Nishruus

[CamDawg]

Argh.

 

The official patch makes two changes to nishruus:

• Fixed Nishruu draining charges could wrap item's charges to 65000. This also caused these items to be sold for millions of gold pieces.
  
• Fixed major bug with Nishruus eating item w/o charges (familiars, weapons, etc.)
  

After the patch, the item draining capabilities of nishruus are gone altogether. I could not get a nishruu to drain wands, rings, weapons, anything. Does opcode 243 even work in a patched game?

 

If we can not get this working, then we should drop the wholly redundant Nishruus and Hakeashars Eating Non-Charged Items patch (or move it to the modder component) and alter the Summon Nishruu/Hakeashar spell description.

[devSin]

Hooray! I noted this a long time ago and asked if this was a Mac-only issue or a 26499b issue. (Nobody even bothered to test or reply, of course.)

 

Now I know it isn't, and there's one less thing to feel crappy about. The opcode doesn't work in a patched ToB game; I don't know about SoA.

[Nythrun]

I'd thought it was a ToB change, but I'd never tested it myself (fix a bug by disabling an opcode smells like ToB though, a la thief snare notations).

[devSin]

So do the add map note and remove map note opcodes (called only by thief snare spells) not work in 26498 ToB either? This is another area where I tried to get information from the community and failed (it doesn't work in Mac ToB, based on 26499b).

[Nythrun]

Add Map Note definately doesn't work, which leaves Remove Map Note a bit difficult to test

[devSin]

Kumbaya! One less thing to make my life shittier than it should be!

[devSin]

How about the saving of projectile traps? The easiest way to check is to cast something like Skull Trap or Glyph of Warding, save and reload the game, and have the party walk over the projectile. When it explodes, do all the effects run correctly, or is it just the projectile explosion with no effects at all?

 

I'm pretty sure this one is specific to the Mac version or (more likely) 26499b. Having this broken is the reason I couldn't finish the NI support for the pro traps structures.

 

As for the nishruu fix, I think we should just make it an SoA only patch. We might save a few items from the override for ToB that don't need to be patched. (Unless this was fixed in an SoA patch, in which case, I think we should drop it altogether.)

[Nythrun]

I've not looked at projectile traps in an age, but I don't recall any projectiles retaining properties through a save/load cycle. It doesn't seem likely that their behavior would be different in any incarnation of the Infinity Engine either - the projectile traps section would need to store some dynamic information about the responsible actor and there doesn't seem to be any room. Setting a spell to use only global effects/absolute targets and seeing if it still does nothing would probably settle the matter, but it's doubtful

 

The last SoA patch documentation claims to fix the nishruu bug, so Super Happy Fun Lucky Erotic Modder Pack it is, I guess (I'm so not hard d'core enough to maintain a separate SoA install for testing).

[devSin]

There should be plenty of room to store it (they already save the projectile reference in a separate structure and attach the EFFv2 effects list), but it isn't saved correctly on my install, and I too don't have the will to maintain an SoA install to see if it worked there.

[CamDawg]

I have a couple of SoA-only installs... but they were set up in a slightly odd fashion so I'm not sure if they're working properly or not w.r.t. the patch. Nishruus were eating everything, including stuff like Nalia's ring, so it was like the patch wasn't installed. I'd rather wait for someone with a properly patched SoA install.

[Nythrun]

There should be plenty of room to store it (they already save the projectile reference in a separate structure and attach the EFFv2 effects list), but it isn't saved correctly on my install, and I too don't have the will to maintain an SoA install to see if it worked there.

 

Yeah, it saves the effect structure, but not who target:self is or whether enemy only flagged projectiles should affect red circles or green circles, so my hopes are not high for this ever working

[devSin]

They could have hacked it in like they did with the Project Image stuff (you can only save if it was a PC that cast it). So it's just the old BG behavior (you can't save) if an enemy cast it, and all saved projectile traps are assumed to be PC-cast.

[Nythrun]

That's an interesting point, although saved clones don't add to the .gam a fair amount of the information that's in memory (projected images shedding their vow of non-violence being a famous example). Since projectiles don't run scripts, I wonder where this info would go?

 

Sorry for hijacking, Cam

[devSin]

Clones get a special effect with an owner value corresponding to the party member who cast it (and is responsible for re-initing the hold effect and other crap); it's a simple PlayerN index, which is why they only let you save if a PC cast it (there's no way to identify NPCs). They get saved in the ARE file as normal actors.

 

Projectile traps wouldn't matter. There aren't any that need any more information than "cast by party member"?

[Nythrun]

None that exist, no. But they're capable of using that information, and that information never makes its way into the .sav, which is why it's interesting to me

 

What part of the .are isn't updated correctly on the mac? The Windows version adds a 0x100 (embedded style) structure for each effect in the parent spell. The data size field for the effect block isn't correct (I'm suspicious that this isn't actually a data size field) but the rest of it works okay. The "unknown" at 0x18 in the traps section is a timing marker, I don't know what the dword at 0x10 does.

 

I thought you were able to save in BG2 which enemy traps on screen, so I'll have to look into this when I get a day off