On Beholders

[DavidW]

Obviously I wasn't claiming to"fix idiotic decisions", I was simply trying to see if I could be able to please players, as some complains about beholders seem quite common.

 

I'm regretting that phrase... I was being playfully self-deprecating, not critical of others.

 

It appears that nerfing the antimagic ray effects themselves is far from being free from bounderies, thus the main other thing left is 'how many rays are used per round'.

 

Is spellcasting time assigned to the .spl files taken into account? In that case tweaking these values probably is the only way to reduce the rate at which they are fired without having to modify scripts.

 

To be honest, with beholders (more than any other creature, in fact), I don't think you can really separate off modifying the spells from modifying the script. Any creature that uses ten spells per round is going to have a script that's acutely sensitive to details of the spells in question. (And - hence my point about "modding SCS" - I think changes to, e.g., casting time will have very different effects in SCS and the vanilla game).

 

If you really don't like existing beholders (in SCS, Tactics, Quest Pack or the vanilla game) I think you might find it easiest just to write your own. Of course you're welcome to borrow code from SCS to do so.

[Demivrgvs]

It appears that nerfing the antimagic ray effects themselves is far from being free from bounderies, thus the main other thing left is 'how many rays are used per round'.

 

Is spellcasting time assigned to the .spl files taken into account? In that case tweaking these values probably is the only way to reduce the rate at which they are fired without having to modify scripts.

 

To be honest, with beholders (more than any other creature, in fact), I don't think you can really separate off modifying the spells from modifying the script. Any creature that uses ten spells per round is going to have a script that's acutely sensitive to details of the spells in question. (And - hence my point about "modding SCS" - I think changes to, e.g., casting time will have very different effects in SCS and the vanilla game).

 

If you really don't like existing beholders (in SCS, Tactics, Quest Pack or the vanilla game) I think you might find it easiest just to write your own. Of course you're welcome to borrow code from SCS to do so.

Does raising rays casting time by 1 (thus reducing the rate of fire to 5 per round in theory) really causes issues in terms of script performances? I didn't noticed any but I'm certainly not aware as you are of how your scripts work.

[DavidW]

It appears that nerfing the antimagic ray effects themselves is far from being free from bounderies, thus the main other thing left is 'how many rays are used per round'.

 

Is spellcasting time assigned to the .spl files taken into account? In that case tweaking these values probably is the only way to reduce the rate at which they are fired without having to modify scripts.

 

To be honest, with beholders (more than any other creature, in fact), I don't think you can really separate off modifying the spells from modifying the script. Any creature that uses ten spells per round is going to have a script that's acutely sensitive to details of the spells in question. (And - hence my point about "modding SCS" - I think changes to, e.g., casting time will have very different effects in SCS and the vanilla game).

 

If you really don't like existing beholders (in SCS, Tactics, Quest Pack or the vanilla game) I think you might find it easiest just to write your own. Of course you're welcome to borrow code from SCS to do so.

Does raising rays casting time by 1 (thus reducing the rate of fire to 5 per round in theory) really causes issues in terms of script performances? I didn't noticed any but I'm certainly not aware as you are of how your scripts work.

 

I don't really know myself. The script is fairly intricate, and relies on a combination of (1) a timer so that rays are used once per round and (2) a behaviour counter to cycle through the different rays. If I could only use five rays per round, I'd have written a very different script that gave some thought to prioritising. Since the current script is allowed to use all ten rays, it doesn't prioritise at all.