my playthrough

[DavidW]

sorry for pestering you, I must be pain in ass=).

You're not. I'm very happy to get feedback (which isn't the same as saying I'll agree with it!

 

About animation - I was unclear, probably - not "casting", but "gaining" animation.

 

Although I stil don't agree. Player has plenty of ways to know which buffs an enemy has. It includes animation, sounds, metagame knowledge, just intuition, results of other party members attacks. The enemy mage has only one - detectable stats, so I think it would be fair enough to hide pre-buffing strings and animation.

 

Okay, I have some time for this (except that it's against SCS's design principles to accept "metagame knowledge" as a way of knowing something). I'll have a look at how much in practice would change. (Bear in mind that rather a lot, and in particularly many of the most flashy, spells cast by enemies are contingencies cast at appearence time, not pre-castings, and so need their animations on realism grounds.

 

It would look much better.

That's quite a good point.

 

(I should warn that leaving aside these issues, there is a technical problem which would also have to be addressed.)

[DavidW]

@Gort: since you're around, could you do me a favour and reply to my question about your timescale for finishing your run-through? (Even if the answer is "April", it's still useful to know.)

[Gort]

Okay, I have some time for this (except that it's against SCS's design principles to accept "metagame knowledge" as a way of knowing something). I'll have a look at how much in practice would change. (Bear in mind that rather a lot, and in particularly many of the most flashy, spells cast by enemies are contingencies cast at appearence time, not pre-castings, and so need their animations on realism grounds.

contigencies should have it all info, of course. They are the actual problem, though. I was thinking about 1-second self-cast spell which adds immunities to a bunch of displaystrings and animations. It could be an optional component, "consistent prebuffing", or "silent pre-buffing". Smth like that.

[Gort]

for avoid confusing - I have installed the first beta4 version (with ascension error and lich ctd)

 

 

I have dragblue.cre in the main game folder

 

ir dung 2nd level:

thief does not attack mephit

 

Planar Sphere:

I planned to wait with this quest a bit, but Korgan forced me to find Valygar, and Valygar forced me to go there. So, I entered with 4-character party, none of which was higher then 7 level=). But I foolishly forgot to put the difficulty slider back to normal after learning spells, so I came almost through the whole sphere on easy.

 

1. Knights of Solamnia seem to use the same shout as sahuagins, because they turned hostile when I had figt with in the room (I didn't hurt them with area effect spells)

2. Halflings party:

- Mogadish didn't run from cloudkill

- Entu has strange "detonate" ability. What is it?

- when my PC was charmed and alone (others party members ran away) Entu and his band didn't attack me for a while, but about 20-30 seconds later started to attack.

 

I killed them on the second try and uninstalled XP fixer at this point. No fun fighting vs horred willings and summoned fiends when you can't cast spells with higher then 4)

 

3. I throw cloudkill to the room with Necre. Halfling warriors died soon after, Necre himslef used sequencer with invisibility and just disappeared. I couldn't find him anymore.

4. Golems. I don't know if you changed their characteristics, but I don't remember them being so touch. Stone and clay golems are immune to simple weapons. Not scary, but I don't remeber it. Adamantite golems - hit only by +3 and higher weapons. The only +3 weapon I had was Korgan's axe, and I lost Korgan in battle with halflings, so I couldn't hurt him at all. I just cast haste, grab golem's head in the clock room and ran away. The golem could not follow - too big.

5. valygar managed to poison fire elemental=). I didn't expect elementals being vulnerable to poison

6. lavok did NOTHING. Absolutely.

7. Outside tanarri were easy. I do not exaggerate. They kept spamming death gaze, but unfortunately for them, my dwarven multi 7fighter/7cleric had a save vs death of 0, so he never failed it. He could easily kill them 1x1, and not that easily but still for sure if not prebuffed. I noticed a demon cast death gaze on Jan, who was already held. The one that used silence was less pleasant, but anyway easy enough. While I dealt with demons, hasted Jan destroyed a little army of their minions (about 15-20 mephits, imps, maurejis) with a wand of frost. Valygar helped him, but was he stunned most of the time.

Later (when realized I was playing on easy), just out of curiosity, I reloaded a save, set difficulty to normal and tried to kill them again. Not much difference. Just hack and slash.

8. adamantite golem at the power core blocked way for all other golems. I just used the heart and went away.

9. The real problem I had: efreeti at the fire room. His damage is not too high, nor his defences are. But the "gaseous form" ability really discouraged me. He just jumps to the form when badly injured and regains all the health. He alone killed my party 3 times (well, there were 2 of us left: me and Valygar. Jan died from Tolgerias' Power Word: Kill. Thanks God he is not "selected SoA mage" with HLA). I started to think about ctrl-y, but on the fourth try he used it 2 times, and then I killed him somehow. Don't know why he didn't jump to it again.

10. adamantite golem at the power core blocked way for all other golems. I just used the heart and went away.

11. After finishing the sphere and resurrecting all companions I decided to try to kill adamantite golems. Buffed Korgan with all spells and potions I had and sent him forward. The highest hit was 3, while the golems hit for 30-40 every time easily. At the same time, for a mage with Lower resistance they would be just a piece of cake, not able to go into melee.

 

Jan's quest:

githyanki at five flagons inn: one of them cast spells, other did not

 

common bugs:

1. I noticed something strange with summons - they suddenly turn hostile. Example:

I summoned wolfs with a wand. During the fight, 1 of them was dominated, so I had to kill him. Nearby wolf turned red right after his death.

Next time I summoned 3 ogres, and right after summonning 2 of them turned hostle and attacked the third. There were no visible enemies around, no spells cast on them.

2. mages happen to have not full sequencers. For example, yuan-ti mage cast on me Spell Sequncer with 1 skull trap and nothing more.

 

 

A thought: I see you treat specially Blood war, maybe djinni and efreeti scripts need to be adjusted, too?

[DavidW]

I have dragblue.cre in the main game folder

 

ir dung 2nd level:

thief does not attack mephit

Can't find this - can you give me more details?

 

Planar Sphere:

1. Knights of Solamnia seem to use the same shout as sahuagins, because they turned hostile when I had figt with in the room (I didn't hurt them with area effect spells)

I can't reproduce this (I've tried) - they certainly shouldn't, they're on different scripts. Don't know what's going on there.

2. Halflings party:

- Mogadish didn't run from cloudkill

I can't reproduce it (on my version, he uses Zone of Sweet Air and clears it), but then running out of clouds is pretty fiddly to do on the Infinity Engine so it could just be a glitch.

- Entu has strange "detonate" ability. What is it?

It's a psionic power - he causes rocks around the party to blow up. He actually uses it in the vanilla game too, but it's a bit more powerful in SCSII - possibly that's why you haven't noticed it before.

 

- when my PC was charmed and alone (others party members ran away) Entu and his band didn't attack me for a while, but about 20-30 seconds later started to attack.

They're supposed to finish off charmed enemies. I'm not sure why they leave it for a while before doing so but I don't really mind - possibly it takes them a while to be confident that other enemies aren't coming back.

 

3. I throw cloudkill to the room with Necre. Halfling warriors died soon after, Necre himslef used sequencer with invisibility and just disappeared. I couldn't find him anymore.

Not a bug. This seems to me to be perfectly sensible behaviour on Necre's part. (He's not doing anything weird, he'll be around somewhere, but possibly invisible and SI: Divination shielded. Try wandering back into the same area a day later and he might well have another go at killing you.)

4. Golems. I don't know if you changed their characteristics, but I don't remember them being so touch. Stone and clay golems are immune to simple weapons. Not scary, but I don't remeber it. Adamantite golems - hit only by +3 and higher weapons. The only +3 weapon I had was Korgan's axe, and I lost Korgan in battle with halflings, so I couldn't hurt him at all. I just cast haste, grab golem's head in the clock room and ran away. The golem could not follow - too big.

I haven't touched them. Possibly you're not used to meeting high-powered golems so early in the game - that's probably because of the fairly high setting you've got the "level-dependent monster groupings" component on.

 

5. valygar managed to poison fire elemental=). I didn't expect elementals being vulnerable to poison

Bug (well, oddity) in the vanilla game. I might fix it anyway, though.

 

6. lavok did NOTHING. Absolutely.

Again, can't reproduce - he does plenty on my install. Maybe it's a local change that has fixed it without me knowing; maybe there's something funny about your install.

7. Outside tanarri were easy. I do not exaggerate. They kept spamming death gaze, but unfortunately for them, my dwarven multi 7fighter/7cleric had a save vs death of 0, so he never failed it. He could easily kill them 1x1, and not that easily but still for sure if not prebuffed. I noticed a demon cast death gaze on Jan, who was already held. The one that used silence was less pleasant, but anyway easy enough. While I dealt with demons, hasted Jan destroyed a little army of their minions (about 15-20 mephits, imps, maurejis) with a wand of frost. Valygar helped him, but was he stunned most of the time.

OK, I'll look at making it harder (probably for a subsequent release). I think part of the problem is that the terrain is pretty awkward for the tanar'ri to move around in.

 

8. adamantite golem at the power core blocked way for all other golems. I just used the heart and went away.

Vanilla game bug. (If and when I have a more systematic look at golems, I'll fix it).

9. The real problem I had: efreeti at the fire room. His damage is not too high, nor his defences are. But the "gaseous form" ability really discouraged me. He just jumps to the form when badly injured and regains all the health. He alone killed my party 3 times (well, there were 2 of us left: me and Valygar. Jan died from Tolgerias' Power Word: Kill. Thanks God he is not "selected SoA mage" with HLA). I started to think about ctrl-y, but on the fourth try he used it 2 times, and then I killed him somehow. Don't know why he didn't jump to it again.

He gets either 2 goes or three, I can't remember, then he runs out of options to do it.

 

githyanki at five flagons inn: one of them cast spells, other did not

One of them is a fighter/mage, the other is a fighter/psionicist. The second one is still using the vanilla script - writing a better one is on my list of things to do when I get a chance.

 

1. I noticed something strange with summons - they suddenly turn hostile.

I guess this must be something to do with the general AI scripts not working that well for party allies. I'm not quite sure what, though. Did you by any chance have cloudkill spells running? (even if the summons weren't in them)?

 

2. mages happen to have not full sequencers. For example, yuan-ti mage cast on me Spell Sequncer with 1 skull trap and nothing more.

Again (sorry) I can't reproduce this - the only spell sequencer bug I can find is one where Improved Invisibility should have been cast but wasn't.

 

A thought: I see you treat specially Blood war, maybe djinni and efreeti scripts need to be adjusted, too?

Cute idea - but I don't tend to think of djinni and efreet having quite the same visceral hostility as do baatezu and tanar'ri - happy to be corrected, though.

 

Thanks for all the comments.

[Gort]

ir dung 2nd level:

thief does not attack mephit

Can't find this - can you give me more details?

after the room with Khalid's body, there is a shadow thief fighting mephit. I attacked mephit, he attacked me, but thief did nothing. It only happened 1 time of 3.

 

 

Planar Sphere:

1. Knights of Solamnia seem to use the same shout as sahuagins, because they turned hostile when I had figt with in the room (I didn't hurt them with area effect spells)

I can't reproduce this (I've tried) - they certainly shouldn't, they're on different scripts. Don't know what's going on there.

try to throw cloudkill or fireball in sahuagin's room and have them come in the round room, where the knights stand

 

3. I throw cloudkill to the room with Necre. Halfling warriors died soon after, Necre himslef used sequencer with invisibility and just disappeared. I couldn't find him anymore.

Not a bug. This seems to me to be perfectly sensible behaviour on Necre's part. (He's not doing anything weird, he'll be around somewhere, but possibly invisible and SI: Divination shielded. Try wandering back into the same area a day later and he might well have another go at killing you.)

I was there later, but still couldn't find him.

 

4. Golems. I don't know if you changed their characteristics, but I don't remember them being so touch. Stone and clay golems are immune to simple weapons. Not scary, but I don't remeber it. Adamantite golems - hit only by +3 and higher weapons. The only +3 weapon I had was Korgan's axe, and I lost Korgan in battle with halflings, so I couldn't hurt him at all. I just cast haste, grab golem's head in the clock room and ran away. The golem could not follow - too big.

I haven't touched them. Possibly you're not used to meeting high-powered golems so early in the game - that's probably because of the fairly high setting you've got the "level-dependent monster groupings" component on.

They certainly didn't have so much physical resistance. About 90%, I think. Will check.

 

6. lavok did NOTHING. Absolutely.

Again, can't reproduce - he does plenty on my install. Maybe it's a local change that has fixed it without me knowing; maybe there's something funny about your install.

I didn't change anything on my own with NI or something like this. There was a warning during installation:

SCS warning: I tried to swap the order of scripts MAGE16A and SHOUTDLG in LAVOK01, but I couldn't find both of them

My installation is not quite the same as at the beginning, so I attach weidu.log and debug again.

 

1. I noticed something strange with summons - they suddenly turn hostile.

I guess this must be something to do with the general AI scripts not working that well for party allies. I'm not quite sure what, though. Did you by any chance have cloudkill spells running? (even if the summons weren't in them)?

no, I didn't. I summoned them in a room where Necre disappeared.

 

 

2. mages happen to have not full sequencers. For example, yuan-ti mage cast on me Spell Sequncer with 1 skull trap and nothing more.

Again (sorry) I can't reproduce this - the only spell sequencer bug I can find is one where Improved Invisibility should have been cast but wasn't.

well, I might send you a screenshot. Certainly none of modes I have installed add sequncers to mages.

 

A thought: I see you treat specially Blood war, maybe djinni and efreeti scripts need to be adjusted, too?

Cute idea - but I don't tend to think of djinni and efreet having quite the same visceral hostility as do baatezu and tanar'ri - happy to be corrected, though.

I had a gut feeling about their relations for a long time, but couldn't find any confirmation. Just recently, I happened to read "History of Calimshan", and it is stated there undoubtely.

 

 

edit: damn, what's up with quotes?

SETUP_SCSII.debug.zip

[DavidW]

ir dung 2nd level:

thief does not attack mephit

Can't find this - can you give me more details?

after the room with Khalid's body, there is a shadow thief fighting mephit. I attacked mephit, he attacked me, but thief did nothing. It only happened 1 time of 3.

OK, I think I'll put this down to some random glitch for now - I can't get it to happen for me.

Planar Sphere:

1. Knights of Solamnia seem to use the same shout as sahuagins, because they turned hostile when I had figt with in the room (I didn't hurt them with area effect spells)

I can't reproduce this (I've tried) - they certainly shouldn't, they're on different scripts. Don't know what's going on there.

try to throw cloudkill or fireball in sahuagin's room and have them come in the round room, where the knights stand

Aha. Thanks, very nice clear description. It's not the shout scripts, it's the cloudkill - there's a bug that's making nonhostile creatures go hostile when there's a cloudkill around. Fixed locally.

 

3. I throw cloudkill to the room with Necre. Halfling warriors died soon after, Necre himslef used sequencer with invisibility and just disappeared. I couldn't find him anymore.

Not a bug. This seems to me to be perfectly sensible behaviour on Necre's part. (He's not doing anything weird, he'll be around somewhere, but possibly invisible and SI: Divination shielded. Try wandering back into the same area a day later and he might well have another go at killing you.)

I was there later, but still couldn't find him.

Smart halfling. He basically has to be somewhere around (there's nothing in the script that can make him permanently vanish) but there's no straightforward way to stop him wandering off God-knows where.

 

4. Golems. I don't know if you changed their characteristics, but I don't remember them being so touch. Stone and clay golems are immune to simple weapons. Not scary, but I don't remeber it. Adamantite golems - hit only by +3 and higher weapons. The only +3 weapon I had was Korgan's axe, and I lost Korgan in battle with halflings, so I couldn't hurt him at all. I just cast haste, grab golem's head in the clock room and ran away. The golem could not follow - too big.

I haven't touched them. Possibly you're not used to meeting high-powered golems so early in the game - that's probably because of the fairly high setting you've got the "level-dependent monster groupings" component on.

They certainly didn't have so much physical resistance. About 90%, I think. Will check.

Adamantite golems have 90% physical resistance in the vanilla game.

 

6. lavok did NOTHING. Absolutely.

Again, can't reproduce - he does plenty on my install. Maybe it's a local change that has fixed it without me knowing; maybe there's something funny about your install.

I didn't change anything on my own with NI or something like this. There was a warning during installation:

SCS warning: I tried to swap the order of scripts MAGE16A and SHOUTDLG in LAVOK01, but I couldn't find both of them

My installation is not quite the same as at the beginning, so I attach weidu.log and debug again.

Found it: it's a bug in Quest Pack. I'll fix it in SCS because questpack isn't likely to be updated any time soon.

(In case you're interested, both Questpack and SCS try to swap the order of those two scripts. Hence the "SCS warning": it's already been done. But there's a bug in the way Questpack does it.)

 

1. I noticed something strange with summons - they suddenly turn hostile.

I guess this must be something to do with the general AI scripts not working that well for party allies. I'm not quite sure what, though. Did you by any chance have cloudkill spells running? (even if the summons weren't in them)?

no, I didn't. I summoned them in a room where Necre disappeared.

 

Still not sure about this one. I'll see if the changes I'm introducing to solve the Solamnic Knights bug help.

2. mages happen to have not full sequencers. For example, yuan-ti mage cast on me Spell Sequncer with 1 skull trap and nothing more.

Again (sorry) I can't reproduce this - the only spell sequencer bug I can find is one where Improved Invisibility should have been cast but wasn't.

well, I might send you a screenshot. Certainly none of modes I have installed add sequncers to mages.

Please.

[Gort]

reinstalled SCS2 yesterday. While installing "[Gaylan wants 60,000 gold pieces]" I got an error: "ERROR: No translation provided for @1301". There were several warnings, also. Debug is in the archive, if you are interested.

 

Temple ruins:

The liches were unexpected, the first one took 3 reloads to strike him down finally. Actually, I didn't even kill him, he got himself toasted in the lava pool. The second one I killed without reloads. "Summon and run" technique worked like a charm, as always. Though I wasted about 12 fire elementals and numerous amount of other monsters on them. Maybe not very fair, but I don't know a way to for a 10th level party to fight a lich face to face. Shadow dragon was moderately touch. I didn't expect he would notice my traps and attack, and his "shadow dragon breath" is really deathbringing, so it took 3 reloads, also. I don't like his ability "create shadows". He can walk, cast spells, attack in melee and remain absolutely invisible during all of this. I'd suggest to make him at least partially visible, as it does Improved Invisibility.

 

The weirdnesses I noticed during going through the dungeon:

 

1. lich cast horrid wilting on sceleton warrior (party was far out of his sight)

2. berserk warrior from horn of valgalla uses potions (actually, it's even fun, and like it. Just don't know if it's intentional)

3. greater mummy cast gaze of despair during timestop

4. mummies and sceletons keep attacking elemental who is immune to their attacks

5. lich sees through sanctuary

 

 

Some of them are illustrated with screenshots in the archive. The one with undercharged spell sequencer is also there. For some reason, forum does not allow me to attach the archive, so you can get it at http://mail.ngs.ru/~forn/scs2_bugs.zip

[Gort]

Killed the sewers party yesterday. First threw cloudkill then step back. The mage, the priest and the archer remained in the cloud for a while, then tried to escape from it, but they ran on another side of the cloud and were afraid to cross it to help their comrades, so I easily killed the dwarf (maybe one more meleer, too, don't remember exactly). The archer died in the cloud, and I killed the rest 1 by 1. A pity, I find party on party fights the most interesting.

[DavidW]

Thanks again for interesting and thoughtful comments.

 

Bug reports:

 

- Lich casting at skeleton warrior: it's an overenthusiastic side-effect of the code that liches use to try to get back at you even if you're using Protection from Undead scrolls. Hopefully fixed locally.

 

- Berserkers with potions: yep, it's unintentional. I've removed it (a tad reluctantly, since it's kinda cool)

 

- Half-full sequencers: I don't understand this one at all. I'll have to do some testing of my own; in the meantime, could you do me a favour and make a note (of the spell that actually is cast) every time you see this happen?

 

- Mummy gaze in Timestop: blame Sim, it's something in Quest Pack. (It actually takes quite a lot of effort to stop creatures using these sorts of innate powers in Timestop; SCS2 does it but I can't think of many other AI mods that do.)

 

- Mummies/Skeletons attack elemental: not so much a bug as unfinished content. At the moment the AI only detects protection from the mage antiweapon spells, it doesn't detect creatures' innate protection. It's on the to-do list.

 

- Sewer party: I originally thought this was just a consequence of the difficulty scripting around Cloudkill, but actually they have a crap Help script. Fixed locally.

 

- Bug in installing Gaelan component: ignore it, it's harmless. (It's saying that you haven't got Romantic Encounters installed). I'll try to hide it more next time.

 

Content comments:

 

- the temple ruins liches are being caused by the "harder level-dependent creature groupings" component; normally they don't spawn till you're 16th level.

 

- liches can see thru Sanctuary in the vanilla game.

 

- the "Create Shadows" power is in the vanilla game. I'm quite surprised if it doesn't break in melee, but anyway, I don't think SCS is doing anything to it.

 

- I'm glad the "detect traps" thing for the dragon works! - it was a bugger to code.

[Gort]

went through the unseeing eye quest. What can I say - beholders are easily the touughest foes I've fought so far. Actually, not even beholders themselves, but gauths. They're killing spree, slinging rays like machine guns. Supported by beholders' antimagic rays, they do very big amount of damage in very short time (+paralyze, charm, etc). Beholders are also nasty with their spells, but thanks to saves' bonuses that short folk have, they not so much of a danger. Keldorn was petrified in seconds, though. I'd revive him, but the sculpture was destroyed, too. Poor, poor old paladin. I decided it will fit RP well to take him in the party for completing the quest, although this time I decided to go with shorties only. Beholders at the area with diseased followers of Amaunator took 3 or 4 reloads, the ones at the hive - only 2 (but Keldorn was lost =(). The lich at the undead lair was striken down without any reloads. Actually, I even expected to meet a lich there. I'm getting used to SCS=).

 

the bugs:

1. I couldn't save in the area with Gaal and with the diseased, because "enemies are about". Of course, no enemies were about.

2. blind priests at beholders' hive cast blindness on unnoticed invisible enemies (just by script, it seems)

3. unseeing eye sees through sanctuary

4. there were several strange sculls un the cult's quarters. like of Scull Trap, but they didn't explode when I was going near them. Don't know what caused them to appear.

[DavidW]

Partial progress in working out what's with the Shadow Dragon: it turns out that in SCS, breath weapons and wing buffets aren't breaking invisibility. This is unintentional and needs fixing.

[Gort]

druid grove: nothing outstanding, besides one of rakshasas casting magic missile at first level and Faldorn casting only 2 spells and beeing brought down by blind Cernd (actually, not even him, but summoned bear and wolf).

[DavidW]

druid grove: nothing outstanding, besides one of rakshasas casting magic missile at first level and Faldorn casting only 2 spells and beeing brought down by blind Cernd (actually, not even him, but summoned bear and wolf).

 

Rakshasas: got it, fixed locally. (Actually it's a vanilla-game issue, but one I'd intended to address.)

 

Faldorn: actually I don't touch her (she's one of the fairly few bosses that SCSII leaves alone). In a future release, maybe I'll cover her.

[Gort]

killed Firkraag. Not really a challenge. Just a couple of summons, pre-buffing (yep, I hav RP reasons for pre-buffing), a couple of traps. He used wing buffet several times and breath once, but party attacked him with ranged weapons only, so it was wasted on summmons. For some reason, in the middle of the fight he ran away to previous area. I followed him, and in close space he almost killed my PC (nobody could move at all because of his size), but again, for unknown reason he ran back into the lair. I almost haven't used spells - 1 Breach and several magic missiles. I think he was tougher in original game (or it seems to me so, maybe I improved my tactics so much=))