Bartimaeus

V1.1.0 released. Miscellaneous changes: As per @Palanthis's request, the readme has been updated, partially. Some outdated information was simply excised entirely, a little new information was added, and a complete list of spell descriptions have been added that the readme now links to in several places. Took about forty five minutes to convert my language files to HTML, I guess it could've been a lot worse without Notepad++'s mass operations. The "general overview of spell changes" has been removed for the time being due to inaccuracies - hence why this is only a partial update on this. At least all of the subcomponents are now described. Spell Deflection-like spells no longer state that they do not protect against AoE spells (since I'm pretty sure that most people install the AoE SD subcomponent), but they do explain that stationary effects like Cloudkill are still not deflected, and this is mentioned in the subcomponent description itself. Additionally, Spell Trap was not explaining this at all before, but now it does. Ghoul Touch has a slight text revision that suggests its effect lasts for the entire duration of the spell, not simply the first attack you make. I've literally never used this spell because it sounded so bad, but while doing some MR tests, I discovered that this spell is basically a summonable weapon that lasts for the entire duration, and isn't a single use spell like Shocking Grasp. And I thought...that should probably be more clear in its description, because this actually seems like a pretty cool spell. Thanks to @DrAzTiK, I remembered that I made a change to the Cause Wounds series of spells a long while back when I was looking at the Cure and Regenerate Wounds series of spells that rather nerfed their damage from standard SR - that nerf has now been reversed. General fixes: A number of summonable weapons that weren't supposed to do physical damage sometimes had a damage type set (e.g. crushing with Cause Wound spells) even when the amount of damage was set to 0. This could sometimes cause physical damage to apply via certain kinds of bonuses even when not appropriate. The specific case I found was when the game applies what it calls the "attack of opportunity" +4 damage bonus, which triggers when a target has either no weapon or ranged weapons equipped when being attacked by a melee weapons, but there are quite possibly other cases. Although...sometimes I think these "hand" spells should do 1D2 fist damage + strength bonus, since that makes sense, but whatever. Energy Blades were doing slashing instead of missile damage. Magic Circle Against Evil's anti-stacking effect was not dispellable while the rest of the spell was, meaning if it got dispelled, you couldn't recast it for up to 5 turns. Magic Resistance fixes: Grease and Web are now subject to magic resistance (nothing in either's description suggests they shouldn't be?). Spook had a string that would indicate a target was affected by fear that was not subject to magic resistance unlike the rest of the spell. Similarly, Contagion had a graphical effect that was not subject to magic resistance when it seems like it should be. Larloch's Drain and Vampiric Touch were not considering whether the target resisted via magic resistance before they buffed/healed the caster - now they do. Otiluke's Resilient Sphere's confining effect was listening to magic resistance when it wasn't supposed to. Essentially, you could cast this on a party member that magically resists it and they'd be invulnerable and still able to move around for the duration of the spell. Sleep's "wake on hit" effect was attempting to wake characters even when the spell had been successfully resisted - no longer. Horror's graphical effect that plays over each affected creature was playing even when resisted. Now only plays on creatures that actually fail to resist. Poison was playing a graphical effect even when successfully magic resisted - effect still plays when saved against, since there's still a partial effect. Half of Obscuring Mist's effects were subject to magic resistance, half of them were not - now the entire thing is, since it seems like there's no reason it shouldn't be. Gust of Wind's wind buffet effect was subject to magic resistance, but its unconsciousness effect wasn't - now they both are. Faerie Fire was mostly but not entirely magic resistable. Unlike most other invisibility detection spells, I think this is one that *should* be magic resistable due to its mechanism (actually applying something to a target rather than simply seeing through), so I've opted to make it entirely resistable. Spike Growth was not subject to magic resistance at all. Dolorous Decay was not subject to magic resistance at all...and that continues to be the case for now, though it's now mentioned in its description that it isn't. And thus concludes my magic resistance test. AoE Spell Deflection subcomponent fixes: Symbol of Pain was getting warped by the AoE Spell Deflection subcomponent due to having an extra header (almost certainly my fault when I revised this spell). Undead creatures were not immune to Horrid Wilting, Skull Trap, or Horror. Flying creatures and dragons were not immune to Earthquake.

I don't understand how either of your solutions would work. Don't know what effect you're talking about for the first one, and the second one I'm failing to see how making it immediately knock off some levels would help. Even if you only wanted it knock off levels at the first pulse, which I presume you would just do by splitting it into different subspells, how do you make the subspell containing the actual stationary projectile detect whether or not the character has some kind of SD up and subsequently protect them? Not having any power level will just make it pierce the SD, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Let's assume there are no conceptual problems with what you're suggesting. Do you think it makes for a better game? For me, the answer would be "maybe, sounds like it might be neat to try out at least to see how it affects the power of magic resistance and the need to spam Lower Resistance...but it probably won't be really better or worse, just different", but I say that as someone who's decently familiar with how things currently work. Kind of a janky solution, since multiple uses of the spell can overlap and the player can still exploit them to simply throw one at an SD-ed character then throw the rest at someone else for the same amount of SD charges wasted as if you had used them all on the SD character, but I suppose it would at least semi-work. Now if you have any ideas for stationary spells...

Haha. Speaking of feeling dumb, I thought it'd be fun to test doing exactly what I just proposed, so I made a 5 missile Magic Missile cast a subspell that created 5 more magic missiles at 0-100% frequency, then the effect of the subspell was to do 100 damage at 100-100 chance, then copy+pasted the cast opcode like 200 times. Sat there for like a minute while the game played at sub-1 FPS while having literally about a thousand magic missiles on screen at once, and yep, no damage. Not sure what I expected. (e): And then I tried 0-0, and exploded into bloody chunks. Wonderful, :).

Heh, doesn't sound fun to test either, although I guess you could've just cheated and mass copy+pasted the effect like a hundred times all with the 0-0 chance to see if it ever happened within a few tries, but that's much easier to say in hindsight already knowing what the problem is.

Mega thanks. I'll try that after I get through my current set of SR fixes.

Duh, yes, you're right - reading comprehension is overrated. Okay, well...um...I'll put that on the to-do list. Dang it, I don't want to fix that, but I guess I gotta. (e): I'm pretty sure both IR and SR have both used 0% as a way to "disable" stuff as well before, though I've mostly stripped such unused effects in both IRR and SRR. Interesting to think about. Guess if you want to keep an effect around but disable it, you should actually be doing 100-100.

You're probably thinking of the fact that a Spell Deflection-ed character casting spells on themselves will pierce their own Spell Deflection (i.e. Spell Trap wizard casting Shadow Door or Improved Invisibility on themselves). I think another party member casting Improved Invisibility on the Spell Trap wizard would actually trigger the Spell Trap, however. One additional inconsistency is that we don't bother to make the AoE Spell Deflection subcomponent apply to *friendly* spells, so you can cast Bless and such all you like and it'll never be deflected. It's not worth the trouble to fix, and would likely annoy people more than provide any comfort in creating absolute consistency. Furthermore, I think you've opined the idea of making buffs (or at least the Cure series of spells) not have a power level at all so they can always pierce Spell Deflection even if cast from other characters, and I think I'd rather go down that route than making friendly AoE spells not affect Spell Deflection characters. @Lianos Nope, it's a little "cutting edge" stuff since it's only as of the last couple months or so that I was alerted to the kind of derelict state of the AoE Spell Deflection subcomponent and subsequently seriously went through it and fixed everything up, added and tested a whole lot of spells that were inexplicably not included, fixed spells that were getting broken by it, and then found out the problem from kreso about stationery spells causing multiple Spell Deflection charge usages (every round - so an Ice Storm at 4th level with a 4 round duration could take up 16 charges if a Spell Deflection-ed character sat in it!). I'll be adding some explanations to the description of each Spell Deflection-like spell to explain better in the next patch, which will probably be in the next few days. As for the readme...it would probably be pointless for me to try to update it, because this isn't my mod and presumably it'll get an official readme update eventually, but I do sympathize that things feel like they're in a state of flux for somebody not already intimately familiar with its current state. As subtledoctor has said before, the mod is basically stable at this point, but a whole lot of stuff is no longer accurate in the readme or even mentioned at all at this point (e.g. some of kreso's changes). At the very least, SRR's spell descriptions should always be accurate, I guess, since I've trawled through and tested virtually every spell myself? But yeah, not ideal.

Part of what you're arguing against something I already accepted as being a novel idea. Traditional magical energies, like fire or magic damage, I already said am open to making them check magic resistance even if originating from an item, whether summoned via SR spells or through IR weapons. But since they're not already like that and I'm not sure that anyone actually wants them to be like that, I have no real desire to effect that change, and it is a pretty big change. What I said I was less open to was physical force not magically enacted being resistable - e.g. a rock thrown by somebody's hand that hits someone in the face. While the object may have been magically conjured, the force that threw it was not, and I think that should be respected (and I think it generally is within both vanilla BG and SR, and I am curious to know if that's the case within D&D 2.0 as a whole). If you go down that route that that should also be magically resistable, then it opens a whole bag of worms that I just have no interest in even thinking about just because of the mess it'd create. You say that "[the meteors] are entirely magical in nature" in contrast to a magically conjured sword, but in point of fact, I do not know that. It is a conjuration spell, same as Monster Summoning spells, same as the Enchanted Weapon weapon - where in the universe am I pulling real magical +3 weapons from repeatedly? Where in the universe am I pulling real umber hulks, hobgoblins, slimes, basilisks, ogres, werewolves, etc. from? Is conjuration the act of teleporting all these different real things from real points in the universe, or is it the act of converting energy to create and/or arrange specific patterns of atoms to effectively create them? Personally, I think it's creating them, because they're spells that are cast the same exact way every single time with the intent of creating (or grabbing if you insist that they're being pulled from somewhere else) the same exact creature or weapon every single time, and therefore it follows that if you make the physical damage of Magical Stone or Minute Meteors require an MR check for every attack, you have to do the same for conjured creatures and Enchanted Weapons. I think gated creatures are the ones that are magically grabbed from their home plane and potentially bound, not normally summoned creatures, no? As for Spell Deflection, it just seems fundamentally wrong to have a 3rd level spell potentially count as 30 spells against Spell Deflection. It is not a 30th level spell. I have less of a problem with Magic Missiles or Flame Arrow breaking multiple Mirror Images because they're literally fundamentally supposed to be multiple projectiles, so it makes sense they might hit different images or hit Stoneskin multiple times (although I'm pretty sure Stoneskin doesn't help at all against Flame/Acid Arrow), and less of a problem with stationary effects penetrating Spell Deflection entirely because it's a game engine limitation (as far as I know) that we would correct if we could. Additionally, stationary spells don't generally do massive damage since their effects are supposed to spread out 5+ rounds, so they don't tend to kill in of themselves, which makes it a flaw with the system that's a little easier to accept.

I always wondered how many points were actually useful, since the default is 0 to 100, and if you count 0 as a point in of itself, that's 101 points. Turns out, neither 0 or 100 were counted. Not much you can do about it - right now, an item that has a 15% chance of an effect uses percentage points 0 to 15, which is effectively 15/99, or 15.15-%. 14/99 would be 14.14-%, which is less accurate, so I don't think this really changes much. Thanks for letting me know, though.

Download and view with a video player if it doesn't automatically play in your browser. Also, sorry about the music, but I didn't feel like remaking it: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/3rlsvsjsmitigkw/2019-02-04_11-02-59.mp4 Seems to be working for me. As you can see, I cast a Fire Trap on top of Edwin, then had him cast Spell Deflection, then removed him from party and attacked him, Fire Trap activates and is deflected, and then I cast various other AoE spells on him until the Spell Deflection runs out of charges. Can either/both of you describe the exact situation(s) where it doesn't seem to work? One note I'm planning on adding to the Spell Deflection-type spells is an explanation that stationary spells like Cloudkill and Ice Storm et. al. penetrate Spell Deflection (sadly by game engine necessity). Hopefully that's not the point of confusion here. I think I've tested every spell pretty thoroughly at this point, but you know how it is...

I think it's an arbitrarily drawn line between types of force delivery, I suppose. You have to physically throw a Minute Meteor, just like you'd have to throw a dart. Yes, the Minute Meteor is magically conjured, but so are the weapons of Monster Summonings and Enchanted Weapons, and I'm surely not in favor of .spl-izing all of their attacks to make sure everything passes a magic resistance check every time they do something. I'd be more open to adding magic resistance checks for magically created traditional energy attacks coming even from items (e.g. elemental effects like fire as well as stuff like vampiric or even fear et. al. effects), but it's a big no from me for physical damage that is delivered by physical force (there is more of a grey area on physical force delivered by magical means, though, such as Melf's Acid Arrow, and of course, there are specific and arbitrary exceptions in general such as the Cause Wounds series that are mysteriously exempt from MR where similar attacks are not). I'm not exactly clear on whether you still wanted the Minute Meteor to still do any kind of physical damage, though, which definitely affects whether you need to argue about this - if the idea was to eliminate all physical damage, there are already other limited use spell weapons e.g. Shocking Grasp that do have to pass MR checks, so yeah, go crazy (although I must admit that don't I particularly favor this Melf Meteors redesign to begin with and would probably revert it for at least myself). In a broader sense, though, I'm not sure whether I'd want every instance of magical effects coming from e.g. IR weapons to really necessarily have MR checks...I'm leaning towards no because there's no way I'd want to actually implement it and also it's just how it's always been and I'm kind of loathe to change it just because of that...but I am open to it at least being a novel idea. Big no from me on it triggering Spell Deflections, though - for the same reason we're not allowing stationary effects like Cloudkill to trigger Spell Deflection: a single Y level spell should never take up more than Y levels of Spell Deflection. Either it protects against it fully in the proper way (which we cannot implement in this case), or it shouldn't at all - at best, a note should maybe be made of it (probably unnecessary in this case, since this is already how the item has always functioned and what people already expect).

It's not that I hate change, but I hate change. @Jarno Mikkola I think when you actually paste something, a little prompt at the bottom of the message box shows up so you can paste in non-rich text. Rest in peace, BBCode Mode. Yep, see:

Ah, I think I know the reason. Because it is an AoE spell, it is affected by the AoE Spell Deflection subcomponent. This means that the effects of the spell are passed onto a subspell, the spwi812d.spl. Thing is, dvhorrid.eff, the self-immunizing effect file that protects undead and such against Horrid Wilting, is protecting for spwi812, not spwi812d. And while protecting against the base spwi812.spl should prevent spwi812d from affecting them, it only works if the effect is applied to them *before* spwi812d.spl hits them, not after like it currently is doing. Am I correct in assuming that you can only cast Horrid Wilting once upon these creatures, and then subsequent tries they're immune? If so, then the solution is really simple. I'll probably have to look at AoE spells to see if there are any more examples of this sort of errant behavior. Sigh...

Hmm. Not a spell that SRR touches (spwi812 is literally not included with SRR). Could you give me a copy of your override spwi812 and spwi812d if it exists? Furthermore, does this apply to all undead, or do you have specific creatures in mind?

Bracers of Speed: brac11.eff needs to be set to type 1 instead of type 0, already fixed in IRR. Saving Grace: I guess you'd need SCS to flag this shield as being "anti-undead" and something for non-mindless undead to generally avoid when possible if IR is installed. (e): Also, Saving Grace should possibly use condition 0 (hit by) instead of 7 (attacked by), as well as target 1 (last attacker) instead of 2 (nearest enemy). I am guessing that it was made this way to limit its damage output, maybe?

Cool, better safe than sorry. Also why outlining the process you used to reach the conclusion that something is a bug can be helpful for those diagnosing it, :P.

Yeah, sorry, wasn't really supposed to be posted for probably several days. I'm doing a big Magic Resistance test of every offensive spell, and I wanted to give Draztik a chance to reply, and I hate unnecessarily double posting. But yeah, when I thought it was single-use, it sounded like just about the worst 2nd level spell out there...lasting for an entire turn, on the other hand, means it could be borderline overpowered with a swashbuckler- or fighter- multi/dualclass. It still doesn't have great damage, but who cares when it has a -2 saving throw 5 round paralyzing effect? Really curious to play around with it in an actual game.

Firkraag is definitely weaker than that group of vampires. I can't recall because I usually side with her instead of the Shadow Thieves, but are they even harder than the vampires you run into in Bodhi's lair the first time during the main quest?

1. Please clarify: did the projectile not target your charmed character, or did it simply fail to dispel the Charm? If the projectile targeted the charmed character, then you are likely not understanding how Dispel/Remove Magic works. Read the description of Dispel/Remove Magic for more info on how dispelling magic works - it is not a 100% chance of working on enemy targets, party members or not (at least, I would think that'd be the case). If, on the other hand, the projectile did not attempt to target the charmed creature at all, that would be very weird, since the projectile Remove Magic uses is a vanilla projectile and has not changed. 2. Yeah, looks like the self-protection opcode is not dispellable, thanks. 3. Me neither, particularly. Makes pretty much absolutely no sense to use vs. the 3rd level AoE spells like Glyph of Warding and Holy Smite, for both the AI and the player. The one neat thing about them is that they're not subject to magic resistance, I suppose, but I'll think more about them.

Think it's supposed to be set that way already (it is kind of the idea of having a separate symbol for him, I would think), but yeah, it's not. Fixed and thanks.

It was a little bit of a nightmare to fix since the way Spell Shield, Dispelling Screen, and Breach were all interacting with each other via the different .tpa files was...not intuitive, to say the least...at least to somebody not intimately familiar with weidu (a hour or so of my life down the drain trying to figure what in the world was happening between ardanis_spell_shield.tph, dispelling_screen.tph, dispelling_screen.tpa, and main_component.tpa...), but I think I got it now. Should be fixed, and the version number has been incremented to V1.0.11. ...Also, once again, something that needs to be fixed in SR b16 - not a bug originating from SRR. ...This also makes me think that there are probably more inconsistencies with the various Wish spells, but I really don't want to look at them right now, .

MR issues with SR (non-Revised) b16's Sound Burst, Teleport Field, and Incendiary Cloud all confirmed and fixed for SRR (and now live on github). As for Breach, seems fine to me. Created a two sorcerer party on a fresh BG2EE install with only SRR installed, and went through three scenarios: Scenario 1: Had sorcerer #1 cast Stoneskin, then sorcerer #2 cast Breach on sorcerer #1, and it was dispelled. Scenario 2: Had sorcerer #1 cast Dispelling Screen and then Stoneskin, then sorcerer #2 cast Breach on sorcerer #1, and the Dispelling Screen was dispelled, but not the Stoneskin. Then cast Breach on sorcerer #1 again, and the Stoneskin was dispelled. Scenario 3: Same as scenario 2, except the order of Dispelling Screen and Stoneskin was switched. Same result. If you have reproducible steps, lay them on me. (e): I just noticed that you said the Breach spell from Wish. Reading comprehension skills, people. Yeah, looks like you're right, it's not getting the remove Dispelling Screen effect correctly, will get back to it later.

Okay, cool, thanks for letting me know!

Huh. I thought the colors would be switched from what you described. Blue would be empty (because it doesn't contain hostile effects in of itself), while white is full (because it could contain either hostile or friendly effects). I guess it's a little arbitrary either way you look at it, though.