Getting a couple of very strange bugs in the game

[Cerek the Barbaric]

I finally got my home PC back from the shop this week after making extensive upgrades to it. One of the items I upgraded was my harddrive (from 40gb to 120gb). An unfortunate result of switching harddrives was that ALL of my games have to be re-installed on the new HD (but they WERE nice enough to make a copy of my SAVED games in my Black Isle folder). So I got home and installed BGII, TOB, and even BGI on my machine. I then got online and downloaded Weimers' Ease-of-Use, Tactics, and Weapons Upgrade Mods. I had been playing BGII on my sons computer and I had made a copy of my SAVED games from that machine too. After getting BGII installed and activating all the Mods, I copied my SAVED games from the other machine into the SAVE folder and resumed playing them.

The game I played first was my Solo Bard. He has cleared Level 1 of Chateau Irenicus for the most part. Improved Ilyich and his crew are history, as well as the cambion demon. I've gone to the Plane of Air and met the genie, recovered his lamp and got my sword back. I've also killed MOST of the Duergars that are randomly spawned, but not all of them. Since my Bard is a thorough fellow, he has decided to go back and kill the few remaining duergar before traveling on. That's where I ran into a couple of bugs.

The largest group of duergar are in the corridors that lead to Rielev's(sp?) Room and (eventually) into the library. I took the hallway to the left (leading towards the top of the screen) and found a duergar mage in the first corridor to the right. During our battle the game CRASHED twice and actually caused the PC to REBOOT! I've had the game CRASH back to the Desktop before, but it has NEVER caused the PC to actually ReBoot. When I finally DID get a chance to fight the mage, the dialogue feedback I got was very strange. Whenever the mage attacked, I got a message in orange text explaining he was an "Alchemy Mage" and that this gave him the ability to create various potions at random. Whenever I actually injured the duergar I got a list of the possible potions he could create in white text. [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img]

Can anybody tell me what the heck is going on?

One other item of curiousity. When I tried to install BGII on both systems, it would NOT allow me to do a "Full Install" (even though I have PLENTY of room on both systems). Each time, the installation would proceed until it was approximately 61% complete and I got an error regarding some of the movies. The installation aborted. I tried 3 times with my sons machine and twice with my own, but I never could get a Full Install to work. Instead, I had to do the "Recommended" Install. That't OK, except that I have to put the ToB CD in to start the game, then I have to switch to the BGII CD2 when I choose to play Shadows of Amn. So I have to physically plug 2 CD's in to get the game started. I can live with that, but it is a bit annoying.

As always, any advice, suggestions, or tips are greatly appreciated.

[uss]

After installing ToB, did you install the latest patch? If you didn't, you should download it from here.

Sorry, that's all I could suggest right now. Hope it helps!

[True_Moose]

I'm not sure how to fix it, short of using Baldurdash or the patch (you would have to uninstall the mods, install the fix(es), then reinstall the mods,) but it sounds like you have a messed up dialogue.tlk file. That's the file that controls the text in the game, and it sounds like its confusing the strings for the Alchemy ability with the duergar's dialogue. I would try uninstalling, then reinstalling Tactics, because it sounds like that is the problem. It may be the install order, but I'm not sure about that either.

As for the CDs, you should be able to manually copy over the files. In a full install, you should have the directories /CD1/, /CD2/, etc. I think you can copy the files manually, then go into Baldur.ini, and it will have a section where it tells you the directories that it will search for the CDs in. If you did a recommended install, they should point towards your CD-ROM drive. Simply enter in the directory that you have the files in, and it should work.

Hope that helps. Those solutions work for me, so they should help. Good luck.

[ 06-12-2004, 03:20 AM: Message edited by: True_Moose ]

[Cerek the Barbaric]

I decided to just uninstall the entire game and reinstall everything. The game was causing my PC to crash and reboot even when I wasn't actively playing it. I had loaded a game last night, but got interrupted before I could actually start playing. I left my character standing in a hallway and did NOT hit the PAUSE button. When I got back to the game, it had crashed and rebooted my PC even though I hadn't done anything in the game.

Every time my system reboots, I get a pop-up window that says my system has "recovered from a serious error".

One thing I had NOT done was install the Balderdash Remix from Wiemer's site. I'm gonna correct that oversight this time around.

In addition to Tactics, Ease of Use, and Upgraded Items (and Baldurdash Remix this time), I was curious about a few of other Mods from Weimer's site. I'm specifically interested in the Oversight, Unfinished Business and Magnificent Magic Shop. Has anyone installed these Mods? If so, did they work well with the game?

[True_Moose]

I really like Oversight and Unfinished Business - they're really good roleplaying mods, that don't tip the balance of the game too much. The Magnificent Magic Shop has gotten some criticism for being overpowered, and some of the descriptions are slightly lacking, but it's well programmed, and I haven't heard of any uncompatibilities with the game. The only mods you have to watch out for are the ones that mess around with pre-existing encounters. Most WEIDU mods that do that are fine, but the root of most of your problems will be there.

EDIT] I would add that Baldurdash Remix is not such a great idea. www.baldurdash.org has the most recent patches. They're not WEIDU, but Remix had some fairly serious issues with it.

[ 06-12-2004, 03:25 PM: Message edited by: True_Moose ]

[Cerek the Barbaric]

Thanks for the information, True Moose. Unfortunately, I already downloaded and installed Baldurdash Remix. How do I UN-Install it? Or will the latest patches from the site you linked override the problems you mentioned?

[Hank Parsons]

Wow. Where did you even find the Remix? Most sites that ever hosted it now have warnings about the known problems with Remix.

Just use the latest version from baldurdash.org

[LennonCook]

To uninstall the Baldurdash remix should be the same process as uninstalling any other WeiDU mod. And, yes, Remix is a bad idea at the moment - the only version that exists currently is no longer supported, and the author took it down from almost everywhere quite a while ago. There is talk at Forgotten Wars about making a new Remix, but as far as I can tell, it is still talk at this point.

[Cerek the Barbaric]

Well it looks like Good News. Apparantly I did NOT install the Baldurdash Remix yet. If I did, I can't find it in the SoA folder. I DID download the latest ToB patch from Bioware's site. I guess I hadn't actually gotten around to downloading the Remix yet.

However, just to be safe, can somebody tell me what the name of the actual file would be?

In the meantime, I'm planning to download several Mods this time. I have the Kelsey NPC and I'm planning to download Valen and Soluafein as well - in addition to the Mods I mentioned previously.

Is that a good idea? Or will that be too many mods and increase the risk of incompatibility errors?

[LennonCook]

Mod readmes will generally list known incompatibilities. Other than that, WeiDU mods are - generally speaking - compatible with one another. Or atleast, there are less ways they can achieve being mutually destructive. You should be right with all of those.
As has been mentioned, you most probably haven't downloaded the Baldurdash Remix - a quick poke around has told me that *nowhere* seems to have working links to download it, except maybe one or two threads at Forgotten Wars.