Biff the Understudy

[Katherine]

What's the deal with this guy? He shows up at strange moments...

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When I went and got Skie from her home, I had Safana sneak up on her own as the rest of the party waited downstairs. Skie went ahead and started talking to Eldoth, who was downstairs, and suddenly, Biff the Understudy was there, performing lines for Eldoth!

In another game, Jaheria was dead and I used CluaConsole to summon Khalid. Who do you suppose showed up with Khalid? That's right, Biff the Understudy. They did the lines where they say how you remind them of Gorion, etc. and then were both available to join your party. Biff is a first level fighter with stats of all 9s.

It's pretty funny, but sort of breaks the frp mood.

[ 01-23-2002: Message edited by: Katherine ]

[Lemernis]

Right, Biff appears when you CLUA a character who is paired with another, eg, Khalid and Jaheira, Xzar and Montaron. They aren't supposed to be separated, remember. I think there are other times when he might show up. He's part of the AI.

[ 01-23-2002: Message edited by: Lemernis ]

[Scholarcs]

He shows up when a 3rd character required for a conversation is either on another map, or dead.

[fable]

Scholarcs' got the right of it. If something has occured which interferes with the progress of the storyline or a quest arc, Biff shows up to briefly parrot the lines, then vanishes. He isn't actually the person he impersonates, and he can't accept goods, or offer 'em.

[SixOfSpades]

Actually, Biff doesn't vanish when he's done with his lines, he's still there. On every game, I try to make him appear by going to Bassilus's map and killing all the Zombies before I get within Bassilus's sight range: As soon as any party member can see Bassilus, he launches into his "Go on, brother Thurm," speech, and a Zombie will answer him. But if I've already killed all the Zombies, enter Biff, who just stands there like an idiot while I whack Bassilus and the Skeletons.

I also got him to appear in the Thieves' Guild, but I forget exactly how. He's a nice little addition to the game, isn't he?

[Seraph]

Biff means one of three things:
Doing things out of order. Lets say there's quest A and quest B. Both result in the same person dieing at the end. The game may expect that you do quest A seperate from quest B. However, if you have both active at the same time, you can get a Biff incident. The Thieves HQ in BG is a place to do this.

Killing someone you shouldn't have. eg, killing the Priest of Helm, and then trying to bring Commander Barg back to the temple would probably trigger a Biff incident.

Cheating. The console can really screw up the plot if you abuse it too much, Espically the jump commands (both intermap, and intramap) and the spawn NPC commands.

quote:

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It's pretty funny, but sort of breaks the frp mood.

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And summoning characters out of thin air somehow doesn't?

[ 01-24-2002: Message edited by: Seraph ]

[Katherine]

quote:

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Originally posted by Seraph:

And summoning characters out of thin air somehow doesn't?

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I was not referring to the summoning thing. I was referring to having Eldoth in another part of the estate while talking to Skie with Safana and having Biff appear to do Eldoth's lines. The only time I summoned anyone was just to see how it worked. It was just an experiment and I didn't save the results.


Katherine

[Whailor]

Biff the Understudy was added with the patch. The whole idea is that he replaces the chars who shouldn't be dead/gone in the first place. The game would probably crash otherwise and perhaps even did, so Biff was added to "fill in", so that the game/plot may continue. Think of it as if Biff wouldn't be there, the game would have gone boom!

[Katherine]

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Originally posted by Whailor:
Think of it as if Biff wouldn't be there, the game would have gone boom!

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Oh, I understand- it's a work-around for a routine that was hard-coded. The specs had not taken into account that the end-users may do something unexpected in these situations. I used to write technical specs and know how hard it is to come up with all use cases. Users are unpredictable creatures!

Anyway, it's a funny solution to the problem, isn't it? In my line of work, I've seen a lot of work-arounds, some elegant, some not, but this is the most interesting I've seen- instead of writing new routines for all the possible places where an error could occur, they just wrote one new routine that would be called when the error condition is met. Very clever!

I had not realized it was a bug fix. Thanks for the 411. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Katherine

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Originally posted by Katherine:


I was not referring to the summoning thing. I was referring to having Eldoth in another part of the estate while talking to Skie with Safana and having Biff appear to do Eldoth's lines.
Katherine

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Ditto but with my character. I then dumped Skie & Eldoth in the FFI....Biff appeared saying Skies or Eldoths lines and would then stand beside them when he was told he was not wanted. My PC would crash upon exiting the FFI. Oddly enough Biff stands to this day in Skies place upstairs in the estate, it may be the same for you. I think it's a bug that occurs if Eldoth isn't physically in the room with Skie when you first meet her. Biff appears at various times when an NPC is missing for whatever reasons, it's the same in BG2.