How to show Area of Effect markers, spell effect range, etc.

[MacGregor]

Tired of accidentally enveloping your frontline fighters in a fireball? Sick of guesstimating the area of effect a spell has? Well, you've come to the right thread.

I noticed there's almost nothing on the internet about this and since I also had to spend some time to find it I thought I would post it here to help future people searching for a way to display the Area of Effect spells have. (First tried making a guide but capturing the markers onscreen is too much of a hassle to me.) As far as my research goes, this will work for version 2.5.16 and up.

1. Locate the "Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition" folder in your documents folder. (This is were also where your savefiles are located - not the local files folder steam takes you to.) For me this was in C:/users/USERNAME/OneDrive/Documents/Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition

2. In there you will find a file called "Baldur.lua" open it with your favourite text-editor (I used Notepad++ though I assume, regular windows notepad works too as long as you save the file as .lua) and add "SetPrivateProfileString('Game Options','Show AOE','1')" without the " " in a new line to the document.

3. Save the file, start your game, load a save and you should now have Area of Effect markers whenever you try to cast a spell.

[hexemon]

This doesn't work because the "SetPrivateProfileString('Game Options', 'Show AOE', '1')" line already exists in the Lua file, but with 0 instead of 1. Just have to find it and change the 0.
However, I thank you for pointing out this option as in all the years I have been playing the game, I've never known you could do this.

[thegunfire]

It does work, only that you don't have to add "SetPrivateProfileString('Game Options','Show AOE','0')" to the list, you just replace 0 with 1.

Thanks for sharing!