Modder question: city areas/hubs for Siege of Dragonspear

jmerry

I'm working on something that includes an ability that can be activated in city areas - or in anything I add to a whitelist. For example, in the main BGEE campaign, the city areas are the nine sectors of Baldur's Gate, Ulgoth's Beard, Beregost, and Nashkel. You're never without access for too long, so that campaign doesn't need anything on the whitelist. Black Pits 1 gets its hub on the list, though. In BG2EE, Amkethran isn't flagged as a city, so that goes on the list as the chapter 9 hub.

So, then, what areas in SoD have the "city" flag? And if there are stretches when you can't reach any any for a while, what are the hub areas I should add? Area codes needed, not just names.

jastey

SoD starts with BG city areas: Ducal Palace area (bd0010), Elfsong Tavern area (bd0020), After that, it's camps and keeps. I would assume the big coalition camp bd3000 would count as a "city"/settlement. Maybe the interior of Bridgefort too, to give the player another possibility to activate it (bd2100).
For the rest - is it about city as in, civilized and lots of other people? Or is it more like houses and less nature so ruins would do, too (e.g. Kanaglym, bd5300)?

jastey

Forgot to list all city areas: Flaming Fist exterior bd0030, Three Old Kegs exterior bd0040, Iron Throne exterior bd0050.

jmerry

Lots of other people. The ability in question costs money (well, technically, it summons an invisible creature that talks to you if the area check is met, and then the dialogue options that do stuff cost money).

That's about what I figured. I'll go with bd2100 and bd3000 for the whitelist. (And, of course, I'm asking because I don't have SoD myself but would like the mod to be reasonably functional on games with it.) Now I just have to hurry up and get it done before my self-imposed deadline.

jastey

jmerry wrote: »

Now I just have to hurry up and get it done before my self-imposed deadline.

You know reality implodes every time a modder says that?
I hope it's ok to link this here, I am using the GameBanshee Walkthrough myself and find it quite helpful. There is an error in the area codes of two of the city areas, though (the ones I posted above are the correct ones.)

jmerry

Nice. I tried the wiki and ... that wasn't helpful. Most of the area pages are stubs.

The project is almost ready; I've cleared the first level of syntax errors and am trying to get it to install.

The current stumbling block ... it's a monk kit. Error message as follows when trying to perform ADD_KIT: Cannot set column-wise because there are 23 lines in 25STWEAP.2DA but I was only given 4 things to append

On my examination... here's the relevant code snippet:

ADD_KIT ~%KitCode%~
        ~%CLASWEAProw%~
        ~%WEAPPROFcol%~
        ~%ABCLASRQrow%~
        ~%ABCLSMODrow%~
        ~%ABDCDSRQrow%~
        ~%ABDCSCRQrow%~
        ~%ALIGNMNTrow%~
        ~%DUALCLASrow%~ 
        ~%KitPath%~
        ~K_MN_H~
        ~0x00004000       20~
        ~Mo0~
        ~%25STWEAPcol%~
        SAY @101
        SAY @102
        SAY @103

(OK, a couple of those variables are explicit strings in the real thing. But most of them are variables. And a debug print command has verified that 25STWEAPcol has the twenty non-whitespace entries it's supposed to have - all *, since I'm testing on BGEE and read from game files to create the strings referenced.)

The only thing I can think of is that there's some misalignment, but I just can't see it.

Update: I replaced the offending variable with an explicit string that exactly matched it except for lacking a trailing space. Somehow, that was enough to get past the error. On to the next.
And testing again ... it wasn't the whitespace. Operation succeeds with explicit string, fails with variable that evaluates to the exact same thing. But only in that particular spot.

jastey

I have problems with variables that evaluates to strings mysel. Sometimes, putting EVAL in front of the variable will make it work, like in this example:

COPY_EXISTING ~c#br01.are~ ~override~
LAUNCH_PATCH_FUNCTION ~fj_are_structure~
INT_VAR
(...)
STR_VAR
(...)
fj_destination_area = EVAL ~%CoastWay%~
END

Apart from that, I'm no hlep here unfortunately.

argent77

ADD_KIT has some issues with variable evaluation (among other things). I'd recommend to use the add_kit_ex library nowadays. It combines ADD_KIT, the EE-extension for ADD_KIT and optional multiclass kit functionality.

jmerry

Yeah, I've noticed. And thanks for the link.

I've gotten to the point of "the mod installs", though there's still considerable work to be done. I might well switch over to use that library even though I've got the basic kit installation part to a functional state already.