Tweaking bdsum00.BCS to make summons follow to other areas

[Guest TheOrderOfTheStick]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to make summons follow me when changing areas or entering places. I tried adding the flag "Moving between areas" to the creature, but it doesn't work.

Is changing/adding to their script the way to go? I found some script commands in IESDP that could maybe do it, but I'm not sure.

[lynx]

That bit that you mention is only for following into subareas. To move between main (master) areas, the creatures need to be stored. You need MakeGlobal and MoveGlobal*, but there's no way to undo it in the original (gemrb has UnmakeGlobal), so your save files will grow a bit faster.

I'm pretty sure this has been done before too (djinn mod from Argent?).

[Skye]

As lynx said, the only way to do this is to make them a global object (which will register them in the GAM file) and then either convert them to a familiar (change EA to FAMILIAR and then call AddFamiliar) or use MoveGlobalObject to move them around manually via BALDUR*.BCS. Doing this for all summons is not really what you want though and you'd probably need to have unique script names for each of them.

Maybe the alternative is to have the creatures increase a global when spawned and decrease it when they die and then resummon them via script when you change areas. But then you'd also have to track the remaining summon time via global counters and they'd get fully healed between areas, so it's not as organic.

In other words, it's worth doing for a particular special summon or a new familiar, but if you want to do this for all summons in the game, things get messy.

[Guest TheOrderOfTheStick]

Thanks for the answers! 

 

So adding to the summons scripts to make them follow into subareas is pretty feasable, I'll try that first 

Do you know what the flag "Moving between areas" does?