Fireshield-type spells shouldn't play sounds or disrupt ongoing sounds

[Galactygon]

This has been my pet peeve since the early days of BGo. Even if the casting graphics and sound of the child spell is blank, the launched spell still disrupts other ongoing sounds i.e. spellcasting. It turns out the EE engine does have a fix for this! There's a flag in the special field that removes this disruption completely, even if the child spell has casting graphics and sound enabled so it should be an easy fix to go through those external .effects, preferrably with a REGEXP GLOB.

For those external effects, you want to WRITE_LONG  0x48 (THIS BOR BIT2)

You also might want to patch all items as well (i.e. Keldorn's NPSW03.itm).

Edited July 24, 2023 by Galactygon

[jmerry]

For clarity, this is a change to the EFF? The parent spell or item has an opcode 177 effect, leading to an EFF with an opcode 232 effect, leading back to the subspell with the actual damage. At least, when the fireshield is implemented that way. Some of them, such as the balor fireshield and Keldorn's sword, skip the op177 and just put the op232 in the parent resource.

[Galactygon]

Yes exactly, all EFF files using opcode 232 should be patched. Those instances of opcode 232 (cast spell on condition) should have that flag special = bit2 enabled for this behavior to take hold. Equipped items do not outsource their 232s into EFFs so the effect instances of opcode 232 on the items should be patched.

The reason those spells outsource 232s into external EFFs is because of the hardcoded  behavior that adds a protection from spell to itself which prevents those spells from being refreshable (via an opcode 321 placed in front of the effects list).

Edited July 24, 2023 by Galactygon