Version 15 released

[DavidW]

Version 15 of SCSII is out, hot on the heels of v14. Partly that's because of the new Russian translation (thanks, Prowler); partly it's because a rather nasty bug crept into version 14. Apologies to anyone who suffered from this; thanks to those who gave bug reports.

 

Changelog:

 

Added Russian translation

(Some) mages now use Bigby's Clenched Fist and Bigby's Crushing Hand (priority order: just after power word:stun)

Tweaked the targeting of Nyalee's Mirror

Tweaked the way Liches deal with pro-from-undead enemies, to avoid some glitches when players are just out of sight

In rather unusual circumstances, mages weren't noticing when enemies were immune to magic missile; now they do

Corrected a serious bug in the v14 version of the "make_casting_innate" macro (this was causing a variety of crashes and glitches)

Revamped the hostile copies of the party summoned by various creatures, using a method worked out and coded by Ardanis. It should all work much more smoothly, and be more bug-resistant and compatibility-friendly, now;

it will also be slightly harder, as clones of party spellcasters no longer lose their highest-level spells

"Faster bears" no longer struggles with BG1-style files

Dragons' immunity to Imprisonment should now allow better for mods that change the spell (in technical terms, we now give immunity by spell code as well as by effect type)

[Galactygon]

v15 still needs to address this:

David, your macros that patch REGEXP GLOB are missing a SOURCE_SIZE check. I tracked two of them down:

 

SCSII/Spell/spell.tph, ACTION_MACRO ~mirror_image_AoE~

scsII.tph, ACTION_MACRO ~make_short_spells~

 

I was lazy about installing the official patch and the G3 fixpack, and the installer bailed out on IPLOT01K.itm, because it was reading out of bounds. Adding SOURCE_SIZE checks fixed this.

 

There is another bug which caused Smarter Mages option 2 to fail at install if any mod adds new effects to SPWI921.spl's casting feature block. This includes the components Chant, Mental Domination, and Hypnotic Pattern of SpellPack which patch all spells in the game so they break the caster's concentration of these 3 spells.

 

The bug is located in scsII\mage\mage.tph ACTION_MACRO ~mage_alacrity~

 

The macro starts searches for effects starting with the feature blocks and progressing to the effects in the first extended header, while using the number of effects in the extended header for counting how many times it loops. This means that if there are any effects in the feature block, those effects will be counted while leaving out an equal number of effects in the first extended header. Since opcode 188 is the last effect in the first extended header in SPWI921.spl, it will certainly leave it out, the variables will not get set, and when it tries to use those variables to clone the effect, the installer will bail out.

 

Also, the macro is not flexible enough to account for additional extended headers in case there is a mod that adds any. Furthermore, it does not increment the effect offsets of the abilities that follow the ability the effect was added to, and bails out if it doesn't find an opcode to clone.

 

I haven't fixed this bug, and I suspect the installer will bail out at ACTION_MACROs ~mage_pro_elements~, ~mage_make_timestop~, ~mage_smart_clones~ for the same reasons.

 

Nothing short of completely rewriting these macros/or using Gort's macros will solve this.

[DavidW]

Sorry - I didn't forget, but I urgently needed to get the current version out, and since these are (unless I'm missing something) relatively unusual compatibility issues rather than bugfixes, they ended up getting triaged. I'll do it when I next have a chance.

[Ilyich]

Just out of interest, can I install v.15 without uninstalling v.14 beforehand?

[Ardanis]

Bad idea. While some components may still work fine, others will accumulate changes, resulting in 9x HPs for dragons, double Vecna and Vhaloir loot, and so on.

[DavidW]

Bad idea. While some components may still work fine, others will accumulate changes, resulting in 9x HPs for dragons, double Vecna and Vhaloir loot, and so on.

 

Not quite (I think). If you install v15 over the top of v14, it'll think all its components are already installed. If you then reinstall them, it'll install the v15 components. You'd have to work hard to create iterated changes (deleting weidu.log would do it, for instance). In that situation, I imagine the install would break; certainly it would at best have the weird results Ardanis mentions.

[spanyam]

Hi David, any update on the IPLOT01K.ITM error? I'm attempting to install SCSII v15 on a complete vanilla install (latest patch), and the Smarter Dragons component option 2 fails due to an attempted out of bounds read on a 0KB file. I'd like to do this without installing any fixpacks and such, since I'm in the process of testing out SCSII's compatibility with BP-Ascension and would to minimize the variables.

 

In case there isn't an updated fix for this already, is there anywhere I can add a SOURCE_SIZE check in my local code to bypass this error? I am not familiar with WeiDU syntax, so if you could just paste the line of code, I would appreciate it.

[DavidW]

This isn't really something I'm that interested in fixing, to be honest - SCSII basically requires the Fixpack.

[Jarno Mikkola]

In case there isn't an updated fix for this already, is there anywhere I can add a SOURCE_SIZE check in my local code to bypass this error? I am not familiar with WeiDU syntax, so if you could just paste the line of code, I would appreciate it.

Yes, just open the "setup-scsII.tp2" file and any other .tph files that have been "INCLUDE ~fileaddress~" 'ed, with Notepad or similar program and search for:

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP ... ~override~

And add in use this:

COPY_EXISTING_REGEXP ... ~override~
PATCH_IF (SOURCE_SIZE > 0x71) THEN BEGIN 
<all the actions>
END

Like said, this is not DavidW's priority as it does seriously hamper his work, but for you spanyam, you should do it manually... so you can diff the files.

[spanyam]

@DavidW: Yeah, I understand perfectly. My needing this is just a one-off case for a specific and uncommon reason.

 

@Jarno Mikkola: Yes, that's exactly what I needed! Thanks, I'll go ahead and do that.