DavidW

@MachoGrande 1) "SCS plays fair" means that the rules for enemy spellcasters basically conform to the rules for PC spellcasters. It doesn't mean that enemies who are higher level than you don't get an advantage from being higher level. & SCS doesn't make them higher level for the most part: that's just how the basic game works. 2) Most of the feedback I get from players is that Firkraag is if anything a bit too easy. If you need to reload fifty times, you're doing it wrong. 3) If an enemy lowers your defenses, try putting them back up again. You're not required to restrict buffing to the pre-battle phase, and they don't have infinitely many dispel magics (and each round when they're casting dispel magic is a round when they're not casting something else.) 4) While mostly this is just opinion and taste, this claim isn't true: It's not enabled by default. It's where it always has been: as its own component. The description of that component is completely clear as to what it does, both in the readme and in the description the WEIDU installer gives you. I assume you either used some third-party installer that preselects components, or weren't paying attention at that point in the install process? @subtledoctor Firkraag (and other large creatures) don't use globes of invulnerability for aesthetic reasons: the globe animation looks silly overlaid on a large sprite.

Yeah, that certainly looks well-formed... how odd. I’ll see if I can reproduce the error.

Literally any time? OK, I'll see if I can reproduce. That's widespread enough that it makes me think something specific about your install is causing issues, since I haven't heard it reported by anyone else.

I think there must be something malformed - or odd, at any rate - about RR's version of the table. SCS doesn't hardcode the highest level of bard spells, it reads it from the file, so it shouldn't be upset just because the highest level has gone up. Caedwyr: do you still have your install in place and if so can you post mxsplbrd.2da?

It's not an SCS-specific issue, though it may be exacerbated by SCS, and it's a bug, not a feature. Fear has to be dealt with specifically by scripts; it looks as if some enemy actions aren't being caught by SCS's scripts. Can you be more specific as to when it's happening?

I don’t but almost certainly it’s one old enough not to work on EE, at least. I’m not sure the Spanish translation has been updated since SCS and SCSII were merged.

As usual, people should ignore Jarno, who hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about in 90% of situations.

It's not harmless: the component isn't installing correctly, because SCS is getting confused by a resource name (T-BONE01) with a minus sign in it. You can *probably* fix it by editing stratagems/sfo/general/lib_evaluate.tpa in notepad or similar, and, on line 153, replacing [A-Za-z0-9#!_] with [A-Za-z0-9#!_-]

The Spanish translation certainly hasn’t been updated since the new difficulty system was added, and in fact I don’t have a record of it being updated for some years before that.

Thanks. I should probably check if that’s still true, in any case - there have been a couple of relevant updates since then.

You can iterate through the items in the store fairly easily... but to be honest, in most circumstances you might as well just use FILE_CONTAINS to see if the resource name for the item occurs inside the store file. Unless your item has a weirdly short name, so that other item names contain it, or unless its name coincides with the name of a rumor dialog or a healing spell, that will be reliable. (And those are exceptionally weird edge cases.) That said, if all you want to do is remove it from whatever store it occurs in (and you don't care which store it actually does occur in), you might as well just use REMOVE_STORE_ITEM on every store. Unless I'm mistaken (it's been known), REMOVE_STORE_ITEM doesn't care if the item wasn't there to begin with.

Agreed: if you're not using "HLAs are innate" then mages can be a bit sorcerer-y with their 9th level spell slots (likewise priests and 7th-level slots). I can't really see a way around that: it's the price I pay for making HLAs tied into the difficulty slider while still supporting people who don't want innate HLAs. I'm hoping it's not too noticeable in game. Possibly I should be toning down use of Dark Planetars. The problem is that there just aren't that many HLAs - the offensive ones are just Dragon's Breath, Comet, Planetar, really - and I don't want to use more than one of each. If you want to tweak it yourself, the files are in stratagems/mage/hla/vanilla and ought to be human-readable.

I certainly have to look things up in SFO a lot. I think the main advantages in simple edits like the one Luke gives are that code is basically self-documenting and, more importantly, that errors tend to produce install-time failures rather than silent bugs. If you throw SFO this code: LAF edit_creature STR_VAR creature = "bandit" editstring = "xpv=>1400" END then the code will refuse to install (it'll throw a 'function CRE_xpv does not exist' error or similar). If you do this: COPY_EXISTING "bandit.cre" WRITE_LONG 0x16 1400 then WEIDU will install fine and the code looks indistinguishable from the correct code on casual examination, but the file will be changed incorrectly. To be fair, you can get a lot of that advantage through using NAME and the like in baseline WEIDU.

I think it's just that the logic of 319 doesn't allow for the _ALL classes - it just does a direct check on the field value.

I'm not completely sure I understand. There isn't a separate spellcasters-get-HLAs component any more: it's integrated into Smarter Mages/Priests. (But in any case I think you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist - see earlier post.)

That's intentional, but shouldn't be visible in-game (except in the rare cases where you manage to charm or dominate a high-level spellcaster). If you're not using HLAs as innate, I keep track of total 9th-level spells cast via a variable; assuming it's working correctly, and it was last time I checked, high-level wizards won't exceed their legal slots. As you correctly surmised, it's to allow for on-the-fly shifts in difficulty: every L18 wizard needs HLAs, because the difficulty setting might be set to maximum. Tactically it makes sense for demiliches to use Imprisonment, since I give a saving throw vs. their Trap the Soul. Thematically I agree it's weird, though: I'll probably change it. I'll check the other things. (I'm a bit surprised by the double-damage thing, that should be a very simple ToBEx setting. But I don't do playtesting much on classic any more, so I could easily have missed a bug there.)

At the technical level I think I agree with subtledoctor: while in EE you can more-or-less simulate a Dexterity check, the complexity* is out of all proportion to the advantage and you'd do better just using a save vs. breath weapon. (As an additional issue, the game's allocation of Dexterity scores to enemy NPCs is unreliable: they're often just given 10 and some ad hoc AC and attack bonuses.) * my immediate thought as to how to do it is to do 20 different opcode-318 checks, each with a 5% chance of occurring, each keyed to the target's Dex being above a certain value, with that value varying from check to check. Ugh.

On (2), I didn't mean anything very deep. Just that lots of things that aren't spells from an in-world perspective (like dragon breath, or nonmagical traps, or psionic attacks) are created by 'SPL' files. (And conversely, occasional things that are spells in-game, like Irenicus's sleep effect in Spellhold, aren't created by SPL files). On (3), AD&D 2nd edition used ability checks (roll d20, try to get your ability score or under) from time to time. It even occasionally supported using them in lieu of saving throws (see, e.g., AD&D 2nd edition Player's Handbook, p.101: 'ability checks as saving throws'.) And high Dexterity doesn't generally improve your agility-based saving throws. D&D 3rd edition more systematically lets ability scores affect saving throws, but still sharply distinguishes ability checks (roll d20, add your ability modifier) from saving throws (roll d20, add your save modifier) - a Reflex save, for instance, includes your Dexterity modifier but also includes the effect from a cloak of resistance, a Haste spell, and your base saving throw modifier, and so usually is going to generate a rather higher number. It's not until 4th or 5th edition that the distinction gets dropped and we just have the idea of a Dexterity save. As for Xd3+Xd3, of course I agree that it still works in EE. But you said something stronger: that save-for-half effects 'almost never' just do Xd6, they use the Xd3 + Xd3 trick instead. That's not true in EE: if you look at spwi304, it uses the save-for-half flag. (Actually, even in the original engine, it's normally (X/2)d6 + (X/2)d6, I think - same average, different variance.)

Pretty much!

On the original bug: see Nathan82's thread for details, but it originates in a bug in the Dark Side of the Sword Coast's priest-spells component. That bug in turn confuses SCS and generates the problem. The simplest workaround is to uninstall that component of DSotSC. Since that's at the very beginning of your mod install order, you might instead want to insert this line into another mod's tp2 (SCS, or one that installs before SCS) if you know how: STRING_SET 34735 "Selune's Blessing" Alternately, use Near Infinity to set string 34735 to 'Selune's Blessing'.

Got it. It's a straight incompatibility between SCS and the 'DSotSC priest spells' component of DSotSC; no other mods needed. (And it breaks pretty much all anti-magic spells, not just breach.) Here's what's going on, for anyone curious. SCS dynamically collects a list of all player-usable spells that Breach can dispel. It assumes that the existing description for Breach contains a possibly-incomplete list of those spells. The name of each spell is replaced in the description text by 'DW_PLACEHOLDER'. The comma-separated sequence of DW_PLACEHOLDERs is then compressed into a single DW_PLACEHOLDER. And finally, that DW_PLACEHOLDER is replaced by the newly-generated list of all the spells Breach actually takes down. It's obviously not resilient against arbitrary changes of Breach's description, but it works for Breach as presented in the original game, in the Enhanced Edition, and in SR. DSotSC introduces a new protective spell, Selune's Blessing, that is taken down by Breach. BUT it doesn't give that spell a name: instead it hardcodes the 'name' field of the spell to '34735'. I don't know why, as that string isn't 'Selune's Blessing', or anything similar, on any of the IE games. (The string 'Selune's Blessing' appears only in IWD2, and in a different slot). So this is a bug in DSotSC: the spell is misnamed. Unfortunately, on BG2 (and so on BG2EE, BGT, and EET) string 34735 is blank. And that means SCS's name-substitution goes mad: it replaces every blank space in the spell description with DW_PLACEHOLDER. Contraction of that mess down to one DW_PLACEHOLDER fails, and so hundreds of DW_PLACEHOLDERs get replaced with the whole 'spells affected include' string. So: on the one hand, this is caused by the DSotSC bug: if the spell were named properly, things would work fine. On the other hand, I should have learned by now to write code that is more robust against things being broken by other mods: it was rash to do a substitution on an unknown string without checking it was sensible. I'll fix this next time I release SCS (and since this is a critical bug, albeit only on a specific mod combination, I'll try to do so relatively soon - this weekend, maybe). In the meantime, the simplest workaround is just not to install that component of DSotSC. If you really want it, put the line STRING_SET 34735 "Selune's Blessing" into the tp2 of DSotSC before installing. Thanks to Bartimaeus and Nathan82 for help diagnosing it.

OK: I can reproduce it on DSotSC+SCS 5900. Now to diagnose it...

2: distinguish 'spell' in the engine sense from 'spell in the in-game sense. 3: not true in either 2nd or 3rd edition. (Also, the Xd3+Xd3 thing isn't true on EE - there's a save-for-half flag instead.)

Aha. Thanks, that’s terrific. I’ll see if I can reproduce it myself, and then work out what’s going on!

The breach spell description is probably getting corrupted when SCS 5900 is installed. What I'm interested in is why. I'd very much like to see its description immediately *before* SCS 5900 is installed. Could you uninstall just 5900, then see what it is? I don't just mean 'is it corrupt?', I mean the exact description.