Qwinn´s Ultimate DAO Fixpack v3 (no longer beta!)

[Thandal]

@Qwinn; See my edit above. Your "morrigan_main.dlg" is just fine. :laugh:

[Qwinn]

1) There's a countryside random encounter where a couple of mages are fighting darkspawn. After the battle, only the senior mage had survived yet spoke as if his apprentices were still alive. I forget the exact dialogue but it was along the lines of "I'm taking these apprentices to Redcliffe" and "They might be young but, as you could see, quite formidable".

Yeah, I was aware of this one. Unfortunately, he has no other dialogue at all, and the only thing I could do would be to make him silent, which kinda sucks. (Just occurred to me I could maybe resurrect/revive them, if any of the 3 survive, on the basis of the well established "no one really dies till their party is wiped out" logic. Will look into it. Probably won't make it into v3.2 though).

2) When speaking to Master Ignacio at the marketplace, some of the wardens weapons can block Ignacios' face. Maybe the weapons could be disabled during this conversation? Screenshot.

Ew. Don't think I can deactivate the weapon visually without unequipping it, and then I have no way of knowing which weapon to reequip when it's done. The stage in question is a generic one, probably used in a ton of places, and I don't dare adjust the camera position without being ready to do another full play through. This one will have to remain as is for now, sorry. (It's also a never ending problem - can't count how many times some of the armors with big shoulder pauldrons blocked my view - the only place I explicitly fixed that was in Kolgrim's dialogue because it was HORRIBLE there, elsewhere it was generally tolerable.)

3) When speaking to the White Falcons at The Pearl, the bodyguards in the background don't have any eyes. Their eyes are just fine outside of the conversation. FYI: I am using Dragon Age Redesigned and I have not tested if this bug happens without that mod. Screenshot.

That's... really weird. I fully expected to find that this was a mod conflict, but in fact, the guy on the *left* in that screenshow does indeed lack eyes when I tested it, but the eyes on the *right* guard were fine. Bizarre! Even more bizarre is that they both use the same head morph. And I think this would be either a morph issue or an engine issue.... at least, I can't see how it could be resolved via tweaking the creature file if they look fine outside of dialogue and only have the problem in dialogue. So afraid I don't know what to do about this one either :sad: Sorry. Man, that's the second time this stupid brothel has stumped me.... the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts was easy in comparison...

Edited July 22, 2017 by Qwinn

[Qwinn]

Thandal: What mod caused the Morrigan problem? I'm every bit as interested in knowing what mods *aren't* compatible as which ones are. Please share any that you couldn't get to work.

[sialivi]

Ew. Don't think I can deactivate the weapon visually without unequipping it, and then I have no way of knowing which weapon to reequip when it's done.

Ah, I thought the weapon setting under cinematics was for hiding weapons, like the helmet option, rather than drawing them.

 

That's... really weird. I fully expected to find that this was a mod conflict, but in fact, the guy on the *left* in that screenshow does indeed lack eyes when I tested it, but the eyes on the *right* guard were fine. Bizarre! Even more bizarre is that they both use the same head morph. And I think this would be either a morph issue or an engine issue...

I did encounter the same issue elsewhere a few days ago, but thought I just imagined the NPC lacking eyes that time so I didn't make a mental note of it. But now I'm curious whether or not it was the same headmorph that time. Unfortunetaly I can't remember where it was, might have been Castle Redcliffe.

[Thandal]

Thandal: What mod caused the Morrigan problem? I'm every bit as interested in knowing what mods *aren't* compatible as which ones are. Please share any that you couldn't get to work.

 

Totally obvious, when I stepped back to think about it. :laugh:

It was Kamajii's Equal Love, which replaces the following (long) list of dialogue files:

 

 

alistair_main.dlb

alistair_main.dlg

arl100cr_alistair_origin.dlb

arl100cr_alistair_origin.dlg

arl110cr_kaitlyn.dlb

arl110cr_kaitlyn.dlg

arl130cr_dwyn.dlb

arl130cr_dwyn.dlg

arl150cr_bella.dlb

arl150cr_bella.dlg

arl150pt_tavern_drinks.ncs

bdn100_noblehunters.dlb

bdn100_noblehunters.dlg

bhn100cr_duncan.dlb

bhn100cr_duncan.dlg

den510_anora.dlb

den510_anora.dlg

denpt_alistair.ncs

denpt_anora.ncs

genpt_alistair_defined.ncs

genpt_morrigan_defined.ncs

morrigan_main.dlb

morrigan_main.dlg

ntb100cr_cammen.dlb

ntb100cr_cammen.dlg

ntb100cr_gheyna.dlb

ntb100cr_gheyna.dlg

orz300ar_nobles_quarter.ncs

pre100_duncan.dlb

pre100_duncan.dlg

 

 

N.B. There are only a few gender-gated options in the game.

 

The biggest ones are:

• Male Warden who wants to romance/marry Big Al
• Female Warden who wants to romance Morri (With EL, this can lead to a female Warden 'fathering' the OGB.)
• Female Warden who wants to marry Anora

Then there are some minor-character interactions:

• Female Warden who wants (the opportunity) to receive kisses from Bella and/or Kaitlyn in Redcliffe Village
• Same-gender Warden who wants (the opportunity) to bed Cammen/Ghenya in the Dalish Camp
• And (apparently) some convos with both Duncan, and Dwarven Nobles, where gender matters!

 

My experience (with a sample set of 1) was that Equal Love can be removed after the desired effect (e.g starting a romance) has been achieved.

 

As the vanilla "morrigan_main.dlg" contained the approval-reversed test for teaching Shapeshifting, and Kamjii didn't change anything in the vanilla dialogues other than the gender checks, using Equal Love reinstated the bug. :tongue:

 

So hey! If you want to take a look at Kamajii's work and make the same kind of Warden's-gender-neutralizing changes to the Alistair, Morrigan, and Anora .dlg/.dlb files, that'd be great! That's where the restrictions can have real impact on the story. :thumbsup: Then one could delete those particular files from Equal Love and... Voilá! Both mods working "as intended". (Although I'd have to admit that this would be a "tweak", not a "fix", wouldn't it? :whistling: )

[Qwinn]

Er, sorry, Thandal, but yeah, making the entire Dragon Age universe gay is outside of the scope of this mod. Sorry. At some point I'll release the B2B and developer's notes, and if someone wants to recreate it after that, they're free to do so.

 

Ah, I thought the weapon setting under cinematics was for hiding weapons, like the helmet option, rather than drawing them.

Sigh, of course, sorry, I was half asleep at the time I wrote that. Still, it wouldn't fix the armor shoulder issue, and I don't want to implement that sort of a half fix. The REAL solution is to find what generic stage and camera is causing this problem, and fix the camera angle. Which I have done! The culprit is ip_200_all.stg, and the camera is cam2_1_2. It's used in a couple dozen dialogues throughout the game. I've adjusted the camera angle in such a way that the big shoulder pads and longbows will no longer occlude the face of the speaker. Well, ok, it'll SOMETIMES be occluded, when the player shifts left while the speaker shifts right, but it's momentary and not remotely as bad as the vanilla. I don't want to move it more than I have because the camera is used in a whole bunch of cutscenes too and I'm afraid of moving anything intended in those cutscenes out of the main view. Still, even if this angle causes any such issues, it's hard to see how any resulting problems could be even remotely as bad as the problem being fixed. I'm willing to chance it, and if my moving the camera slightly causes any ill effects in any of those cutscenes, hopefully someone will let me know and I can fix it then.

 

And this will be my second fix that should - hopefully - take effect in DLC and Awakenings!

 

GL3209: A particular frequently used camera in a particular dynamic stage used in dozens of dialogues throughout the game was placed such that if the player had armor with big shoulder pauldrons or a large weapon, the armor/weapon would occlude the speaker's face, sometimes completely and for significant stretches of dialogue. I have moved the camera slightly to significantly reduce this problem (any occlusion should be very temporary at worst). This camera is also used in many cutscenes that I cannot test in every circumstance. If any camera work in any dialogues or cutscenes appears to have worsened with use of this Fixpack, please do let me know, and I can fix the problem in future versions, but I expect few if any issues and the cure is almost certainly far better than the disease in this case. Note: I am not certain if this stage is also used in the DLC and Awakenings, but if it is, this fix will apply there as well.

 

Also, meant to do this one months ago, but forgot about it:

 

LO3219: Lothering: A helpful location based party bark where your party members advise you that you should do everything you can in Lothering before leaving because the Darkspawn are coming was interrupted 99% of the time by Sten's first line from his cage (the triggers were only a couple of steps apart, you have to inch past the Chasind very, very slowly in the vanilla game to hear it.). I have moved this trigger closer to the actual exit of the area where it should no longer be interrupted.

Edited July 22, 2017 by Qwinn

[Qwinn]

So I gave rezzing the mages in that random encounter a shot, but it's not working. I can't think of any other instance in game where dead NPC's are resurrected, and if that functionality did exist. I can think of a few places they would've been pretty likely to use it instead of how they did do things. The only other answer I can think of is making them unkillable (it wouldn't be totally unprecedented - Sgt Kylon during Pearls Before Swine is unkillable for a battle because he's "plot critical" at that point). Does that dialogue make the mage and his apprentices "plot critical" for the purposes of this encounter? I dunno, having them stand in the middle of 8 darkspawn at 1 health and not die is probably just as immersion breaking as the dialogue is. Gonna move on and hope some bright idea occurs at some point for how else to deal with that issue.

 

Gonna work on releasing 3.2 now. Feel free to bring up more reports, but unless it's something big (I'd say that camera thing qualified! Thanks for reminding me to look at that again before 3.2, sialivi) it's unlikely I'll be getting it in for this version. Always room on the TODO list, of course.

Edited July 22, 2017 by Qwinn

[darthbdaman]

I would say make them immortal. He specifically comments that you saw them, so that can't be other apprentices who are following behind or anything. I'm not sure if that voice actor has any other generic lines that could be appropriate though

[Qwinn]

Yeah. Okay. I think I've come up with a good solution. Yup. Immortal. It's the only way. But I'm also giving them the ability to cast Heal on themselves, as well as Mind Blast which clears threat (both tier 1 spells, very reasonable for apprentices to have). If they are brought to 1 health, it won't be long before they cast a heal on themselves, which should mostly eliminate the "holy crap, why don't they die?" immersion breaker effect.

 

RA3205: Random Encounter "Roadside": Even on Easy difficulty, the apprentices in this encounter have a very high probability of dying, after which their master brags about how capable they obviously are and how he plans to take them on to help your cause. I have therefore dubbed the master mage and his two apprentices "plot critical" for the length of this encounter, as even the apprentice dialogues state that they all survived, with no alternative dialogue available for any of them. The apprentices have been granted some low level spells (heal, mind blast) and the intelligence to use them so that their survival won't appear as excessively improbable as it otherwise would.

 

 

 

Wow... 42 new fixes between 3.1 and 3.2 so far... that's a fairly high percentage of the number of total fixes in v2.0 of my fixpack, lol.

Edited July 23, 2017 by Qwinn

[Qwinn]

ZOMG... if I had been able to make ONE wish that I could get into v3.2, it's to make this a *total* fix - and I think I just did!!!!!!

 

Remember this one?

 

DE3001: Market District: Significantly reduced (though did not manage to eliminate) the lag and crashes that plagued the Denerim Market District, particularly when loading a save game there.

 

I'm going to test it a bunch more times, but... so far I've loaded 12 different saves in the Market District in Denerim in the areas it's most prone to crash, and I *can't* duplicate the crash!

 

What did I do? It's Alistair's fault, of course.

 

Triggers in the game never really go away, they're just deactivated, but the collisions with the trigger still happens, the script still runs, it checks if it has deactivated itself and if so, it just breaks out doing nothing. But it's still there, and the engine still has to run the script every time something enters the trigger. You CAN stop that by actually destroying the trigger, though, instead of deactivating it.

 

In DE3001, I destroyed a bunch of the triggers in the area once they were used, like Landry's four or five triggers, and like 6 triggers for the Steal the Tilver's Key quest. This helped, crashes were a bit less frequent, but they could still happen, sometimes quite a lot, and the closer to the center of the market the worse when you saved your game, the more likely to crash when you loaded it.

 

But I hadn't deactivated the trigger in front of Goldanna's house. You know, the one with *two little kids frantically running in, out and around it*? I set that trigger to destroy itself after it's used... and since then, I cannot duplicate a single crash in the Market district!

 

Maybe I've just been lucky in those 12 tests. I can't say it's fixed for sure yet - but usually even when you COULD get a save to load in Denerim, the little spinning symbol as the load screen went away would stutter. It's not stuttering at ALL now. Really, REALLY excited. Wish me luck!

Edited July 23, 2017 by Qwinn