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 ]