So Siege of Dragonspear breaks most of mod compatibilities

fantasma

Almost any mod that interferes with dialog.tlk seems to have lost its compatibility with SoD.
You can hold installing SoD if you're going to start BGEE now and then move on to SoD through character importing, although it's required to reinstall mods after patch 2.0. It seems patch 2.0 alone doesn't break mods.

AstroBryGuy

BG1NPC appears to be working fine so far.



Did you install the mods after installing SoD? SoD will replace the dialog.tlk, so you'll want to install SoD before any mods.

fantasma

AstroBryGuy said:

Did you install the mods after installing SoD? SoD will replace the dialog.tlk, so you'll want to install SoD before any mods.

No it messed with dialog.tlk regardless of install order. Probably because SoD and its dialog.tlk file is zipped in DLC folder.

megamike15

i'm playing on steam and before i installed sod everything was fine [ besides a crash.]. but after installing sod whitch had all my mods installed before hand now everything is broken text wise.

elminster

megamike15 said:

i'm playing on steam and before i installed sod everything was fine [ besides a crash.]. but after installing sod whitch had all my mods installed before hand now everything is broken text wise.

Delete everything in your override folder and reinstall your mods.

Sylvus_Moonbow

Most mods will require updating by their authors to support the latest dialog.tlk changes introduced.

argent77

As @fantasma already mentioned, the reason for this is the way how SoD is installed by Steam. The SoD content (including the dialog.tlk which contains the text strings) is installed as a self-contained zip archive which is currently invisible for modding and editing tools.

There is currently no simple way to work around this issue, but I'm pretty certain that some modder will come up with a solution soon.

Abel

Oh, that is most foul! Maybe WeiDU could locate and extract said file before patching.

megamike15

man i wanted to wait for siege before beginning my epic trilogy run. now the mods i need don't work. might need to wait afew days as i can't play bg1 with out the npc project mod.

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megamike15

it's also only a bg1 issue so the amount of work needed to update the mods is alot smaller. in the mean time i may just start a new game in sod until this is fixed.

AstroBryGuy

megamike15 said:

man i wanted to wait for siege before beginning my epic trilogy run. now the mods i need don't work. might need to wait afew days as i can't play bg1 with out the npc project mod.

BG1NPC installs fine on BGEEv2 without SoD. There will be some minor bugs (Coran's wyvern quest). If you wait until you finish BGEE and then install SoD (and then import the final save), that should work for now.

argent77

subtledoctor said:

Unfortunately dealing with this kind of thing is not something that can be figured out by any enterprising modder. It seems like something that has to be dealt with by Weidu itself.

But, I'm not sure Weidu is (or should be) capable of extracting .zip archives...

It's not only a matter of extracting files from a zip archive. Normal game resources can be simply placed into the override folder, but a modified dialog.tlk has to be put back into the archive again. It's probably much simpler to create a mod that integrates the SoD content directly into the main game.

Ulb

argent77 said:

subtledoctor said:

Unfortunately dealing with this kind of thing is not something that can be figured out by any enterprising modder. It seems like something that has to be dealt with by Weidu itself.

But, I'm not sure Weidu is (or should be) capable of extracting .zip archives...

It's not only a matter of extracting files from a zip archive. Normal game resources can be simply placed into the override folder, but a modified dialog.tlk has to be put back into the archive again. It's probably much simpler to create a mod that integrates the SoD content directly into the main game.

So, as a workaround, could you not simply extract the SoD dialog.tlk, put it into override, install mods and then put it back into a zip archive?

(Just asking if this would be a working short term solution for steam users, obviously it would be weird for weidu to do that..)

argent77

Probably not. The file has to be put into the lang/xx_YY folder (or maybe into the game's root folder) to be recognized by WeiDU. But that doesn't really solve the underlying problem. You still have to extract game resources from the zip archive (unless the mod doesn't touch any SoD files) which is currently not possible via WeiDU.

Putting files back into the archive is tricky as well. The game requires the zip archive to be in a very specific format because it is used as a memory mapped file internally. Files have to be added with compression type 0 (store only) and you have to run centralfix.exe afterwards to fix any potential incompatibilities.

As I said, it would be much simpler to create a mod that integrates SoD into the main game.

Ballad

As a Steam user who was desperate to get started with his playthrough, I chose to reinstall the game without SoD. As others have pointed out in this thread, Bg1NPC project works just fine on the new patch as long as SoD is not installed. Given that 1) the content of Bg1NPC project does not carry over to SoD and 2) SoD has no effect on the main game aside from the UI, I don't think there is any real reason to bother with SoD until you've beaten the main campaign anyway.

In case anyone's wondering how to get rid of SoD from your Steam install, you need to untick the box next to the 'installed' status in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition/Properties/DLC on your Steam client. Then you need to delete all local content and redownload. Yes, it's a pain, but it still beats waiting God only knows how long for a hotfix that may or may not happen.

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TheMetaphysician

Does this problem only apply to Steam users? Will the mods work with SoD for non-Steam users?

Ulb

TheMetaphysician said:

Does this problem only apply to Steam users? Will the mods work with SoD for non-Steam users?

The issue will affect Steam and GOG users.

Mods should work fine for Beamdog users (there might be some issues but those can be easily fixed through mod updates and the upcoming weidu update)

subtledoctor said:

Realistically, and unfortunately, this needs to be addressed by Beamdog and Steam.

They gave me a Steam key for owning the Beamdog Direct game... maybe they can give people Beamdog licenses for owning the Steam game.

@CamDawg would that be possible?

Not sure if there is a way to publicly "share" one's GOG library or provide proof of ownership of the Steam/GOG versions any other way though..

fantasma

Ulb said:

Not sure if there is a way to publicly "share" one's GOG library or provide proof of ownership of the Steam/GOG versions any other way though..

"Traditionally", Steam offers cd-keys that can be copy&pasted to be used elsewhere, EE series are not supported for this at the moment. Maybe Beamdog might come forward and arrange cd-keys to be distributed through Steam that can be activated in Beamdog client.
Just maybe.
Because all I can do is hope.

AstroBryGuy

@argent77 has outlined a method to expand the DLC zip file into the override directory. Not for the faint of heart, though.

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/732373/#Comment_732373

Aedan

Mods do not work if you have the Steam version of SOD? Do they work with the Beamdog version of the game?

ALIEN

@Aedan They do.

Aedan

@ALIEN
Thanks for your answer. I really hope you will find a solution.

crawlkill

weird--I was trying to use the Vynd NPC mod and had the bright idea to ditch Steam and go install my old un-expansioned Beamdog version of the game, and he was broken in the same way on that install. this is pretty disappointing! the vibrancy of BG is in its modding community! are we confident some kind of one-size-fits-all solution will emerge sooner rather than later?

sandrol

Hi,,,
anybody knows if stratagems-v30 is compatible with SOD ...?
because i believe that he don't

JuliusBorisov

@sandrol SCS is a mod for BG1 and BG2, not SoD, so you can't install SCS on SoD. But you can install SCS on BG1EE and BG2EE after they got 2.0 patch, if you use fixes by @subtledoctor from here - https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/49016/patch-2-0-and-tthe-scs-compability#latest

AstroBryGuy

For Steam/GOG users, there is a ModMerge tool from @ScottBrooks that will merge the DLC content into the main game folder:

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/50441/modmerge-merge-your-steam-gog-zip-based-dlc-into-something-weidu-nearinfinity-dltcep-can-use

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Mirandel

subtledoctor said:

@bengoshi SoD contains BGEE within it, so you can and should install SCS on SoD (with my hotfix). SCS won't affect any of the SoD part of the game, but it *will* improve all of the BG1 part.

I'm installing SCS right now, in fact - I'm doing a mini-semi-mega mod install on SoD with ~40 mods 30 installed so far, but SCS is S L O W. I'll write up a post on how everything goes once I'm done installing.

So... How did it go? Very, VERY interested to hear if it is possible to mod SoD with mods for BG1EE.

Thels

@Mirandel: It should work. If you have Steam or GoG, you need to use the modmerge application, but then you should be able to install most of the mods.

A couple of mods will currently fail to install properly, as SoD changed the contents of the file they're targeting, and the mod doesn't know how to properly address this new file. These mods will need to be updated.

Also, once Weidu 240 is out, all weidu mods need to be updated to properly install on sod in addition to bgee.