a user has to do is ask, and provide feedback. Sounds like a very cheap return for over a decade of someone else's sweat, frustration, and hard work. 

 

Edit: another good thing that has come out of all of this BWP/Mega./Multi/BWS/MonsterMash stuff is a much larger set of known mods that do dthe same thing. So if Vlad does that "Keldorn Third Path" thing, we will have Saerileth, Berelinde's Paladin third path, the standard ones, and another Keldorn pathway. Sounds like fun to me, but I think Lollorian may have just lost half of his hair!

Edited by cmorgan, 26 July 2015 - 04:38 PM.
idiocy on my part

[Vlad]

I didn't do Gray Clan - it's not mine! ))) Baronius will confirm! ))))))))

[Bill Bisco]

Hi Vlad,

 

Thanks for posting here.  And, thanks for all the work and support you've done so far; it means a lot. 

 

You tend to like your own mods, TS and NeJ.  And, that's cool.  As far as I know the only other mod that you will use is BGT.  A lot of other people have played the game several times and need new characters/quests/locations, etc. for the fun to remain.  You, like everyone else has limited time and you hate to see it wasted with compatibility issues.  We don't expect you to fix compatibility issues between mods.

 

You should know too that the easiest way for many people to enjoy your mod is through Big World Setup.  It's a program that I wish we had years ago.  And, while not perfect, really simplifies the process.  To have a mod browser in which you choose what mods you want, it downloads them, installs them, and creates it's own separate game instance for you?  That's hugely simplified from the standard method of searching for mods, downloading mods, figuring out which order to install them in and hoping to get lucky.  Longer-term this program prevents a lot of problems players experience installing and using mods.

 

If NEJ3 isn't publicly available, it will be much harder for people to enjoy, more steps.  I really want the Erevain modmod that I am working on (with your generous support) to be easily available to everyone.  If you don't release NEJ3 publicly then that just invites more issues and prevents more people from enjoying this and that work.

 

To go even further, I want my children other people's children to be able to enjoy these mods for years to come.  If you don't release NEJ3 publicly then BWS will be forced to use the older version and many people will not get to play the rest.  To add to what the others have said, I hope that you release NEJ3 publicly in the not too distant future.

 

@The_Imp , I think we definitely should keep the existing version in BWP until the newest version is made public.  Publicly available downloads make all the difference in the world.

[cmorgan]

This is what happens when you are an old man - You are Tower of Deception, right? Good mod!

[The Imp]

This is what happens when you are an old man - You are Tower of Deception, right?

That was Valiant, so I believe you missed again.

Vlad has mainly the Balurdash fixpacks Weidu-fying and TS and NeJ.

[Usurper]

I'd also like to add my voice to those asking for the public release of the latest Never Ending Journey. I have just reached the point in my playthrough where I have finished the Icewind Dale portion of the NEJ2 and have come back to Irenicus' dungeon. I'm very much looking forward to what I hear are the Halruaa and Ulcaster school portions of the mod. I don't exactly know what NEJ3 adds to the game, but I trust that it is cooler than NEJ2, and I'd really love to play through it. It may take literal years for me to get to this point of the game again, and I don't want to miss the opportunity to play NEJ3.

Edited by Usurper, 26 July 2015 - 05:11 PM.

[micbaldur]

Ok I think I worded it wrong a bit I don't care which NeJ is included in the BWP/BWS... Let me put it this way:

- Suppose one fine day, some bug comes up in random mod #1 and we derive a fix for it

- My usual next course of action is to check every fucking mod in the BWP for symptoms of the same bug

- Now with 3 versions of NeJ, this is extremely redundant because I may find that it is fixed in one version but not in another

 

What do you propose I do? I am not too keen on making 3 versions of the same fix for technically the same mod (also keeping in mind that the bug in question might already be fixed in v7)

 

To make the BWPFixpack easier to maintain, we should ideally stick to one version of NeJ (preferably the latest one - v694) but seeing that v7 may contain stuff that is fixed from v694, it is redundant to make fixes for v694 specifically unless we are going to backport the v7 fixes into v694 (which I am not going to take up )

 

The same problem happens with:

1) TS-BP and TSv704 (and now TSv705)

2) Imoen Romance v1 and v2

My opinion is that BWP should drop older versions of NeJ and TS because there aren't any problems with newest versions. But that's Leonardo's decision.

 

Imoen Romace is diffferent thing, there's no reason to use v2. V2 is newly coded v1 and has nearly same content but it was wriiten for BG2 EE (aka Evil Engine) and it breaks BGT (it overwrites files instead of patching) as Leonardo mentions in BWP pdf-file.

 

Besides ToB part isn't written yet. Israel Blargh is writing it at the moment (after Kat dropped out) but i don't know when he finishes writing ToB part. Imoen Romance forum is here.

[Vlad]

Bill, when you finish writing Erevain mod for NeJ3, and I'll put it in the game, after testing, it will be possible to upload it to some public server. But I guess all this will take years. And you now understand why.

 

[EDIT] By the way, my kids have never liked BG-BG2. They prefer Skyrim, Witcher and even Minecraft. My son said that BG is old, ugly, boring, lacks reality feeling and a lot of text to read.  I guess it will be worse with time, so don't expect much that your kids and other kids will ever play this game or mods (unless you force them to play LOL).

Edited by Vlad, 26 July 2015 - 10:48 PM.