SCS inherent difficulty

[Dakk]

I liked what you tried to accomplish Ithildur, and bigg's suggestion was really elegant. But I suppose Ardanis nailed it with "enemies attacking 'dead' chars". It would have been nice, but alas...

 

And on a sidenote, "cheating death" doesn't imply anybody is cheating

[the bigg]

Power Word spells are hardcoded to work at X hit points (as opposed to deciding the HP cutoff via effect parameters), so you'll always end up buffing the PC*. The scripting issue can be fixed either using some smart coding to rewrite the relevant bits of the scripts on-the-fly, or by having DW account for this in Dead() checks in SCS's scripts.

 

*: an unskilled, brute force reverse engineer like me could make so that Power Word spells affect X+10 HP instead - so that you nerf the enemies rather than buffing the PCs. A much more skilled reverse engineer could make the X depend on the effect parameters rather than being hardcoded (thus allowing a perfect reimplementation by having PCs suffer at 70 or less and NPCs at 60 or less), but I'm unsure if this is doable without altering the executable size (a big no-no for compatibility with other EXE-patching mods).

[Ardanis]

If hacking the engine, then imo it would be better to go straight after altering the 'dead' state. Provided someone with skill is into it.

 

Scripting wise, well, I still think it will introduce more confusion than use. 'Undead' chars will take damage from aoe, block tight spots, prevent others from leaving 'party required' exits, etc.

[the bigg]

If hacking the engine, then imo it would be better to go straight after altering the 'dead' state. Provided someone with skill is into it.

You're perhaps not thinking of the difference between "change a single integer from 60 to 70" (like I suggest) and "insert some kilobytes of machine code" (like you suggest).

 

Scripting wise, well, I still think it will introduce more confusion than use. 'Undead' chars will take damage from aoe, block tight spots, prevent others from leaving 'party required' exits, etc.

Your point being? Aoe is supposed to hit everybody in the aoe (unless unconscious people are supposed to become immune to magic), unconscious people can be brought back to 11 HP with an innate that all party members will have*, and if you manage to (ab)use the unconscious state to bodyblock a choke point (without dying to aoe or bleeding damage while the rest of the party kills the opposition), you deserve the 'easy' win

 

*: and you can make it so that binding wounds would leave you in a weakened state for a day or until you receive a 'real' healing spell.

[Ardanis]

My point being, to put it short and simply, I dislike the idea as not being implementable without dubious workarounds. By dubious I mean - involves scripting.

 

kilobytes of machine code

Whoops... my bad.

[erik]

Whence comes this fascinating wooly idea that scripting, in general, is dubious? Everything beyond the pure whack-with-a-sword-and-take-damage mechanics is implemented by scripting. Even that needs scripting for the victim to turn hostile and defend himself.

 

Is it poisonous? Does it emit dangerous radiation turning your game to mush?

 

</rant>

I'm honestly puzzled. Is there any horribly gamebreaking backstory many years back that I'm unaware of? The Great Script Fiasco Of '03 ?

[the bigg]

I'm honestly puzzled. Is there any horribly gamebreaking backstory many years back that I'm unaware of? The Great Script Fiasco Of '03 ?

There are some factors here:

- less than trivial scripts are generally not 100% reliable if written naively. While a medium deviation in AI scripts isn't usually noticed, even small deviations can become game breaking if it's quest scripting or ability scripting.

- if multiple mods add some KLOC each to baldur.bcs or some similarly fundamental script, you'll likely reach the point where the KLOCS become HKLOCS and everything becomes slow as hell.

- badly written scripts would stop further evaluation of scripts, cause walk stuttering, etc. (and, by "badly written scripts", I mean "something in Refinements that took me two years and and ad-hoc tool to figure out). Of course, "possible source of troubles" is misinterprested by some as "worse than yo mama jokes" and the myth of 'scripting is unreliable' is spread out.