Zhurlong's Boots of Stealth/Boots of Stealth dropping as intended?

Messi

Okay I don't know if this a new fix or what, but at least in vanilla BG1 there were two places to get these from South Beregost Road(AR3800) and Ulcaster(AR3900), and you could get two pairs of boots. Now you can still get Zhurlong's Boots from either these two places, but if you get them from either area first, the hobgoblins in the other area don't drop any kind of boots after.

It's very easy to reproduce:

1. Start a new game with the Abdel pregen
2. C:MoveToArea("AR3800")
3. C:ExploreArea()
4. Ctrl+J to near x=1763, y=2679(Just below the brown cave)
5. Ctrl+Y the hobgoblins there
6. Loot Zhurlong's Boots
7. C:MoveToArea("AR3900")
8. C:ExploreArea()
9. Ctrl+J to near x=2040, y=2640
10. Ctrl+Y the hobgoblins
11. Observe that they drop no boots.

This works either way doesn't matter if you go to AR3800, or AR3900 first. Also having, or not having Zhurlong's quest seems to have no effect.

Aristillius

Sounds like an obvious fix.

ChorazyGlus

The devs said something that this feature i.e Zhurlong's Boots of stealth shoving even on unidentified boots is only in beta. In v.2014 they're counted as normal stealth boots, which should be the same in 1.2 So current situation in beta seems like a temporary solution. I suppose they replaced normal stealth boots with Zhurlong's version only for whatever reason. Haven't been in Baldur's Gate yet so I dont know if normal stealth boots drop from shadow thieves or if someone sells them.

Isaya

I believe this has nothing to do with the change of name of the boot for Zhurlong.

In Vanilla BG and in BGEE, the creature that has the boots is indeed present in the two areas. It has a unique name CRE file, HOBGZHUR. In principle, it should have appeared in only one area, or more precisely, killing it in one area should have made it disappear in the other one, so you could one get one item. Unfortunately this didn't work because the CRE file was missing something to make it really unique (called the script variable).
This has been fixed in the beta. So now you'll only get one pair of boots.

ljbo

@Isaya is technically right but how do we know the devs of the original BG1 did not omit the script variable on purpose in order to make two pairs of boots available? For a start, the new fix implemented in the beta has never been part of BG1 Fixpack…

Pokota

@Ijbo probably for the same reason that the BG1 fixpack doesn't remove one of the two rings that double 1st level spells.

Of course, at this point it's more like the Girdle of Piercing than the Ring of Wizardry in that you have to choose whether you want the nominal quest reward or an item that's arguably better than the quest reward.

Isaya

@ljbo I won't pretend to be in the head of the original developpers. However when you make a single CRE file called HOBGZHUR, it looks a lot like the hobgobelin that is holding Zhurlong's boots. Creatures with such a unique name are only found in one place usually. And it makes sense to have only one creature having these boots.
It's not as if the game was lacking in this kind of item as there is another pair of these boots in Baldur's Gate city, as a reward. Which is more than all other kinds of boots.

I'm not sure what you consider BG1 Fixpack. There were several projects, all made by a single person, as far as I know, nothing like what was done for BG2 and that is almost considered as an unofficial patch.
From what I understand (the initial "more than 400 bug fixes" and more recent changes), the BGEE devs went beyond what all previous attempts at fixing BG1 did.

ljbo

@isaya Baldurdash Fixpack is what I had in mind. You are correct on both counts: it has never reach the status of BG2 Fixpack and BG:EE went even further, including even some of Unfinished Business.

In any case, you convinced me that it was an oversight indeed.