The installation instructions and compatibility descriptions in the readme are comprehensive and well done.

I know it is impossible and even undesirable to include compatibility issues for every mod. Ordinarily, NPC mods are not affected by other types of mods. However, I believe the Amber mod by Meira and Darios might have some issues due to a Cromwell dialog modification. I believe the issue had more to do with Item Upgrade, so there probably won't be compatibility issues with Improved Anvil.

The point of this post, however, was to praise the completeness of the readme instructions.

I installed Improved Anvil over Amber's current version (1.1) and if you choose the "Go on with your regular item upgrades." from Cromwell's dialogue, you can access Amber's upgrade. Amber's version 1.1 should be compatible with IU too, provided that you installed IU *before* any mods that add dialogue states to Cromwell's dialogue. So, be you choice either Improved Anvil or Item Upgrade; you can still have Amber with all her bells and whistles.

Oh, Sikret, I got an Windows error when Improved Anvil's readme was about to launch.



Looks like you might want to get rid of that space in the readme filename.

@berelinde
Thank you very much! You are too kind.

@Meira
Thanks for testing the two mods with each other. I had already referred to their compatibility here.

I'm almost sure that even IU would work fine with your mod even if it was installed after Amber. No efforts were needed on your part. IU and IA use the same method. If (as you confirmed) IA has worked fine with your mod (even if installed after Amber), IU would also work fine in the same way. However, now that you have made some changes to your mod to detect IU, I'm not sure what will happen if people install IU after Amber. (But if you had not touched your mod, they would work fine with each other even if IU was installed after Amber.)

As for the problem regarding launching the readme file, no such problem occurs when I install the mod on my own computer. I'll be thankful to know if any other person has this problem. There is no reason for such a problem, because all paths are defined correctly.

It's the scenario where IU is installed before Amber that we wrestled with. If IU preserves the existing upgrade options like IA installing it after Amber should be fine. However, being an older mod people tend to have IU already installed.



The comp I installed IA to is running a Win2000.

But you are encouraging people to install IU before other mods which include dialogues with Cromwell. Here is what you wrote:

I think you need to revise this if you have written it in your mod's readme, because it is simply untrue. There is no need to have IU installed before other mods that add dialogue to Cromwell. I have tested what I am saying and I am completely certain. IU or IA (they use the same method) can be installed after such mods with no problems. In fact it is better to install IU or IA after other mods which add dialogue to Cromwell.

Yes, from the viewpoint of IU (and supposedly also IA, if it works similarly), everything works fine and dandy regardless of the order in which the mods are installed, I do not doubt you there. Also, if you install Amber first and then install IU or IA, everything should work fine for both mods. But the problematic scenario is the one where you install a mod that adds states to Cromwell's dialogue, then install IU (or, apparently, IA), and after that, install Amber. This particular order can potentially cause miscallaneous funkiness (what exactly, will depend on the Cromwell-altering mod installed before IU). Why? It's somewhat complicated, but let me try to explain.

When designing the mod, we decided in our great wisdom that it would be cool to have Amber's quests involve an item that Cromwell could combine with another item for the greater good of all. This will help us integrate the mod with existing Bioware content and make it seem a part of things. Great.

Figuring out how to do this in a manner that would not affect the functionality of Bioware content or possible other mods took a little thinking and furious deconstructing of Cromwell's dialog, but in the end it was quite simple. What Amber does in a more technical sense, is to add a new transition trigger to Cromwell's state 13 to refer to our new item while preserving everything else as it is, using a single ADD_TRANS_TRIGGER command and an EXTEND_BOTTOM on that state. The rest is just appending our new states to Cromwell's dialog. Nice and smooth.

But then it turned out that Weimer's Item Upgrade did something nasty, namely replaced that very state 13 and moved the original state 13 to the end of the dialogue file. And since Amber was the new kid on the block, we would have to accommodate people who were using IU (i.e. had it already installed). Well, a solution to this problem had already been devised and was kindly communicated to us by Cam. We could simply check if IU was installed and append the "new state 13" instead of state 13 if this was the case. Cool. So we installed IU onto an immaculate installation of the game and looked up the new number of the old state 13, which turned out to be 101. Sweet, so if IU was installed, Amber would append this state instead and everything would work fine. Unless...

...You had installed a mod which added a state (or several) to Cromwell's dialogue before installing IU, in which case IU would have happily again moved the old state 13 to be the last state of the file, but this time it would not be 101 but something completely different which we would have no way of predicting. (Well, actually it would be exactly 101 + the number of states added by that other mod, but that doesn't really help much, does it?) This would cause Amber to add the trigger and append a completely different state, resulting in potential random silliness in Cromwell's dialog (or just that particular aspect of Amber not working).

So, you are completely correct in saying that IU (and apparently also IA) can be installed after Amber (and all other mods that use a similar system of adding to Cromwell's dialog). But what you cannot do (well, you can but you shouldn't) is to install Amber on top of IU that has been installed on top of other Cromwell-altering mods. And since Amber was released years after IU, the assumption naturally was that anyone wishing to use IU was already using it and installing Amber on top of it; hence the caveat in the readme. Now that Amber has been out for a while and people can take her into consideration when planning their installs, we can well emend the compatibility clause in question to include "..., or install IU only after installing Amber."

So, to provide a practical example of the various installation orders (using the forthcoming Delainy mod as the other Cromwell-altering mod):

IU + Delainy OK!
Delainy + IU OK!
IU + Amber OK!
Amber + IU OK
IU + Delainy + Amber OK!
IU + Amber + Delainy OK!
Delainy + Amber + IU OK!
Amber + Delainy + IU OK

Delainy + IU + Amber TROUBLE!

(This of course applies only to aspects of the mods relating to Cromwell's dialogue; the compatibility of Amber and Delainy in other respects will have to be ensured when Del is released.)

Did this clarify our reasons for writing that instruction at all?

The space is a windows command line problem, not weidu, not notepad.
It happened with the dltc installer too when people installed it into spacy folders.

How could Amber+IU or IA+IU work if IU always replaces the 13th state.
To me that stuff is a flawed design.

Well, from what I understand (although I'm not all that familiar with IA), IA+IU is not a valid combination (I think Sikret said that somewhere). And the reason why Amber+IU works is that when IU replaces state 13, it is kind enough to move the old state 13 to the end of the file using COPY_TRANS, which will also move all the changes Amber makes to state 13 along with the original state 13 (which will still be available via the new states added by IU). It's kinda hard to explain but it works.

But yes, in the light of present-day WeiDU fucntionality, this "state 13 pokery-jiggery" (as Cam put it) really is sub-optimal coding. But then again, I think it was done a *long* time ago, and may have been the only way possible back then. But yeah, no-one should use it anymore and there has been talk of updating IU to use a more elegant way of accomplishing the same result.

Thanks for the clarifications, Darios!

Yes, I also think adding this correction is necessary.


I disagree with this kind of general "should" sentences (see below for why).

Cam once used to think that IU and IA would preclude other mods' item upgrades in Cromwell's dialogue. He said much against IU and IA based on that false belief. We tested and proved that it was a myth. Unfortunately, Cam never sent any post to any public forum admitting his mistake (he only did so in IA's workshop which is not open to public).

The only drawback(?) of IU's method is that if you install it before some other item upgrading mod, the order in which item upgrades appear during talking with Cromwell will change. A minor (if any) problem. (In my opinion, it's not a problem at all.)

However, as far as IA is concerned, players need to install IA after all other mods (for independent reasons relating to the tactical portion of the mod), hence since the mod is surely installed after all other mods, the item upgrade portion of the mod will also work seamlessly with no shift or change in the order in which other mods' upgrades will appear.

For all these reasons, the good old method works seamlessly for IA and there is no need to change the way the dialogue is coded (at least as far as we are talking about IA).

@Avenger_teambg

As Darios correctly mentioned and as mentioned in the mod's documentation, IA is not compatible with IU.

I'm fairly certain I remember reading that discussion. Was it originally posted in the workroom, or was it perhaps posted in the public forum and then moved to the workroom?

I felt moving state 13 was a poor idea compatibility-wise, and cited Delainy as a concrete example. This was, indeed, incorrect and if it makes you feel better I'll apologize here in public as well.

The issues that Darios have cited vindicate that it's still a poor idea because we're forcing an install order where none need exist.

It started in the public forum, then continued in the workroom. (I'll send you a PM too.)