polytope

8 hours ago, DavidW said:

I've fixed the Holy/Unholy issue. Detecting Haste, if it doesn't set the STATE_HASTED marker, is a bit beyond me, at least for the next release.

Isn't this one more a Spell Revisions issue than an SCS issue anyway? It's one thing to nerf 3rd level Haste to single target but another entirely to strip the opcode from it for the minor benefit of not accelerating poison/disease/regeneration from items (regeneration from spells is handled easily).

Even in vanilla there are script checks for STATE_HASTED.

Welcome back Btw.

ETA. A couple of other players noticed that conjurers can't effectively use anti-magic in current SCS + SR

2 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

From what I've seen of such efforts, they're currently not totally convincing, particularly when it comes to anything beyond potato quality, but again, that may well not hold true in the future - and clearly "not totally convincing" to me can be "very convincing" to some, as their use for defamation and disinformation has already been attempted in several cases for recent elections.

After deepfakes got a sitewide ban on reddit they went to voat for a while before that was canned too, so I'm not sure where the community congregates now and aren't up to date on the capabilities, I believe the consensus was that the accuracy of the portrayal depended on how much time and effort the creator was willing to expend on feeding the machine learning model various angles of photographed faces, of which many can be gleaned from a film if you go through it frame by frame.

7 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

What's the line between the depiction of a "person" and a "character", anyways? Either way, if we start protecting individuals' likeness (be it their face, words, or even ascribed words) on that particular basis, I think that starts to be a much more cohesive argument for me.

The line between the person and their character is indeed less clear when you have an actor portraying a character who started out as an illustration, especially if more than one actor plays them over the years, but I'll certainly agree that the individual human's likeness is the important thing that should be sacrosanct against impersonation, even if currently legal and permissible... it's often the case that there's a legislation lag where the courts have no ability to pursue charges for a new thing that's obviously morally wrong and directly harmful.

52 minutes ago, jmerry said:

If the game pauses on exactly the wrong frame - which is most common with "auto-pause on spell cast" - the effects of a spell/item that happen on exactly that frame are decoupled.

Also "auto pause on hit", which is why it would be relevant for an effect block in an enemy creature's natural attack (but irrelevant for the "target gone" autopause, because that means the victim of the attack is dead anyway).

That said, I have literally never seen this bug with manual pause, only autopause, of which the only one I use is "enemy sighted" ("spell cast" is kinda cheaty, even "badly injured" makes the game easier).

If it can occur due to player pause it's the rarest of bugs, rarer for instance than the "endless spellcasting without a spell ever actually cast" thing that can occasionally be triggered by breaking line of sight for a player controlled character, and which I've never seen mentioned in the "code fixes" thread.

On 8/18/2023 at 10:12 PM, Bartimaeus said:

And if it's clearly marked as "THIS IS AN IMITATION GENERATED BY A COMPUTER"?

In principal yes, but such disclaimers are so easily scrubbed from the content or simply missed. Consider how often reports from "satirical" sites go viral among those who didn't read the fine print and assume it's for real.

12 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I once saw art of a favorite character of mine turned into a literal genocide-supporting nazi. I certainly found it reprehensible, but should it be illegal to transform someone else's ideas and work? It was basically fan art, no matter how despicable I personally found it. Someone thought up and poured themselves into that character and their concept/personality, someone visually designed that character, someone wrote their dialogue, someone directed how that character should act and speak, and then someone actually acted out that character. Is that final part so sacred compared to the rest that only their creative work should be protected while the rest is perfectly fine for everyone to transform however they please?

Well, if it's a cartoon or anime or CGI character then no, it's vulgar but not illegal to draw them as a Nazi. Photo-shopping the actual human actor who plays a character into an SS uniform is different. Just as you can't use a person's face in representative media they didn't consent to (c.f. the deepfakes controversy) I'd argue that their voice as a similarly unique (if less easily distinguishable) extension of the person should be accorded the same degree of protection.

On 8/16/2023 at 1:53 AM, Luke said:

f that is indeed incorrect, then why does op162 (Cure Paralysis) remove both op109 and op175? That is to say: should we have two separate removal opcodes, one specifically for op109 and another one specifically for op175...?

Are there specific situations where you'd want to remove one but not the other? Except of course when one's a magical effect and the other isn't, but then it can probably be dispelled in any case.

Remove Paralysis spell description states: "By the use of this spell, the priest can free all creatures within the area from the effects of any paralyzation or related magic (such as a ghoul's touch or a Hold spell)." Seems to cover all in-game cases of #109 and #175.

Related, should Remove Paralysis actually have a #163 in addition to the #162 in the block?

16 hours ago, testlum said:

Oh, that is unfortunate. I saw a similar implementation of your suggestion in semiticgoddess' War Hulk mod to increasing slash/crush/pierce damage, but would prefer keep the buff to weapons only.

Besides Blade Barrier/Globe of Blades, Earthquake and Implosion there aren't many sources of physical damage from spells rather than weapons (Comet may be, depending on mods, and Lance of Disruption if you have IWD spells).

Could forbid dual classing to priest (if it's a self-targeted kit ability) or simply disable spell casting for the duration of the buff (if not).

On a closer look, I posted misinformation about the fiends yesterday though, the top blocks in their script seems to never cycle if summoned by a PC, thus not losing the "Summoned Demon" identifier nor becoming an ALLY in terms of EA.ids.

However there's definitely a problem that player-summoned fiends in the middle of a fight proceed to attack each other even if of the same type i.e. not Lawful vs Chaotic, a neutral aligned caster has a 50/50 to summon either so fiend summoning would be less useful to such a PC even if things were working as intended.

On 8/11/2023 at 7:47 AM, boof said:

No one's experienced this?

Can someone look and see what in my mod loadout could lead to something like this?

I doubt it's a mod interaction. In my default SCS install DEMPITSU - the pit fiend - has these problematic blocks in its script:

...at the beginning, and:

...at the end.

Proceeds to absentmindedly misdescribe the problem

The (currently) bad AI of summoned fiends is not an aTweaks bug per se, but iirc aTweaks fiends can no longer be installed smoothly over SCS.

I managed to get aTweaks fiends to install in working order over (version 34+) SCS fiends on a previous game, although I had to change so many things in the setup that while I still have the files on a USB somewhere, I couldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't have exactly the same install order.

ETA: And it would be rude to publicize hacks of someone else's mods, even if they were needed for your own game.

13 hours ago, InKal said:

yeah. and actually nobody actually takes multiclasses characters, only cheaters and thers is quite a lot of them belive it or not.

Some multiclass in IA are decent, fighter/thief and cleric/thief are terrible last I checked, but gnome fighter/illusionist is okay, because he's both a support caster and fighter and when you eventually start getting HLAs he doesn't have to pick Hardiness (he's got Stoneskin) and can choose a lot of Critical Strikes, will also have weapon grandmastery through the Black Blade of Disaster spell. Fighter/mage/cleric is also not bad if you have an Auramaster or Avenger as your divine caster and want access to some cleric-only stuff like Chant, Aid & Champion's Strength sometimes (in fights where they'll get silenced). Latest version includes a lot of new stuff for clerics, but I haven't really tried it yet.

IA requires HLAs though, nowhere in the vanilla game or probably even Ascension do you really need to use a HLA, although SCS Irenicus in Hell and the Ascension finale would be much harder without HLAs or a lot of exploits.

Another idea, rather than setting the cursed flag on the spear itself have it apply a spell on equip - noncumulative when switched - that is removable by Remove Curse (easy on EE or use a lot of #283 effects otherwise) and which:

1. Restricts by #181 the type of weapon usable to Spears category & Hand to Hand (which would presumably include the magically created spider weapon)
2. Alternatively, by melee hit effect #248 ensures a possibility thereafter of transforming into the spider whenever attacking in melee, regardless of weapon used
3. Both of the above, which would be very close to the implementation you initially posted (can't use weapons other than spears until curse is removed, probably wouldn't use a different spear anyway, risks transformation whenever fighting)

20 hours ago, Allbrother said:

Maybe RemoveItem (Spear) -> CreateMagicalItem (Spider item)-> CreateItemInSlot (spear) after duration could work, but the downside would be that if something else is equipped in the targeted slot, it would be destroyed I think. edit: possibly opcode 264 on equip can address that, not sure 

In my experience the #143 opcode is bugged and problematic to the extent that I'd only use it on creatures outside the party, usually to grant a "bundle" of abilities or protections that can then be detected by the simple scripting trigger HasItem() rather than needing an associated detectable spell state and also be removed via DestroyItem() instead of requiring a secondary spell with sectype removal (for original BG2) or #321 (for EE).

On 8/4/2023 at 6:36 PM, Luke said:

Actually, this might be incorrect...

I asked ChatGPT (lol) about that, and it depicted hold monsters as "a spell that affects a creature's physical movements by magically paralyzing them. It doesn't directly target the mind, but rather the body."

• OK, nevermind, ChatGPT also states that the "Hold Monsters" spell is considered a mind-affecting spell. Mind-affecting spells are spells that target a creature's mind, influencing their thoughts, emotions, or mental faculties. "Hold Monsters" falls under this category because it affects the physical actions and movements of creatures by magically paralyzing them.

The fact that it is an Enchantment spell is kinda misleading...

I think undead immunities have varied a lot between editions of the rulesets, like in 3rd edition they were immune to illusions, but in 1st and 2nd edition of AD&D only a few were.

Original MM says ghouls are "subject to all attack forms except sleep and charm spells." whereas for instance spectres are "not affected by sleep, charm hold or cold-based spells. Poison or paralyzation do not harm spectres", wights (and by extension wraiths) get the same immunities. Shadows, even skeletons and zombies are also described as proof against sleep, charm, hold and cold magic.

Perhaps the idea is that "living" flesh - with metabolism and a need for food - is susceptible to hold-type spells, paralyzation or poison, so ghouls actually count; reanimated and incorporeal/ghostly undead don't. There's a consistent pattern that all undead are definitely immune to sleep & charm-type spells presumably including the ones that hadn't been published yet such as Emotion.

5 hours ago, dbianco87 said:

It kind of wouldn't work anyway though with how I have the spear designed.  The spider form has it's own attack style and procs including "spider frenzy" which applies improved haste for 9 seconds but also makes the spider form go berserk for 3 rounds.

I'm kind of reaching here (there probably isn't a good solution) but you could treat the spider transformation similar to the Spirit Warrior challenge in watcher's keep, i.e. the spider is a separate creature but still tied to the wielder.

• Your spear would have a chance of summoning a spider statted out however you like - which would be initially invisible - and its script would instruct it to: PolymorphCopy(LastSummoneOf(Myself)) then Polymorph(SPIDER_WRAITH), or whatever you want it to look like
• The wielder would be placed under a fake maze effect through #271 and #100 versus everyone, plus #101 vs 12 etc. to be safely hidden away for the duration the spider is active.
• If the spider dies the wielder's fake maze state ends (AoE removal by a spell on death script) and dies too, or drops to 1 hp like the harm spell, if you'd prefer.

11 hours ago, Galactygon said:

For the sake of consistency, it might be a good idea to have Hold Undead use 175 and change Hold Monster to affect everything but Undead as well as remove protection from 175 from undead immunities (i.e. RING95.itm). This way, they are affected by Free Action as well.

Would that not break compatibility with mods that introduce #175 dependent hold effects which were only intended to work on living things? Of course #175 respects ids targeting so multiple instances of the opcode could be applied against HUMANOID, GIANTHUMANOD, MONSTER, ANIMAL with the exclusion of UNDEAD but why would a modder have set it up that way if the assumption has always been that they're immune?

Some non-undead have the RING95 immunity package, anyway, and not all undead have it, most vampires get their immunities from a different item, as do most liches (which are immune to 3rd and 5th level spells anyway, so irrelevant for Hold Undead and Hold Monster).

Glad to hear it, Polytweak always worked fine on oBG2, but a lot of the scripts would need to be completely rewritten for EE which is the assumed default these days, I don't really want people seeking out an unsupported mod.

There was a minor unfixed "bug" with the umberhulks last I checked, they can confuse Phaere or Solaufein in the underdark, which results in automatic quest failure if they then attack each other (doesn't occur in vanilla).

Of course a victim of confusion will only ever attack the closest creature so a Stoneskinned or low AC, high hp party member can soak attacks for a few rounds until they regain their senses, but it's probably best not to have summons in this encounter.

Le malapropism.

Also @Bartimaeus the ancient mod I once published, polytweak, is deprecated and substantially incompatible with recent versions of EE (really, all except the new icons for the flametongue sword/blackrazor, which I don't think were well received anyway), so should probably be removed from the install order recommendation in the IR revised thread.

11 hours ago, jmerry said:

What's that even supposed to mean? Of course a script isn't going to interrupt itself; once the game starts executing an action block, it keeps going until either the block is done or some outside influence interrupts it. The game doesn't run the script again unless the block is already interrupted. If that's how SetInterrupt works, it might as well be NoAction().

Have you actually tested this? RunAwayFrom(), MoveToObject() and probably other actions that eat up game time are often interruptible by other prioritized scripted actions.

It's not really relevant to the elementals anyway, and won't work if you can select them and give orders, which overrides script actions for friendly creatures.

16 hours ago, InKal said:

If you first installing something like remove level cap and then you want to remove HLAs then I am not sure that you actually know what you are doing. HLA is actually pretty good concept but I understand when someone wnats to change something, improve or replace some HLA like giving actually good HLAs to bards is amazing Avenger's idea and execution and if you want to just remove them just like that because you are somewhat angry about HLAs fuck knows why? sry champ you are kinda stupid imo. 

What is actually cheesy is multi class hlas, double or even triple HLAs which means HLA every level for every class. Ideally multi class should gain HLA every two levels and triple class every three levels to make their HLAs number the same as single class. but that is pretty sure impossible to do because engine limitation or something and for example Improved Anvil circumvent this (tahts the word? circuumvent?) by removing the strongest HLAs from multi classes, which is really NOT FUN at all. Do not remove HLAs but rather make them great again like Avenger.

Not sure if you intended this for me or where you picked up anger in my posts, I'll just say that I think Improved Anvil's designer(s) understood the balance problems introduced by HLAs, and although I sort of like IA and play it from time to time, they took the opposite direction to nerfing HLAs and instead strengthened enemies to a tremendous extent, like, many IA monsters have ~75% physical resistance (or more) precisely because a fighter comboing Improved haste and Critical Strike deals 4x the damage you'd expect. Many IA monsters can soak a mage's entire memorizable complement of spells before dying, because Improved Alacrity and casting speed bonuses allow such a spell barrage in the first place.

Such superlative improvements of the monsters' resistances have strange consequences though, for instance the difference between weapons and each one's base damage is muted when attacking an extremely physically resistant creature because of ceil rounding, unless it's applied as a separate damage unit as in the Treefolk's arm club, which suddenly becomes very useful. Spells like Creeping Doom and Flame Arrow which apply the damage (over time or up front) as small increments instead of large blocks are disproportionately effective too.

Also, most IA enemies are immune to disabling effects and instakills again because a fighter can Whirlwind with Celestial Fury, Flail of Ages, Ravager Halberd etc. and practically guarantee a proc, or a mage could Malison + storm-of-save-or-else spells under Alacrity.

My point is that if you don't apply some rebalancing of overpowered vanilla abilities you need to juice up enemies, by a lot, far beyond what they should have btb, for them to present a tactical challenge again, but doing this locks out several styles of play too. Purists might prefer to remove OP things rather than meddle with creatures stats like that.

15 hours ago, jmerry said:

Multiclass characters get essentially the same number of HLAs as single-class characters, because of how the XP system works in these games. Each class levels half or a third as fast as it does in a single class, so the totals come out the same.

Fighter/thief multi is still six HLAs ahead of a plain thief though with a potential total of 23 instead of 17... but I think InKal was referring to Improved Anvil, which has an xp cap of 12.2 million, multis would draw noticeably ahead if IA didn't also delay HLAs for them, especially for the triple classes which I think nobody takes when playing an Anvil campaign.

The readme does say IR should come after almost all "content" mods except Spell Revisions, Sword Coast Stratagems, atweaks, G3tweaks and some components of IA and 1PP.

 I have a feeling Item Revisions and Item Upgrade are conceptually incompatible anyway, the three elemental staves after revisions don't have abilities analogous to those which should be "inherited" and combined into one by the upgraded Staff of Elemental Mastery.

The IR staves:

The Item Upgrade combo staff:

Note, different spell like abilities, no on-hit effects except versus elementals.

I mean the design philosophies of Item Revisions and Item Upgrade are pretty opposed too, IR doesn't contain single handed weapons of higher than +4 enchantment even in ToB, with IU you can forge a +5 club in chapter 2 of SoA.

9 hours ago, jmerry said:

I had an idea on the script side, guarding the whole thing with a SetInterrupt(FALSE) and SetInterrupt(TRUE) pair. That should stop the block from being interrupted, right?

Nope. It didn't work. I could still issue commands to the elemental as normal, resetting its side of the struggle. Does that script action even do anything?

I believe that in a script...

RESPONSE#100

	SetInterrupt(FALSE)

	*other scripted actions*

	SetInterrupt(TRUE) 

...will allow separate & time consuming actions in the block to be executed consecutively without interruption by other prompts in the script.

As for the Wizard-summoned elementals, if I was doing it I'd apply a spell via opcode #146 to each such creature file which:

1. Sets movement rate and APR to nil for 3 rounds, could also apply blindness if you think it's worthwhile.
2. For PC summoned elementals only has a 15% chance at the end of the three rounds to firstly remove any enchantment school effects, secondly to set reaction, opcode #72, to ENEMY

I've been thinking more about this. Since (some) enemy fighter and thieves are scripted to use HLAs even without SCS, opponent HLA usage could be simulated with special and rare potions with warrior/rogue usability and a chance (10 to 25% depending on the HLA being replaced) to drop a dose of such potion (game mechanic wise, added to the inventory when their scripted HLA occurs).

• Whirlwind/Greater Whirlwind -> Potion of Celerity, duplicates Improved Haste for 6 rounds
• Power Attack/Critical Strike/Smite -> Potion of Might (would be power if not already in game) giving +3 to hit +5 to damage + 20 temp hp for 1 turn.
• Assassination -> Potion of Improved Invisibility (or Elixir of the Spectre if that's a better name)
• Avoid Death/Greater Evasion -> Potion of Magic Shielding (exactly as in game)
• Hardiness -> Potion of Imperviousness

Improved Alacrity is the difficult one to fake, because if a mage is scripted to use it it's almost certainly for a good reason, there could be a Potion of Speedcasting added but probably no more than a 10% chance of an extra being found on any mage who uses it. Other mage HLAs can be (as I said) Wish spell effects or rod charges (one of Comet or Dragon's Breath should be).

If fighters aren't to get HLAs I'm thinking their THAC0 and save progression should be revised.

THAC0 would progress normally to level 14 (7) then 1 point per 3 levels, so 17(6), 20(5), 23(4), 26(3), 29(2), 32(1), 35(0)

Saves, across the board, would progress toward 3 at a rate of a single category improving 1 point every 2 levels. I.e.

L17-18: 3/5/4/4/6

L19-20: 3/5/4/4/5

L21-22: 3/4/4/4/5

L23-24: 3/4/4/4/4

L25-26: 3/3/4/4/4

L27-28: 3/3/3/4/4

L29-30: 3/3/3/3/4

L31-40: 3/3/3/3/3

This way the fighter has some improvement to look forward to at higher levels without HLA stuff. Monks do keep improving above 20th level "naturally" as it is, but should probably follow the fighter THAC0 curve.

 I think this might appeal to purists, but most players obviously prefer the existence of HLAs, debating whether it's worth making it into a mod considering the new item graphics will take time to produce.

3 hours ago, auc42x said:

I can add one more detail, in case it is of interest.  I originally encountered the bug on the rest that triggers the "Life... is Strength" Irenicus dream.  The crash happened after the dream finished, after the "Loading Area" screen came up, and directly before the resting movie played.  I could then generate the crash on non-dream rests as well; it always happens before the movie plays (but, if a dream is triggered, after the dream completes and after it loads the original resting area).

Aha, I've been able to reproduce this, it looks to me like the problem is resting when a party member is injured and you have the bugged spells memorized. This triggers the "healing spells cast on rest" routine, this is why dismissing Keldorn, even though he's no spellcaster worked... he was probably lightly injured. Apparently the game parses through all your memorized spells if a PC is injured before resting, and found an opcode it choked and CTDed on.

Still no explanation as to why the bug triggers on resting rather than use of spells. I'd guess some party AI script is trying to cast the bugged spells out of combat, but none in that list seem obvious candidates as long duration prebuffs.

1 hour ago, CamDawg said:

A few other notes: ghast1 is used by the ghasts from Monster Summoning IV; cdiwdtr1 is used by the troll summons in Shades. These, and everything else flagged in argent's list, is also fixed in IWDification.

Actually it turns out this not a problem with the IWD spells packaged in SCS. MSIV calls a yuan-ti rather than a ghast from MSUMM04.2da, whereas the trolls from Shades don't have the peculiar pseudo-immortality of other trolls (in its various implementations).

Which is why I thought it was interesting, the spells enemy casters will use against you don't have these opcode bugs, the player should only see it if they're trying to cast the unused spells (although summoned orcs had a misassigned animation in SCS).