I've just come across some of the unofficial expansion modules downloadable from the web...they claim to add on new adventures, items, monsters, abilities etc. Can anyone tell me what the deal is with them?
At the site I found the usual disclaimers are there 'this Mod is not official so download it at your own risk' so i'm wondering just how popular and safe these expansions are, I haven't really seen that much mention of them.
I would appreciate anyones advice, ratings and/or recommendations if any (i.e. even if they are safe to integrate how good are these new adventures, spells etc.) and have they actually added new spell effects?

Unofficial mods are mods that people have put together using some tools that allow them to edit the Bioware Infinity Engine (which the BG and IWD series runs on). Examples would be any of the editing tools that you can get from www.teambg.com, such as Infinity Engine Editor Pro, Script Editor, etc. There are also other tools like Near Infinity, Infinity Campaign Maker...the list goes on.

At its most basic, a mod might be a customized, personal weapon that you create for yourself, with some specific ability. You may then decide to create some additional dialogue with some existing NPCs in the game. You may then extend this to a romance dialog eg the Solaufein mod pack or the Nalia romance. At the pinnacle of modding would be in creating whole new modules/maps/encounters/storylines eg. like the Darkest Day mod.

The quality of the mod is obviously totally dependent on the ability of the people putting them together. The more complex the mod, the bigger the chance that there will be bugs. Usually the bugs are limited to the mod either failing to work or working in an erratic way. Sometimes it may cause another part of your game to not work. Sometimes it might work perfectly fine. [img]smile.gif[/img]

It's unusual for a mod to corrupt something else in your hard drive - but I can't guarantee this, since something that works for someone might not work for someone else. ;)

Forums such as this are a good idea to get feedback from people on which mods they have tried and which ones work well and reliably. One thing I will say though is that the amount of reverse engineering (modding) that people have been able to do in the last year or so has been quite amazing and they're getting better all the time. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Yes I agree.

Just ask and you will hear from the people here who have tried it out [img]smile.gif[/img] It is a good place for comments and those kind of things ;)

I'm sure you would have rather heard from a non-modder, BUT:

If you poke around, there are actually people discussing a number of the mods. For instance, in the 8 months or so since its release, The Darkest Day's merits and demerits have been beaten to death (some people like the new areas, new quests, other people don't like its incompatibility issues, its relative lack of attention to detail like fleshed-out NPCs and writing, its power level, etc.) It remains officially compatible with SOA-only although a TOB-compatible version is in the works.

The mods that I work on and tend to be the most interested in are NPC add-ons, because I happen to feel that above and beyond the core storyline or the side-quest, "friends, companions, and lovers" are what made BG2 a great game. Having written Kelsey, I will shamelessly but honestly say that he works with pretty much anything: plain SOA, TOB, TDD, and all the other NPC mods, as well. Using Wes Weimer's WeiDU utility (which rules more than Tiax), it's a very do-able project to drop in any number of new NPCs, quests, etc. without conflicting with other projects.

So Kelsey, Tashia, Solaufein, and Valen, which all use the WeiDU system, basically all inter-operate and play nice with each other and with the rest of the game. Arnel's Nalia is a bit of a different story, while it works with some other mods it is trickier to install.

The other "big-name" mod would be Ascension, which extends and enhances the TOB end-game. It was lead-developed by David Gaider, co-author of TOB, and implements things that were cut or under-explored or just "how he thought it should have worked."

Kelsey lives at http://www.forgottenwars.net/kelsey

You can grab WeiDU, a new WeiDU version of Ascension, and Solaufein from http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~weimer/bgate/

[ 06-02-2002, 10:26 AM: Message edited by: jcompton ]

To jcompton's point, if you wanted one mod to start on, and you had ToB, I would choose Ascension since it was written by Dave G and contains a lot of stuff he wanted to include in ToB but couldn't for various reasons. I've used this without a problem.

If you haven't got ToB, a lot of people have been able to successfully play the Darkest Day and have said good things about it. It's NOT compatible with ToB though. I haven't tried this since I've got ToB and don't want to uninstall it.

I haven't tried the NPC mods so I can't comment, but reports of the Kelsey, Solaufein and Nalia mods all seem favourable. [img]smile.gif[/img]

OK, thanks to all of you who replied [img]smile.gif[/img] As I understand it the ascension mod only really adds to the end of the game, is this right? If so i'm really looking for something that comes close to an expansion pack which I think is 'The darkest day' again, is this right? lol
Basically i'm wondering if this is worth downloading and adding on...I want new quests, monsters, plots etc. What do people think about these expansion mods and are they anything as good as what TOB is supposed to be or do they pale in comparison?

While we're on the subject, I have a few questions to toss in, as I was writing the MODs section of my guide yesterday and had to fake a lot of the info that I don't know.

TeamBG is the most 'official' of the unofficial sources, because many of its people used to work for BioWare and helped the development of the BG series--right?

The next most 'respectable' sources are BaldurDash and Dave Gaider--right?

One of the groups mentioned above made the MOD that ties together a lot of the BG2 quests that never really got finished (Twisted Rune, Slave Lords, Guarded Compound, etc). Does this patch/MOD have a name, and who exactly wrote it?

Thanks!

Wrong - nobody in TeamBG worked for Bioware (which makes their reverse engineering work on the Infinity Engine all the more impressive). You could say that TeamBG were the pioneers of Infinity Engine Editing. A fair number of the freeware tools available today have their origins in the TeamBG editing community.

Depends on what you mean by respectable. Baldurdash is kind of like an unofficial "bugfixer" for the BG games and Kevin Dorner is respected by a lot of the Bio guys for his work in this area.

David Gaider is a Bioware employee and was the Senior Designer for the BG2 and ToB project, so I'd say he's pretty respectable. ;) He did the Ascension mod in his spare time, for peanuts - which goes to show what a great guy he is. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Not quite sure to tell you the truth...there's so many of them out there now that I've lost track of them all. ;)

[ 06-04-2002, 11:17 AM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

...and many did not, and TeamBG "members" were by far not the only people working on tearing the engine apart. Infinity Explorer and the work of the Infinity Engine File Format Hacking Project. Near Infinity.

And of course, there's the absolute world-beating smart bomb of modding, WeiDU, which has done things TeamBG either did poorly, gave up on, or declared "impossible."

There are a lot of people doing good work who don't enjoy the "brand recognition" of TeamBG, which I think is a real shame on a number of levels.

The Nalia Romance (hey, lookie, yet another non-TeamBG project!) expands upon those connections.

http://web.starman.ee/arnel/nalia/

[ 06-04-2002, 11:59 AM: Message edited by: jcompton ]

So what do people recommend? From what i've seen 'The Darkest Day' seems to be the most popular and problem free and since i'm looking for new adventures and stuff it's looking like the one i'll download..what did people think of this mod?

[ 06-04-2002, 01:07 PM: Message edited by: SpiritWarrior ]

Uh, no. TDD is fairly notorious for its bugs. You'll also find it quite inconvenient if you have TOB...because it doesn't work with it. And when the TOB compatibility is finally available, it sounds to me from what they're saying that you'll have to reinstall.

If you really want "new adventures" you probably should go with Solaufein and enable all of its optional modules. It adds several new encounters and makes the AI for a number of existing encounters more clever.

Warning: this makes the game very difficult.

Both Kelsey (link below) and Tashia add some new encounters to the game (not as many as TDD or Solaufein, though) and add a lot of character, I think.

some one said something about the Nalia Romance pack also makes more since of the twisted rune, gaurded compound, etc. Does this add more twisted rune battles or just more of a quest to it

If it does not make more battles then wouldn't it be awsome if someone could make a quest out of the investigation and ultimately destruction of the twisted rune.

If anyone decides to make this ever, especially some one like jcompton because i know he is more than capible

The Twisted Rune is based in Calimshan and has 30 full members most of which are liches Their Leadership is the Rune Council
According to the book THE LORDS OF DARKNESS The 9 members of the Rune Council are
1)Jymahna - NE female human Lich level 19 enchanter, she wears a metal mask with many unknown properties
2)Kartak Spellseer - CE male human Lich level 20 necromancer, his body was destroyed 200 years ago but it was restored and his new one is relatively undecayed
3)Priamon "Frostrune" Rakesk - CE male human lich level 20 wizard, former wizard of Waterdeep but expeled for delving into dark magics. He stole portal-building books from Halaster and is now the primary portal-builder for the Rune. All the portals he builds have secret triggers known only to him that allow him to seal them with a word or to transport the user to an alternat location of his choice.
4)Rhanguan - NE male human lich level 20 wizard. A lich of over 1000 years his body has decayed down to only a skeleton and glowing eyes. owns a staff of the magi
5)Sapphiraktar the Blue - LE male ancient blue dracolich. Made into a dracolich 300 years ago. Maintains appearence through magic so that he is indistinguishable (sp.) from a living blue dragon. He is teaching dragon magic to Rhanguan while he plots to destroou Jymahna, whose network of spies overlap his own
6)Shangalar the Black - LE male tiefling lich level 20 wizard. He is to son of the camion vizier of Calimshan. He eventually slew his ownb father and ruled that country with his childhood friend until the latter was assassinated. He wears a cloak made by the hide of a black dragon, one of a pair that hie slew before succumbing to his wounds and becoming a lich
7)Shyressa - NE female human vampire level 20 wizard. slew the vampire that created her and began to study magic. She gained a Runemaster seat only a decade ago. She enjoys playe cat-and-mouse games with people who draw her attention. She has created many fire spells that give off dark flames in order to be more subtle in the night hours when she is active.
The identities of the other two Runmasters are unkown, but they are certainly powerful undead, such as a phaerimm, a beholder mage, or perhaps an alhoon.
A small handful of living agents are employed to deal with tasks such as recruiting adventurers and interacting withthe subjects of the Rune's evil machinations. These agents change from time to time, as they are killed or turned into undead servants befor they have a chance to make a msitake that chould reveal the Rune
The best allies of the Runemasters are the other Runemasters. Because their lairs are linked to each other, if one is under attack and feeling threatened, he or she can easily escape th the lair of an ally or recive aid very rapidly.

I believe that Vaxall (The beholder mage with the Twisted Rune in the Bridge districts is one of the Runemasters. The 9th may be Revanek or Layene, or some one else, i have no idea and maybe if i find time i'll do some research and find out for certain.

I think it would be an awsome mod to discover the truth of the Rune and destroy it. Just think, fighting a battle with a blue dracolich, it would be great, oh well.

I have no idea how to progam anything, much less make a mod, but if anyone thinks that they might be able to program somthing this extravagant, i would be more than willing to help with ideas, drop a message here or send me an E-Mali at Yeti426@aol.com if you are in any way interested

Cool--thanks for the clarification, Memnoch. The Nalia romance might be the patch/MOD that puts the connecting thread back into the Slave Lords/Skinner murders thing. (For instance, in a game of unpatched BG2, investigate the Skinner murders and you'll be attacked by Rune Assassins, without any explanation of what the hell the Twisted Rune is doing in the Skinner murders quest.

[EDIT]Oh, and P.S.: Darkon, a battle against a Dracolich would NOT be cool--all he has to do is cast Mirror Image (which all Liches do as soon as they go hostile) and your computer suffers instant Death by Lag.

[ 06-04-2002, 09:50 PM: Message edited by: SixOfSpades ]