Creature Morphology

[FredSRichardson]

Hand tweaking creatures is still a bit too tedious. I'm going to take another whack at improving the automatic conversion.

 

First a brief explanation of why the CRE conversion works the way it does now. Wes essentially creates new creatures from the originals using the number of levels the creature has and building it up like you would a PC (adding feats, skills, attributes, etc as the creature levels). This makes every creature you meet the equivalent of a tough adventurer like one of the fighters or barbarians in your party. And this is why they beat the stuffing out of your party (Wes does a bunch of other things too, I've way over simplified). The result is that you end up with a really uber monster, nothing like what you'd see in the 3E monster manual.

 

Now, here's what I'm going to try to do. I'd like to rank a few types of creatures in the original IWD2 by CR (challenge rating). For example, it would be great to list the goblins you meet in order according to when you run into them (i.e. party level). Next I want to track the various aspects that change as a function of CR: the attributes, feats, skills, etc (there are even a few unknown fields). Then I'd like to do the same thing for other type of creatures as a function of CR: Animals, Yuan-Ti, etc and see if I can come up with some general automatic mapping routine. It's a long shot, but it would make this whole thing move a lot faster.

[FredSRichardson]

Does anyone have any idea of what level you're at in IWD2 at different times? That is, what level is you party when you've wiped out all the goblins? What level right before you take on the waves of Goblin's at the palisade? How about when you start Chapter 1? I'll see if I can get my IWD2 working again (I'm not sure I followed my own advice in backing up things).

[BigRob]

My memory on the subject is pretty vague (it's been a while since I played), but I seem to recall still being level 1 at the end of the docks, but somewhat higher (around 3-5ish) at the end of Chapter 1 and about 2-3ish with the goblins.

 

I hope that's accurate and helpful... might be a good idea to get someone to back that info up though.

[FredSRichardson]

Yes, thank you for the info! I think I'm going to have to play through IWD2 a bit to get a sense of how party level scales through different areas.

[Grand_Dracolich]

I can help you there, 'cause I was just about to play through IWD2 again. But I have a habit of giving 345 xp to the parties I premade.

 

I can tell you this much, you hit level 2 when you clear the docks of goblins, level 3 after you finish up the quests in the town before the attack on the palisade (just about), level 4 by the middle of the second area in chapter 1, level 5 just before you hit shaengarne bridge.

 

I don't play through the goblin stronghold much, but I can assure you I leveled up sometime over there.

[FredSRichardson]

Ah, okay, this is great.

 

I'm hoping that for the next beta I can bring the whole party up to level 4-5 or so. Then shoot for 9-10 for the beta after that. I hope I don't wear you guys out too much.

 

I've been playing through IWD1 (yet again) with a generic party just to see how leveling goes so I think I have enough to go on.

[cewander]

Trying to get a better understanding of the autoconverter here. So a Orc would be conveted to a fighter or barbarian for example ? (with extra feats, skills and all).

 

Most "enemy races" will have "monster levels" and not class levels in monsters manual, and challenge rating counts in most cases two monster levels as +1 challenge rating. Example Ogre is Challenge Rating 2, and have 4 "monsterous levels". Monsterous levels is basically the same as cleric with no spellcasting or abilities (D8, 2skill points (generally spot and listen), 3/4 base attack bonus advancement, simple weapons and some armors etc.

 

Try converting monsters to 2x challenge ranting with cleric, their scripts should still not allow them to cast spells or turn undead (against players ? :confuzlement: ) Curious how that would turn out.

 

 

 

"I hope I don't wear you guys out too much." -Fred

 

I could only wish

[Guest Guest]

Trying to get a better understanding of the autoconverter here. So a Orc would be conveted to a fighter or barbarian for example ? (with extra feats, skills and all).

 

Most "enemy races" will have "monster levels" and not class levels in monsters manual, and challenge rating counts in most cases two monster levels as +1 challenge rating. Example Ogre is Challenge Rating 2, and have 4 "monsterous levels". Monsterous levels is basically the same as cleric with no spellcasting or abilities (D8, 2skill points (generally spot and listen), 3/4 base attack bonus advancement, simple weapons and some armors etc.

 

Try converting monsters to 2x challenge ranting with cleric, their scripts should still not allow them to cast spells or turn undead (against players ? :confuzlement: ) Curious how that would turn out.

 

 

 

"I hope I don't wear you guys out too much." -Fred

 

I could only wish

 

Hey there, sorry to be away so long and not respond. The creature conversion is really a tough problem, and I think I'm resigned to doing a lot of this by hand. This will still be a bit hard. The existing creature conversion algorithm is brilliant in many ways (thanks to Wes Weimer ), but it really isn't a good solution (the creatures are way too tough).

 

I think a lot will be a bit ad hoc. The Orc Shaman's you find in the cave just outside of Easthaven cast something like a curse at you, and maybe this is what they should do. But it's sort of an accident. The "AI script" for the IWD1 Orc Shaman was converted, and new spells were assigned in place of the old spells. But it seems the AI script should really be totally different now for the 3E rules.

 

Most monsters have "fighter" levels and not anything else (like cleric). Perhaps these are the same as generic monster levels when you don't assign feats and skills. A skeleton will have a ring which gives them the undead mind spell immunities.

 

Speaking of undead, I found a good skeleton CRE in place of the awful converted ones in the Vale. Those were clearly insane (and now I know why, they had ridiculous immunities).

 

Anyway, I'll keep you all posted, thanks for hanging in there!

 

-Fred

[FredSRichardson]

Oops, not logged in again, that was really me ^^^^

[FredSRichardson]

Okay, I've been tooling around a bit and it's getting daunting again. I'm picking on the skeletons because they are so obviously in need of repair. I've found a close match for a decent skelly in IWD2, but the lowest level one has 3 HD. Also, their are many variants of undead in the Vale that I don't have a match for. Undead in IWD2 come in at pretty high levels.

 

So, I've got a sort-of infrastructure in place for modifying various CRE aspects. I just need to go over this some more. I know I was beginning to think of some radical overhaul to this whole approach, but maybe I don't need to do it. The changes to the skellies are pretty minor. Hmm.. need more drawing boards.

[devSin]

Maybe you should concentrate on the getting the game over and working and basically finishable before the nitpicking? Then you could just worry about having creatures make sense for the engine when there's not much left to be done (you could probably even farm out the work to other people to come up with good CREs)?

 

I wonder if bringing over items and spells is going to be as much a headache...

[FredSRichardson]

I think you have a point there. The skellies were kind of a show stopper for the Beta as I recall (though the real problem was that you couldn't get through the main door).

 

Most of the spells map over, and I've mapped many items (probably not all of them).

 

The bosses will require tweaking just because, um, they do.

 

But there are a lot of undead in early chapters of IWD1 and almost none until later chapters of IWD2, so I need to think of something.

[FredSRichardson]

Okay, I think I've thrown in enough to do most conversions in a satisfactory way. The basic approach is use an existing IWD2 CRE and modify it with a bunch of macros in one of the "rules" files. It's a bit complicated, and the worst one is the features (currently you have to specify three 32 bit fields for the boolean feats, and a long list of parameters for the incremental feats, I'll see about getting "or'd" macros to work for the boolean ones).

 

The syntax is lousy, but it should work, and of course I'll need to provide a set of docs for it, but I think it should be enough to get going. I'll keep you all posted.

[FredSRichardson]

Alright, random treasure conversion. It looks like random treasures are coming from "RT_NORM.2DA" or "RT_FURY.2DA" in IWD2 instead of "RNDTRES.2DA". Now the skellies work as advertised with the correct drops, and yes they can wield the things they drop.

 

Turning works really well too. Maybe too well. My cleric took all of the skellies out in one go. Hmm... I may have to adjust something.

[FredSRichardson]

Well, I've gotten a little bit stuck on Mytos. This is the first real NPC I've tried to convert in a reasonable way, and the problem is an interesting one.

 

First I tried to see if I could determine Mytos' real level. According to the CRE, s/he's a level 8/8 FIGHTER_CLERIC, but if you look at the save and THAC0 the real level is more like 7/7. The level could be used to reflect turning or spell difficulty? I'm not sure how accurate this level field is in IWD1.

 

Anyway, Wes' CRE morphing has a lot of problems as I mentioned before. One is the multi-class level calculation. The recommended level conversion is to take the maximum level and add 1/3 of the remaining levels (rounding down, unless the result is zero in which case you use 1). This puts Mytos' IWD2 level at either 10 (e.g. 5 fighter, 5 cleric) or 9 (e.g. 5 fighter, 4 cleric). I have no problem with using 10 I guess.

 

The next problem is the experience reward. I believe the "challenge rating" field is only used for XP. Mytos is supposed to have a substantial XP reward which would mean that it should be boosted over the norm. I've tried profiling XP and CR in IWD1 and IWD2 respectively to see if there's any conversion formula I could use. Nothing pops up yet.