A thousand mod ideas for BG(2)EE
Alonso
Member Posts: 806
I have a zillion ideas for mods, so I have decided to try to do my first mod. I've read several times that the first step is to choose the mod you want to create. I've also read that it's best to start with something as simple as possible. I'm not sure of what's simple and what's complicated, so I have written a list with my ideas to get some feedback. Have a look and tell me what seems easiest. Of course, I realize that this list is overkill, but hey, I've written it already and it looks nice, so here it goes. The links point to threads or comments with more information:
IMPROVED COMBAT LOG
IMPROVED AUTO PAUSES
BUG FIXES
Bugs would be the cases in which the behaviour of the game contradicts what the documentation says. Whether the bug is in the behaviour of the game or in the documentation is often unclear, though.
IMPROVED DOCUMENTATION
USER INTERFACE
OTHER
Obviously some of the mods in this list are very complicated, but I thought I’d just have the whole list here for reference anyway. So what would be the easiest thing to do in this list?
Note: Years ago I studied engineering and worked as a programmer, that should help with the modding.
Edit: Fixed some typos and mistakes.
IMPROVED COMBAT LOG
- Extra information in the combat log:
- A character uses a wand or some other magical item.
- Successful attack roll, but no damage. Explain why there was no damage. Examples: Stoneskin, Ironskin.
- When a creature makes a save or has magical resistance, say against what they made the save or had the resistance (when several casters cast spells at the same time it can be very difficult to tell).
- An enemy casts a spell or uses an ability but the feedback says nothing about it.
- Dispel spells: Say what has been dispelled. If nothing was dispelled, say “Remove (or dispel) magic didn’t affect <creature_name>”.
- Item drained: Say what item was drained.
- Results of spells, scrolls, etc., when they are missing:
- Save vs. spell.
- Magic resistance.
- Immunity.
- Something important is missing altogether. For example: A character becomes unconscious, but the combat log says nothing about what caused it.
- Improved feedback options:
- Improve the description of each feedback option.
- Divide the option “Actions” in two more specific options: Target Selection and Other actions. Target selection is the part of the feedback that says “X attacks Y”. Other actions is all the other feedback currently included in the Actions option. This allows to remove all the “X attacks Y” messages, which typically are not very useful, and still leave more useful feedback, like which spells are being cast.
- Jimfix reloaded. Jimfix is a great little mod that (among other things) improves significantly the combat log. Unfortunately, Jim has been offline for almost a year and his mod is no longer supported. I’d like to replicate the notifications part of Jimfix, i. e., the part that displays extra notifications in the combat log. This would allow me to add some customization and fix some minor issues. One such customization would be to display expiration notifications only when in combat.
- Increase the amount of text allowed in the combat log. Currently it is so limited that for some long fights it doesn’t fit into the log.
- Searchable combat log: A button or maybe a hot key open a search dialog that allows you to search text in the combat log.
- From @leeux: An enhancement of the combat log that allows you to separate it from the conversation/dialogue log. Two options:
- A new panel with just the combat related text. Optionally docked to either side of the screen.
- A tabbed interface, or a filter or a set of checkboxes on top of the current log that filters the non-wanted stuff and leaves just the wanted info.
IMPROVED AUTO PAUSES
- New auto pause options:
- Item used. This includes wands, scrolls, potions, abilities of items, etc.
- Skill used (e. g., disarm trap, pick lock, pick pocket, steath).
- Weapon ineffective.
- Character state change (e. g., poisoned, level drained).
- Disrupted spellcasting.
- Character blocked. For example, you order your fighter to make a melee attack but he can't reach his target because he's in a narrow corridor and the archer and the mage are in his path.
- Character hit auto pause: Pause only when a character is hit, not when a summoned creature is hit.
- Fix End of round auto pause.
- Fix Enemy sighted auto pause. In some cases it doesn’t go off. Examples:
- BG2: Chapter 6: Fight after returning the eggs to Adalon.
- BG2: Final fight.
BUG FIXES
Bugs would be the cases in which the behaviour of the game contradicts what the documentation says. Whether the bug is in the behaviour of the game or in the documentation is often unclear, though.
- Spells.
- Zone of sweet air.
- Time stop.
- Grease.
- Dispel Magic and Remove Magic display the message "Dispel Effects" in the combat log and a visual effect even if nothing gets dispelled.
- Party formations: When you have summons in your party, the formations become very weird, with the party members in their correct formation, but the summons forming a mile away.
- Chance to learn a spell of kitted bards, wild mages, and dual classed characters. Also discussed here
- Pathfinding. Problems that need fixing:
- Characters refuse to move.
- Characters moving in the wrong direction.
- Characters push and move other characters.
- Faster characters (hasted) cannot overtake slower characters.
- Inconsistencies with character immunities: Characters attacked with a type of damage to which they are immune behave like they received damage. For instance, a character immune to fire is attacked with a fire ball. He doesn’t receive damage, but he still complains (in audio and in the feedback panel), is held for a fraction of a second, the game displays a damage animation, and it is paused automatically if the appropriate option is selected.
- Spell disruption: Sometimes dealing damage to a caster doesn’t disrupt his casting. Other times the casting is disrupted even though the caster is immune to the damage.
- Drink potion button: When you click “Use item” in the quick access bar and then right click one of the abilities listed, a panel with a description is displayed. This panel has two buttons: Done and Drink potion. Drink potion doesn’t belong there.
- Combat log mismatched text: In long fights, the first lines displayed at the beginning of the combat log are often wrong.
- Fix the damage stats in the inventory and record screens.
- Simulacrum.
- Mazzy's Strength gives her a bonus to THAC0 even with ranged weapons, which seems wrong.
- Characters use banter in the middel of combat.
- Minor issues reported here.
- Any of the other bugs reported in Redmine.
IMPROVED DOCUMENTATION
- Spells descriptions:
- Chaotic commands.
- Blur.
- Chant.
- Tenser’s transformation: It disables spells.
- Emotion: Hopelessness: It makes its victims sleep.
- Many abjuration spells bypass Spell Immunity: Abjuration.
- Enchanted weapon: For ranged weapons, the enchantment is bestowed on the weapon's ammunition.
- Protection from evil, 10’ radius. Correct the radius.
- Protection from fire: Remove the part about magic fire (it’s incorrect and there is no magic fire in the game).
- Add the information about spell interactions provided in this table.
- Remove incorrect ranges (which are most of them).
- Remove wordiness:
- "The target of this spell must make a saving throw vs. spell or come under its effects".
- “This effect lasts for the duration of the spell or until dispelled”.
- Items descriptions:
- Protection from Magic scroll: List forms of magic that can go through it. It’s not invisible.
- Periapt of proof against poison: Doesn’t protect against poison.
- Cloak of the stars: The darts only last for 24 hours.
- Abilities descriptions:
- Thieving abilities: Add the information in this thread.
- Set snare. Add info on the risk that the thief hurts himself.
All this extra info will be available in:- The level up screen.
- The description of the set snare ability that pops up when right clicking.
- A tooltip displayed when hovering the mouse over the ability name in the record screen.
- The defensive and offensive spins of the blade cancel each other.
- Add info from the thread on typos and text errors.
USER INTERFACE
- Better enemy identification: Fighting a group of enemies with generic names can be very confusing. For example, you fight a party of drow that includes five generic drow. The game simply identifies each of them with the word “drow”. One of them casts Mantle. The feedback screen just says “Drow: Casts Mantle”. It doesn’t tell you which of the five drow cast it. When you want to use Breach to remove the mantle, you don’t know which of the five drow you need to target.
Solution: Give a number to each drow: Drow 1, drow 2, drow 3, drow 4, drow 5. When one of them casts Mantle, the feedback says “Drow 4: Casts Mantle”. The tooltip that identifies each drow also includes this number. - Improved level up screen: Add the current score of thieving abilities, i. e., the score including bonuses from items, potions, etc.
- Improved record screen:
- Display actual ACs in the Inventory and Record Screen.
- Correct wrong info: Ability bonuses.
- Add missing effects, like Invisibility.
- Remove Magic Fire and Magic Cold resistances (they don’t exist in the game).
- Replace “Backstab damage” with “Backstab damage multiplier”.
- Add missing effect icons, like Invisibility, in the character buttons.
- Aiming helper:
- When a ranged spell or ability is selected, it highlights all the points (i. e., the area) at which it can be cast from the current location of the character. This allows to know whether the character needs to move to cast the spell. Useful in multiple situations, specially when you want to cast a spell at a point located in a different room.
- Improved area of effect indicator: Displays the actual area of effect of a spell, I. e., it removes from the indicator the areas which are blocked by a wall or other obstacle. It also displays the area of effect for spells centered on the caster, like Chant or Protection from Evil.
- Improved labels: Separate the labels of creatures (displayed when pressing tab) to prevent them from hiding each other.
- Improved combat log UI: Dock the combat log to one corner and make its width adjustable. Modern screens are wide and not very tall, as opposed to the almost square screens that existed when the game was created. That means that a combat log that displays about a dozen lines of text covers half of the screen. Most of that screen space is wasted because the lines of the combat log are typically very short, so about three quarters of the combat log space are typically empty. Docking it to one of the corners would make much better use of the screen space.
- From @leeux: Buffs overlay: On hovering the mouse over a character it says which protections and buffs he has applied and current applied statuses (only for the ones that are already visible in the combat log).
- Summons and enemies panel buttons. Similar to the characters buttons in the right column.
- Located below and/or besides the character buttons.
- Clicking the button of a summon selects the summon.
- Clicking the button of an enemy centers the camera on the location of the enemy.
- The buttons display icons with info about the buffs and debuffs that affect each of them, just like the character buttons.
- Buff manager: Panel that allows to select a sequence of buffings to be cast before a big fight. Features:
- The player selects all the spells, potions, and items to be used in the buffing.
- The mod automatically selects the order in which the buffings will be performed. It sorts the buffs by order of decreasing duration, to make the buffs last for as long as possible during the fight.
- The mod automatically sorts the buffs to avoid conflicts among them, like trying to cast a buff on a character that is invisible.
- Once all the buffs have been selected, the mod makes all the spell casting, potion drinking, etc., automatically, without user interaction.
- Improved Inventory: The AC subsection lists several contributors to the AC simply as "Ability bonuses". That's not very informative. Break down these ability bonuses line into the actual origings of those bonuses, like Blur, defensive stance or the improved bard song.
- Improved spell selector: Depending on their duration, spells are best suited for different moments of the game. Long duration spells are best cast as soon as the party awakes from their rest or after travelling. Medium duration spells tend to be more helpful when entering potentially dangerous areas. Short duration spells are best cast during or just before combat. This mod uses background colour coding to distinguish between spells of different durations (expressed in game time, not real time):
- Green: More than one hour.
- Orange: Between two turns and one hour.
- Red: Less than two turns.
- No colour: Instant effect.
- Order queuing: A new UI control allows the player to queue orders for a character: First cast spell x, then move to spot y, then attack enemy z with your axe. The character performs all three actions in succession without player interaction.
- Minor tweaks:
- The ESC key closes item containers like bags of holding or potion cases.
- The ENTER key accepts and closes the "Choose amount" dialog that is displayed when choosing an amount of stackable items.
- The middle mouse button selects all the items in a stack of stackable items.
OTHER
- Remove the pointless gas animation of spore colonies.
- Improved Melf’s Minute Meteors: MMM are a great weapon, but they can be very dangerous. If an enemy attacks the mage in melee, the mage cannot drop the MMM, so he suffers the big penalty for using a ranged weapon in melee combat. This mod simply allows the mage to drop the MMM, which enables him to select a melee weapon and eliminate the penalty.
- Improved contingencies and sequencers. Contingencies and sequencers fail when their target is out of range of their spells. For example, a chain contingency that casts Mordenkainen Sword fails if its target is the nearest enemy. This mod prevents the player from putting in a sequencer or contingency spells that are guaranteed to fail due to their range limitations.
- Party AI off affects summons. The AI of summoned creatures is not very good. Examples:
- A demon casts Fire Storm on my party. I move my summoned creatures away from the fire damage. However, as soon as they become idle, the AI kicks in and they attack the demon, thus returning to the Fire Storm area and killing themselves with the fire damage.
- An enemy charms my summoned elemental. In order to avoid killing it, I neutralize it for the duration of the charm with a wand of paralyzation. However, my other summons keep attacking it, and the only way to stop them is to move them far away from the elemental.
The easiest way to fix this would be to turn off the AI of summons. A possible way of doing so would be to turn off their AI when you turn off the AI for the whole party.
- Allow summons to move between areas. It doesn’t make much sense that a summoned kobold cannot follow you into or out of a house.
- SCS tweak: Add more options to the ease of use script:
- Mage/thieves, like Imoen and Jan: On top of their magic scripting, they can also search for traps or hide in the shadows automatically when they're idle.
- Bards: On top of their magic scripting, when enemies are around they can sing their bard song instead of attacking enemies.
- Join the nine areas of Baldur’s Gate into one.
- Allow targetting of enemies who have their red circle behind a door.
- Remove the "dead magic" effect from the rooms in the maze level of Watcher's keep. It works in unpredictable and weird ways and it's unfair because it affects the party but not the demons.
- GUI for Weidu. Includes:
- An update feature that updates all the components of a mod to the newest version with one click.
- An uninstall feature that uninstalls all the components of a mod with one click.
- A reinstall feature that reinstalls all the components of a mod with one click.
Obviously some of the mods in this list are very complicated, but I thought I’d just have the whole list here for reference anyway. So what would be the easiest thing to do in this list?
Note: Years ago I studied engineering and worked as a programmer, that should help with the modding.
Edit: Fixed some typos and mistakes.
Post edited by Alonso on
10
Comments
The rest of these are controlled by the engine, so unless your altering the exe, modding won't likely help.
Time stop. - add Baldur.BCS script trigger to rewind time by (duration) before triggering the Time Stop effect. (It might not fix everything, but is a start).
Grease. - (not sure what the issue is, aside from BG2EE lacking one of the sound files)
Inconsistencies with character immunities - See this thread https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/64821/blazing-inferno
Spell disruption
Drink potion button
Combat log mismatched text
Party formations
Chance to learn a spell of kitted bards, wild mages, and dual classed characters.
Pathfinding
The rest of these are controlled by the engine, so unless your altering the exe, modding won't likely help.
"+1 luck and saving throws to allies, -1 luck and saving throws to enemies, multiple chants do not stack?"
Emotion Hopelessnesss - The relevant opcode is used for a wide range of effects, including Wake on Hit (Sleep), Unconsciousness, Knockdown, Trip, Hopelessness - anything that causes the creature to fall to the ground. But it is not "Sleep" that is used here, hitting them will not wake them. (The portrait icon does need correcting though).
Enchanted weapon - The effect is applied to the creature, not really their weapons, it affects all attacks they make.
That sounds like something quite easy to try to get my feet wet. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I wasn't very careful when I was writing this list, sometimes I just wrote down quick notes as I played, thinking I would expand them further when needed. Of course, this mod idea isn't very useful without some specific examples to work with. Off the top of my head the only case I remember is the final fight in BG2. If my memory serves, the balors cast Stoneskin a lot, but sometimes the combat log says nothing about it.
I guess it's probably better to skip this one until I have a couple of confirmed cases with screenshots and saved games to tinker with.
Altering the exe sounds like the kind of tinkering that will make my PC explode, so I think I'll skip that.
BUG FIXES
This, on the other hand, does sound quite scary. Like something I might dare to try after I have completed half a dozen easy ones.
It's not that it lacks the sound file, it's that the sound file sounds horrible (somebody said it makes his ears bleed). The most straightforward solution is to replace the offending file with a blank sound file. When I created that post my problem was that I couldn't figure out which file was the problematic one. It turns out you answered that in your post in that thread, so I'd say that's my first mod right there! Except, of course, I didn't do it, you did it!
Nice one! Looks like this fellow did exactly what I had in mind. I'll install it and see how it goes.
Descriptions
CHANT
Gives these benefits to allies:
- -1 to saving throws.
- +1 luck:
- +1 to attack and physical damage rolls, up to the maximum roll.
- -1 to damage rolls for magical damage received, with a minimum of 1 per roll.
- +1 to healing rolls, up to the maximum roll.
- Improves reaction times.
- Slightly improves the chances of success when using some thieving skills.
- Improves the effectiveness of the spell Mirror Image.
Applies the opposite effects to enemies.Chant does not stack with itself.
All of this written in a more colourful and interesting way, of course.
OK, so this seems like a two parts task. First correcting a bit the description (according to which the victims say things like "I'm going home", which doesn't fit the idea that they're unconscious), and fixing the portrait icon. Sounds quite doable, but since we've already identified one or two that look even easier, I might just start with those instead.
Interesting. Then the mod idea doesn't change, it's still about correcting the spell description, but specifically to explain what you just explained here.
Once again, any feedback on this thread will be greatly appreciated.
I have to say I like and agree with much of the stuff you listed! And congrats on your first release!
If I could be so bold to add some of the things I'd love to have which are somewhat related to the things you've already listed, then... let me say that I'd kill for an enhancement of the combat log that allows you to separate it from the conversation/dialogue log.
Or, maybe additionally even, an UI overlay on hovering a character that says exactly which protections/buffs he has applied and current applied statuses (only for the ones that are already visible in the combat log.)
One of the most tedious aspects of playing with SCS is scanning several pages of the log to find who casted what and and then who is who
Also, another thing I'd like is something like "some mage: starts casting Necromancy spell" visible in the log, since all the info/hints are already there, the visual orb, the spell chanting, etc. It would make much easier to keep track what's going on on complex battles.
Probably all of the veteran players already instinctively know what a mage is going to do when it starts casting... so, it's info that most already have/use and having it easier to consume would help a lot of the more newer players. Of course, should be toggeable on/off.
How do you envision that separation?
Very good idea indeed. I've added it to the list. Don't hold your breath, though, that sounds difficult. I'm just learning the very basics of modding, so for now I'm trying only very easy mods. Our best hope is that a veteran modder gets interested in doing it.
Good news for you! That's done already. Check Jimfix. AFAIK the only way to toggle it on and off is to reinstall the mod, but in my experience, once you have it there you don't want to play without it.
I'd think of it as either, a new panel where just the actual combat related text gets added and no dialogue/conversation related stuff... optionally, that could docked to either side of the screen, as you suggested!
Or, alternatively, maybe a tabbed interface/filter set/checkboxes/etc on top of the current log that filters the non-wanted stuff and leaves just the wanted info.
I'm not completely sure if the new UI modding abilities of the game allow for adding something like I'm describing to be done, but it'd certainly seem to be the more feasible than in the past! Maybe it's something that could be doable with the EEex from Bubb in the future
Wow, that looks awesome indeed! I didn't knew of this one! Thanks for the pointer, I'll certainly give it a try on my next mods reinstall (which are fairly common lately, as I'm always wanting to tweak stuff and thus restarting playthroughs
EDIT: clarification and typos