Last call for SCS v32 fixes

[DavidW]

I’m afraid I’m not very likely to spend time coding for LoB - I’ve never played it and have only the vaguest conception of how it works. Ultimately, brute-force rescaling of creature abilities is always going to generate a bunch of anomalies.

That said, I can probably flag the rats as LoB-immune easily enough in this particular case.

[AnonymousHero]

Plantar behaves strangely (v32rc8)

1. If there are no enemies on screen, just after being summoned, any movement command given to the Planetar causes it to move for about 1 second, but then stop. The same thing happens if you direct it to cast a spell, but the 'interruption' may  seems to coincide with end-of-round (or something similar) since it sometimes casts OK and sometimes gets 'interrupted' mid-cast.
2. While in combat, the Planetar will attempt to move within Touch range of the PC (a True Neutral in this case) and cast Holy Word. This is a bit strange:
   1. Holy Word is an AoE spell, so there's no need to move to the PC (and why would it choose the PC?)
   2. It does this even if it has a Globe of Blades up... which could prove *fatal* to the PC unless the 'Blade Barrier doesn't hurt friendly/neutral' component is installed.
3. Actually maybe nr. 2 is an alignment problem. The Planetar will actually also cast Chaos on the PC (I've attached a screenshot)

 

Edited January 30, 2019 by AnonymousHero

[Guest ktgrey]

On Windows, BG2 2.5.16.6, SCS v32 R8 + Ascension + Tweaks Anthology:

1. Planetars are hard to control. Trying to make them go anywhere requires lots of clicks since their script takes over every second and cancels the move command. They also cast Holy Word and Chaos at party members when no enemies are around. On v31, they were totally controllable, but didn't cast spells on their own.

2. If I cast Mordenkainen's Sword and then hit it with Magic Missile or even Sunfire, the sword attacks me even though it stays green. I can move it away, and it obeys, but once it reaches the destination it comes back to fight me which is a pretty amusing mental image.

3. Casting Improved Alacrity doesn't do anything. I can see the spell being queued up on the portrait (if my aura was on cooldown), but then it disappears and nothing happens; no cast animation, no spell cast message, the spell is still there in the bar afterwards. I have the priest/mage innate HLAs component. This was working fine for me in v31. I have no 9th level spells written to book, but if I go to the spell book and start clicking on where the icons would be, I hear the same sound and see the same animation as if I was memorizing spells, though nothing shows up in my one empty slot. There are 7 blank icons like this, then if I move the mouse to where the 8th icon would be and click, then nothing happens. Summon Planetar works fine.

4. Sometimes monster abilities are duplicated. I notice this most with Spell Deflection, where a monster casts a ton of Spell Deflections all at the same time, and I saw someone report this elsewhere too. This happened on v31. On v32, this still happens, but I also ran into a ghast (or mummy, or some other undead monster) in the Unseeing Eye quest who had super poison: every time the poison ticks, it hits 7 times for 1 damage each (so it was probably 7 separate instances of poison effect applied at once). Same thing with Sea Zombie Lord and also maybe 1-2 other monsters.

5. On one occasion, went down the stairs in De'Arnise keep and ten or so trolls suddenly spawned around the staircase. This happened every time after saving and reloading, fortunately I could get away with invisibility. Also ran into something similar after killing the Kuo-Toa Prince in the Underdark where on the way out, I was ambushed by what seemed like more Kuo-Toa than should be right. They were also super fast, and chased a boots of speed solo char all the way into the Ust Natha tavern (where's the war parties when you need them?).

6. When fighting either the mage or the lich that you release from the dome in the Underdark, I ran out of sight. The mage proceeded to cast Summon Nishruu and then, IIRC, Summon Fiend and got a Cornugon. They proceeded to fight each other, don't remember clearly who was attacking who, but I think the mage cast attack spells.

7. After completing Spellhold with the "party loses items" components, the # of items in stacks is changed so I went from 40 arrows of dispelling to 8 or so and lost a bunch of potions of extra healing as well. All the items I noticed this happening to were equipped or in quick item slot. This might be related to the tweak that increases stack sizes, but I only bought one stack of arrows of dispelling. This was also reported at https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/63409/getting-my-items-back-after-spellhold-scs-spoilers I also noticed that the tweak-created versions of ring of protection +1 and cloak of protection +1, that don't grant ac and thus can stack with each other and magical armor, were not removed and stayed equipped, but that might be out of scope.

8. This one might not be a bug but I was hit by a Beholder Anti-Magic Ray, while Spell Shield was up and this had the result "Spell Ineffective". I was under the impression the ray and spell shield were supposed to cancel each other out, but I still had the spell shield afterwards.

[Guest ktgrey]

Forgot to mention that ordering the Planetar to cast Globe of Blades does nothing, the same way how ordering the PC to cast Improved Alacrity does nothing.

[AnonymousHero]

Heh, what timing ktgrey! Just posted about the exact same weirdness with the Planetar :).

[Guest ktgrey]

Yeah, I was pretty surprised at that timing too.

One last comment: the weird behavior with the spell book, with the 7 dummy spells, might be because after running into the Improved Alacrity bug, I tried uninstalling the priest/mage HLAs component, but this just caused me to lose Improved Alacrity and Summon Planetar (spells weren't displayed in the book for memorization). I then reinstalled the component, and it was after this that I discovered the dummy 9th level spells. So that might not been there in the original installation.

[Jarno Mikkola]

49 minutes ago, AnonymousHero said:

Heh, what timing ktgrey! Just posted about the exact same weirdness with the Planetar :).

If either one of you wants to find out what the creature is up to, just install the LStest tool to the game, load a save game and summon the Planetar, and see what the main character says of which scripts are ran... and then open up the scripts with Near Infinity for example and copy-paste the blocks in question and then  you can uninstall the tool mod.

It technically breaks the game, as the in-game cinematics break, as the tool affects the main char... until you uninstall it, but such is debugging.

Edited January 30, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[Guest ktgrey]

I saw quite a few scripts being run but the two that were running the most were PLANGOOD 17 and DW#MG27 34: https://pastebin.com/KyX8WjnC

I also saw two AR2500 blocks, 10 and 101, but one is for drow weapons disintegrating and the other is for summoning Rillifane. Some other scripts occasionally ran, but I tried moving the Planetar back and forth repeatedly and the others were infrequent enough that I didn't think they could be the cause. Mostly it was just those two getting spammed like crazy.

[DavidW]

Don't worry with diagnosis, I understand this bug.

[Guest Macnube]

6 hours ago, Guest ktgrey said:

 

2. If I cast Mordenkainen's Sword and then hit it with Magic Missile or even Sunfire, the sword attacks me even though it stays green. I can move it away, and it obeys, but once it reaches the destination it comes back to fight me which is a pretty amusing mental image. 

 



 

I noticed this behavior with summoned creatures generally in my BGEE + SCS 32 r8 playthrough.

 

[Jarno Mikkola]

4 hours ago, DavidW said:

Don't worry with diagnosis, I understand this bug.

Not using this to summons:

IF
ActionListEmpty()
...

How rude of you.

[DavidW]

2 hours ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

Not using this to summons:

IF
ActionListEmpty()
...

 

Right general idea, though it’s a bit more complicated because the creature might be enemy-summoned.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Yeah, but the general idea of ActionListEmpty() is that as it's a controlled creature... its action list will be empty if it's hostile, or it's already been given an order by one of the other scripts and it will finish it, as needed, which will lead to empty action list, and then possible re-check of what to do. Not; ouh, I am going to waste everyones time and fuck all of you, just cause I, CAN(can-should, cause my script tells me to).

[DavidW]

3 minutes ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

Yeah, but the general idea of ActionListEmpty() is that as it's a controlled creature... its action list will be empty if it's hostile, or it's already been given an order by one of the other scripts and it will finish it, as needed, which will lead to empty action list, and then possible re-check of what to do. Not; ouh, I am going to waste everyones time and fuck all of you, just cause I, CAN(can-should, cause my script tells me to).

That doesn't entirely work. In enemy-AI scripting, sometimes you want one block to interrupt another (if it's higher-priority). There's a reason the game has ActionListEmpty(), after all, and doesn't just impose it all the time by default.

[Jarno Mikkola]

12 minutes ago, DavidW said:

That doesn't entirely work. In enemy-AI scripting, sometimes you want one block to interrupt another (if it's higher-priority). There's a reason the game has ActionListEmpty(), after all, and doesn't just impose it all the time by default.

Yeah, but if the player assigns the creature to cast a spell, you don't want to interrupt it, as it will be lost. If you want to make higher priority calls, you put it on a higher script file, and to priority position on that script. .. I know all of this*.

And yes, the "how rude of you"... was a little bit of a joke. Don't take it as a real criticism... *I don't know too much of your struggles with it, just slightly enough for me.

But yes, I would pertain that on a summoned creatures, even the override script should be pasted with the ActionListEmpty() -conditions. Well, for all the actions that do not involve the loss of the creatures control, like for a demon seeing a devil, efreets and djinns(yes, a genie) seeing each other, etc.

And yes, this is magically summoned creatures from spells. The Demons and other creatures that are located in the maps already or plot included, should not get included into that list.