Planning and Collaboration for a Teleport Spell Mod

[Endarire]

TELEPORT SPELL MOD FOR EET - PLANNING

Forenotes

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Edited September 21, 2020 by Endarire

[subtledoctor]

This is a 2E game, what is that 3E nonsense?? I demand there be a non-trivial chance that the teleporter winds up in solid earth 30 feet below the destination and instantly and irrevocably dies.

[lynx]

- restoring the slot/scroll on failure is cheesy

- what coordinates would you warp to?

- I doubt it can be done without exe hacks

[Endarire]

@lynx
As mentioned above, you would warp to the same place you would arrive had you walked to that destination.  This is very intentionally mimicking the functionality of walking there, but without encounters and with a travel time of 0.

Note that the spell is refunded for some purposes, not merely because you were disrupted while casting.  The refund is there because simply being told, "You can't use this spell you cast when you don't know why" with no mercy is just not fun.

@subtledoctor
Tell me your main character's name so that, if the caster is named that, he alone suffers the pain you desired for him.

EVERYONE
I'm more interested in getting the specific area codes of blacklisted areas and vendor NPC IDs who sell Teleport scrolls.  Also, what other areas should be blacklisted for teleport use due to them being extraplanar or likely game/plot-breaking if warped out of or to?

Thankee!

Edited September 21, 2020 by Endarire

[lynx]

Areas have several entrances though, even if you had access to the world map.

[Endarire]

@lynx
I understand this.  That's why I said you'd arrive as if you had walked there.  To clarify, I meant walked there from your current pre-teleport location.

[lynx]

In bg1 there are several links between areas, so it could depend on which edge you started travelling from.

[Jarno Mikkola]

9 hours ago, Endarire said:

Tell me your main character's name so that, if the caster is named that, he alone suffers the pain you desired for him

Thing is, I have sevear doubts you can do that in this engine. Hmm, so if you can, do so with the "Eeg" character.

[DavidW]

22 hours ago, Jarno Mikkola said:

Thing is, I have sevear doubts you can do that in this engine. Hmm, so if you can, do so with the "Eeg" character.

You can detect the main character's name: use the Charname() trigger. (The game uses it to get Drizzt to attack you if your character is also called 'Drizzt'.)

[lynx]

Nice! Didn't know about that one.

Anyway, I think this mod started at the wrong stage — areas to exclude can be figured out eventually, but without a technical proof-of-concept showing the mod is feasible in the first place, asking for areas is a bit moot.

[DavidW]

At the technical level, the simplest way to do this is by script and dialog. Teleport just summons an invisible creature that initiates dialog. Use the dialog options to select where you teleport to and to control what options are available and whether you're allowed to do it at all. Implement teleportation to an area via an area-specific cutscene called from the dialog, and put the special effects into that cutscene. That's fairly easy to implement. It would obviously be cooler to have a graphical select option but it would be radically harder to do (lots of UI editing at the least, possibly EXE changes.)

That said, I think the problems of breaking the plot are fairly severe. You have to lock down quite a few areas, with not very much in the way of in-game justification, in order to avoid messing with the whole leave-and-return structure of chapters 4-5. (A party who can teleport doesn't really have any reason to accept the underdark-vs-Saemon dilemma at the end of chapter 4.) And it would be quite difficult to deal with the various forced random encounters that the game (and probably also some mods) triggers from time to time.

[Endarire]

@DavidW
I also considered the 'warp via dialog' situation, but vastly preferred what I proposed as it seemed like a more elegant solution.  In terms of scope, how easily implemented is my solution of changing the map travel times to 0, avoiding all encounters, 'fast traveling' to the location, then returning things to normal post-warp?

Plot-wise, I assumed chapters 4 and 5 had ample justification to prevent warping.  Spellhold Isle probably has some sort of 'anti warp field' to prevent stray mages from jumping in and out.  Chapter 5 is in the Underdark where long-range teleportation effects, by canon, don't work.  ([url=https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Faerzress]Faerzress[/url].)  Again, I chose the blacklist teleport locations for good reason due to plot or technical reasons.

[DavidW]

3 hours ago, Endarire said:

In terms of scope, how easily implemented is my solution of changing the map travel times to 0, avoiding all encounters, 'fast traveling' to the location, then returning things to normal post-warp?

Impossible without engine hacks, I *think*. (If there’s an ingame way to edit travel times, I don’t know it, though it’s not something I’ve looked for extensively.)

If you’re set on this strategy, I agree with Lynx: do a technical proof-of-concept before worrying about fine details.