'Forge of Virtue' and 'Silver Seed', "met characters"

[Kennedy]

Silver Seed add on was that after you talked to the new characters, they still would not be viewed as 'Met' (Meaning there name wouldn't show up after you talked to them if you click on them again like you do for the other characters.) If I remember corectly I think I tried setting one of these character flags to 'in party' and the game crashed. I believe the problem lied within the INITGAME.DAT files as I found names for all the other NPCs, but not the ones from the add ons. Will Exult update these files? Also it would be nice if after you 'meet' characters in BG thier names would show up like in SI.

[Oblivious]

"Also it would be nice if after you 'meet' characters in BG thier names would show up like in SI."

Uh... I thought that was done a long time ago... did it get removed?

[Dominus]

Kennedy, I don't really understand you. You mean, you talked to them and afterwards you set them to be "in party" and then the game crashed? Well, if it crashed before you saved then the conversation has not been saved....

Some characters do however are not set to "met" after you talk to them. Examples are automatons and some of the monks on monk island (why thoxa is among them is a mystery to me). Mostly I think this is intended. Please tell us which NPCs in the SS add-on are not set to met (and you didn't mention FoV in your actual post).

[Kennedy]

Actualy this was dealing with the original BG and SI, If I remember I tried to put Iskandar (I think that's his name, he's the automaton guy) into my party when it crashed. Also when I turned on the 'number ID' I noticed that a lot of the characters from Silver Seed tended to reuse old ID numbers (such as the witches). It's been A while since I played Forge of Virtue though, but I did notice that the names of characters like the blind mage, Erathian, were not included in the INITGAME.DAT file. It sounds like you got the 'met character' thing fixed with the Black Gate part from some of the messages though. I was mainly wondering if you were going to update the INITGAME.DAT files.

[Dominus]

the in party flag doesn't work (yet?). As with all bug reports please make sure you are running the latest version and in the case of the beta, please also start a new game.
Then try if those issues still remain and tell us which NPCs have a problem with the met flag.

[Pan Sola]

Maybe for the monks, they are supposed to all look alike from afar. So even in real life, if you run into one that you've met before, you won't recognize her/him (because of those monk garbs).

Same with automations/guards. They all look alike.

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

In U7SI, the "met" flag is among the NPC flags.

Not so in U7BG, where there are scattered randomly over the FLAGINIT file.

Thus implementing the "met" flag in BG will be not so easy.

Anyway in both games these flags are manipulated by the usecode only.

[Colourless]

Actually Max, the Met flag has been implimented in BG in Exult for Quite some time. It gets set true when an NPC's face appears on screen during a conversation in BG.

-Colourless Dragon

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

The correct way would be - to determine what FLAGINIT flag numbers are "NPC xxx met" in BG and to filter the flag setting to set the "Met" flag in the NPC table too.

BTW - the conversation invitations works differently in BG and SI.

In BG, double click calls the talk usecode.

In SI, double click switches the NPC to "Talk" activity, it pathfinds to the Avatar and calls its own usecode talk function only after approaching.

Is it so in Exult too?

[wjp]

yes, we do the same thing.

[Oblivious]

I found out the problem, guys.

The healer, mage, and caped automation of Serpent's Fang have no NPC numbers.

That is to say, if you enable NPC numbers, they merely appear as "woman/healer/etc.". They also do not appear on the NPC menu list (if you scroll NPCs, they're not there) Nor do they appear in the room of the dead before you use the amulet.

I think this is because they are among those who, due to some sort of usecode bug, have had their numbers replaced by those damned injured trapper duplicates (there's about 30-40 of them.) IMO, I would suggest NOT playing too far into SI until the Exult team fixes this problem.

[Oblivious]

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about programming to know much about the problem, though I do know that it's clearly a case of their NPC numbers being assigned instead to injured trapper duplicates. These are the numbers of the duplicates:



Interesting note, in earlier versions of exult, about 15-20 of the trapper duplicates were instead batlin duplicates. Instead, there is now only 1 or 2 Batlins. Hell, I might as well list all the NPCs. I'll go look at the BG NPCs for the Beta version and make sure there's no duplicates.

[wjp]

The most likely reason for the Silver Seed NPCs not having an NPC number is that they were added in an add-on, and therefore they had to be added to already existing savegames. The way this is done is that the SS NPCs are created when you talk to Karnax about the amulet of balance.

[Oblivious]

Note that when I refer to clones, I'm referring to duplicates of a character with no name other than 'mage' 'pirate' etc, who have little to no function, and cannot be spoken to.

U7BG:

139- Gorn Clone "pirate"
148- Skara Brae Mayor Clone "ghost"

293-297- Koryn clones "mage"
302-355- Batlin (is this normal..?)


U7SI
(I believe these ones are bugs. They all have automation sprites and all appear on the exact same location ehich doesn't actually exist, 4088, or something like that.)
234- Meryl
235- Dustin
236- Ellen
237- Kessler
238- Perrin
239- Owings
240- Anton
241- Papa
242- Taylor
243- Malloy
244- Cairbre
246- Alagner
247- Caine
248- Brion
249- Nelson
250- Rankin
251- Danag
252- Kallibrus
253- Cosmo
254- Lasher
255- Mama
(I'm pretty sure that's not normal,. and it was that way from the beginning of the new game. Depending on the version, some of the NPC numbers have different duplicates for SI, such as 30 Batlin clones, but other than that.... Am I the only one experiencing this? Oh, and I use Win98.)

285- Johnson
286- Xenkamonk
296- Fitch clone 'trapper'
297- Fitch clone 'trapper'
298- Forskis (trapper clone)
299- Abraham (trapper clone)
300- Lizbeth (trapper clone)
301- Batlin Monster (trapper clone)
302-355- Fitch clones 'trapper'

285-355 as well as 284, the TRUE Fitch, all have function 395. When you talk to Fitch and wake him up, an army of trappers will get up with him and start walking around, which is quite alarming.

[Colourless]

SI NPCs 234 to 255 are unused. In the original you couldn't even access them in the cheat menu. Exult however does load them, but removes them from the game as soon as they are loaded. That is why they are at about location (4080,4080). Exult uses this location to say that the NPC is no longer in the game world. If you compare the NPC names to Black Gate, you will notice that the NPCs from 234 to 255 actually have the same names as the same NPCs in Black Gate.

NPC's numbered greater than 255 are usually special NPCs are are used only for things like the scripted sequences such as looking through the crystal ball and such. You won't normally meet them in the game.

-Colourless Dragon

[Colourless]

Additionally, NPCs greater than 255 were used by the originals for monsters and such. Exult however handles monsters slightly differently to the original and doesn't assign them NPC numbers.

-Colourless Dragon

[drcode]

It's true that Exult creates many NPC's that it shouldn't. I only discovered last week that there's a flag, 'iflag2' in npc.dat, that, if 0, means that NPC isn't valid. Implementing this, however, will only work for new games.

[SB-X]

Breaking old save-games is appropriate if necessary IMHO.

[wjp]

This doesn't really break old savegames. The fix just won't show up unless you start a new game.