An Ironworks Mod *Spoilers*

[Jimmy Joe Jamboree]

Hey there boys n girls


After reading through many of these here post on this fine forum, it was a welcome sight to see such dedicated players to the most glorious of all RPGs: Baldur's Gate II.

I spent a great deal of time, trawling through the 'third way' thread on a possible third way to get to Spellhold, and it pleased me to see so many good ideas from so many members.

Now, y'all seem like an innovative lot and thought to myself, with so much raw energy and scope, it shouldn’t be wasted. Now what better way to put this talent to good use, than uniting together to forge a brand new BGII mod.

This thread would serve as an ideas cache that you pour all of your ideas and thoughts into. Hopefully this thread will take off in a way I never imagined, and because of it, a mod, of epic proportions is born.

If you have any ideas, or thoughts and want to share them with the rest of us, please do post them, and hopefully we can make some of your mod dreams, come true.

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[Sir Degrader]

New thief NPC's. Not munchkins, but honest to God, thieves, maybe a shadow thief mod.

[Illumina Drathiran'ar]

A few of us from IW tried just that... It didn't work out, due to a lack of people who could mod beyond item, spell, and dialogue creation.

[Magness]

Illumina, what is required to actually, say, create a NPC mod?

I realize that you have to create the character (and I don't mean the CRE file), give it some depth, etc. More than just the base stats.

Then you have to try to imagine how the new NPC will interact with the other NPCs. I think that this isn't too difficult, but actually translating a few sentences of outline into conversational dialogs seems like the tricky part. Writing the actual code for this is probably the easy part.

Creating items is probably fairly easy, as long as you're not trying to add some strange or abnormal effects.

Creating the actual CRE files is also probably not difficult.

Having a nice portait set that brings the character to life visually helps a lot.

Beyond this, developing and coding cutscenes and encounters that will end in combat may be challenging. I have no idea what would be required here. No doubt it involves editing various ARE and BCS files. perhaps some others as well.

Oh, BTW, I've poked around quite a bit inside of BG2 and IWD1 with Near Infinity. I haven't written a real mod yet. I actually wrote a mini-mod for IWD2 that created a dinky little merchant on the docks, just to see if I could do it. (I could.) But I've never really written a "real" mod.

I'm curious because I'm sorely tempted to try to write my own BG2 NPC mod.

[Illumina Drathiran'ar]

Writing the code is the easy part? I would have thought it the most difficult part... If I'm not mistaken, the project failed because nobody really knew how to write code. I'm capable of writing dialogue, making items, creating CRE files, the works... But I still haven't found the time to figure out how to implement it all.

[Magness]

Let me rephrase. Coding is 'easy' when you know what you're doing. For example, once you've learned how to make an NPC spawn in an area the first time, you now know how to do it and it becomes "easy". But, of course, until you've done it that first time, it's difficult.

[Kestrel Daystar]

Hmmm, I would also like to see a nice Thief NPC mod, with some good interjections and a nice quest.

Maybe some more quests. I am sure if we pull all our ideas together we could come up with a good idea for a quest mod...

--Kestrel--

[Link]

No more NPC's! Please! I beg of you! There are too much as we speak!

[Jerr Conner]

Originally posted by Illumina Drathiran'ar: Writing the code is the easy part? I would have thought it the most difficult part... If I'm not mistaken, the project failed because nobody really knew how to write code. I'm capable of writing dialogue, making items, creating CRE files, the works... But I still haven't found the time to figure out how to implement it all.

Lol yep, our little BG Mod project failed. Though, we did have a lot of good ideas. no?

[The Hairy Caveman]

If you're going to make a thief NPC, not a bad idea considering their useful abilities and the fact that you only have 1 pure class option, you need to figure out what kind of personality, abilities, dialogue, ect. you want to give him/her before you start actually building it to save yourselves time. You should know, however, that Valen and someother assasin (she has a short short called cryblade, I forget her name) are out there. They are both evil so I would suggest either another neutral or the first good aligned thief. How about instead of the traditional burgler or backstabber you make a character whos more espionage oriented. He/she could be a spy sent by Belt from Baldur's Gate to keep an eye out on charname after the mysterious departure from the city. I don't know when to suggest his/hers first appearance but I DO think that the new spy should contact you, instead of the other way around, like every other npc in the game, after all the spy's mission is to keep you close. Could make sense to have contact after reaching spellhold or any other natural chokepoint in the game. It would also be great to see some of the elements of the infinity engines forgotten child (planescape)implemented. Would it be possible to initiate conversation with an in party character? Could be useful. as for abilities here are my humble suggestions

str 12
dex 16
con 14
int 17
wis 12
cha 18

Daggers, long swords and crossbows

just to make him more of a mole type agent (reflected in int and cha) As for personality I would make him a very "in the know type of character" who often knows or suspects the path the group must take before it is upon them. He should also be intuitive, able to tell when people are lying or hiding the true motives of their actions. And with him being from the city of baldurs gate it would be very easy to implement some kind of side quest...