Hi,
A few years ago, I started a project to make aTweaks fully compatible with EE. It was a huge task and I finally gave up. A few months ago, I had this crazy idea to merge aTweaks with my old project Enhanced Creatures (20 years ago).
Building aTweaks from scratch (or almost) with EE in mind. Some players might still play older engines but targetting only one engine make modding easier and less subject to bugs. Today, I can't see any reason to not play EE, it's arguably the best engine we have. Also, it will be made and tested for BG1 and BG2 since I don't play other EE games.
I have started to work on PnP monsters and patching a high number of CRE was a challenge. I really like how aVENGER did it but it was still quite some work to maintain, not to mention adding more monsters.
20 years ago, I have worked on Enhanced Creatures and I had to leave for RL. Then, David W. created SCS which covered half of my project. Other half was to make all monsters closer to PnP, something aTweaks was already partly covering.
So why not merging the 2 by adding all uncovered monsters in aTweaks?
Since I needed to patch many creatures, I wanted a robust system. Additionally, having a huge number of items, spells, and effects can lead to bugs, since they are usually forgotten after testing phases. Checking each of those files takes time and is not optimal.
I have created a generator system which cover everything: WEIDU scripts and BAF scripting. This generator is strongly typed to make it easy to configure creatures.
For example, Greater basilisk is designed here: aTweaks/generator/lib/creatures/basilisk_greater.ts at develop · arnaudpourbaix/aTweaks
It contains everything needed. It will generate this files:
Notice the former file create weapons and spells. Any fix or improvement will update everything. My goal is to generate almost everything (that make sense). Some creatures will probably require dedicated code (thinking about fiends summoning and scripting).
I have currently finished these monsters:
- Ankheg
- Basilisk
- Bear
- Carrion Crawler
- Greater Cats
- Dogs
- Helmed Horror
- Battle Horror
- Doom Guard
- Wolves
- Golems
- Ogres
- Hellcat
- Displacer Beast
- Spectral Hound
aVENGER has made an interesting system for immunities but it was hard to maintain. I have kept his idea but it is now generated from this file:
I am currently working on converting existing aTweaks monsters, which will take several weeks.
I have started with BG1 to have a smaller scope, but I will extend it with BG2 later on.
I might also generate documentation from creature files.
First releases might not be as good as current material, but it will a huge potential with upcoming iterations.
