I think I ran into a bug with regards to Check the Bodies, Saerk Farrahd's banquet invitation

[rubyFeedback]

So first, here is my installation of mods in 1:1 fashion:

- Every_mod_and_dog                                # 01
- Tower_of_Deception                               # 02
- Assassinations                                   # 03
- The_Sellswords                                   # 04
- Tales_of_the_Deep_Gardens                        # 05
- Innershade                                       # 06
- The_White_Queen                                  # 07, should come after Tales of the Deep Garden.
- I_Shall_Never_Forget                             # 08
- Romantic_Encounters                              # 09
- Back_to_Brynnlaw                                 # 10
- Trials_of_the_Luremaster_mod                     # 11
- BridgesBlock                                     # 12
- Southern_Edge                                    # 13
- The_Ooze_Lounge                                  # 14
- Tangled_Oak_Isle                                 # 15
- lucy-the-wyvern                                  # 17
- Eilistraee                                       # 18
- Skip_Chateau_Irenicus                            # 19
- Dusk_Aldant                                      # 20
- Fishing_for_Trouble                              # 21
- The_Dreadful_Tales_In_Love_Undeath               # 22
- The_Dreadful_Tales_Juniper_and_the_Stone_Leech   # 23
- Reunion_mod                                      # 24
- willowisp                                        # 25
- Sirene-NPC                                       # 26
- Alabaster_Sands                                  # 27
- Heroes_Thieves_and_Moneylenders                  # 28
- Tales_of_Anegh                                   # 29
- Ascalons-questpack                               # 30
- wheels                                           # 31
- Isra_NPC                                         # 32
- The_journey_to_the_Whin_Hill                     # 33
- Dark_Tidings                                     # 34
- forgotten-armament                               # 35
- Unfinished_Business                              # 36; Should come late, but before cliffkey. Contains Artemis Entreri and the kidnapping of Boo.
- Quest_Pack                                       # 37 Should come after "Unfinished Business".
- Unofficial_Item_Pack                             # 38
- Made_in_Heaven_mod                               # 39
- Check_the_Bodies                                 # 39; also installs the Saerk Farrahd's banquet invitation. This one crashed the game in September 2023, so I moved this mod downwards.
- A_mod_for_the_orderly                            # 40 This is cliffkey. Should come fairly late.
- Tactics_Remix                                    # 41
- Tweaks_Anthology                                 # 42; should come last

I actually installed check the bodies at position 17 or so, but ran into an issue just today. Often installing some mods lateron works very well. Tweaks Anthology I installed earlier but that caused issues, so installing it late worked much better.

At any rate ...

So, I believe the mod Check the Bodies includes a Saerk Farrahd's banquet invitation. This one causes me issues.

I am finishing up the quest where you have to help the temple and slay a beholder and what not. Upon emerging, the prophets start to fight in the temple district. Then some girl shows up from another quest; and then the messenger comes in and sends an invitation. I click on the finish/continue, but the whole game freezes and does not continue past this point, so I am stuck.

I then tried to uninstall check the bodies, but weidu kind of wants to uninstall and re-install everything. The invitation still got in (I think weidu shows its age finally). I then tried to re-install the check the bodies mod but that didn't fix the game-freeze situation.

I should say I have another problem with another mod, where you have this gnome kensai in the docks area and when you go up, it also freezes. Normally it works, so some mod-combination messes things up. :(

Always hard to see which issue is caused by what.

At any rate, I googled for issues and I actually found someone else reporting the same bug I encountered:

"I ended up deleting the mod, it kept crashing my game when the messenger arrived to invite my character to some girl’s coming-out party. Kind of a shame because the content is excellent. I have version 3.0, is there an update to the mod that fixes that bug?"

The user is here:

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/75748/mod-spotlight-check-the-bodies

(I don't have an account on beamdog; I find github issue trackers sooooo much easier and more convenient to use.)

weidu also has issues with the chat-irenicus mod or so, at the least in cmd.exe I always get some annoying delays and I have to hit enter. weidu is really not good at handling multiple mods. I tried to install that other engine or something, but that one did not even work at all. :/ :\

Perhaps the chat-irenicus mod causes side effects. I need to re-visit the installation order eventually.

Anyway, just here reporting that error with the messenger. I don't know if anyone is maintaining the code or changing anything; on the webforum there was one who responded to look into it but I don't know if anything has been done about it.

Perhaps, if anyone reads this, the messenger could be changed. Or that particular component not be installed at all (the installation of this mod via the setup .exe file is a bit weird, could be more detailed).

A partial work around if the bug can not be fixed would be for the messenger to spawn at a slight distance, so I can run away from him crashing the game. :P

Unfortunately the code seems to always hit my character, triggering the invitation, even when I try to run away with boots of the cheetah. Anyway just reporting the same bug (I think).

[rubyFeedback]

I am also thinking of bypassing weidu.exe if that would be possible and writing some ruby scripts, if it is just copying and deleting file then I would not need weidu.exe. But I haven't modded anything yet.

The above installation order I showed actually comes from a .yml file and a ruby file checks it, then re-arranges all the mods that I want to install. Ideally I could then designate what I want to install and automatically skip everything, without being queried by weidu.exe or the setup.exe file what I want to install. I think it should be possible to do some kind of mega-mod that batch-installs everything according to user's preferences (assuming here the user downloaded all these files too). I don't know if weidu does anything "behind the scenes". There is quite a lack of documentation IMO. Some links to mods don't even work anymore. For example, beamdog forum tries to redirect me towards http://www.spellholdstudios.net/ie/ctb but that page no longer exists. github seems less volatile here; would be great if all modders could use github at the least for the downloads.

[GraionDilach]

Regarding the generic modding questions, which has nothing to do with CtB in general - GitHub isn't convenient in this case at all. In terms of megamod support, it's easy to see new questions on Reddit's r/baldursgate latest, Beamdog Forums's latest, Gibberlings3's latest and the handful of modding Discords.

If I do this on GitHub, I basically need to either manually track or subscribe to 300+ repositories to track their discussions, which requires a lot of overhead and can generate a fair amount of noise considering that I don't use GitHub solely for Infinity Engine modding. (Reason why am I only going through your questions now because I only noticed it that you opened multiple questions in different repositories and I noticed them whilew wikiwalking your profile even.)

I don't think you can rewrite WeiDU to Ruby. WeiDU has a great technical documentation - https://weidu.org/~thebigg/README-WeiDU.html - and it doesn't just do "copying and deleting". Yes, SHS went down earlier this year, but all mods hosted in GH has their documentation hosted in GH as well - https://spellholdstudios.github.io/readmes/ctb-readme-english.html for CtB and in general you can look at the github.io counterparts for readmes.

This community has the communication channels already set in place. If you decide to attempt using your own, don't be surprised if people end up missing your feedback.