incompatible but stable?, I've been playing v4.2 for months now with my megamod... Options

[coineineagh]

First of all thanks to Sikret for the BEST bg2 mod by far. Thank you for your time and effort, the result is an improved game experience for me and many others.
I love the fact that despite my acquired gear I'm most definitely not overpowered for most of the IA encounters.

<slight spoiler>The brain golems were an xp goldmine! Once I'd finished off the golems in the hallway 40-50 had spawned in the main room of the Illithid boss. Thankfully most were killed by two well placed Dragon's Breaths.
The new golems are tough and sturdy! just how I like my golems. Too bad I saved and reloaded the game at the wrong moment: The 3 amber golems [you know where] didn't spawn anymore. Now I probably can't make [you know what].
Zalladora was great fun - tactical thought required. But here I encountered an incompatibility issue: Not choppiness, but a frozen screen while the game continued, I heard everything, but only got to see what was happening when the game was paused.

This is where my big question arises: You list a ridiculous amount of mods as incompatible in your readme. Basically I would be forced to choose between quantity (megamod) and quality (IA). So far my install has worked fine. There were some issues, but I doubt they were all caused by IA. Also, on the site IA is often praised for it's stability despite altering many native game characters. What I fear the most is an incompatibility that results in a CTD or something that stops me from progressing. Anything that is fixable with a bit of CLUAing is no more than an inconvenience.

I'd like a bit more insight into this if you have time: Are the incompatibilities the result of mods overwriting eachother, and so not taking effect? Is the Zalladora issue above an example of what you mean by incompatible? And most important: Can I expect any CTDs or other insurmountable obstacles? I plan to uninstall an install it at the end, so that all of IA takes precedence, but I'd like to know in advance if there is a point where I definitely can't continue.

Thanks for your time. BTW it doesn't need to be Sikret - if anyone has some answers for me, by all means!

[Sikret]

Welcome aboard, coineineagh!

And thanks for the kind words.

First and foremost, note that IA v4.2 is no longer supported. Please use the latest version of IA.

So far my install has worked fine. There were some issues, but I doubt they were all caused by IA. Also, on the site IA is often praised for it's stability despite altering many native game characters. What I fear the most is an incompatibility that results in a CTD or something that stops me from progressing.

You seem to admit that you have installed mods which are listed as incompatible in IA's readme file (even worse, you seem to have read the installation document in IA's readme, but have intentionally decided to ignore it). I usually don't reply to posts from players who have ingored my installation guidlines. They are on their own.

CTD is not the only form of bug in the game. The fact that you have not encountered CTD doesn't mean that everything is working as intended in your game.

The nature of the bugs you will face varies depending on which incompatible mods you have installed. Some of them may even create CTD; some others may create bugs which are harder to detect during the game . For example, they may cause some of IA's quests not to trigger at all; you won't notice anything abnormal in such cases and won't realize that some content is missing; some other incompatible mods (typically those mods which use Detectable Stats, such as 'Ascension') may break IA's scripts and lower the difficulty of the battles considerably. Again, in such cases, you will not notice the bug and will think that you are defeating the enemies without knowing that you are not actually playing "the real IA" (= IA in its full calibre).

Please, make a clean installation of the game plus the official patch and the non-WeiDu Baldurdash fixpack v1.12 and then install only those mods which are compatible with IA and always use the latest version of IA.

And please remember that I don't offer technical support to players who don't follow the installation instructions accurately.

This post has been edited by Sikret: Jun 5 2008, 03:13 PM