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SR Revised V1.3.900 (2022 August 8th)


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Insect spells not properly protected against from the secondary effect. I recommend immunity to the secondary effect, but not the primary - essentially, if the AI cast insects upon someone protected by a Fire Shield, they will not be affected, BUT the insects will still spread to other nearby characters.

Call me crazy but I'm not seeing any immunity effects involving insects at all. How is it coded?

 

I do see that the subspells are getting a custom sectype... but I don't see anything in the main spells, or in Fireshield itself.

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Okay:

 

 

 

school errors:

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

Dispel Magic/Remove Magic inconsistencies

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

Ice Lance's icon is messed up

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

Vampiric effects (Larloch's, Vampiric Touch, etc.) should not affect a variety of creature types (illusory, golems, undead, etc.)

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

SR's hidespl.2da, in other words, is not working for the EEs

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

Emotion: Despair has a -3 saving throw penalty instead of a -2

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

Disintegrate has incorrect saving throw types for the last 2 headers

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

Planetars have 3 regeneration per second instead of 1 per 3 seconds

Fixed in 4.15.4

 

 

 

The stupid basilisks from MS9 are the worst idea

Everyone seems to hate this, and I agree. So I am erring on the side of caution and simply disabling MS9. So wizards can once again Gate in a Pit Fiend, and the MS spells end at MS8. Obviously once there is a good idea for an MS9 spell we can try again.

 

 

 

Regenerate Wound series. Neat idea that can work if done right, awful execution that just kind of gimps druids

Per Demi's suggestion in some thread around here, I made the regeneration undispellable. Being reliable in that way, and curing more hp than the equivalent CW spells, and able to be cast before combat to give a warrior the effective benefit of a Ring of Regeneration, right from level 1, makes these spells pretty great IMHO.

 

 

 

Insect spells not properly protected against from the secondary effect. I recommend immunity to the secondary effect, but not the primary - essentially, if the AI cast insects upon someone protected by a Fire Shield, they will not be affected, BUT the insects will still spread to other nearby characters

I can't see how this protection was happening in the first place. I added some 206 effect against the insect subspells to SPWI418, but I'm not sure whether that's necessary or might step on the toes of a pre-existing method.

 

 

 

Summon Nishruu doesn't exist anymore because of bad scroll allocation?

Summon Nishruu doesn't exist anymore because it was intentionally merged with Summon Hakeashar, IIRC.

 

 

 

Halt Undead and Control Undead are affected by magic resistance

In my view this is not a problem with these spells, but rather with the dumb way spell resistance was implemented on some creatures. (Actually not many undead have MR, I'm guessing you're mostly talking about, what, skeleton warriors and liches?) This is not worth messing with IMHO. But of course I welcome opinions of players who may feel differently.

 

Next to do:

- kit innates to match changed spells

- Spell Deflection(s) to be patched instead of overwritten

 

And that gets close to the point where I have to get off this train and maybe someone else can take over. RL issues are going to prevent me doing stuff like combing through .BAM files or cataloguing the EEs' new missile weapon .PRO files.

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Bart, are you on Github? The easiest way to do this is through Github forking and pull requests. I think that Mike said that this would help get a new 'official' release up and running. A nice thing about Github is that it could also help with documenting changes. It will show you what files have changed and (for text files) exactly what text has changed.

 

Or, if you will give me permission, I can add your changes to my version for a pull request either to subtle's version, or, if it comes after he sends a request to gibberlings, to another request to gibberlings.

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Or, if you will give me permission, I can add your changes to my version for a pull request either to subtle's version, or, if it comes after he sends a request to gibberlings, to another request to gibberlings.

 

Best to start with a solid base so that we can get an accurate idea of what the differences are. Why don't you make a new branch/fork/whatever of my most recent fixed version, and then dump the SRR files into it and make a new commit? Then we can review each change and adopt whatever we need to. Could be a nice way to speed things up.

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Okay, I just dropped SRR into Git and took a glance at the differences. Wow. There is... a LOT to consider. My gut tells me that this should be a pretty deliberative process, so I think it's worth figuring out what was done for what reason. As an example, in /lib/kreso_eestatSR.tph, this is deleted:

 

SNPRINT 3 ~spl_prefix~ ~%SOURCE_RES%~
 PATCH_IF NOT (~%spl_prefix%~ STRING_EQUAL_CASE ~#bo~) BEGIN

 

I don't know whose modder prefix is "#bo." Why did kreso put that in there? Why did Bartimeus remove it? Was is breaking something? If not, I don't want to mess with it, because I really like SR 4b15 and if a piece of it isn't actually broken, I don't want to try to fix it.

 

So, for now, how about this: let's talk about .BAMs. This should be easy: if Bartimeus fixed a bunch of .BAM files - at least, ones representing icons - then it should be a simple matter of grabbing his and dropping them into the mod.

 

But, then I realized that, a lot of the new icons I'm seeing here have Demi's modder prefix. "dvwi603b.bam," etc. Which, first of all, nice, I do the same thing with my prefix when I need something to refer to vanilla .SPL files. But second of all, I realized that the spells using those icons are probably different in Bartimeus' version as well. So we can't just drop in the icons, we would need to use his versions of the spells. But I don't want to do that, because I don't know whether or how they have been changed, and that bears discussing first. And the only way to directly compare would be to look at the .SPL files in NI/DLTCEP, which, holy crap man shoot me in the head first.

 

So, fingers crossed, here's a question for Bartimeus: all those icons like "dvwi603.bam" that clearly refer to the a/b/c icons of a particular spell... can I just make a blanket assumption that those spells should have those icons? Would that very simple assumption hold, or is the situation more complicated than that? Because if that assumption is good, then I'm gonna drag this damn mod into the 21st damn century and start setting those things in Weidu.

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Eh, whether it's to your taste, this is very much what Demi intended, and part of what (IMHO) makes SR good. Look at it from the perspective of someone making a mod like this: the SI spell(s) is trash, it doesn't exist in PnP, it makes for stupid cheesy gameplay, we want to remove it. But, objection: SCS AI utilizes it. So what do we do? An elegant solution: let the AI do what the AI needs to do, but present the player with a spell list that excludes the trash. Move the basic functions - thematic categorical magical protection - to more suitable spells.

 

tl;dr: SR's treatment of the SI:x effects can maybe be refined a bit, but overall it's gotta remain.

 

IMHO the SI thing really falls into the category of your personal preferences, like the other stuff in your "glaring problems" list. I haven't touched on that stuff because I wanted to clarify some things about the list of bugs first.

SR removing the SI spell altogether would be the right thing to do (I am with Bartimaeus here).

 

But how does SCS cope with that kind of change?

Edited by Salk
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Eh, whether it's to your taste, this is very much what Demi intended, and part of what (IMHO) makes SR good. Look at it from the perspective of someone making a mod like this: the SI spell(s) is trash, it doesn't exist in PnP, it makes for stupid cheesy gameplay, we want to remove it. But, objection: SCS AI utilizes it. So what do we do? An elegant solution: let the AI do what the AI needs to do, but present the player with a spell list that excludes the trash. Move the basic functions - thematic categorical magical protection - to more suitable spells.

 

tl;dr: SR's treatment of the SI:x effects can maybe be refined a bit, but overall it's gotta remain.

 

IMHO the SI thing really falls into the category of your personal preferences, like the other stuff in your "glaring problems" list. I haven't touched on that stuff because I wanted to clarify some things about the list of bugs first.

SR removing the SI spell altogether would be the right thing to do (I am with Bartimaeus here).

 

Sorry, I should have been clearer. The goal of SR is, indeed, to remove SI altogether. It is gone from the player, and I think Dispelling Screen is in its place. However...

 

But how does SCS cope with that kind of change?

From what I understand, very poorly. I think Bartimeus was suggesting that the SI spell(s) should be removed altogether and AI script (including SCS and Ascension and whatever other AI mods there are) should be changed to intelligently use the new spells (Nondetection, True Sight, Mind Blank, etc.) instead.

 

Which is a fine and wonderful idea, but totally pie in the sky. How will such a thing ever happen?? So Demi designed SR to kind of split the difference: the player-facing portion removes the SI spells and gives you Dispelling Screen and moves the functions of the SI subspells to other places (ND, TS, etc.) But the SI subspells still exist in the game files, and SCS can use them in its scripts. So, for instance, an SCS mage might pre-buff with SI:Divination... from the player's perspective, the enemy has effectively pre-buffed with Nondetection.

 

This seems like a perfectly fine compromise to me, given that the alternatives are 1) leave SI in the game, or 2) break SCS AI scripts.

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Insect spells not properly protected against from the secondary effect. I recommend immunity to the secondary effect, but not the primary - essentially, if the AI cast insects upon someone protected by a Fire Shield, they will not be affected, BUT the insects will still spread to other nearby characters.

Call me crazy but I'm not seeing any immunity effects involving insects at all. How is it coded?

 

I do see that the subspells are getting a custom sectype... but I don't see anything in the main spells, or in Fireshield itself.

 

 

I might be crazy, but I think the insect spells have a primary effect (the spell you cast in your spellbook that also has the projectile) vs. the "secondary" spell that is actually the insects' damage and spell failure and stuff. So you just grant make Fire Shield-type spells grant immunity to the secondary spell for the duration of the spell. The sectype is not for protection against, but as a method of dispelling with e.g. Gust of Wind. From your later post that I just read now, I think that's what you ended up doing anyways.

 

@Regenerate Wounds: I hated these spells because druids basically became unusable in terms of in-combat healing. Out of combat, sure, they're fine, but I mean...out of combat healing is not exactly a pressing need like in-combat healing. YMMV, I guess.

 

@Projectiles: You're free to steal my code for the projectile fixes, which I mostly stole from 1pp itself, which was already installed on top of the EEs (bugs and everything that they still haven't fixed!) to begin with. I have the same thing for the spell deflections - should be in the EE-only file that you mentioned.

 

@BAMs: From what I recall...it's complicated due to the mess that SR created with its bams. For me, it's not too much trouble to mass change every header to the correct icon because I use a hex editor to edit .spls a lot of the time (because editing spells with anything more than one header via DLTCEP or Near Infinity is a gosh danged travesty/nightmare that has frequently made me seriously reconsider whether modding is worth the trouble at all), and mass hex editing every header to have the correct icon is really easy. However, hex editing is not for everyone, and it can take time to understand file structure and how to not completely destroy it with casual edits. Thank goodness I started doing things that way, because I would've given up on fixing variable duration spells with a lot of effects a long time ago otherwise. My suggestion would be to completely ignore this problem for the time being, then let me know when you're otherwise ready to submit the update, and I will correct that stuff for you from whatever latest version you have. Or point me towards a download of your latest version now and I'll do it when I have a little free time.

 

@Grammarsalad: Uh, you know, I would, because everyone seems to just love github, but my few experiences with github's web interface have been extremely infuriating to the point of never wanting to touch the thing. I've been told that there are other ways to use github that don't involve the ridiculous web interface, but... As I've said to subtledoctor, anything SRR can be used as anyone pleases. Like IRR, I only started messing around with things for my own enjoyment - anything beyond that is a bonus. However, I would warn you, as subtledoctor discovered...just compare my main_component.tpa to b15's...and THEN compare my arcane.tra to b15's arcane.tra. Ha.

 

@#bo: I made no such change. I just compared from b15's version of that file to mine, and neither make any mention of "#bo". What version did your kreso_eestatsr.tph come from?

 

@SI: My solution was to replace the spells entirely. Like, I think spwi590 is the Contingency version of SI: Abjuration that the AI uses. SRb15 - aka Demi or kreso, not me - completely chopped this spell out and replaced it with a clone of Dispelling Screen. Though I have reverted it, I have applied a similar principle to the others that you can use via a settings.ini option if you so please.

 

Did I respond to everything? Jeeze, :p.

Edited by Bartimaeus
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@BAMs: From what I recall...it's complicated due to the mess that SR created with its bams. For me, it's not too much trouble to mass change every header to the correct icon because I use a hex editor to edit .spls a lot of the time (because editing spells with anything more than one header via DLTCEP or Near Infinity is a gosh danged travesty/nightmare that has frequently made me seriously reconsider whether modding is worth the trouble at all), and mass hex editing every header to have the correct icon is really easy. However, hex editing is not for everyone, and it can take time to understand file structure and how to not completely destroy it with casual edits. Thank goodness I started doing things that way, because I would've given up on fixing variable duration spells with a lot of effects a long time ago otherwise. My suggestion would be to completely ignore this problem for the time being, then let me know when you're otherwise ready to submit the update, and I will correct that stuff for you from whatever latest version you have. Or point me towards a download of your latest version now and I'll do it when I have a little free time.

Man... you need to learn to use Weidu. Just a matter of adding after each COPY command in main_component

  LPF ALTER_SPELL_HEADER STR_VAR icon = ~dvwi###~ END
I can pretty easily add that to main_component for each spell when I see that SRR has a corresponding .BAM file. Question is, should I? Am I interpreting the existence of those files correctly? (spwi112.spl should get dwwi112.bam, etc.?)

 

@#bo: I made no such change. I just compared from b15's version of that file to mine, and neither make any mention of "#bo". What version did your kreso_eestatsr.tph come from?

That file only exists in b15...? b14 doesn't have kreso's extra stuff.
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Eh, whether it's to your taste, this is very much what Demi intended, and part of what (IMHO) makes SR good. Look at it from the perspective of someone making a mod like this: the SI spell(s) is trash, it doesn't exist in PnP, it makes for stupid cheesy gameplay, we want to remove it. But, objection: SCS AI utilizes it. So what do we do? An elegant solution: let the AI do what the AI needs to do, but present the player with a spell list that excludes the trash. Move the basic functions - thematic categorical magical protection - to more suitable spells.

 

tl;dr: SR's treatment of the SI:x effects can maybe be refined a bit, but overall it's gotta remain.

 

IMHO the SI thing really falls into the category of your personal preferences, like the other stuff in your "glaring problems" list. I haven't touched on that stuff because I wanted to clarify some things about the list of bugs first.

SR removing the SI spell altogether would be the right thing to do (I am with Bartimaeus here).

 

Sorry, I should have been clearer. The goal of SR is, indeed, to remove SI altogether. It is gone from the player, and I think Dispelling Screen is in its place. However...

 

But how does SCS cope with that kind of change?

From what I understand, very poorly.

 

Correct. This is a general issue of good design for mods that change the spell system, not just for SCS: since the AI (vanilla game or modded) doesn't know about any spell-system changes you've made, the existing spells can't be changed in a way that fundamentally alters their functioning. If you want to replace or radically change a spell, do it by putting the original spell into HIDESPL and introducing a new one.

 

Now, SCS does make some attempt to use SR's new resources. In the early days of SR, I said to Demi that it was not realistic for me to allow for SR in the basic interplay of defensive spells, and so the logic of those spells had to remain unchanged for compatibility's sake; Demi agreed. SCS's internals have evolved to the point where it's become more realistic, and the next release of SCS that *I* do (as opposed to the maintenance release that CamDawg and others are very kindly putting together) will probably try to use SR's new defensive spells more and drop the legacy ones. But that "next release" may be a while away given how busy I am these days, and in any case SCS is not the only AI mod (and the vanilla game also has AI), and the basic case for leaving the original spells available for non-SR-aware AI still remains.

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@That one file: Then why would your version of this file appear to be different than mine? I have an archive of spell_rev b15 that does not have that line. Is it a more recent BWPFP addition that I didn't notice, perhaps?

 

@Bams: Eh. I only use commands that I've seen before, and that's not one I've seen, I don't think, :p. Anyways, I prefer to not have to patch and just have the base file correct from the get-go...and honestly, doing a "mass replace" in what's basically a text editor is probably as easier as patching like that. As for MY bams, yes, that does make it a bit more simple for you, since you're correct in your assumption that it is what I went for. Test all spells out to make sure everything is correct after you do that - I remember Salk and I having to correct a number of spells like Globe of Invulnerability and the Spell Deflections that had strange set icons.

Edited by Bartimaeus
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@That one file: Then why would your version of this file appear to be different than mine? I have an archive of spell_rev b15 that does not have that line. Is it a more recent BWPFP addition that I didn't notice, perhaps?

Nope, I don't use the BWFP. Now I'm annoyed, and a little concerned...

 

@Bams: Eh. I only use commands that I've seen before, and that's not one I've seen, I don't think, :p. Anyways, I prefer to not have to patch and just have the base file correct from the get-go...and honestly, doing a "mass replace" in what's basically a text editor is probably as easier as patching like that. As for MY bams, yes, that does make it a bit more simple for you, since you're correct in your assumption that it is what I went for. Test all spells out to make sure everything is correct after you do that - I remember Salk and I having to correct a number of spells like Globe of Invulnerability and the Spell Deflections that had strange set icons.

Yeah and then you end up distributing a weird "copy all these files into a mod's subfolders and then install it" package. If all this stuff is in the Weidu commands, in the main_component file, then anything that needs to be fixed is as easy as doing a mass replace in a text editor. Having all the files correct from the get-go is in fact a terrible way to make mods for these games. Lately I'm not even using "base files" at all. Just

CREATE SPL
CREATE EFF
CREATE ITM
Then later, if it turns out there's a bug or I want to tune something a bit differently, or add an extra effect or something, all I need to do is tweak a WRITE_SHORT or add a LPF ADD_SPELL_EFFECT or whatever.
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@Different file: Does the latest github version of Spell Revisions not match kreso's version that's up for download in the thread below, then? I just re-downloaded kreso's b15 to check, and again, it's the same thing - no mention of anything #bo-related, and it matches my archive's version.

 

@"Weird 'copy all these files into a mod's subfolders'": Pft, SRR and IRR only work like that because I was only given permission to distribute files I changed, not unmodified IR/SR as a whole. Creating a proper package and renaming it to "irr" or "ir_revised" and adding all the files that I did not modify but still use would be easy, but I was not given permission to do so. Mind you, that's what I asked for because I felt it stepped the least on the toes of the base mod (since it still required that you download the base mod in addition to mine, and therefore would never "replace" it in that sense), and that's what I was given. It's basically just an extremely inelegant Big World Project Fixpack patch, :p.

 

@weidu: Yeah, I know you advocated for this style for IR, but man, that's just so much work if you want to do it that way from scratch that I can't imagine switching over to it at this point. It would be different if IR and SR had already been created in this style...but they weren't, and it'd be a ridiculously burdensome task to convert.

Edited by Bartimaeus
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@weidu: Yeah, I know you advocated for this style for IR, but man, that's just so much work if you want to do it that way from scratch that I can't imagine switching over to it at this point. It would be different if IR and SR had already been created in this style...but they weren't, and it'd be a ridiculously burdensome task to convert.

Nonsense. Weidu is just, in essence, a scripted hex editor. Take for example those three spells with errant 328 effects that were crashing the old engine. To fix them, you could copy them into a game's override folder, open them in NI or DLTCEP, find the offending extended headers, and delete them. Then save the files, and copy them back into the mod folder.

 

Or, I can open up main_component.tpa in a text editor, and paste "LPF DELETE_EFFECT INT_VAR OPCODE = 328 END" three times, and save the file. Have the mod itself edit out those effects for me, at install-time. Now increase the number of files needing changes by two orders of magnitude...

 

It is WAY easier to implement the kinds of changes you made in Weidu. Doing that is no problem at all. The only thing slowing down the process of implementing your fixes is finding out what those fixes are, because all of your fixes are hidden inside monolithic files that are only meant to be run through a COPY operation.

 

It's basically just an extremely inelegant Big World Project Fixpack patch.

I couldn't have said it any better :p

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