[Bug report] Minor things noticed by David

[bob_veng]

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

Elemental princes are never summoned by your enemies in the unmodded game (not least because you might accidentally end up with two of them). So the designers can't have intended that you get experience for fighting enemy-summoned princes. The only function that their XP serves is that the player can summon them specifically to kill them. (In BG2EE, they won't even fight back.) It seems really unlikely that that's intentional, especially since the elemental princes are obviously clones of actually-fightable princes and it's extremely easy to see how the XP could have been left in place.

yes, after thinking a bit more, I agree that the summoned princes should never provide xp

in a hypothetical version of the game where enemies could summon an elemental prince (... and while summoned the same prince could not be summoned by anyone else), i would not mind it providing xp, unlike basically all the other summons, and would not see it as a discrepancy, but that's an imaginary scenario

[DavidW]

SCS actually has enemies summon elemental princes, as a point of interest. I don't recall if I nixed their XP, but anyway, that's a mod issue where the rules are different.

[DavidW]

Energy Blades (eneblade.itm) do slashing damage, but the spell description (and, in BG2EE, the item description) says they should do missile damage.

 

[DavidW]

The bears summoned by Conjure Animals (bearposu.cre) have cbear as a script (this is normally only for non-summoned bears) and lack the standard bdsum00 summons script). (Compare beargrsu.cre).

[CamDawg]

Potion of Icedust doesn't work as the projectile is enemy-only.

[DavidW]

17 hours ago, CamDawg said:

Potion of Icedust doesn't work as the projectile is enemy-only.

Are you David? Didn't think so.

Still, I suppose I've noticed it now.

[CamDawg]

22 minutes ago, DavidW said:

Still, I suppose I've noticed it now.

The system works!

[CamDawg]

Alright, caught up with everything in the thread with this commit, as well as a followup (and spectacularly egregious) bug I noted for the Potion of Icedust.

Potion of Icedust is a bit of a mess. I added a fire protection icon and the buff spellstate to bring it in line with fire resistance potions, but there are still some uncertainties. It was originally enemy-only, but I changed this to affect everyone (enemies and allies) in its AoE, because the description says the effects apply to 'all'. The effects are also subject to MR, which seems wrong (most buffs bypass MR), but I left it alone for now.

[DavidW]

Exaltation (either the Tyr innate or the IWD spell) and Greater Restoration don't remove the 'confusion' icon when they remove confusion.

[CamDawg]

This is handled by #curecon as part of this... mess.

[polytope]

An EE engine specific issue that you may already be aware of @DavidW which I learnt about from Bubb is that the repulsion opcode 235 fails if called from a spell which starts with the resref "SP" on targets with any positive value of magic resistance, including SPIN695 named DRAGON_WING_BUFFET (which is perhaps the most common source of knockbacks for the player to worry about).

Is it a better fix to change SPIN695 to have no projectile or direct effects, but cast via 146 a secondary shell spell with AoE projectile and a different prefix to apply the actual effects of damage + unconsciousness + repulsion (I haven't actually checked whether that will work, I'm not 100% sure that the engine won't consider the original spell the source).

Or should it be handled on the level of scriptwriters to assign a differently labelled wing buffet ability to dragons? I've noticed SCS dragons use the original wing buffet in their scripts.

Meh, it's no difference to me, the couple of dragons I've designed apply the repulsion as an on-hit effect of their offhand weapon (blunt and double claw base damage, an approximation of their tail slap), but it arguably weakens them if they can't use it as a ranged AoE (even if it's more believable)

[Luke]

8 hours ago, polytope said:

Is it a better fix to change SPIN695 to have no projectile or direct effects, but cast via 146 a secondary shell spell with AoE projectile and a different prefix to apply the actual effects of damage + unconsciousness + repulsion

Why are you suggesting the main file should use `projectile=1|None` and the shell file should instead use the real projectile...? I mean, CLERIC_HOLD_PERSON ("sppr208.spl") also requires you to target a specific creature (`ability_target=1|Living actor`) while using an AoE projectile ("hold.pro")... On reflection, I don't think it really matters (since we're not using op146*p2=2, op326, op333 + the spl in question is supposed to bypass all MR checks)... just wanted to know whether I'm missing something or not...

Moreover, I think the AoE projectile should be coded as a cone projectile rather than a traditional AoE projectile (only targets facing the dragon should be affected, not also those staying behind...)

Edited July 28, 2022 by Luke

[polytope]

12 hours ago, Luke said:

Why are you suggesting the main file should use `projectile=1|None` and the shell file should instead use the real projectile...? I mean, CLERIC_HOLD_PERSON ("sppr208.spl") also requires you to target a specific creature (`ability_target=1|Living actor`) while using an AoE projectile ("hold.pro")... On reflection, I don't think it really matters (since we're not using op146*p2=2, op326, op333 + the spl in question is supposed to bypass all MR checks)... just wanted to know whether I'm missing something or not...

Moreover, I think the AoE projectile should be coded as a cone projectile rather than a traditional AoE projectile (only targets facing the dragon should be affected, not also those staying behind...)

My rationale behind suggesting a shell spell isn't the target or the area (although both could be improved) but EE specific code related to the repulsion opcode (235) used in (among other things) dragon wing buffets. It will always fail (repulsion distance of zero) if the source is a file with a resref commencing with "SP-" and the target has a greater than zero magic resistance value.

Thus, by donning for instance the +5% magic resistance amulet from the Unseeing Eye quest, a character will be immune to knockback from dragon wing buffets in EE installs, it doesn't matter whether the opcode is set to bypass magic resistance in the feature block of the .spl file.

I hope that a subspell with a name starting with something other than "SP-" and a different projectile will counteract this bug. The alternative is rewriting all dragon scripts to replace SPIN695 with a renamed ability, easy enough for vanilla, but a nightmare to keep track of all modded dragon AI to say nothing of added dragons.

Edited July 29, 2022 by polytope

[DavidW]

I don’t think the replacement is such a big deal (though, if your shell trick works, even better). After all, mods-added dragons are already bugged - it’s not being introduced by FP.

[Luke]

12 hours ago, polytope said:

I hope that a subspell with a name starting with something other than "SP-"

A quick test shows the trick works fine, so we can proceed me thinks...