SCSII issues in general

[DavidW]

Since really quite a lot of discussions in this forum seem to come down to "can we make this compatible with SCSII", I thought I'd post some general comments here. Of course, all this applies only to spells that the SCSII AI actually uses.

 

Obviously, small tweaks to a spell (mildly increased/decreased damage/range/whatever) aren't a problem. In theory, any such tweak gives the player a slight advantage because the AI doesn't know about the tweak and so its actions aren't so optimised, but it's no big deal.

 

Where an offensive spell is modified significantly (so as to make it useless rather than useful or vice versa, to significantly change its nature, to make it party-friendly or -unfriendly, etc), this is going to cause more significant problems. If the spell is one which has actively harmful effects for the caster in some circumstances, it's going to create an incompatibility; if it's less drastic than that it doesn't matter so much. In the medium to long term, I hope to allow for offensive SR spells in SCSII (as I've done, to a limited extent, in SCSI); don't hold your breath, though. So if you want to maintain compatibility I'd suggest keeping changes that make a spell harmful (e.g., dropping party-friendliness) to an absolute minimum.

 

The reason I can allow for changes to offensive spells is that they tend to be used in discrete blocks, which can be swapped in or out. The network of protective and anti-protective spells is a different matter: they are hugely interconnected and the code to handle this is easily the most complicated bit of the SCS mage scripting, and has taken ages to get to its current (I hope!) fairly smooth and bug-free state. For that reason, I really cannot support any optional changes to defensive or antimagic spells beyond those already in SCSII. I'm in principle open to being persuaded that some change really is essential, in which case I'd want to include it in SCSII myself, but the threshold is high (for instance, I'm not moved by the objections to Remove Magic or to stacked Spell Immunities).

 

I hope that's helpful and doesn't read as too inflexible - it's just that I find maintaining something as complicated and interconnected as SCSII hard enough as it is, and there's only so much I can do, consistent with the rather limited and variable time I've got available, to work around spell changes.

[Salk]

DavidW,

 

first, thanks for posting your view on this matter.

 

You certainly know that SR's authors ,and I'd assume the large majority of SR users (me included), are also SCS players.

 

This is to a good advantage when we discuss issues that might arise between SR and SCS.

 

My personal view is that SCS should take precedence. That is, that SR should work around SCS and accomodate its changes to it.

 

And I believe that the compatibility grade between SCS and SR is already pretty high.

 

Demivrgvs is changing more and more though and this might affect compatibility.

 

There is talk of adding new spells and it's obvious that this will be unfair to the AI since they won't reciprocate (something I don't like myself).

 

On the other hand, like another user suggested before me, it's important to have a close collaboration between you and the SR authors because SCS is refined and smooth enough to allow small changes.

 

SR is still trying to find its own identity and I am sure that in time, things will become better and better!

[AzureDrag0n1]

Ok I guess I should mention that in SCSII some of the antimagic spells have a tiny AoE to better counter the overpowered improved invisibility and spell immunity divination combos.

 

Also I am not sure but does spell immunity abjuration block antimagic in SR unlike vanilla and SCSII? I don't think it should. Otherwise spell immunity stacking should not be allowed if you can block antimagic with it.

 

I guess I could also mention a bug for firetrap. If you reload a game when yhou casted a firetrap before the firetrap will disappear.