SR Revised V1.3.900 (2022 August 8th)

[Bartimaeus]

5 minutes ago, Satrhan said:

Thanks for looking into this. I haven't had any trouble with installing SCS before, and SRR is the only major change compared to my previous mod setup. Although this is the first time I've installed on a Windows 10 pc, maybe that has something to do with it. I'll try your suggestions and see if that makes a difference.

Yep, let me know. Windows 10 is more sensitive to install location than previous versions of Windows were (well, at least Windows 7 and before...but hardly anybody used Windows 8, so...).

[Satrhan]

Well, still don't know what it is. Tried uninstalling all mods up to SR, that didn't solve it. Tried running as admin, that didn't work. Copied the game to a different folder, that didn't help. Tried installing SCS on a clean BG2 (still in the default location), that didn't work, although the initial AI components did install without warnings this time. I'll move this to the SCS topic, can be pretty sure it isn't a SR(R) issue by now. Again, thanks for looking into it.

[Bartimaeus]

48 minutes ago, Satrhan said:

Well, still don't know what it is. Tried uninstalling all mods up to SR, that didn't solve it. Tried running as admin, that didn't work. Copied the game to a different folder, that didn't help. Tried installing SCS on a clean BG2 (still in the default location), that didn't work, although the initial AI components did install without warnings this time. I'll move this to the SCS topic, can be pretty sure it isn't a SR(R) issue by now. Again, thanks for looking into it.

If you're using the latest versions of the EEs, it's also possible that SCS simply hasn't caught up to it yet - a number of mods are having problems and unfortunately need to be updated to work with...2.6, I think it is? But I don't know for certain - I pretty unabashedly prefer the original games, .

Edited July 25, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Salk]

Bartimaeus,

could it be that the description for Hold Person and Hold Animal incorrectly reports the area of effect to be the target and enemies within 5 ft while it should be 4 ft instead?

The Hold projectile shows an area of 64 which seems to be consistent with the 4 ft correction made in the EE spell description.

Edited July 26, 2021 by Salk

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, Salk said:

Bartimaeus,

could it be that the description for Hold Person and Hold Animal incorrectly reports the area of effect to be the target and enemies within 5 ft while it should be 4 ft instead?

The Hold projectile shows an area of 64 which seems to be consistent with the 4 ft correction made in the EE spell description.

The only projectile size that can be reliably ascertained based off of the vanilla game is that 30' (aka 15' radius) is 256 - I investigated a number of other projectile sizes and found them too inconsistent in order to draw any reliable conclusions. Furthermore, it should be noted that SR notes sizes as double what they are in the vanilla games (Enhanced or not) - 15' in a vanilla game is the same as 30' in the SR descriptions. I'm not a hundred percent why SR does this. In other words, that EE-listed size of "4-ft" (actually 3.75?) for Hold Person would be exactly 7.5' in SR numbers. On a side-note, Hold Person has a size of 42 in SR, not 64...and it's long been my opinion that Hold spells should actually have a size of 10' (85).

These are official EE numbers for sizes...let me know if they make any sense to you:

Hold 4-ft -> 64
Power Word Blind 4-ft -> 84
Fireseed 7-ft -> 126
Invisibility 10-ft -> 160
Delayed Fireball 11-ft -> 200
Skull Trap 11-ft -> 230
Glyph of Warding 12-ft -> 200
Symbols 12-ft -> 230
Various 15-ft -> 256

...Because they certainly don't to me. In contrast, SR's notation is much simpler:

5' -> 42
10' -> 85
15' -> 128
20' -> 170
25' -> 213
30' -> 256

Nice and linear. Are they correct? I'm not a hundred percent sure - these are supposedly radii (i.e. simply straight lines) and so they should scale linearly, and I feel like I remember exhaustively testing them in-game using video and screenshots to measure and make sure that they do years back, but it is possible someone knows better than I on the matter.

Edited July 26, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Salk]

I take your word for good here, my friend. 

I certainly could not move any criticisms because I most assuredly know less than you do about how projectiles areas work. I was simply reporting a discrepancy I found while comparing original BG2 and EE BG2 spells text. Most of the time they match but sometimes there are a few differences here and there.

Those EE values for sizes you presented above are the same for non EE too? They do not make much sense to me either but I wonder what the original AD&D values are... 

Cheers! 

Edited July 26, 2021 by Salk

[Satrhan]

9 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

If you're using the latest versions of the EEs, it's also possible that SCS simply hasn't caught up to it yet - a number of mods are having problems and unfortunately need to be updated to work with...2.6, I think it is? But I don't know for certain - I pretty unabashedly prefer the original games, .

I used the 2.5.something beta for the BG1 install, that should be fine I think. Maybe the BG2 install is at 2.6, I'd have to check.

Well nothing changes with the originals, that's a plus. But I wouldn't want to play without the ease of use changes Beamdog made.

[Bartimaeus]

42 minutes ago, Salk said:

I take your word for good here, my friend. 

I certainly could not move any criticisms because I most assuredly know less than you do about how projectiles areas work. I was simply reporting a discrepancy I found while comparing original BG2 and EE BG2 spells text. Most of the time they match but sometimes there are a few differences here and there.

Those EE values for sizes you presented above are the same for non EE too? They do not make much sense to me either but I wonder what the original AD&D values are... 

Cheers! 

I believe they are. As for AD&D, I imagine that it's a very difficult thing to compare - heck, even a Fireball is apparently supposed to be a 20' radius in 2E...but how exactly that would translate to in-game would be a complete mystery to me (in terms of character size and whether a "foot" in these games is the same as a foot in AD&D...). To me, the 256 size (which is used dozens of times in the vanilla games) is the only consistently used size, and so it makes the most sense to work off of that, especially given everyone knows just about perfectly what the radius of a fireball and the like is.

@Satrhan Hope you're able to figure it out. If your BG2 game is 2.6, it might be worth temporarily downgrading for the time being until it's figured out (especially since IIRC, they didn't even make that many notable changes for most players in 2.6 anyways?).

[subtledoctor]

4 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Furthermore, it should be noted that SR notes sizes as double what they are in the vanilla games (Enhanced or not) - 15' in a vanilla game is the same as 30' in the SR descriptions. I'm not a hundred percent why SR does this.

I think it’s because one of the things Demi wanted to do was clean up spell descriptions and make them more consistent. I have to say, I think it makes more sense. The descriptions simply denote “Area of Effect;” while the most correct way to describe this would be in square feet, if you are going to use linear units then diameter communicates the size better than radius.

[Bartimaeus]

52 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

I think it’s because one of the things Demi wanted to do was clean up spell descriptions and make them more consistent. I have to say, I think it makes more sense. The descriptions simply denote “Area of Effect;” while the most correct way to describe this would be in square feet, if you are going to use linear units then diameter communicates the size better than radius.

Yeah, I prefer the doubled up numbers as well...but spell descriptions still say "radius" even though they should probably more accurately say "diameter" (not just in the "Area of Effect" field, but also sometimes in descriptions themselves, e.g. Remove Fear), but I've kind of made my peace with it - especially because I have no desire to list any AoE sizes as 2.5', 7.5', or 12.5'. Anyways, ultimately my goal is that projectile sizes are consistent to the gold standard fireball - if you know the size of a fireball at 30', then you should be able to roughly mentally measure half of it at 15' for something else, and as best I can tell, the numbers I have stay true to that.

Edited July 26, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Guest Raimn]

Hallo all,

thank you for all your hard work on this mod. Most of the changes quiet useful and well thought out, however i do have a suggestion to make. PLEASE document ALL your changes in the readme. I was not entirely amused to find out that there was a change to how the mage/priest HLAs work without being told or able to choose as I don't think that change is all that good. Furthermore your Pick Familiar function does not appear to work.

Thank you.

Best Regards,

Raimn

[FixTesteR]

Hey. I also have a question about Find Familiar. Why is it that only a protagonist can cast it? In case he's soloing? Shouldn't everyone in the party be able to cast it? Also, my protagonist bard was unable to cast it successfully, even though he had access to arcane spells. He cast it but nothing happened.

Maybe bards, being jacks of all trades, should be able to wear robes. But this is another topic :)

[Bartimaeus]

23 hours ago, Guest Raimn said:

Hallo all,

thank you for all your hard work on this mod. Most of the changes quiet useful and well thought out, however i do have a suggestion to make. PLEASE document ALL your changes in the readme. I was not entirely amused to find out that there was a change to how the mage/priest HLAs work without being told or able to choose as I don't think that change is all that good. Furthermore your Pick Familiar function does not appear to work.

Thank you.

Best Regards,

Raimn

As far as I know, no changes have been made to Find Familiar outside of tweaking each familiar's stats. What game are you playing, and is it BGT/EET?

As for the HLAs, I can only assume you refer to the fact that you can no longer cast Dragon's Breath and/or Comet 6 times in a row for every mage you have. Not a change I made, it's been in SR for a long time, but I do agree that it should be something probably noted in the readme.

8 hours ago, FixTesteR said:

Hey. I also have a question about Find Familiar. Why is it that only a protagonist can cast it? In case he's soloing? Shouldn't everyone in the party be able to cast it? Also, my protagonist bard was unable to cast it successfully, even though he had access to arcane spells. He cast it but nothing happened.

Maybe bards, being jacks of all trades, should be able to wear robes. But this is another topic

Most probably because BioWare did not want to try to handle having multiple familiars running around, plus giving familiars to established NPCs that do not have familiars would be kind of weird.

As for Familiars not working at all, I just installed a fresh copy of SRR on a BG2EE game, cast Find Familiar, and I got a Rabbit. Perhaps it's only the "pick familiar" option you can enable in settings.ini that is broken...but no, that seems to work just fine too, regardless of whether I am using a mage or bard. I will need more information.

[Guest Raimn]

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

As far as I know, no changes have been made to Find Familiar outside of tweaking each familiar's stats. What game are you playing, and is it BGT/EET?

EET, from the way I read the description, I thought one could choose the familiar freely and not that it only tweaks their stats. Oh well, there are other mods that do that.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

As for the HLAs, I can only assume you refer to the fact that you can no longer cast Dragon's Breath and/or Comet 6 times in a row for every mage you have. Not a change I made, it's been in SR for a long time, but I do agree that it should be something probably noted in the readme.

Hmm, never did that. Would that even be fun? For me it's more about having a second Improved Alacrity as a backup in case you run into something after a big fight and needing an "Oh-sh*t" button. I know vanilla good enough that that won't happen, but I'm going to play some of the big quest mods, like Shadow over Soubar for the first time now and I'm not a fan of save-scumming or similar.

Thanks for clearing that up. How complicated would it be to add a working option into the .ini for the HLA's? I'm familiar with coding but not with anything related to the Infinity Engine.

Have a good one. Best Regards,

Raimn

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, Guest Raimn said:

EET, from the way I read the description, I thought one could choose the familiar freely and not that it only tweaks their stats. Oh well, there are other mods that do that.

I used to have this note, but it seems as though I forgot to include it when I updated the readme to explain each settings.ini tweak instead of the settings.ini file doing it itself: "set to 1 to be able to pick your familiar type when using Find Familiar (NOTE: SR/R's Find Familiar spell is not installed on EET games at all due to EET radically changing how this spell works)"

I should take a look at exactly what the issue with EET's Find Familiar spell is sometime. May still not be able to fix it, but at least I'd understand the issue better.

HLAs: A bit (particularly because some spells such as the Celestials have variable durations which means each level has to be updated and that is somewhat odious), but I have implemented it in the latest GitHub repository, since this is not the first time others have asked for it - the default remains the previous implementation, where HLAs are only single pickable innate abilities. I believe SCS applies the same kind of tweak if you do not prevent it from doing so, so beware that.

Edited August 23, 2021 by Bartimaeus