Spell turning animation

[Suslik]

There's an animation called spsturni.bam which appears when a spell is reflected by Spell Turning/Minor Spell Turning/Cloak of Mirroring and similar effects.

spsturni.bam:

in game:

 

I am talking about a small effect that appears actually when a spell is reflected(not the one under caster's feet, spmagglo.bam). I do remember such animation when i played vanilla BG2 - SoA a few years ago, there was also a specific sound i think.

 

But now when i play even unmodded game(ToB, patched), the animation does not appear when a spell is reflected.

 

Question : why does this happen and is it possible to make the effect appear again?

[Suslik]

Update: after thorough testing it seems that the effect does appear, but only the very first frame of it. If I happen to pause the game during the first frame of spell being reflected back, I can see the halo. But then it instantly disappears. Any ideas why 12-frame animation stops after the first frame?

[Daulmakan]

Nice find. I don't think I ever saw it in all my playthroughs, vanilla or otherwise.

[Suslik]

Ohmygod, there's someone in my thread!

 

So it seems that no mods are responsible for absence of the effect and neither is consistency of my vanilla BG distrib.

 

I think the first step is to find someone who does have the animation in vanilla game. And then find the difference between mine/yours setup and theirs.

 

I think first of all we should narrow down the search: is the problem related to particular BG distrib(patch? config?) or hardware issues?

 

More info on my setup where Was reflection animation:

 

Software:

- 4CD early version of SoA(probably 2001), without any patches

- no ToB

 

Hardware:

- No GPU, no D3D/OGL acceleration, pure software rendering on Pentium1 133MHz with 32MB RAM

 

I have tried to turn OGL acceleration off in my current system and use software renderer - still no luck, only the first frame of the animation.

 

The only info I have found in the internets regarding to this animation is how to turn it off lol. So I am feeling like I am doing something no one needs except for me, which makes suslik sad : ( I will go on anyway, but I need some help.

 

Current question is:

Anyone who has a spare minute to write a short post: what config(brief hardware description and version of BG) you have and do you have the reflection animation. I would be grateful.

[Azazello]

Suslik, I don't have any info for you, as I don't even have access to my game disks. Just wanna say that I too love that animation, it always made me feel like "boo-yaa!" to whatever enemy mages casting against my party.

 

I think G3 is the best place to get this investigated.

 

Hope a way can be found to make the duration longer.

[Avenger]

It is probably not rendered because of low machine specs.

 

And as to nitpick, spmagglo is different (it is a complete shell made of lightnings around the caster).

spturni2 is the one you meant.

 

These are not directly used as bam, but vvc. There is a positional flag in spsturni, that changes its appearance based on direction of target.

[Suslik]

Just wanna say that I too love that animation, it always made me feel like "boo-yaa!" to whatever enemy mages casting against my party.

Exactly! Ok, at least I am not alone.

 

But still, can you please tell Any info on your system when you were running BG with the animation? Was it SoA-only or ToB? Was the system old or new?

 

 

It is probably not rendered because of low machine specs.

Actually my idea is opposite - that the animation is played on low machine specs(CPU frequency? hardware acceleration?) and not played on modern ones. In my previous post I have told that the spsturni.bam was always visible on Pentium1 133MHz(no graphics acceleration) and only the first frame of it on modern systems(i have tried Core2Duo 2x2.4GHz and Core i5-based systems, ~GF250GTX graphics).

 

 

And as to nitpick, spmagglo is different (it is a complete shell made of lightnings around the caster).

spturni2 is the one you meant.

Didnt I tell in post #1:

I am talking about a small effect that appears actually when a spell is reflected(not the one under caster's feet, spmagglo.bam)

Forgive me if my grammar is all messed, but I did intend to tell that spmagglo.bam has nothing to do with animation discussed and spsturni.bam is the one I am investigating.

 

These are not directly used as bam, but vvc. There is a positional flag in spsturni, that changes its appearance based on direction of target.

Interesting. I've thought that there must be some meta-info for such animations. Does the .vvc file contain the number of frames to be played?

[Suslik]

Okay kids. A few more hours of testing have finally narrowed down the problem. What I did:

 

1) Install SoA(only), there is the animation(spsturni.bam if someone has forgotten lol)

2) Install ToB(in separate folder), there is no reflection animation.

//apparently it already means that no harware/SoA distrib can be responsible for such behavior

3) If I take BGMain.exe from ToB and put it instead of SoA's BGMain.exe, it all gets really messy(i was surprised it even started and allowed me to load a game without all ToB resources), but important thing is - reflection animation vanishes.

 

So my conclusion is: bug(feature, whatever) which prevents spell turning animation from playing is definitely in ToB BGMain.exe, not in any resources, chitin.key hardware or something like that.

 

I am more or less familiar with debugging ToB's BGMain.exe (I have procedure addresses responsible for spells being reflected and some experience tracing them with OllyDbg/IDA). But SoA's BGMain.exe procedure offsets are completely unknown to me, so it will be quite difficult to find the same functions that apparently were a little "modified" in ToB. Any help/advices are welcome.

[Suslik]

Okay, I have checked spell reflection code in SoA's BGMain.exe and ToB's. Those are pretty similar, I have failed to find any major differences. But unfortunately I do not know Infinity Engine's internal game object hierarchy, so I just tried to compare all functions that were used in reflecting spells(quite a few of them), and they all turned out to be pretty the same in both SoA and ToB. More details in my TobEx's thread: http://www.shsforums.net/topic/53226-spell-protections-bug/page__st__20__gopid__531204entry531204

 

Please don't hesitate to give an advice where else and how to look for the cause of the problem.

[Suslik]

Latest updates: the bug was added somewhere between 22941 and 23037 version of SoA. In earlier versions spsturni.bam is played perfectly, but in later ones and in ToB there's an issue with a visual effect being applied to a creature incorrectly and after playing the first frame, animation gets eliminated.

 

There's currently a workaround suggested by Ascension64: to make the reflection animation effect parentless. It can be easily done but causes the effect to float stationary in the air even if the creature with spell turning spell is moving.

 

Now we are working on a solution that would allow to play the effect properly without detaching from parent creature.

[Suslik]

Issue was fixed in TobEx 0.23