Spells

[FredSRichardson]

I've been working through the spell conversion business. Part of this is converting spell tables over and the other part is making sure BCS and DLG's use valid spell tokens (i.e. in SPELL.IDS). Innates are going to be trickier, so I'm not going to go near those yet and just focus on the spell caster conversion.

 

At first I tried to see if there was any way to do a direct spell table translation from iwd1 to iwd2. This is almost possible for Wizard, Druids and Cleric (with the addition of domain spells), but the Bard, Paladin and Ranger classes are more problematic. In IWD1 they each use exactly the same spells as the corresponding Mage, Cleric and Druid class whereas the spell tables for all casting classes in IWD2 can be quite distinct (specified by LISTSPLL.2DA). I'm just worried that some Bard CRE in IWD1 is going to have a BCS script that tells it to cast a un-Bard-like spell in IWD2.

 

It's actually easy enough to check which CRE's are using which spell tokens and what their classes are. This should narrow things down by a lot.

 

A more pressing issue concerns the AI scripting itself. An IWD2 party is going to have access to a whole set of nifty new spells (or domain powers or racial innate abilities) that the IWD1 translated AI scripts won't use. This is something to handle much later on, but I'll start to look into back-porting some of the AI scripts from IWD2 to the converted IWD1.

 

I thought about doing complete CRE specs via a rule file (attributes, spells, feats, skills, etc) and that still might be needed.

[FredSRichardson]

Oh shoot, another pretty amusing thing I noticed: all those cute, helpless and seemingly harmless little Svirfneblin's are suddenly quite powerful. They have the innate ability to cast blur, mirror image and invisibility on themselves and start with a +2 to WIS and DEX (-4 CHR, -2 STR), a lot of boosted saves, magic resistance. No wonder they have a +3 level adjustment. Hmm, a deep gnome monk/rogue could be a lot of fun...

 

Um, with the new engine, your evil party might want to think twice before attacking all those little Svirfneblins in Dorn's Deep...

[Guest Guest]

I don't know much about the technical part of what you're doing, but if you'd think it'd help at all I'd be willing to spend time doing busy work for this project--table conversion etc. Drop me a line if there's anything I can do that's relatively simple and involves typing and knowledge of game (vs. programming) mechanics.

 

coterie[no-space-here]songs[at-symbol-here]gmail[dot-symbol-here]com

 

EDIT: I just realized that you're probably going to get spammed relentlessly on this e-mail address. I changed it to be less machine friendly (us humans just need to replace the bracketed parts with the right thing, wink-wink).

[FredSRichardson]

I don't know much about the technical part of what you're doing, but if you'd think it'd help at all I'd be willing to spend time doing busy work for this project--table conversion etc.  Drop me a line if there's anything I can do that's relatively simple and involves typing and knowledge of game (vs. programming) mechanics.

 

coterie[no-space-here]songs[at-symbol-here]gmail[dot-symbol-here]com

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I may take you up on this very generous offer relatively soon. I'm afraid it's going to be a little while though as I have to work out some gnarly details. I'll try to keep you posted though.

 

Thanks!

 

-Fred

[FredSRichardson]

I'm beginning to think that spell tables will have to be created by hand and the spell casting scripts modified to use them. The good news is that some of the spell casting scripting is easier in IWD2 (and I'll probably copy most of this from other scripts).

 

I briefly considered re-doing all the scripting by back-porting relevent code from IWD2. It's almost tempting, but it's all too easy to under-estimate that amount of code that amounts too.

[Guest Guest]

thanks for keeping the spammers away, and seriously let me know if there's anything i can do.

[FredSRichardson]

thanks for keeping the spammers away, and seriously let me know if there's anything i can do.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

No troubles! If you register with G3 here, I can send you a PM (and you should recieve an e-mail notice when a PM is sent from here).

 

-Fred