Best way to simulate potion spoilage? (BGEE)

[dbianco87]

I'm working on a summon that makes a certain number of special health potions every day.

These potions are nearly identical to the normal health potions that you find throughout the game, however I think for game balance reasons it would be better if they expire/spoil on a successful rest to discourage stockpiling.

Anyone have a good method for executing this in a script?  Should I add it to the player 1 script or is there a better way?  I would prefer a less invasive so as to prevent compatibility issues with other mods. 

I have made a regular, spoiled, and rancid version of the item.

[Awachi]

Created weapons have timers to remove them, but that works great because they're also unequipable. A script run to remove all X items seems almost as simple. 

Edited April 10, 2022 by Awachi

[jmerry]

You can do this directly in the item. Look up the Cloak of the Stars for how it works.

It does have some issues if you put the item in a container once you've created it; the condition for getting rid of it isn't tested until you pull it out.

[subtledoctor]

This is not what you want to hear, but honestly, I've moved toward abstracting away from things like this. Look at the Goodberry spell as the most direct example of what you want to do, but also think about what the goodberry spells does: it makes some berries, and then you have to click on your character in various ways to eat those berries. Do you have to actively tell your character to eat anything else in the game? No, it is implied. Potions are the only thing you consume, and that only because they are meant to be consumed in the thick of combat. So for the Goodberry spell, I just have it directly apply the effects of the Goodberries upon casting the spell, removing the need to

1. Go into your inventory
2. Move the berries to the right party member
3. Go to their inventory
4. Move the berries to a quickslot
5. Go to the main screen
6. Use the berries' quickslot
7. Go to the inventory screen
8. Put whatever used to be in that quickslot back in the quickslot

That's exhausting! I just skip it and apply the effect directly through the spell. Might make senses here, too...

[temnix]

By this logic, subtledoctor, items shouldn't exist at all. Or anything else. Too much trouble. This is the sort of streamlining that has eroded the interactive dimension of these games and many others, and players' imaginations alongside. What we need is more original items and more buttons, dialogues and ways of using items.

To the OP: as the others said, it is possible to make items disappear on their own, if you create them by an application of a spell with a temporary Create inventory item effect, but only if they are in the inventory at the time they are supposed to vanish. If the player drops them on the ground before the X hour, he can pick them up later. You want them to be gone or converted on rest? Add a simple check to the top of BALDUR.BCS and BALDUR25.BCS, followed by Continue().

[Graion Dilach]

@subtledoctor Lava's Below and Below Inn in IWDEE has a quest which involves delivering goodberries, FYI.

[subtledoctor]

On 4/11/2022 at 2:37 PM, temnix said:

By this logic, subtledoctor, items shouldn't exist at all. Or anything else.

Wat?

On 4/11/2022 at 2:37 PM, temnix said:

This is the sort of streamlining that has eroded the interactive dimension of these games and many others, and players' imaginations alongside. What we need is more original items and more buttons, dialogues and ways of using items.

Nonsense. Look, when I play something like Oblivion or FNV, I play with hardcore mode/mods that require eating and drinking. But those games are designed for that, they are full of food and water that you can interact with. Baldur's Gate is quite different. There is no place in these game in which you eat. There are potions, but the only reason they are individually usable is because they are designed for tactical mid-combat use. There are alcoholic drinks, but they are only drinkable in the context of gathering rumors in an inn. You don't buy the bottle, move it to your inventory, move it to a quickslot, activate it, etc. This is not me arguing in favor of anything; it is just how the game was designed lo those many decades ago. In this context, if you wanted to add the "Create Food and Water" spell, you wouldn't literally create inventory items for roast hams and loaves of bread and jugs of water, and then force the user to click each on three times to get the benefit of the spell. You would just create a spell that grants the imagined benefits of a home-cooked meal. You would likely give that spell a long casting time and apply the "non-combat only" flag.

In this context, Goodberries in its unmodded form is a stupid spell. I replaced it with a better version, with the "non-combat only" flag and applying the benefits directly.*

You want to add more clickable junk to the game and accelerate the onset of RSI, by all means do so. Note, I never said you shouldn't do that. I only said, in the context of the game as it exists right now, a mod that creates special potions might ask whether the created potions are intended to be used like existing potions, with immediate  tactical benefits in combat, or whether the created potions are more like the drinks in the inn screen, with the "drink this" part abstracted away for the benefit of a better UX.

* (Lava's Athkatlan Grounds mods have a quest that involves Goodberries, which works just fine with my mod. I can't play modded IWDEE right now because Beamdog is incompetent, so I don't know if that quest requires an actual berry in your inventory. If so, sorry not sorry, the original Goodberry spell is so brutally awful that I will not tolerate it in my game just to work with some mod's fetch quest. )

[temnix]

What you are saying, in essence, is that the game is short-changed to begin with and ought to remain that way - or become more so. But there is only one standard and universal: the three Is of immersion, imagination and involvement. This takes different forms in different worlds, but the purpose of art is to advance those participate in it to a new level of perception, which is where the story and the technical execution come together, supporting each other. The Infinity games' designers left out elements that were not essential, like eating and drinking, very likely because they had to prioritize. There are already some elements in the first BG in particular that must have required incredible effort - the recolorable creatures and equipment, for instance. The Bioware team was not very large, and they had to set priorities. This, unfortunately, left out more than food and drink - sophisticated dialogues or a more interesting and full representation of magic from the pen-and-paper game also didn't make it in. But that is hardly a badge of merit, and if modders can fill in where role-playing is missing, they should be encouraged. You want to make a game already too simple -primitive. Say, have you considered modding the Fallouts? There are drugs there: Mentats, Buffout. They also involve picking things up, moving them around. Buying them. Finding them on chest shelves and dead enemies. Clearly those are time-consuming and should be converted to charge-like abilities.

[Awachi]

This reminds me of when crafting invaded rpgs. Cromwell was decent, but Cespenar was just obnoxious. Too many top tier weapons were upgradable, making finding a new one half as exciting because you knew it probably wasn't its best version. Then NWN just went full baloney. Every other creature dropped a clump of hair or pelt or horn or ichor or whatever, so you've got a weird pantry in your backpack, hoping to stumble across a literal recipe. Sometimes dev intent is asinine and should be ignored. Games aren't religions. 

Edited April 13, 2022 by Awachi

[subtledoctor]

2 hours ago, temnix said:

What you are saying, in essence, is that the game is short-changed to begin with and ought to remain that way

Uh, no. If you go from “I’m not arguing in favor of anything” to “you are saying in essence that it ought to [etc.]” then you maybe should re-read the post before responding. Because you don’t seem to have understood it very well. 

Also I’m trying to remember the last time anyone lauded the Goodberry spell, for advancing Immersion, Imagination and Involvement.   Could make a whole game that involves nothing but rummaging through a backpack. Cut out everything except inventory management. It’d be glorious. 

Edited April 13, 2022 by subtledoctor

[jmerry]

Honestly, I'm fine with the mechanics of Goodberry - creating berries and consuming them is fine. The problem is that the spell is hilariously undertuned - half the healing of a Cure Light Wounds, but at a higher spell level. Just tweak what the berries do - say, a non-stacking slow regeneration that's good for about five HP per berry if you let it run its course. That would give the spell a niche, with a high total healing amount but only if you have the time.

There is a "food" category of items in the game; it's used for things like those healing Tree of Life nuts. And the silver apples in Dorn's ToB quest. And ... I don't think there are any others, at least in the BG series. Maybe something in SoD which I don't have. They're not really mechanically different from potions, anyway. Bottles of wine exist, but you can't drink them; they're just miscellaneous items that sit in your inventory and can be used as quest tokens or sold.

[subtledoctor]

2 hours ago, jmerry said:

The problem is that the spell is hilariously undertuned - half the healing of a Cure Light Wounds, but at a higher spell level. Just tweak what the berries do - say, a non-stacking slow regeneration that's good for about five HP per berry if you let it run its course. That would give the spell a niche, with a high total healing amount but only if you have the time.

I tried that - it still sucks. But of course it depends on what you want the spell to represent. I present players with a version that is meant to represent magic-enhanced nourishment - something you do out of combat, when you are catching a breather, sitting around a fire or while on the march between locations. I mean, are you going to cast the spell and then throw the berries away? Of course not. The point of the spell is to eat the berries; so save the player the effort and simply assume the eating in casting the spell. Same result, simpler UX. Of course there are other ways to envision the spell working, which could in turn lead to a different application and in-game interaction. That's fine too.

Goodberries is just an example meant to show that basic principle: have the mechanics of the spell encompass the intended effect of the spell. Form should follow function. Another example is Identify. Here, Bioware got it right: you don't have to cast Identify and then go into your inventory to learn about an item. You do it from the inventory screen itself, when examining an item, just tell the game "use my spell for this." Actually casting the spell - the waving arms, the faux-latin chanting, the colorful effects - is all just assumed. The engine automatically handles removing one instance from your memorized spells. Form follows function.

All of which is just to question the OP's assumptions. not to prescribe a particular course of action, because the OP has not described exactly what they intend. Just to say that, given the intent, let form follow function. And of course, given the rickety nature of this engine, there are limits to how well that can be done. It has already been mentioned that the basic plan of "create an item, after some time remove or replace the item" has some serious pitfalls. The spell effect itself cannot guarantee that the created potion will be replaced with the spoiled variant; you can start summoning invisible creatures and try to script around it, but that too can be tricky. (What if the player creates several instances of it, some time apart? And then shuffle them around the party members' inventories? In and out of Bags of Holding? How will the script know which one should be destroyed at which time?) Given that one implementation can be fallible, or maybe just longer to create, is it worth considering tweaks to the intended effect, in order to allow a simpler, more reliable version to be created, with less effort?

I don't know the answer and I shall not spout the word "ought." Just throwing out possibilities - after all discussion of the intersection of possibility and feasibility can lead to good mods being made.

Edited April 14, 2022 by subtledoctor

[temnix]

subtledoctor talks long-winded rubbish. I hope the potions are interesting and useful. Now the question I have for goodberries is whether they can be made to work with the instantaneous Caster targeting so that they don't consume a round? That's the main problem with them, that each berry takes up a round. This is a very good spell for the pen-and-paper game, and there it's not a problem to throw down a handful of these at once, or making a pie, but one berry at a time it does get a little annoying. I don't know if it's possible to use more than one item in a round even with this targeting, though.

Edited April 15, 2022 by temnix

[subtledoctor]

“Addressing the reality of how this engine works is rubbish! ...But, the reality of how this engine works does get annoying.”

I’m waiting for temnix’s mod that forces you to cast Identify in the main screen before you can use it to identify things in the inventory screen. Because, you know, immersion and involvement!

 

Edited April 15, 2022 by subtledoctor