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!

Many mods are conceptually incompatible with IA.

A mod that provides additional treasure that would make IA battles too easy too soon, would be classified as "incompatible".

Additional IA incompatibilities with 5 and 6 is that vanilla spells have been replaced with different spells. Thus often other mods that were scripted to cast such spells as Mislead, no longer will work as intended.

IA uses a different form of detectable spells than G3's DS system, so those are incompatible on the technical side as well as the conceptual. This, in turn, affects all other big mods that rely upon certain spell.ids or what not in their scripting.

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.



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.

Hello Sikret,

Your insight is valuable, some of the issues you named were things I suspected by playing. Thanks too, Ymarsakar. Fortunately I don't have any spell-replacing mods installed.
Please don't misunderstand me Sikret, I didn't deliberately install IA despite warnings. I only read the readme thoroughly later on, when I was searching for info. I've been playing this installation for months now (hence the old v4.2), and I'm a bit squeemish about big changes. I'm a noob obviously, and last time I had issues and decided to reinstall everything, I couldn't play my saved games (Jaheira and Imoen started spouting item descriptions, so I guess the dialog.tlk was wrecked). Had to start over.
I don't wish to rub you the wrong way, especially since you wrote my favourite mod, but asking me to uninstall practically everything is too much. I've become too attached to my gear, and this is my first time playing all the mods. I hope you understand my feeling about this: I hog my items, and don't want to miss out on content.
I'm going to risk it. Obviously I don't expect you to help me with troubleshooting now. In the future I will definitely try your mod on a compatible install, but until then all I can say is thanks for the help and wish me luck.

Perhaps you should have a look at this post. It may be interesting to you for maintaining an installation.

http://forums.pocketplane.net/index.php/topic,17555.0.html

Also, if you install in a particular order, keep the weidu log to check which installation options you have used and maybe you can reinstall everything in that particular order to get your savegames to work. Otherwise, I don't suggest uninstalling mods during gameplay or I would start with a new party.

I also suggest to read all the mod readmes as some indicate a clear incompatibility with another mod. Often I only install 2-3 mods with a careful decision on fixpack or tweakpack settings because basically most enhancement mods provide more than enough additions. It is also vital that your BG installation remains stable. If certain mods don't mix well than you may miss mod content or you get real bugs such as wrong strings being allocated or overwritten if some mods don't append but overwrite certain things (I believe Baldurdash text update does this for instance), crashes to desktop (though quite rare), stutter bugs (AI scripts continuously checking variables that are impossible to meet) and even immortal enemy bugs (like the werewolf in Firkraag's Dungeon).

Good luck with your v4.2 game.

Thanks, I read it before. Building a megamod is a lot of work, it took me weeks to get my current installation right. I missed the warning in IAv4.2 by accident, but mostly I do my research. This brings me to a question about biffing: .BIF threads were mentioned in that thread, and I'm looking for a way to bif my override folder. My game is a bit slow and it's not because of the Bags of Holding. How do you BIF?

So far I only uninstalled one mod, that was BG1NPCProject after the transition - I couldn't initiate dialogs with NPCs, but it was restored after that was removed.


Yeah, I've encountered those, but killing them is a challenge in itself. The final encounter with Tolgerias and his mage was weird: If I killed the mage, Tolgerias would become unkillable, if I killed Tolgerias, the mage is there to stay. I wanted Tolgerias' loot, so I lured the mage into a corner, but I've still got to figure out how to kill him. Here are some methods of killing unkillables that I use:
1) Vorpal weapons rarely work.
2) The Two-Handed Sword of General Ghotal ( yeah I hog items, from NTotSC, 40% chance to petrify, no save). You can also use this to 'stall' so you can fight off killables in the area, unpetrify it later to see if it will die properly, and use another method so it will drop loot.
3) Level-Draining weapons are most reliable.
4) Mind Flayer INT drain hasn't worked for me so far.
5) Imprisonment, although this is just another way of delaying.
6) This one is a weird combo of spells: Smart Fireball (dunno where it's from) casts instantly, so use Timestop, Improved Alacrity and then bombard the area with about 10 Smart Fireballs. {When you press ctrl+Y a creature is killed (1129damage) but instantly resurrected, this happens 3 times, then the computer stops trying to kill it.} In this case when the Timestop ends, 10 kills occur at the same time, and the computer can't keep up. The unkillable character dies! Well, I think it's cool...

I know what a stutter bug looks like: I tried to reactivate the Jaheira romance after I'd finished Viconia's, Jaheira could hardly move , so I didn't save that...

I read warnings on many fora that Baldurdash doesn't go well with BGT, so I haven't installed that.

It's a bad sign that I encounter so many unkillables (about 10 so far in BGT), I realize now how messed up my install must be.
But I have to press on...

Biffing into few large files is better than using many small files, but if you really have to resort to biffing then your installation must have an extreme amount of files, i.e. mods .

I believe that you can find a tool at www.teambg.eu that still does it and I'm sure that people there can help you work with it.
I also believe that DLTCEP allows biffing (http://www.gibberlings3.net/tools/dltcep.php). Avenger may help you there.
Other than that I'm only familiar with the simple modding stuff to get my game working.

Maybe you can also use Zyraen's Uber Weapon for killing unkillables (pocket plane group), but sometimes it's just a matter of global variable settings that allow a creature to die and you have to find the correct variable.


In all I think your tricks are nice and your effort to create your own compatibility for your custom megamod is good, but I think this thread is not suitable to discuss these things further.
I cannot help you very much because I'm not that wise with modding. Furthermore, I don't think that it's a good idea to tweak IAv4.2 without Sikrets advice on the matter (and I doubt he will give you much useful advice for your mod as he cannot even begin to derive which changes you've made and how each of your mods influences the other ones, let alone how they influence the IA4.2 installation. It would simply be too much work for him).

Biffing helps if the size your override folder is about comparable to your RAM (in my personal experience, having more than 300MB of override with 512MB of RAM is ill-advised, but over one Gb of override and 2 Gb of RAM is still smooth), thus if you have lots of voiced NPCs and areas installed your limit will run out quickly, especially if you don't have lots of RAM. Having tons of small files doesn't affect performance (except for loading times on unusual configurations, like Linux on a FAT32 file system). If you meet those criteria (override and RAM have similar sizes), then you can try to use the biffing solutions currently offered at SHS.

Ah that's how it works. I thought that it was related to the garble in performance that FAT and NTFS cause when reading lots of small files rather than several big files (comprising the same HD space).

In any case, I thank you for the information as well as the corrections.

You're right Iroumen, this discussion is now not relevant to IA. But thanks for your tips, I'll try one of those bif-methods soon.
I'll also backup my entire Override folder, because some incompatibilities are caused by files in there, and I can't remove them when they're biffed, right? I'm thinking of C6bodhi.cre in Big Picture for example.
We should end this topic now, please send me a PM if you want to tell more.