A way to kick out and re-invite a NPC?

I have a NPC whom has been in my party for must of the entire time i've played. However, he has suddenly gun invisible on me and will not come out of it. I can see his icon, the circle around the empty space where he stands, i can even setup his spells and inventory.

But he cannot cast spells (they do not work) and he does not get ANY turns in combat.


Is there anything I can do short of going back several save games and redoing all that hard work?

 

Not sure how to help you here... to kick someone out, you need to talk to them. If you can talk to them, you can kick them out. However, not all NPCs are available for re-hire. Raimol seemed to have disappeared on me when I gave him the boot...

Otherwise if you get the NPC killed you can click on an icon in the upper right of their picture (I think...) and it will toss their dead body out of your party. It's one way to just keep one NPC if you have to keep a pair or trio of them for some reason. However, when you toss their body into the cornfield and drive off, you can't find them again... they are just gone.

 

I also had this problem with Paida, I asked her to leave the party before I could make it back to the village and she said something to the effect that she was leaving and became invisible, the cirle was still visible when I clicked on her portrait but she wouldn't respond to anything, and you couldn't hurt her in any way, again thank goodness for saved games.

 

This just happened to me after receiving Tillahi's reward. Three of my NPCs went blue circle of death.

Ultimately, I went back to an earlier save, right before they went blue circle and tried to ask them to leave the party, thinking that I could re-invite them after receiving the reward in the hopes that doing so would bypass the bug. Oddly, the dialogue options to leave the party weren't there; instead, each of the three NPCs acted as if they weren't even in my party! I could invite them to join, but that was it. So, I invited them to join the party. I'm not sure if this has fixed the issue for me, but I'm hoping it gets around the blue circle of death problem.

I have no idea what causes this. Maybe it's just some random corruption from a save? The only other odd thing I've experienced is that my extraplanar chest burst, so to speak. It just left a mess of gear all over the place. Perhaps I overstuffed the thing. Not sure.

 

Just guessing, but I think it happens when things like Charm Person or monster or any of the dominate spells are used. I don't know, of course, and I have no knowledge of how the scripting of it all works. I just notice that things tend to get touchy when I use charms or dominates.

In this case, I had Burne use charm monster on the greater temple bugbear guarding T(r)illahi and Sir Juffer. I didn't want to use it, but it was a last resort; otherwise, a tripped and bloody Spugnoir wouldn't have made it another round. Then, instead of getting rid of the bugbear, I made the mistake of carting him around for a while. He eventually turned against me while I was resting in the spiral staircase, after the charm wore off.

 

Do you have a savegame from before the TIllahi encounter that can reliably reproduce the issue? If so that would be very valuable in diagnosing the problem.

 

Unfortunately, I don't. I tend to keep a tight set of four saves that I revolve through every one to three rooms; it's a habit from years ago when the game had a tendency to crash.

I'll expand my queue of saves though in case something similar happens in the future.

 

What's the cause?

 

This bug just destroyed 2 hours of play for me. Zert died, he is the only NPC I have, when I had Jaroo ress him he came back invis. Just a blue circle showing where he is, cannot target him to talk nor can I make him talk to anyone.

 

@Allyx
I haven't been able to reproduce the problem, but if you send the code that fixes it I'll include it in the next Temple+ update.

As always I'd appreciate savegames that reliably demonstrate the problem for indepth diagnosis, which could possibly allow the issue to be repaired at the engine level.

 

Umm....when I use the upload file button, I can only select a JPG image of the save...