Deleting mods before starting Siege of Dragonspear.

PatriCrusader

Like many others, I moded my game to fix bugs, and cut content and things like that. Had no problems.
But then I bought Siege of Dragonspear, not aware that it actually integrated into the main game. Since then, bugs have started to appear, and they just keep getting worse. Especially the last chapter and companions where dialogue from Siege of Dragonspear appear instead of the BG1 when they talk, voices from Siege of Dragonspear playing instead of BG1 voices and things like that.
Right now I'm just about to enter the final battle of BG1, hoping that the bugs will end when Siege of Dragonspear starts. But if that doesn't work, is it possible to delete the mods and do a clean install without completely breaking the game when I continue the BG1 save in Siege of Dragonspear?
I was going to play through all the games before BG3. This playthrough took 315 hours (I always take a long time playing) so starting over is out of the question.

GraionDilach

You can delete SoD from the game and your mods will work for the remaining portion of BGEE but depending on the mods and the amount of stuff you modded, the save can be easily broken in SoD.

jastey

I do not share @GraionDilach 's suggestion that deinstalling SoD will fix the modded BG:EE part.
Mod content showing SoD textlines means that the dialog.tlk (where the game stores all texts in) got overwritten with the Sod one. Line numbers that had mod added content are now overwritten with SoD lines which are pulled by the mod added content, giving the scrumbled text lines. My assumption is that for deinstalling the SoD campaign, the texts will not be reversed to the modded one but to the original BG:EE one because it's not a deinstallation like a mod would do with restoring a backup of sorts. Meaning, after that your mod added content will probably show "Invalid" messages.

On a general note: Updating the game leads to an overwrite of game files, which breaks mods. Changing mods midgame breaks things, etc. Actually, continuing a save you started in BG:EE and continuing it in an BG:EE with SoD is bound to give bugs, even without mods.

To your second question: I'm not sure the problams will resolve in SoD. I don't know what changes were made to the base game things (spells, effects, etc) and whether it could hit you at some point, all I know that there are differences between BG:EE with and without SoD (the changes are more than just added SoD content). For the mods, if you have NPCs who travel with you through SoD, too, I'm afraid the text salad will not stop in SoD, since their new lines for SoD were overwritten too.

PatriCrusader

jastey wrote: »

I do not share @GraionDilach 's suggestion that deinstalling SoD will fix the modded BG:EE part.
Mod content showing SoD textlines means that the dialog.tlk (where the game stores all texts in) got overwritten with the Sod one. Line numbers that had mod added content are now overwritten with SoD lines which are pulled by the mod added content, giving the scrumbled text lines. My assumption is that for deinstalling the SoD campaign, the texts will not be reversed to the modded one but to the original BG:EE one because it's not a deinstallation like a mod would do with restoring a backup of sorts. Meaning, after that your mod added content will probably show "Invalid" messages.

On a general note: Updating the game leads to an overwrite of game files, which breaks mods. Changing mods midgame breaks things, etc. Actually, continuing a save you started in BG:EE and continuing it in an BG:EE with SoD is bound to give bugs, even without mods.

To your second question: I'm not sure the problams will resolve in SoD. I don't know what changes were made to the base game things (spells, effects, etc) and whether it could hit you at some point, all I know that there are differences between BG:EE with and without SoD (the changes are more than just added SoD content). For the mods, if you have NPCs who travel with you through SoD, too, I'm afraid the text salad will not stop in SoD, since their new lines for SoD were overwritten too.

You are right about uninstalling SoD. I tried unselecting it in Steam earlier (meaning it gets disconnected from the game) and like you said, all effected dialogue got the invalid error message.

I have played through the SoD prologue and so for there has been no problems so I guess I'll continue and see. If it gets too bad I guess I'll have to skip it and play from the start sometime in the future.

Thanks for the help!

GraionDilach

Oh, sorry, I mixed up mod.key with dialog.tlk. For some reason I remembered dialog.tlk being shipped as a partiial file to append instead of being wholly overwritten.

jastey

For the mods, if you have NPCs who travel with you through SoD, too, I'm afraid the text salad will not stop in SoD, since their new lines for SoD were overwritten too.

What I wrote here doesn't make sense, because when you installed the NPC mods there was no SoD, so their SoD content wasn't installed previously.
Mmmmaybe if you add the SoD campaign and then reinstall the mods it will give them correct dialogues in SoD. But their names and from mod items you already have will most probably be random textlines.

Maybe you manage to finish BG1 and import your character over for a new SoD game. That should definitely work.

GraionDilach wrote: »

Oh, sorry, I mixed up mod.key with dialog.tlk. For some reason I remembered dialog.tlk being shipped as a partiial file to append instead of being wholly overwritten.

I just figured that the devs don't have to worry about this, from their perspective it's two different sized dialog.tlks so it's safer to just replace the whole thing.