Big World Project

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So I was browsing the various modding communities today and I came upon a project at SHS, called Big World Project.

What this does is allow compatibility and easy installation for a motherload of mods, including automatic installation. It takes BGT as a basis and you can select from a wide range of mods and go on from there.

My question to you: have any of you had a chance to try this BWP? Does it work, is it bug free? Is it possible to have over 50 mods without any conflicts? Also, having only used Tutu so far, how is the transition between BGI and II handled?

Cheers

 

I never tried it myself, as I use to use EasyTutu (it gives you a bit more mods to chose from for the BG1 part. I must say, that I have heard a lot of good about BWP, and Ascension at SHS is quick with newer fixes.

Your chances of conflicts with around fifty mods installed are slim, but it is indeed doable if you accept some oddities. AFAIK it isn't totally bugfree, but you probably wont notice anyway.

Try find some of those playing it at SHS/G3/PPG to get more informations, I'm unsure if many around here uses it...

Cheers

 

Well, I finally managed to install it and I must say I'm pretty impressed so far.
Installation was smooth and painless, just fire up the .bat and let it do all the unpacking itself. I had some problems with the installation at first, which was apperantly due to my virus scanner.

First impressions are pretty good. I have over 70 mods installed and I haven't seen any bugs just yet. The auto-installer makes choices based on the majority of voters (from SHS I think) or the author's choice so there's a couple of things in there I don't fully agree with, such as lowering Kagain's con to 19.
Also experienced some mods I had heard a lot about, but never tried before, such as Xan. Actually, I tried him and killed him 30 minutes later. In the short time between his rescue and killing the amazons just outside the mines he interjected more than a standard BGII character in all of SOA. He was yappng away right in the middle of critical and combat situations. I was pretty annoyed, this wasn't the Xan I knew and "respected". He was actually my favourite character in vanilla BG1, so I was pretty dissapointed.

Anyway, playing through this game with DSOTSC brings back memories. I used to hang out at the TeamBG IRC channel back in the day. Back then, the only mods were the big ones, DSOTSC, TDD and the TC Epic Endeavors. You couldn't really make a small mod as most mods clashed because they overwrote each others files. So the large mods just got bigger and bigger. Most modding was done locally, creating items and npcs for your own game. I helped set up an expansion to TDD and created a bunch of items for it (inlcuding new familiars and a talking sword), but that mod was never released. Too bad though, would've been pretty funny to see my creations after all these years.

Hmmz, all this talk is inspiring me to learn how to code. Maybe someday I'll create an NPC of my very own...

Anyway, enough musings, more gaming! I'm gearing for the bandit camp now, but I'm already pretty high level (around 5) and have some very powerful weapons because of DSOTSC.

 

The Big World Project aims to offer a solution to compatibility problems in an empirical way. In other words, they mostly test the mods and adjust mod files to each other when needed.

I haven't tried it myself, but as far as I heard, it indeed works very well.

Before coding, always carefully design what you are going to code. It can be tempting to see how the mod "progresses" as you code, but when it's released, you will face bugs and will have to recode several things if you have omitted the *design phase* before your *coding phase*. So, always design something before you implement it in code. This can't be emphasized enough times, because it's a common misbelief that modding is about coding. That's incorrect (and can usually be heard from modders who are somewhat incompetent in software engineering.)