Imprisonment item duplication

[gatperdut]

Anomen had Flail of Ages and a few containers in his inventory when he got imprisoned by Azamantes, and those things got transfered to mainchar. When Anomen was released through Freedom, he still had those items, effectively duplicating them. Mainchar was forced to drop some items on the ground because of lack of inventory space, in case it's relevant. 

Edited February 8 by gatperdut

[gatperdut]

Something I just remembered: Azamantes used his Timestop to cast Imprisonment on Anomen twice, which is both a waste and possibly the cause for this? 

[DavidW]

That's weird (the duplication, not the double Imprisonment). No idea how that could happen. It might be a core engine issue.

[Jarno Mikkola]

44 minutes ago, DavidW said:

That's weird (the duplication, not the double Imprisonment). No idea how that could happen. It might be a core engine issue.

The flail heads might be critical items until the quest is done. Which would drop/move them to the player characters inventory.

[DavidW]

Right, but that wouldn't explain duplication. All I do in the imprisonment phase is force-join them into the party again. (Not that it's impossible that has weird consequences, to be sure.)

 

[boof]

Quest items get duplicated when someone gets imprisoned twice during time stop. You can duplicate entire bags of holding if I remember correctly.

Edited February 9 by boof

[gatperdut]

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

All I do in the imprisonment phase is force-join them into the party again.

Not sure that's what happened. For an Imprisonment on mainchar the portrait stayed (after a brief flicker) but when cast on Anomen the portrait was gone until I cast Freedom. Then he had his normal "let's form a group again" dialogue upon talking to him. 

[DavidW]

I might be misremembering, maybe it's when they return that they force-join. In which case the bug is even weirder.

[gatperdut]

Anomen certainly didn't automatically rejoin. Had to talk to him. 

[jmerry]

2 hours ago, boof said:

Quest items get duplicated when someone gets imprisoned twice during time stop. You can duplicate entire bags of holding if I remember correctly.

Which is less interesting than it sounds; while the bag item is duplicated, the contents aren't - they still point to the same .STO, so the bags are just portals to each other.

When a character leaves the party, any critical items they were carrying (which includes the Flail of Ages and all containers) are removed from their inventory and sent to player 1. Apparently, trying to process this twice in the same tick for the same character leads to the items being sent twice, because the game hasn't updated that they're not in the inventory anymore.

Why does a double Imprisonment in a Time Stop trigger this? Imprisonment has a projectile, so it doesn't land during the Time Stop. But it's touch-range, so there's basically no travel time; that mage walks right up to you before casting, and then casts their next spell without any further movement. So both spells land at exactly the same time, and the bug happens.

What can be done to avoid this? Tweaking mage AI so it doesn't cast Imprisonment twice on the same target during a Time Stop - after all, it's not only what triggers the bug, it's also obviously dumb.

[DavidW]

That's helpful, thanks.

AI is already supposed to be tweaked that way, but obviously it's broken. (It's somewhat harder to do than it looks.)

[boof]

15 hours ago, jmerry said:

Which is less interesting than it sounds; while the bag item is duplicated, the contents aren't - they still point to the same .STO, so the bags are just portals to each other.

Interesting, I never really explored the bug further after confirming it, so I didn't know that.

 

15 hours ago, jmerry said:

Tweaking mage AI so it doesn't cast Imprisonment twice on the same target during a Time Stop - after all, it's not only what triggers the bug, it's also obviously dum

Maybe try and do something similar to summons and death spell during time stop. I like my summons, but feel dirty when I see a lich cast 3 death spells during his time stops on my one mordenkainen sword.

[DavidW]

Again, this is harder to do than it looks, but I’ll have a look.

[Galactygon]

You can change the specific.ids of the caster temporarily during time stop (i.e. DW_TIME_STOP) since that has no consequence (caster doesn't die nor interact with allies during a time stop) and then cast a helper MYSPELL.spl onto a creature with opcode 100 (protection from IDS entry) just after the Imprisonment is cast i.e.

Spell(Target,WIZARD_IMPRISONMENT)
ReallyForceSpellRES("MYSPELL",Target)

to prevent the target from being targeted while the caster is inside a time stop.

[DavidW]

That’s roughly what I do (using a spellstate rather than a specifics).