psycros

I don't know if anyone here has the slightest influence over this, but for about the last three months none of these mods has been downloadable for me.  The ISP or PC I use makes no difference.

I still don't understand why you would go to the trouble of trying to maintain distinct-but-identical BWS installs. Surely it must be far easier to use BWS on the computer you have the greatest access to, and simply copy the game files from there to the other computer with a thumb drive, or something. That way you are guaranteed to have identical installs.

AFAIK, DR v7 is not compatible with the EE games, and the DR v8 sphere system is not working right now. So FnP is currently the only option. What "generic error" did you get? And what other mods were installed before FnP? Did you install the IWDification spell packs? They are required for the current version if FnP.

Feel free to discuss this in an FnP forum (at G3 or Beamdog), obviously we want to fix any bugs that affect installation.

Incidentally, a *new* version of FnP is going to be released extremely soon. Like, in the next couple days. This new version will not require IWDification but it will install a bunch of IWDEE spells, using ADD_SPELL. I'm not familiar with the bigger 'megamods' but I understand some of them add a bunch of spells in addition to quests, and they may use up all of the available SPPR slots. Installing something like that first will prevent FnP from being installed. I don't know if BWS is tracking those kinds of incompatibilities.

I spelled out why I have two installs as clearly as I possibly could but I guess I failed.  Originally my purpose for having a second copy of BWs on my laptop was due to my slow and limited home Internet.  I would have to update BWS and download mods at places with good Internet and then copy the newer versions to the BWS downloads folder at home. That's when I first started noticing the differences in behavior between the two copies of BWS.  I tried copying the entire BWS folder from portable to desktop, but that never worked right..everything would go haywire.  (I'm pretty sure BWS must store some of its files in a secondary location.)  Fortunately, only updating BWS itself at home was no big deal.  Its not that big, so I stuck to just making sure the BWS download folders were synched properly.  As time went on, however, I started to notice inconsistencies between the two machines despite having set up identical mod lists on both.  Sometimes the same copy of a mod will re-download every single time I run BWS, and occasionally this is only happening on one machine.  Sometimes a BGEE mod that needs BGEE2 installed won't detect the other game, even though its never had this issue before.  Mods that give extraction or parsing errors on one computer often won't on another..and so on and so on.  I've experimented extensively and cannot find any one thing that can explain these variations.  That's where I'm still at today.  I admit that I'm seeing less differences between the two installs now that I was a few months ago, but the fact I'm seeing any is frustrating.  But the key thing to understand is that I can't even get the game to a fully playable state.  Bugs abound and their horribly intermittent.  Garbled fonts, bizarre graphics glitches, crashes during the tutorial, crashes just after the tutorial, mods that worked perfectly and haven't been updated for eons suddenly not working...its endless.  I am a veteran of several modding communities.  No, I'm not a programmer in any meaningful way, but I "get" modding.  I know its a house of cards next to an oscillating fan.  That said, I've never dealt with a situation where two presumably identical modding setups keep acting noticeably different.  Believe me, if the day comes that I can get either of my BGEE installs working properly with most of the mods I need/want, I'll be making multiple copies of my game folder and storing them on different physical hard drives.  I've done this before - I have a few modded game folders that I would have no idea how to recreate.

I'll try to get BWS to make it to the F&P error once again and get that on your forum.  Ironically, F&P gives consistent errors on both machines (for the moment).

For those whose first language isn't English or who haven't bothered to read my previous posts on what I'm dealing with, here's a summary:

I have two PCs, both running Windows 7 64-bit.  Each one has BG:EE and BWS installed on it in - the game folders are in the same locations on both computers.  I have the exact same mods selected for installation in each copy of BWS (by using the export-import function).  However, when BWS extracts and installs the mods I usually get different errors on each PC.  I am trying to figure out why these (presumably) identical copies of BWS and BG:EE are giving me different errors.  I'm not even worried about actually running the game until I figure this out.  I have read on these very forums that BWS can behave differently each time it is run, even when you haven't updated BWS or any mods.  I don't know if that's actually true or not, but if it is then that could explain how two identical copies could be showing different issues.  However, that would also mean that BWS would be virtually impossible to debug.  Nobody would bother trying to maintain a program that was so poorly coded..it would drive them insane, so I tend not to believe that theory.  I have confirmed that one of the mod errors I'm getting is strictly a bug in Tome and Blood.  But some of these mods only produce errors on one of my two copies of BWS, which makes no sense.  So once again, the primary issue is figuring out if the errors I'm seeing are the fault of mods themselves, BWS just needing updated to keep pace with mod changes, or bugs within BWS itself.  I try to update BWS nearly every day on both my PCs in hopes of seeing problems go away.  This means I am doing new modding runs all the time on both machines.  Most of the mod errors appear on both PCs, but some don't.  That's the real issue..the uncertainty about exactly where the bugs are coming from.  Here are just two of the problems I am encountering on one or both BWS installations:

* I do not have SoD installed but I do have BG2:EE installed on both PCs (I have not even tried modding or running BG2:EE yet).  Golem Construction does not see my BG2:EE installation, which means the mod fails to install.

* I cannot get the sphere systems from either Divine Remix or Faiths and Powers to work.  With DR I get a warning saying the system isn't compatible with my version of BG:EE (latest patch).  F&P simply gives me a generic error of some kind.

Ultimately I may have to give up and just have a single copy of BWS to worry about, but that still leaves me with a lot of uncertainly regarding where some of the stranger bugs are coming from.

I exported my laptop's BWS mod list to my desktop PC.  On the laptop I have no conflicts or missing dependencies while on the PC I do.  It also used Total Commander to compare download folders.  It appears that newer releases of some mods are not always being downloaded, and of course its different mods showing this issue on the two installs of BWS

You could have just copy'ed the entire game folder after the BWS install and use that in the other computer, why would you even think of remaking the setup ? Yeah, you need to edit the baldur.ini in games folder so the [ALIAS] -section point to the correct folder if you move the game to a different directory, and start the game with BGMain.exe ...

But that's all you need to do. Under ten minutes... well of course if you have a slow hard drive or large game, it might be a bit slower. No internet requirement, no downloading of files ...etc.

The game folder locations are exactly the same on both computers.  Besides, just copying the game folder is pointless - as soon as you re-run BWS they would be out of sync again.  its BWS itself that needs replicated, and I've tried copying its folders before with bad results.  Exporting/importing the mod list seemed a lot more likely to get the two copies synched.

I exported my laptop's BWS mod list to my desktop PC.  On the laptop I have no conflicts or missing dependencies while on the PC I do.  It also used Total Commander to compare download folders.  It appears that newer releases of some mods are not always being downloaded, and of course its different mods showing this issue on the two installs of BWS