How do you create/edit/use Scripts?

Heindrich

I am playing BG 2 Vanilla currently. Is it reasonably easy to edit or create custom scripts of your own? And are there major differences between Vanilla and EE? I've seen people mentioning how they created customised scripts, but I haven't spotted an ingame option to do so...

I noticed that there are pre-existing scripts that will more or less take over ur battles for u, like 'Ranged', Wizard. I don't know how effective those scripts are, but I don't really want scripts to take over my battles anyway. I just want some common sense scripts to reduce micro-management and reduce the amount of time my character stand around doing nothing cos I forgot or am too lazy to give a specific order.

A few scripts I'd find really useful would be:

A) For ranged casters (e.g. Aerie)
Automatically fire on enemy within range with missile weapons. Do not disrupt spellcasting in order to do this.

I used to try 'Passive'.

But I usually kept Aerie at the rear of a battle, where no enemies try to attack her, which doesn't trigger her ranged response. So sometimes I'd ask her to summon Minute Meteors, and then she just stands there and doesn't use it, even though there are enemies in ranged.

I guess it sounds bleeding obvious, but I will try 'Ranged' and see if it achieves what I want. I've not tried it thus far cos I assumed it was for Archers/Rangers with bows/crossbows etc... I hope it doesn't mean Aerie will disrupt a spell (say Summon Aerial Servant) and use her Sling when an enemy comes in range.

For simple melee fighters. (Minsc, Khalid, Korgan etc)
Stand ground until a hostile target moves within ~15 ft (half the blast radius of a Fireball). Then move forwards and engage with melee weapon.

The problem I find with 'Standard Attack' is that my characters rush in the moment they spot an enemy in their periphery vision. This makes it near impossible for support characters to use AoE spells like Fireball or Cloudkill. Also a problem I have found with the script is that the AI chooses targets, which u cannot override. For example I want Charname and Minsc to both attack a dangerous Mage in melee to bring him down asap, and ignore the Fire Elemental the mage summoned. However, even though I gave direct orders to attack the mage, one of them repeatedly abandons the mage to engage the Fire Elemental.

Basically I want my warriors to have enough common sense to attack an enemy once they are close. But not seek out enemies on the other side of the screen, and never override my manual orders.

C) For self-buff warriors. (Fighter/Mages, Fighter/Clerics etc)
Exactly the same as B, except that they should NEVER disrupt their spellcasting to attack an enemy in melee. It is really annoying when Anomen decides that he doesn't want to finish casting 'True Seeing' and instead prefers to try hit an enemy protected by Improved Invisibility with his flail cos he can see shimmers.

Any help/advice would be much appreciated!

Mathsorcerer

The best place to begin is the IEDSP Index over at Gibberlings3 as well as their modding forum. A lot of those links are also in the modding forum here, as well.

Erg

Once you are familiar with the script language, you can use a modding tool (e.g. WeiDU or NearInfinity, etc.) to write/edit and compile or decompile scripts.

For example, the picture below shows how to compile a script with NearInfinity:

Heindrich

Wow... thanks guys. It looks to be a bit more involved than I hoped. Maybe I'll learn about modding before my full BG EE to BG 2 EE playthrough. For now I'll make do with the standard scripts. There doesn't seem to be much point learning to mod BG 2 Vanilla, when I don't expect to play it again now that BG 2 EE is available.