IWDification and OlvynChuru's Spell Tool

[Endarire]

Greetings, @DavidW!

OlvynChuru recently released this tool to easily avoid the 50 spells per type (arcane/divine) per spell level.  Since this tool only works for EE games, my request is to use this tool on IWDification and upload a new version that works with this tool for EE- and EET-specific installs.  May we get this?

Thankee!

[DavidW]

No.

It's an extremely clever tool but it's clearly still a bit work-in-progress. But more importantly, there is plenty of room in the standard SPWI/SPPR space for the IWD spells, as demonstrated by the fact that IWDEE itself has them all present there. I can see that if you want to use a huge number of spell mods it would be helpful for some of them to use a tool like this, but IWDification just isn't a good choice for it. Among the reasons: you will break any extant mod that looks for the IWD spells via spell.ids (SCS, for one.) The amount of work required to fix mods to allow for that, and the number of bugs that would inevitably arise along the way, dwarf the advantages for what is a relatively edge-case scenario, especially as OlvynChuru's own mod is using this tool.

(IWDification is more @CamDawg's baby than mine these days, but I strongly suspect I speak for him too.)

[Jarno Mikkola]

On 10/22/2020 at 9:45 AM, Endarire said:

Since this tool only works for EE games,

It can be separated into a component that installs the spells by that definition, and since the IWDification can have different components, it can do this... easily. If the code is submitted by somebody that undestands the active chemical combounds of both mods. Figuratively.

Now, what is needed is to have someone that has that info.

The whole thing with ADD_SPELL is to have the common WIZARD_x_y identified as a spwi*number* in the spell.ids and SCS can use that, and does ...and thus not breaking compatibility with mods that use it, so OlvynChuru's tool probably can give that info too, cause it kinda needs to to not break spell casting books, scrolls etc.

[CamDawg]

On 10/24/2020 at 5:38 AM, DavidW said:

No.

It's an extremely clever tool but it's clearly still a bit work-in-progress. But more importantly, there is plenty of room in the standard SPWI/SPPR space for the IWD spells, as demonstrated by the fact that IWDEE itself has them all present there. I can see that if you want to use a huge number of spell mods it would be helpful for some of them to use a tool like this, but IWDification just isn't a good choice for it. Among the reasons: you will break any extant mod that looks for the IWD spells via spell.ids (SCS, for one.) The amount of work required to fix mods to allow for that, and the number of bugs that would inevitably arise along the way, dwarf the advantages for what is a relatively edge-case scenario, especially as OlvynChuru's own mod is using this tool.

(IWDification is more @CamDawg's baby than mine these days, but I strongly suspect I speak for him too.)

For the record: yes, I am in agreement.

[subtledoctor]

Moreover, that tool can break the capability of other mods to perform correctly. As an example that has already cropped up, let’s say a mod wants to find “all spells available to sorcerers.” There’s no way to do that if Olvynchuru’s tool were used. It needs to somehow standardize and log which spells have been affected by it, creating a method that can easily replace what can now be done with a simple regexp search for “spwi[1-9][0-5][0-9]”