SR Revised V1.3.900 (2022 August 8th)

[Bartimaeus]

23 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

Pretty sure this one isn't true...

Yeah, whoops, I think it's actually just the delay in between using items, but not in between using spells. Still, the overall point stands - OG Haste is significantly more powerful than SR Haste.

[FixTesteR]

On 2/26/2021 at 6:57 PM, Bartimaeus said:

In specifically regards to my AoE comment, that was referring to the fact that SR, for a long while, had Haste be a single target spell

Yeah, just checked it, and you're spot on. I see that SR now has Haste back to AoE. So I must have been doing my trilogy playthrough on that exact SR version that you just mentioned. Well, that certainly clears things up. Thanks.

Since H's duration is longer than IH's, there might be usefulness of H over IH in some late-game encounters, methinks. With SR.

And subtledoctor really finds ... subtleties. 

[DavidNYC]

BETTER VISUAL FEEDBACK FOR MAGE BATTLES

Hi Bartimaeus & Subtledoctor, I've been meaning to post this for a while and I don't know the best place where someone could make use of it. I might try the Beamdog forum as well.

I've been playing heavily modded BG2EE for a while, with SCS + IR (V4 Beta 10) + SR (v4 Beta 16) being indispensable. My style is permadeath with every ounce of (what I consider to be) cheese or imbalance removed. So I've implemented tons of tweaks and bug fixes to these versions of IR and SR (probably a lot of overlap with what you've done).

One of the simplest things I've added are unique animations for every mage spell protection and most mage combat protections. I can't play without it. As far as I can tell, no other mods implement this and yet I think it's the single most useful addition for even experienced players who wonder "Hmm, exactly what did my Secret Word remove on Mage #3 in this giant battle?"

I'm also very fussy about subtle paperdoll 3D animations that don't overwhelm the sprites. When a mage has pfMW, Protection from Missiles, Greater Spell Turning, Dispelling Screen, Spell Shield and Minor Globe of Invulnerability on, I can visually see it at a glance. And I get immediate visual feedback as each is removed.

To prevent this being too long, attached are some screenshots. I know you'll understand what I'm doing without further explanation. I've done tons of modding on my game but I've never released a mod and I don't intend to. Realistically, if this isn't incorporated into SCS or SR, it'd never get used.

Anyway, let me know if you're interested and I could send you some files. I know the idea itself is simple and you could quickly replicate it if desired.

e.g. Black mage has cast Dispelling Screen, Non-Detection, Greater Spell Deflection, Spell Shield, Protection from Missiles and pfMW, each with its own animation.

Remainder of the spell duel:

Spoiler

Yellow mage casts Secret Word and removes Spell Shield. The Black mage's blue orb is gone.

 

Yellow mage casts another Secret Word and removes Greater Spell Deflection. The Black mage's swirling gold animation is gone.

 

Yellow mage casts a third Secret Word and removes Dispelling Screen. The white disc around the Black mage's feet is gone.

Yellow Mage casts Breach, removing pfMW's purple orb and Protection from Missiles' red ioun stone.

Yellow mage casts a final Secret Word and removes Non-Detection's black ioun stone.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 9, 2021 by DavidNYC
Moved images offsite to imgur

[DavidNYC]

BETTER VISUAL FEEDBACK FOR MAGE BATTLES part 2

Some more screenshots of spell animations. I differentiate similar protections mainly by color. So you'll see minor spell deflection with a whitish swirling animation, spell deflection is blue, greater spell deflection is gold, spell trap is purple, etc. PfMW is a glowing purple orb over the mage's head, pfNW is a glowing grey-green orb, etc.

I run all the new animations through SCS's invisibility function (the DW#HDANI, DW#BLHDA, etc.) so that they also turn invisible if the enemy is invisible, and they reappear when the mage becomes visible, etc.

These are also very useful for SCS's prebuffing, since you can instantly see when mages already have precast Non-Detection, protection from Missiles, etc.

ATTACHED: more spell & combat protection animations

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 9, 2021 by DavidNYC
Moved images offsite to imgur

[Jarno Mikkola]

37 minutes ago, DavidNYC said:

I can visually see it at a glance. And I get immediate visual feedback as each is removed.

I believe, the original game, used 1 of those revolving orbs to represent an ion stone, and I believe it was Worm's extended Ioun stone mod that added a lot more, and the Lollorian's RezMod added yet more of those into the game... I know, cause I made them by recolored the original resources to new ones. ... ... and the Item Revision got a permission to use them.

Now, I haven't seen a mod that adds a stationary gloving orb on top of the characters head, like your other pictures show to have, and those seem very nice. Do you have the .bam's as a file archive that we could use ?

Edited March 1, 2021 by Jarno Mikkola

[DavidNYC]

Post deleted; all images moved to imgur and linked in the previous post.

Edited March 9, 2021 by DavidNYC

[DavidNYC]

14 minutes ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

I believe, the original game, used 1 of those revolving orbs to represent an ion stone, and I believe it was Worm's extended Ioun stone mod that added a lot more, and the Lollorian's RezMod added yet more of those into the game... I know, cause I made them by recolored the original resources to new ones. ... ... and the Item Revision got a permission to use them.

Now, I haven't seen a mod that adds a stationary gloving orb on top of the characters head, like your other pictures show to have, and those seem very nice. Do you have the .bam's as a file archive that we could use ?

Hey Jarno, yes, I'm using the ioun stone animations from IR. I'll check in a couple of days from now to see responses and will be able to send .bams. Aside from the ioun stones, every single one I use is a repurposed BG2EE asset.

I've been trying to post the rest of my animations but I keep getting feedback that I've reached my total allowed attachment size of 1000 kB. Does this reset after 24 hours or something? It seems to be aggregating my upload sizes across multiple posts.

[Jarno Mikkola]

29 minutes ago, DavidNYC said:

but I keep getting feedback that I've reached my total allowed attachment size of 1000 kB. Does this reset after 24 hours or something?

This is because your profile is so new one, that it's only allowed so much, it's based on post count, and other factors I am not familiar with. The admins can give more of course as they have the right to do so. But that's a not a perfect way to do so.

But you can upload archived files to very many sites that you can find by using google, naming archive format, like .rar, or .zip, and "file upload" or just say ".zip upload". And then link to the file at the post. They of course use your email address to verify access, and can potentially spy you a little, just like every other email address requester. Meaning you should have a touch more than one. 

[subtledoctor]

@DavidNYC I love the concept. The only thing that gives me pause is the floating orbs... I have about 3 party member with ioun stones right now, and if the same animation denoted combat protections, it might be confusing. But that aside, I love it. I had sort of similar ideas, once - though a different concept.

This should be its own mod... seems like a lot of fiddly work to me, which is why I never bothered with such a thing. But you've done the fiddly work! So maybe we should talk about weidu-izing it.

EDIT - probably in a different thread, as it is not specific to SRR. (Sorry for having continued off-topic discussion, Bartimaeus)

Edited March 1, 2021 by subtledoctor

[Bartimaeus]

I don't mind at all, especially since nothing else is going on in this thread right now. But yeah, this should probably be its own mod, since the idea works perfectly with or without SR. It's a great idea, especially seeing as SR has gotten a number of "how the hell do I tell what anyone has running they have like 15 different buffs and some of them don't have any clear graphics for them good lord" -type feedback over the years, and this would presumably prove helpful.

[FixTesteR]

3 hours ago, DavidNYC said:

My style is permadeath with every ounce of (what I consider to be) cheese or imbalance removed. So I've implemented tons of tweaks and bug fixes to these versions of IR and SR (probably a lot of overlap with what you've done).

Hi there! Maybe you could share what tweaks you made to IR and SR so that we may see the idea and do a comparison. I for one am also interested in what you're doing right there. I'm all for removing imbalace as much as possible. One glaring vanilla imbalance is IH doubling your APR.

My wish in the end would of course be to make pure and single classes viable to play through to the end of ToB, as well ... but I think that wish is just too far out. Kits, duals and multis are just too powerful in comparison.

I like your permadeath style. I'm playing a no-reload right now, and it's fun when I lament wrong choices and bad outcomes. Do you allow resurrection and only suffer loss at a whole party dead or chunking? I also use the mod Protagonist can die.

Bartimaeus, thanks for letting some bits of off-topic here

[DavidNYC]

@subtledoctor@Bartimaeus

Thanks, I'll continue in this thread then. The main reason I posted here is my game is 100% coded toward SR and not vanilla.

I won't have time to come back to this for a couple of days, but I'll be back and upload some files. My motivation is simply I love the game and especially with BG3 coming, it pains me that people revisiting BG2 will understandably find the lack of visual feedback to be painful. So I just wanted to put this out there to people who might have the ability and desire to do something with it.

@subtledoctor Yeah, there's nothing special about the ioun animations except I personally remove them from helmets and so I had them available. The nice part is once this is set up, it's extremely easy to swap BAM's into each animation's VVC and pick something that's visually appealing to you.

I see I got back another 500 kb file size allowance since I last posted, so here's an alternative where the 'ioun stone' orbits the character's selection circle instead of overhead. The true fiddly part of all this is selecting animations that don't overlap too much with each other, and don't overwhelm the sprite when several of them are active at once.

 

Spoiler

Ioun stone around selection circle instead of overhead.

In my previous images you can see I currently have Protection from Missiles as a red overhead ioun anim, and Non-Detection as a black ioun anim. But it'd be an option to shift them to this "foot" ioun version. The main reason I didn't do that is the foot version is a little harder to spot when there are other protections up.

Far right image shows the green foot ioun, but also the big blue Spell Shield, my (customized transparent) Fire Shield, and the swirling gold Greater Spell Deflection. In game you can still see the foot ioun, but it might take a couple of seconds real time to be sure. Especially if there's also cloudkills, fireballs, etc. going off. So you're giving SCS mages a couple of extra seconds to contingency you. Anyway, the point is this becomes a matter of taste.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 9, 2021 by DavidNYC
Moved images offsite to imgur

[DavidNYC]

Hi @FixTesteR, ha, it would be overwhelming to list all the changes I've made over about 3 years as I play on and off. I play few games in general and I prefer to go very deep in a handful of them like BG2EE rather than play new ones. For better or for worse.

Off the top of my head, a couple of points about my playstyle:

• My OCD way of playing is game over if ANY character dies. I greatly prefer playing with a party of 4 or 5 over playing solo. Anyone in the party dies, that's it. This is for reasons of fun, and I'm fully aware of the benefits of a solo run. I like doing every quest and am in no way trying to speed run, I want to beat every encounter.

• Only rest at inns and strongholds, with a couple of non-optional exceptions. I change the .ARE flags to prevent resting in dungeons or indoors, and outdoors I either disallow rest or I crank up the wandering monsters to 100%. I even replace the wandering monsters with versions that award 0 xp so there's no xp farming. This is EXACTLY the type of change a normal person would impose simply by restricting where they rest. But I like it when the option is physically taken away.

• One fun mod I created lets me swap in NPC's at will and do their side quests, get their dialogues, etc. I start by creating a party of 5 with my desired set up, and then as I meet each NPC in game, they're available to swap in and out. E.g. my PC #2 is a fighter-thief or whatever, and he can start as Minsc, then I swap in Edwin, then Rasaad, then back to Minsc, etc. My 5 PC's never change, #2 is always the same fighter-thief, I'm simply changing #2's name, 'death variable', override script and soundset. So I have the benefits of a customized party while still getting all the NPC interactions and quests.

• One example of an anti-cheese tweak is what I call "Door Bumping". We all know how one or two invisible PC's can block a door while the rest of the party hangs back and slaughters them with ranged weapons. Once again, a normal challenge run player would simply disallow that tactic. But I like to make it impossible. In each PC's script, there's a block that detects if the PC is invisible and directly next to an enemy for more than 6 seconds while combat is happening (i.e. my buddies are already shooting arrows at the enemy and he's clearly trying to get past me). After 6 seconds of this, I "force" that enemy to instantly cast a Wing Buffett effect on me (same as Dragon Wing Buffet ) that pushes me well out of the way. This works like a charm and is funny in practice. I can have 4 invisible PC's jammed up against a door vs., say, a troll who can see my 5th PC standing 10' away shooting him a bow. That troll will "door bump" them all out of the way within 1 or 2 rounds.

Gotta go now, I'll check back in.

[Jarno Mikkola]

20 minutes ago, DavidNYC said:

Only rest at inns and strongholds, with a couple of non-optional exceptions.

Do you have a list of the non-optional exceptions ? Cause it would help me to know. It's OK if you don't, there's no need to bother with it if you don't. There's a pretty good area list here that has some description for each areas.

[subtledoctor]

I like the "ioun stone at feet" thing! Though I guess it can make it hard to spot. In any event if this were to be a mod, it would be simple to remove the ioun stone animations from actual ioun stones, it would be optional after all.

I'm curious, did you also disable the normal animations? In my game I have revised Non-Detection, and I just noticed that it creates the big blue bubble, probably because I added an opcode 205 effect and I guess that animation is hard-coded to opcode 205? It's super annoying because it is exactly the opposite of what Non-Detection should look like.  I also had the "shimmering ground" vanilla spell shield effect when casting Haste, because I set Haste and Slow up to cancel each other rather than replace each other, via sectype removal. 

I managed to disable the Haste/Slow animation, I suppose I need to do the same thing for Non-Detection/opcode 205. But it would be super great to have a single mod that makes all of these animation adjustments, and it looks like you have a great start to that! I like that the blue bubble is Spell Shield, since visually it sits outside the other animations and seems to protect them. I wonder if Dispelling Screen should use a similar bubble, in a different color? (White?)

I like the different colors of the different Deflections... though, my mod sets them so that if you cast Greater Deflection, it actually gives you all three at the same time. Three versions of the same animation in different colors might look... muddled.

How did you come up with the colors for the Deflections? I wonder if it's worth trying to systematize it. To me green says "novice" or "introductory" and gold says "the best." Also, in some of my mods I use purple for more high-level magic, since purple seems like a weird, arcane color to me. E.g. I like the progression of PfNW (green)->PfMW (blue)->Abs. Immunity (pink). Just throwing out random thoughts though, it's not a knock against what you've already done.

I'm excited about this - great work! I'm about top publish some major updates to my mods (including a game-wide 5E spellcasting conversion), which will inevitably lead me to reinstall and start a new game. I'd love to have this included when I reinstall...

Edited March 1, 2021 by subtledoctor