polytope

10 hours ago, Luke said:

Addendum: getting rid of op101 would also allow Earthquake-like, knockdown (Dragon Wing Buffet – "spin695.spl") spells/attacks to bypass / ignore Chaotic Commands and the like (these spells are supposed to block only true Sleep / Unconsciousness effects, not also Earthquake and knockdown attacks...)

As DavidW said... replacing 101/206 on cre immunity items with 324 in spell or item inflicting the effect needs to come absolutely last in the mod install order or it will break things.

My old school way of implementing this was to use short duration opcode 283 which bypasses 101 immunity to other opcodes; thus you can have physical knockdowns through opcode 39 as a separate EFF applied through 283 on creatures normally immune to "sleep" etc.

Most trap scripts have the triggering condition of:

IF
	OR(2)
		Entered([ANYONE])
		Opened([ANYONE])
THEN
	RESPONSE #100 //Do lethal trap stuff

Which could in theory be set off not solely by PCs but by charmed/neutral/hostile creatures but hardly any of these traps have the flags in the area file to interact with NPCs passing through the trapped region. A few exceptions including the crushing walls trap in BG2 AR1512 and those called by the trigger:

IF
	IsOverMe([ANYONE])
THEN
	RESPONSE #100 //Ouch

...which are more like persistent environmental hazards than traps.

However, trapped doors certainly can be set off by NPCs trying to open them, again, you don't see this often, to say the least, in the vanilla game, but SCS enemies usually open nearby doors if aggroed and thus suffer the trap effects.

On 7/24/2022 at 12:50 PM, jmerry said:

Edit: I just made a quick test. Cleric 2 dual-classed to ranger in BGEE with the level cap increased to 2.95 million. A ranger 2/cleric 17 with 18 Wisdom gets 4/3/3 spell slots (4 level 1 slots from 2+2 as a cleric 2, 3 level 2 spell slots from ranger 17, 3 level 3 spell slots from ranger 17). They get full access to all of the cleric spells despite their higher-level casting only being from the ranger side. Casting DUHM ... +1 to stats. Clearly, caster level is 2 rather than 10.

Just curious, if you still have the save game file, does this apply to druid as well as cleric specific spells? I.e. does barkskin give AC6 (as for lowest level druid) or AC4 (as for 17th level ranger, or 10th level druid). I ask because I know that EE recoded ranger/clerics substantially.

An EE engine specific issue that you may already be aware of @DavidW which I learnt about from Bubb is that the repulsion opcode 235 fails if called from a spell which starts with the resref "SP" on targets with any positive value of magic resistance, including SPIN695 named DRAGON_WING_BUFFET (which is perhaps the most common source of knockbacks for the player to worry about).

Is it a better fix to change SPIN695 to have no projectile or direct effects, but cast via 146 a secondary shell spell with AoE projectile and a different prefix to apply the actual effects of damage + unconsciousness + repulsion (I haven't actually checked whether that will work, I'm not 100% sure that the engine won't consider the original spell the source).

Or should it be handled on the level of scriptwriters to assign a differently labelled wing buffet ability to dragons? I've noticed SCS dragons use the original wing buffet in their scripts.

Meh, it's no difference to me, the couple of dragons I've designed apply the repulsion as an on-hit effect of their offhand weapon (blunt and double claw base damage, an approximation of their tail slap), but it arguably weakens them if they can't use it as a ranged AoE (even if it's more believable)

Wow, why would they add this stuff? If the 235 repulsion opcode is supposed to be an actual magical effect respecting magic resistance, it would already have the normal % chance to fail. If it derives from an ability that is conceptually non-magical but treated as a .spl file for convenience purposes (like dragon wing buffets) then MR should be ignored entirely, as it was in vanilla.

I mean, it's like twiddling with opcode 12 when type is 524288 to ensure fire damage from any source is multiplied by (100 - magic resistance %)/100, so that a fireball has a 30% to damage a 70% MR resistant creature (as always), but if it does work will anyway do only 30% damage... thus redundantly overpowered, and erroneously applied to non-magical fire sources like lava.

At least this introduced bug - and not really a bug, but looking at the code block a deliberate design choice - is relatively easy to work around by giving nonmagical sources of 235 a different prefix than 'SP' (like a modder prefix).

9 hours ago, Bubb said:

The opcode also has this weird block:

if (this->m_sourceRes.startsWith("SP")) {
    this->m_effectAmount = (100 - pSprite->m_derivedStats.m_nResistMagic) / 100 * (float)this->m_effectAmount;
    if (this->m_effectAmount == 0) {
        return 0; // Terminate
    }
}

It's attempting to dampen the knockback speed with the target's magic resistance, but it fails at casting the first division to a float. If the spell resref starts with "SP" any positive magic resistance will make the speed parameter 0, causing the opcode to immediately terminate.

That's definitely not the case on the original BG2 engine, must be an EE thing. I just made a wand that casts SPIN695 (vanilla wing buffet) and tested it on some magic resistant skeleton warriors, they were sent flying back (although ofc not unconscious because they've got the undead immunity item RING95).

Such a bug would also seem to allow the player to completely protect themself from the knockback of dragon wing buffets (which as I've said the game treats as a spell beginning with an SP reference) by carrying any item that grants a positive MR bonus (amulets of Kaligun/Seldarine/Power... Shield of the Lost, Sword of Balduran, any Archmagi robe etc. Hindo's Doom, Enkidu's plate... plus paladin specific swords, wizard slayer kit and monk obviously).

Are you sure any degree of MR grants immunity to repulsion (opcode 235) on your game?

Yeah, there's a question of how much tinkering to fix should be done with a very niche 6th level spell that isn't available as a wand effect and so isn't likely to see use in game against enemies of the controversial types.

Personally, I think the most useful target for Bolt of Glory is a lich in the early game. Holy Smite and Flamestrike are generally better value against undead, but liches are immune to spell levels 1-5, and of course often stack ProMW with their natural immunity to normal weapons (even unmodded), in which case they can't be physically hit by either party or summons. It might also be useful against demons with very dangerous melee attacks, like balors, although by the time you're encountering them you probably have better options.

The ubiquitous curative spells, especially AoE mass cure stand out as higher priority for fixing.

21 hours ago, subtledoctor said:

Frankly for purposes of the FP I would just leave it alone and let the tiefling thing be a weird undescribed idiosyncrasy. (I think games are allowed to have those even if they are fixpacked.) Put another way, I'm not convinced this spell is buggy.

It also has very little in game effect. How often do enemy clerics cast Bolt of Glory on the one recruitable tiefling you have in your party?

Similarly, how often are you tempted to deal with Aesgareth's friends using BoG? The other noteable encounters with tieflings are in the previous wild magic room (why would you cast any spells there!?), and in the planar prison (although they are not explicitly called tieflings).

Apart from edge cases like a cleric mage putting 3 X BoG in a Spell Trigger, I don't think players use this against non-demonic enemies because it takes an entire round to cast for a mediocre amount of damage against either prime or elemental creatures.

23 hours ago, CamDawg said:

Similarly, antisolars and dark planetars aren't fiends, but seem to be placed to take max damage from a divine bolt. I'm actually not a fan of this, as it implies Bolt of Glory is inherently a good-aligned spell, despite having no such restrictions on who can use the spell.

FWIW it actually was in the FR sourcebooks, it's supposed to be restricted to priests of Torm (or maybe Tyr, I can't be bothered to check). Of course it's way too late now, since evil AI controlled enemy clerics assume they can use it. It's the same with Sunray, which was supposed to originally be a druid rather than cleric spell... and would be a lot more useful to them since they can't just turn undead.

Although it's not too hard to reconcile the concept, rather than smiting evil, BoG could be thought of as more something that's harmless to the uncorrupted - and I guess everyone in the physical world partially fits the target, just not to the same extent as the undead and lower planar creatures who take extra damage.

50 minutes ago, DavidW said:

In oBG2, planetars have regeneration (4hp per second base, possibly increased because they're hasted, though I'm never sure how that works)

Yes, it's 8hp/second so far as I can see, but planetars also have 10% physical resistance which puts the effective physical damage per round needed to merely overcome their regen in the mid 50s (the game rounds dam down, but never below 1). That's in addition to their AC of -8 (including dexterity) and requirement for +3 weapons to hit them at all.

Additionally, a planetar can Heal itself if not slain in the same round, thus we're looking at ~180 damage in a single round to kill one before it heals, rather than ~120 as in vanilla. Very few enemies have that kind of potential dps.

Take (vanilla) Gromnir for instance: With the Ice Star, a second +3 morningstar offhand, an illegally high number of attacks (many boss type warriors seem to get this as a substitute for haste or something) and 23 strength in rage he does ~119 damage per round on average (and misses AC -8 only with a roll of 1). He has a good chance of taking down a vanilla planetar, but the damage he can effectively deal to an EE "fixed" planetar is almost halved, so he won't prevent the planetar from casting Heal.

This situation gets worse when you realize that even improved AI can't effectively deal with player controlled summons whose regeneration makes them effectively invincible (whereas they can recognize Protection from Magic Weapons or the physical immunity of Mordenkainen's sword). Nor does the AI know to wolfpack regenerators and concentrate all possible attacks on them.

A really bad "bugfix" from Beamdog.

1 hour ago, Guest guest said:

First, EE oddly decided to give Dark Planetars and Planetars a huge passive regeneration that scales with haste.

In the vanilla game, (Dark) Planetars have a swift regeneration coded as an applied permanent effect to their .cre file. However regeneration (opcode 98) doesn't work as a permanent effect, only as limited duration or equipped through item (such as RINGWOLF.ITM).

Now the problem is, Planetars as summons were playtested (sort of) and presumably tweaked without their regeneration before the game was shipped. So the default, non-regenerating Planetar even though it is "bugged" with an extra nonfunctional buff is actually closer to developer intent and being balanced (lol, not really) as a 9th level summon.

In addition to their new regen they have (from vanilla) 3 fast casting heals, it's very difficult for 99% of enemies to damage a Planetar who's also regenerating fast enough to prevent them using their heals.

1 hour ago, Guest guest said:

 I will say though that the level 6 Conjure Animals seems pretty horribly overtuned as well, and I've reverted it back to summoning mountain bears in my install.

That's not SCS though, it's a CDTweaks component - the inaptly renamed Shapeshifter Rebalancing - and hundreds of players over the years have noticed how ridiculously overpowered that spell became. Incidentally the improved shapeshifting component of SCS itself goes a long way toward actually fixing the shapeshifter kit, not that I'm inclined to play with one.

13 hours ago, DavidW said:

Polytope: what version of the game were you on when you got this bug?

Classic BG2, SCS version 34.3, OS is Windows10 64-bit.

I suspected it was an animate.ids compatibility thing with the original game, otherwise surely some EE players would've also noticed it by now?

On 7/13/2022 at 1:54 PM, Bartimaeus said:

There are people who experience some feeling of achievement or fun in repeatedly doing a task one million times until that one out of a million outcome happens. Not me, RNG being that extreme is a complete waste of hours of my life, so CTRL-8 immediately and then set them how I like them.

Right, it's one of those things which doesn't have a lot of attraction for me either, like solitaire or trainspotting.

In this case though, it's not a player re-rolling to get 104+ (which would take up a substantial fraction of your adult life), it's third party software doing that. And probably on a much faster machine than were commonly used back when BGII was released, so it's tenuously definable as a bug since it went unnoticed for decades (I feel old).

FWIW, my personal rule on chargen was to press reroll as many times as I want until boredom strikes, but don't lower any stat below 10 in order to shift points to another one (although possibly leave it below 10 if that was rolled naturally, i.e. a mage with 7 strength is fine if not soloing).

On 7/15/2022 at 7:34 AM, CamDawg said:

Specifically, which spell (or spells) was crashing the game? And did you have SoD installed, or was this a straight BGEE game?

I mentioned this a while ago in the feedback thread:

Quote

Monster Summoning I (but not II or III) causes a CTD because two of the creatures potentially summoned dw#ms1oa and dw#ms1ow have the wrong entry in their animation field (4294967295), should be 59440 and 59392 respectively. Not that I use this spell, except from a scroll, but enemy mages can achieve a Pyrrhic victory by crashing the game with it.

Those .cre files can be fixed with an editor rather than completely uninstalling the IWD spells component.

Although the pseudo random algorithm isn't entirely accurate representation of 18d6 I don't think this is much of a bug that needs solving.

As jmerry said, fewer than 1 in every billion 18d6 rolls are >/= 104. A billion seconds is... 31 years, 36 weeks, 6 days, and nearly 9 hours. Oops, my math is bad, I forgot leap years, so it would vary.

It takes a least one second for a human (not a computer) to glance at the summed rolls and tell if those are good or should be re-rolled, realistically, several seconds for most people.

This bug would never be discovered or cared about in the absence of an autoroller program, and I don't see the point of an autoroller, like, you could use the ctrl+8 cheat and save electricity.

This is the highest roll I believe I've ever gotten naturally with a human (base class is thief so only minimum is dex at 9):

13 hours ago, DavidW said:

A Ruhk *transmuter* having *abjuration* spells is more of a scope limitation. SCS only works out how to stat four speciality classes (Conjurer, Necromancer, Invoker, Enchanter), and in addition can't handle speciality fighter-mages. Ideally I'd have a genuine bespoke transmuter script and spell allocation for the Ruhk but it would be a lot of work and it's never been a priority over other projects (and my day job!)

The vanilla Transmuter is in any case an awful kit like the Beastmaster and is only chosen by players who want to increase the game difficulty through nerfing their character. Admittedly, a Rakshasa suffers less from a lack of Abjuration (no need for protections against most spells) but it would be simpler and better design to just rename that guy.

On this subject, I reported some problems with Rakshasas and other creatures shortly after your last update of v34: They use protective spells (like Minor Spell Turning) that don't benefit them, and the highest level Rakshasa casters have actually lost their weapon proficiency and have worse base THAC0 than their level equivalence would suggest (most of the weaker Raks have three stars in their weapon which is really more than a F/M should, then again, by the 2ed rules I think they should also strike as if using magical weapons since they are high HD monsters who are also immune to normal weapons).

7 hours ago, Guest guest said:

Prebuffing through a full array of potions means a warrior could theoretically come out of the gate hasted with +30% hp, 30% lower thac0, Full Plate equivalent AC, 24 str, 21 dex, 18 con, 2hp/round regeneration, immunity to charm/fear/etc, a -20 bonus to all saving throws, and 50% to all magic and elemental damage, 50% magic resistance, or even complete immunity to most elemental damages and another -10AC bonus to crushing. (And depending on how liberal you want to be, you could stack potions or even add green scrolls or common charged items as prebuff effects).

Alas, that all vanishes with a single dispel magic thrown by the player because potions don't have a caster level and single class warriors don't have Spell Immunity (unless you use my revised dispel magic mod in which case potion chance to be dispelled is calculated at drinker's level, not trying to excessively self promote or anything...).

I would support more NPC fighters getting gear which is power equivalent to Valygar or Keldorn's personal items; some already do (Drizzt's friends). It might be too alien to DavidW's usual design paradigm.

If you really want much (emphasis, much) tougher enemy fighters, I'd recommend Improved Anvil from blackwyrmlair (incompatible with SCS and my own mods, though).

The game already has a "Cloudkill" and "Death Fog". I guess "Murdermist" is out?

20 hours ago, InKal said:

"The word "holocaust" originally derived from the Koine Greek word holokauston, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering," or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god." In Hellenistic religion, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full."

pretty much exactly what the spell does. why change the name? why seeking "problems" where there is none? 

Well, the spell poisons the affected, rather than burning them. And if it did it could still be called "Pyroclasm" without losing anything, content wise, while being less likely to upset people. It's one thing to call for the cancellation, scrapping or even rewriting of an author's entire work because it offended someone, it's another to simply request a name change.

On 6/6/2022 at 3:49 AM, temnix said:

As far as representation goes, the only weakness here is that the stooge will visibly strain after being made to take the item, when he should be pleasantly ignorant of the deed being done to him, but I don't think that can be avoided. Maybe it can be covered by making the creature turn around or something like that.

As far as scripting commands go, you can use:

ActionOverride(LastSummonerOf,SetSequence(SEQ_HEAD_TURN))

aVENGER did this many years ago.

Or as an effect externalized to .spl; opcode 138 parameter 2 set to 6

On 6/6/2022 at 10:07 PM, suy said:

Hi @polytope. While I understand that this mod is not that important in BG1, I wanted to try it regardless there, and when I was going to install it, I got a message saying that ToB is required. The check seems to be:

BEGIN @10 DESIGNATED 10

REQUIRE_PREDICATE FILE_EXISTS_IN_GAME ~mel01.cre~ @13

So, how comes that such thing is needed? Isn't BG1EE technically enough? Thank you.

I designed under the assumption that players would be using either vanilla BG2-ToB, BG2EE, or one of the trilogies. From memory, the reasons I required ToB were:

• Subtle opcode differences (possibly harmless and unimportant) between the BG2 and BG2-ToB engine, and the needed opcode 220 doesn't exist in BG1 or IWD1 vanilla engine anyway
• The component for PnP Carsomyr and Arrows of Dispelling disables the ToB upgrade for Carsomyr, and the option to make Project Image a HLA assumes existence of HLAs, so those components (@20 & @23) in the setup would need the REQUIRE_PREDICATE added there instead.
• Importantly, this mod patches a bunch of innate HLAs that had a wizard school so these can't be dispelled, I really should have used ALLOW_MISSING instead, but here are the ones that need to be commented out for it presumably not to choke on a BG1EE game (I don't know whether the high level wizard spells exist as referenced files in BG1EE either).

//Some abilities need their school changed

COPY_EXISTING ~spcl907.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl913.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl914.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl915.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl916.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl917.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl918.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl919.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl928.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl929.spl~ ~override~
	      ~spcl930.spl~ ~override~
WRITE_BYTE 0x25 0

On 4/25/2022 at 6:32 PM, Luke said:

Does this mean that BG cure / cause wounds spells / abilities should match their IWD counterparts (i.e., they should not affect unnatural creatures)...?

Spell description specifically states that "This healing cannot affect creatures without corporeal bodies, nor can it cure wounds of creatures not living or of extraplanar origin."

The most noticeable in-game effect would be that the player will no longer be able to heal NPCs such as Haer'Dalis or Caelar... Not much of an issue, right...?

On 4/25/2022 at 11:45 PM, Luke said:

On top of that, everything that applies op224 (Restoration) and op216 (Level Drain) should receive the same treatment (for consistency reasons – the fact that Haer'Dalis is vulnerable to Level Drain is kinda weird / bad), so in the end this would be a nerf and a buff at the same time...

I have to disagree about giving tieflings immunity to curative magic and its reverse, or energy drain. Tieflings are not considered, per the sourcebooks, to be true extraplanar creatures in AD&D.

For one thing, they can be hit with normal weapons. Per Gary Gygax:

"creatures which can be harmed only by weapons of a special metal (silver, cold iron, etc.) gain this relative invulnerability from having a portion of their existence in either the positive or negative material plane at the same time they exist partially in the prime. Therefore, those creatures which can be struck only with + 1 or greater magical weapons exist wholly and simultaneously in two planes (one of which is, of course, the Prime Material). So creatures which require attack of a + 2 or better magic weapon then exist in three planes simultaneously, and so on."

-Dragon Magazine Volume.1 #8

Neither the designers of the Planescape setting nor Bioware gave most tieflings (i.e. Raelis or the ones encountered with Aesgareth) immunity to normal weapons (or poison, which actual demons are all immune to), in contrast to elementals, fiends and level-draining types of undead... all of which should indeed be immune to healing magic.

As of the most recent versions of CDTweaks, if you install an alternate weapon proficiency system it ensures creatures wielding weapons have as many pips in the new proficiency as they formally did. SCS gives most single class fighters weapon grandmastery if they're high enough level to qualify for it, so I think you should install SCS, then CDTweaks afterward.

I can confirm this is not an issue on the original ToB engine, I must be one of the only people who still play with it and it's for this kind of reason (although blindness in vanilla gives a 10 point penalty to THAC0, instead of 4, unless you have other engine modifications).

Incidentally, as far as druid spells go, Nature's Beauty was much more in need of a nerf than Creeping Doom; the former disables everyone permanently without a save, and possible defense except magic resistance, the latter only interrupts spellcasting for three rounds! Plus the damage and removal of stoneskins, but you don't cast if for damage when a Firestorm would usually serve better.

23 minutes ago, boof said:

Thanks for the reply, but I've done as you said, inserted the line in both places, and they still sit there and spam keening.

Damn, my bad, it needs to be:

    !GlobalTimerNotExpired("BurningManFearTimer","LOCALS")

To check the timer as a local variable for the creature, that should work.

On 3/4/2022 at 3:34 AM, subtledoctor said:

• The vanilla spell has some weird story interactions in the game. E.g. the Harpers in Athkatla announced a plan to Imprison Charname; but it is implied that Charname must be captured first, and thus a tenuous implication that it involves some kind of ritual or long casting time. Fast forward to chapter 6, and charname and enemies alike can cast it mid-combat. So why did the Harpers not cast it at Charname in the first round of that battle? There is no possible defense against it in Chapter 2, so, it should have been game over. Some have suggested that the Harpers' implied ritualized version could be what we all know as the Imprisonment spell, and the quick-cast combat-oriented version that we ultimately learn later in the game should allow a saving throw.

Imprisonment has a long casting time in vanilla (9 segments), and it actually can be avoided in at least 3 ways for a party in chapter 2 (besides spell interruption).

For a mage of at least 9th level (or sorcerer of 10th), Spell Immunity, although SR replaces it with dispelling screen

For a berserker, enraging

For any other character (except a vanilla wizard slayer), drinking a potion of invisibility to break target lock, which is my preferred choice when I see a mage targeting a nearby warrior with a slow casting abjuration spell (i.e. which is clearly not remove magic or breach). Obviously this tactic doesn't work if the enemy can see through invisibility, as liches and the cambion warden of the planar prison can.

Then of course there's the much greater inconsistency that neither mage in that group of harpers is high enough level to cast 9th circle spells, or has a scroll of Imprisonment on them. So, their leader makes a threat he's incapable of acting upon, but that's not uncommon anyway. TL;DR, I don't think it's really an in game justification for entirely redesigning the spell.

Also, enemy AI makes assumptions about how Imprisonment/Freedom work. There was iirc one SCS battle in ToB where a certain spellcaster had pre-emptively imprisoned two hostile balors which would be released if the party cast freedom in that area...