compatibility, simple questions Options

[lroumen]

Hello everyone.


I played through IA a year ago I think, and this summer I'm going to give it another shot with the newly added challenges and items. I still have a week or two before my character is done in BG1 and then I'll port it to BG2. I'm playing a Ranger Stalker and I would like to have the more logical effects of the ranger class enabled reputation-wise. It would therefore be nice if I could enhance IA with the Virtue Mod. Neither Virtue nor IA mention an incompatibility towards one another (neither mention the other anywhere that I could find), but I'm of course wary on mixing mods of different sources. Weird things may happen...


My question is hence: Has anyone played with both mods and has anyone come across some incompatibilities or oddities?

The problem is also the order of installation, Virtue states that it should be installed last, but so does IA. I think the proper order would be Virtue - IA, but since Virtue is Weidu it might as well be better if I went with IA-Virtue instead.


Lastly, I'm interested in adding some other minor mods and I'll just list them to ask whether these too have some disparities with IA:
- the new Rogue Rebalancing
- Exnem's Vault
- Tower of Deception

Cheers

[Marceror]

Well, of course there are the items that Sikret points out from Weimer's ease of use, which equally apply to the BG2 Tweakpack (which it is included in). There is the avatar morphing script, which doesn't seem to work at all with IA installed (at least, that has been the experience in my game).

A bug that I stumbled on is with the P&P style protection items (the feature that allows you to toggle the AC on and off so you can stack save bonuses). Once an item is toggled Cromwell will never recognize it again as a valid component for recipes (I assume this applies to Cespenar as well, but I didn't bother to test). So I could have 3 rings of protection +1, but if I toggle one or more of them, I'll never be able to those toggled rings to forge a ring of protection +2. My workaround to that was to simply stop toggling protection items if I thought I might want to use them in a recipe later. No biggy. Oh, and when I looked in Shadow Keeper I noticed that there are 3 rings of protection +1 listed, so I assume one is the original (which works with Cromwell), and the other 2 are "modified" versions used for toggling (1 that removes the AC bonus, and another that replaces the AC bonus).

The other thing that I noticed is that later in the game many of my IA modified protection items are able to stack (though technically they shouldn't because I installed PnP style protection items). So, for example, I could have a character wearing a cloak of protection +3, a ring of protection +3 and a ring of protection +4, all at the same time with the AC and save bonuses for each stacking. This isn't surprising, however, since with IA installed last, any of Sikret's modified items are going to comply with the rules that he coded them with.

Lastly, I have installed the "remove helmet animation" component, but Sikret's modified dragon helm shows an animation (again, not surprising based on the logic I present above). There are probably other modified helms that this applies to, but the improved dragon helm is the only one I personally used. This actually worked out as a cool side benefit for me, because while I sort of hate seeing 4 - 5 party members in those BG helms, having just 1 with it was sort of cool, for variety's sake.

So, in my experience, there aren't any game breaking bugs between IA and BG2 Tweakpack (except for the items Sikret has specifically called out, which I didn't install), but there are numerous quirks. In general, if you're determined to use both of these mods, just try to stay away from components in tweakpack that modify items.

This post has been edited by Marceror: Jul 10 2007, 01:31 AM