Mod request for BG/BG2

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Since the beginning of my gaming with BG1 my dilemma was who do I left out from the party. Is it technically possible to make a mod that enables more or even all NPCs to be joined at the same time?
If so, would be there a nice modder to make it?
One should say that it would imbalance the game but I think shared XP is just a fine cost for the decision of having more party members.

 

It's currently not possible due to too many limitations in coding within the engine and program itself. It has been tried before a couple of times, but simply not feasible to do.

Sorry!

 

A pity, however thanks for the reply.

 

I agree with 8people completely. It's hard-coded so not technically possible unless you dare to rewrite the whole gaming engine, AFAIK.

But...

Turn About mod brings back some NPCs to the final fight of ToB, as your allies, they are green circled and you can control their actions directly, and they even talk and interject accordingly, but they are not considered 'in the party' so you can not change their items or share xp with them. That's as close as you can get to controlling approx. 10 NPCs at the same time, though. (and it makes for a spectacular end-game fight as well)

 

In the old days, somebody would find a way to patch the .exe file. They'd look for the comparison where it checks to see how many party members you have and increase the number it is compared to.

God, I feel old, recalling back when programs were small enough for that to be feasible.

 

Yeah, but that's only one side of it, all the other scripting is allocated for tags player1 to player6 and adding 7...8...9 would take a lot more coding outside of the exe cracking.

It wasn't all that long ago they only just unlocked adding races without overwriting 2DAs and removed the limit on songs within the game (was capped at 50 before)

So it's possible someone might click with the issue in the future, but I can only think of one or two people that could do it, and I'm pretty sure they've tried it already.

There are also situations which check for ALL party members to interact, sometimes very similar lines but only five of them max will be said... with all the base NPCs in the game... that could be a tedius little interjection

 

Taimon at SHS (I think it was) has hacked around with the EXE and AFAIK it is possible to add a seventh person to your list.

 

Taimon was one of the people I was thinking of, didn't think he'd actually cracked it, can't find the reference on SHS yet either, will keep digging

 

Maybe it was Ascension64 (with his ToB hacks...)

 

It's on the TODO for gemrb, but as you already pointed out, it requires other changes and simple exe hacking wouldn't do:
- the scripts need to be fixed (easiest by adding a new weidu extension)
- the gui files need to be extended and a small amount of code added to handle that