Thoughts on what Improved Invisibility is "supposed" to represent

[ancalimohtar]

Situation 4a:

Enemy mage casts Imp Invis, then Mirror Image, then Non-Detection.

Party mage/cleric casts Detect/Purge

Enemy mage must save or... what? Since Detect/Purge now has an effect on the caster rather than the enemy, how will the player (looking at the screen) be able to tell whether your mage/cleric can now target the enemy mage with spells? (Also Mirror Image stays, right?)

On a failed save invisibility is gone, but Improved Invisibility is not. On a successful save the enemy remains fully invisible. Mirror Image is never affected by Detect Invisibility or Invisibility Purge. The mage using See Invisibility will try each round, once per round, to "breach" Non-detection. As soon as the protected creature fails a save the mage will be able to see that creature.

 

Assume the mage has already semi-revealed himself (full invis gone, imp invis remains) before you even cast Detect/Purge. So at this point, the player sees the enemy, everybody can whack at the enemy (though with PfMW etc it's pointless), but he's untargetable by Breach or antimagic. If the party mage/cleric casts Detect/Purge, how will you (the player) be visually alerted to the fact that the enemy failed his save? If the enemy's imp invis animation is gone, you (the player) will think the enemy is fully visible to your fighter as well. If nothing changes (enemy still appears imp invis to you, the player), you won't be able to tell your mage/cleric can now target him. And since regardless of successful or failed save, your mage has the portrait icon, it's not like situation 3. If looking for "Save successful" in the combat log is the only way to do it, I don't like it. Since BG2 doesn't alert to failed saves (only successful saves), in a hectic fight with a bunch of stuff happening, multiple mages who are all going to have to save (and potentially many spells going off at the same time that will require saves), it's going to be very unclear whether your mage can or can't target someone with antimagic, a crucial part of the game.

 

Also, when you "breach" non-detection, is non-detection dispelled, or does it remain and still apply for potential future re-casts of invisibility? If it's dispelled, does it take an extra round, or is it dispelled the same round invisibility is dispelled?

 

You may consider TS as a sort of See Invisibility + Oracle + SI:Illusion.

Gotcha

[Demivrgvs]

@Demi

Few weeks ago you said my tweak to KR berserker was complicated and now this!?

Jokes aside, I think this Invisibilty system might work out nicely.

LOL Well, in this case it's not like we have to explain how things work in-game (or even in the readme). And I'm not the one tasked to code it! Btw, the fix which allows SCS to use again Spell Shied was born the same way, with a crazy idea of mine (almost as complicated as this one) which fortunately got implemented by a better coder (compared to Arda and DavidW I'm a real noob).

 

Assume the mage has already semi-revealed himself (full invis gone, imp invis remains) before you even cast Detect/Purge. So at this point, the player sees the enemy, everybody can whack at the enemy (though with PfMW etc it's pointless), but he's untargetable by Breach or antimagic. If the party mage/cleric casts Detect/Purge, how will you (the player) be visually alerted to the fact that the enemy failed his save? If the enemy's imp invis animation is gone, you (the player) will think the enemy is fully visible to your fighter as well. If nothing changes (enemy still appears imp invis to you, the player), you won't be able to tell your mage/cleric can now target him. And since regardless of successful or failed save, your mage has the portrait icon, it's not like situation 3. If looking for "Save successful" in the combat log is the only way to do it, I don't like it. Since BG2 doesn't alert to failed saves (only successful saves), in a hectic fight with a bunch of stuff happening, multiple mages who are all going to have to save (and potentially many spells going off at the same time that will require saves), it's going to be very unclear whether your mage can or can't target someone with antimagic, a crucial part of the game.

Sounds like I did not explained myself well.

 

You don't have to look at the log for a failed save, because on a failed save you do see cosmetic changes such as:

- fully invisible target becoming partially visible

- illusionary images getting dispelled

- blurred opponent going back to normal state

As soon as you can see your target because he is not fully invisible (be it on a failed save when protected by Non-detection or because the opponent made himself partially visible by acting) then regardless of Non-detection you can target it with any caster using See Invisibility or True Seeing.

 

Also, when you "breach" non-detection, is non-detection dispelled, or does it remain and still apply for potential future re-casts of invisibility? If it's dispelled, does it take an extra round, or is it dispelled the same round invisibility is dispelled?

Nothing is written in stone with Revisions mods, but the plan was to make it persist. Dispelling Non-detection might belong to Breach or other spells, but See Invisibility is not supposed to "destroy" it imo.

[ancalimohtar]

Sounds like I did not explained myself well.

 

You don't have to look at the log for a failed save, because on a failed save you do see cosmetic changes such as:

- fully invisible target becoming partially visible

- illusionary images getting dispelled

- blurred opponent going back to normal state

As soon as you can see your target because he is not fully invisible (be it on a failed save when protected by Non-detection or because the opponent made himself partially visible by acting) then regardless of Non-detection you can target it with any caster using See Invisibility or True Seeing.

 

Oh I see. So Non-detection doesn't help anyone who is merely Imp Invis at all; it only protects full invis. Once someone loses full invis Non-Detection is useless (except for non-invisibility-related illusion spells). That makes a lot more sense. I really like this actually. Combined with the Breach change, it:

 

1) gives enemy mages at least an extra round of full protection since antimagickers need to cast a buff first

2) yet offers a viable path for antimagickers to strip said protections (makes the untargetability aspect of Imp Invis less overpowered)

3) while still leaving mages post-antimagic/TS/Breach some protections, so they're not butchered in 1/3 of a round

 

Well now there's a reason for the mage/sorc to pick TS instead of having the clerics/druids always do it. And level 2 and 6 slots will be in even higher demand.

 

Thanks for answering my questions by the way!

[DavidW]

I had a really sustained go at doing this a year ago, basically with the Mislead spell in mind. I basically persuaded myself that it was impossible, though if you think otherwise I'd be interested in the method. (I now have some fairly powerful coding tools to build and modify effects on the fly, so I don't mind if it's complicated!)

Well, it was more than a year ago but I think my idea more or less was the following:

- every invisibility effect also cast a secondary spell with a custom sec type

- that secondary spell prevents those animations from displaying (via opcode 291)

- every spell or effect which is supposed to dispel invisibility also removes the secondary spell via "remove sec type"

This should work for all II like spells, but not for normal invisibility which is broken by the caster himself, to handle that as well I think you need to add the following:

- every invisibility spell or effect also add a melee/ranged EFF which removes the custom sec type when an attack is attempted

- every spell in the game flagged as hostile needs an external global effect which removes the custom sec type on self when cast

 

I know I'm crazy, but I actually think it could work, wouldn't it?

That's basically what I tried. If you look in the latest version of SCS, there's a function in spells/invisibility_animation.tpa that pretty much implements it. The main problem I found (iirc) was that attacking only breaks invisibility on a hit, whereas the triggered effect breaks it just on an attack. If you feel like messing around with it further, be my guest.

 

I had a really sustained go at doing this a year ago, basically with the Mislead spell in mind. I basically persuaded myself that it was impossible, though if you think otherwise I'd be interested in the method. (I now have some fairly powerful coding tools to build and modify effects on the fly, so I don't mind if it's complicated!)h

Didn't you do it already? IIrc, in newest BWS, there's an option under Stratagems installation "disable animations on II characters" or something like that. I was surprised since I don't have such an option on my manual install.

This is the kind of reason I get so irritated with BWP and BWS - they mess around blindly with material that they don't actually understand technically. That particular component has a DEPRECATED flag, which means it doesn't show up in-game - it's my own alpha code, which I haven't bothered removing from the mod because it's all of 14KB and it might come in useful someday, but it doesn't actually work. Some idiotic macro (or, being less charitable, some idiotic human) in the BWS has picked it up and failed to notice the DEPRECATED.

 

Sigh.

[polytope]

That's basically what I tried. If you look in the latest version of SCS, there's a function in spells/invisibility_animation.tpa that pretty much implements it. The main problem I found (iirc) was that attacking only breaks invisibility on a hit, whereas the triggered effect breaks it just on an attack.

 

I know for sure that a missed backstab reveals the thief attempting it... Or is this a new feature introduced by ToBEx?

[DavidW]

Sorry, I didn't explain that clearly. I was working at scripting level, so that the invisibility-break command occurs once the creature attacks. But it may be a couple of seconds before the attack action actually occurs, depending on initiative et al. It might be possible to tie the effect to the weapon ability - I don't actually recall (it's been a while since I tried to make that component work).

[kreso]

That's basically what I tried. If you look in the latest version of SCS, there's a function in spells/invisibility_animation.tpa that pretty much implements it. The main problem I found (iirc) was that attacking only breaks invisibility on a hit, whereas the triggered effect breaks it just on an attack.

 

I know for sure that a missed backstab reveals the thief attempting it... Or is this a new feature introduced by ToBEx?

It's like in vanilla. Thieves (and all characters, acutally) always become visible after making an attack, regardless if they hit or not.