Regarding the summoning limit

[critto]

This is somewhat a continuation of this thread from the Beamdog forums.

 

Could somebody please clarify why the genie from Limited Wish and similar things count towards the summoning limit? His allegiance is set to Neutral and Gender to Niether which does not correspond to the info I've found on the subject so far (basically, the stuff described in the thread linked above).

 

Cheers,

critto

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

Ah, the old "break it if doesn't need to be fixed" dev tactic.

 

My guess is that the summoning limit is not based on Gender (obviously), but instead got (re)hardcoded for some unstated reason.

 

Thank god for mods.

Edited November 6, 2016 by Fiann of the Silver Hand

[Jarno Mikkola]

Well, there's the summon limit set to the .2da file called summonlimit.2da ... yey.

The thing is there cause generally you want to limit the excess AI rounds, to conserve resources. Ask... and you'll get as an answer to try the SCS with 1000 creatures on the field ... now if only they would go hostile on each others...

Edited November 6, 2016 by Jarno Mikkola

[Fiann of the Silver Hand]

I haven't tried modding all of the 2das yet, but if they're just pointing to a different IDS file for the limit, can that 2da be appended and have it work?

[Avenger]

That post doesn't complain about the genie, but it complains that the repeated use of 'I wish to summon a horde to overrun my enemies" was nerfed. That means the summoned creatures by the genie, not the genie itself.

 

[argent77]

The djinni is also affected by the horde wish. To reproduce it, summon a horde of rabbits and try to cast Limited Wish again.

The fix suggested in this topic solves both issues, the size of the summoned horde and the ability to summon the djinni again afterwards.

[lynx]

As for why it counts, why wouldn't it? It's the demons and devas that are exceptions via gating. They have the gender of BOTH, not NEITHER.

[subtledoctor]

As for why it counts, why wouldn't it? It's the demons and devas that are exceptions via gating. They have the gender of BOTH, not NEITHER.

I think critto's point is, that genie is not a proper "summon" as far as gameplay is concerned, but rather just a mechanism for casting the Limited Wish spell. If you reach the summoning limit, is that supposed to mean you cannot cast Limited wish? Surely not. Not to mention all of the mods that use invisible creatures to create a scripted effect - if those creatures count toward the summoning cap it would be very problematic. So,

 

1) Modders need to know generally how to reliably exempt such a creature from the cap; and

 

2) The Limited Wish genie should specifically be exempted from the cap.

[lynx]

I know and I also made a mistake. Of course you can only have one celestial.

 

This has been discussed even here at least since 2008 and the D0Tweak mod achieves it by setting the gender to 20.

[critto]

> Ask... and you'll get as an answer to try the SCS with 1000 creatures on the field ... now if only they would go hostile on each others...

The point of my question is not to "cheat the system" and cause slowdowns by executing battles of epic proportions. I simple want to prevent "technical" creatures (genie from Limited Wish and similar stuff) from being affected by said limit. I have no intention of changing the limit itself. Therefore, the 2da file would be useless to me (but thanks for pointing out that it exists, I wasn't aware of that).

> The djinni is also affected by the horde wish. To reproduce it, summon a horde of rabbits and try to cast Limited Wish again.

Exactly.

> The fix suggested in this topic solves both issues, the size of the summoned horde and the ability to summon the djinni again afterwards.

No, it doesn't.

Subtledoctor has described the issue in the best possible way.

> This has been discussed even here at least since 2008 and the D0Tweak mod achieves it by setting the gender to 20.

I probably haven't found this discussion. I'll check out what the d0Tweak mod does, thanks.

[Jarno Mikkola]

> This has been discussed even here at least since 2008 and the D0Tweak mod achieves it by setting the gender to 20.

I probably haven't found this discussion. I'll check out what the d0Tweak mod does, thanks.

Essentially the mod changes the summoned characters gender from "summoned" to be another number, now it's 20 because it was decided to be that, as it allow the unlimited summons while still allow other spells to refer to them still as "summoned" as the spells gain additional abilities that target this gender too. Aka the death spell that should kills all summoned by targeting the .cre's that have the gender id "6" - "summoned", is extended by the component to also kills all the .cre's that have the gender id of "20", via the opcode #55. The ids is 20 cause that is not found in the gender.ids, until the d0tweaks adds it in. That's the old solution, the EE one is what ever floats their boats.

Edited November 6, 2016 by Jarno Mikkola

[critto]

So yeah, I've studied some of the existing solutions you guys have proposed.

 

In the d0Tweak Pack, as Jarno has described, the author introduces another gender and replaces all references to it in the game's files.

 

In the Tweaks Anthology a simple patch to summlimt.2da is employed.

 

While all this is interesting, it is not much of a help, sadly. As was stated above, the creature (WISH01.CRE) does not have its gender attribute set to SUMMONED. Therefore, tinkering with gender.ids probably wouldn't help.

 

I tried to play around with the Genie creature's attributes and see if anything positive would come out of it. Nothing did.

 

If the limit of summoned creatures is not yet reached, I can cast Limited Wish however I want and even summon a couple of rabbit hordes. After that I can still summon up to 5 of the usual summons. Then it's over, no more Limited Wish. I guess there's some kind of engine-level counter which is increased when a player-controlled char summons a creature, and "indirect" summoning (as is the case with Limited Wish's rabbits) is not considered the same thing.

 

Is there any way to ask the devs from Beamdog directly to comment on this?

[Galactygon]

I can confirm that opcode 67 fails to summon a creature and displays the text "You cannot summon any more creatures." if the summoning limit has been reached regardless of the GENDER.ids entry of the newly summoned creatures.

 

So you can have 40 rabbits appear if their GENDER is not SUMMONED but if you already have 5 creatures summoned that contribute to the summoning limit (GENDER=SUMMONED) then you cannot summon even one rabbit.

Edited November 19, 2016 by Galactygon

[Galactygon]

It turns out both WIsh and Limited WIsh fail (=genie does not appear) when the summoning limit is reached.

 

I have filed ticket 27834 internally on redmine.

[critto]

Thank you very much for tests and publishing a bug report!

 

However, if one uses a patch mentioned earlier in this thread, you can summon lots of rabbit even if their gender is SUMMONED because their allegiance is set GOODCUTOFF. I am not sure if this should be mentioned in the ticket as well. Probably, it does.