Skip to content

Force all dialogs non-pausing (mod of a mod)

nog1potjenog1potje Member Posts: 3
edited July 2021 in General Modding
After completing and loving both D:OS games together with friends, I was excited to try to play the BG:EE games. Mostly in preparation of BG3 coming out of early access sometime in the distant future.

We know the gameplay style is very different but they're also sweeping RPGs that could be a lot of fun in their own right. However, we have a really hard time playing together especially when it comes to dialogues. Getting knocked out of whatever you're doing whenever someone initiates a conversation is very jarring and off-putting.

Supposedly in BG2 there's a feature that allows all dialogs to be non-pausing. And because we're planning to play through all of it, I figured I tried the amazing EET mod to play everything in the BG2EE engine. The mod itself worked beautifully. However, I haven't been able to find the switch to disable dialog pausing altogether.

Next up I found Tweaks-Anthology mod, specifically a tweak that modifies all dialogs to force them to pause the game. After reading a bunch of Weidu documentation and reading through the scripts in this mod I figured a simple change which inverts this tweak to force all dialogs to be non-pausing.

We've only played through the opening hour of BGEE inside EET, but thus far it appears to work great! Of course, we are aware that this will lead to bugs and quirks, so we're saving often and we try to limit talking to NPCs simultaneously. But thus far we haven't run into any issues, even when talking simultaneously.

For anyone else who wants to try this, get Tweaks-Anthology: https://github.com/Gibberlings3/Tweaks-Anthology/releases/tag/v9

Then use WinRAR to open the .exe file and edit setup-cdtweaks.tp2 inside the cdtweaks folder inside the archive. Go to the section called "Force all dialogue to pause" and find the line that says
WRITE_LONG 0x30 0
and change it to
WRITE_LONG 0x30 1
Save the file, close WinRAR en run the exe. Then make sure to apply that specific tweak (it's part of the cosmetic changes section).

Reading through the .tp2 script I know that it's possible that this doesn't affect all dialogs, but I haven't found any pausing dialogs or other issues thus far.

Whenever I run into bugs I'll try to post them here. Of course, players who are more versed in the infinity engine and the BG games can probably already tell where we'll run into problems with this change.

Hopefully this will inspire others to make a more proper mod out of this because it makes multiplayer in the infinity engine infinitely (ha!) more playable.

Edit: sorry if there's already better ways to do this btw, if so please point me in the right direction.

Comments

  • nog1potjenog1potje Member Posts: 3
    First cutscene where you're ambushed with Gorion, the non-pausing of that dialog can cause player to die as the monsters don't wait until you're done talking. So have to make those dialog decisions quick!

    Other than that, we made our way till Beregost without issue. Although I'm expecting more of these problems to show up in the future.

    Still, it's hard to stress how much smoother the game has become as a multiplayer experience, now that we can independently explore a region and talk to people. The game is a hit with our group because of this change. We'll be playing every weekend until we run into something truly game breaking or the end of the content.
  • nog1potjenog1potje Member Posts: 3
    Yesterday we were intercepted on our way to Nashkel mines, and ran into a cutscene we couldn’t get through without the main character dying. No matter how quickly I clicked through the initial dialogue, after the dialog followed a scene that was unskippable and some unpaused NPCs kept attacking. It was the cutscene where the players meet Dorn.

    So unfortunately that was a game breaking situation. To fix it, I installed the original version of the mod to force all dialogs to pause again. Then I rehosted the game and we got through it unscathed. Luckily only the host needs this adjustment to get through stuff like this, but it is a bit of a hassle.

Sign In or Register to comment.