CamDawg

Maevar is a mage-thief with a full spellbook and scripting to use it, but can't since he's wearing Shadow Armor.

I'm not too worried about enemy mages--it interferes with player AI scripting, too.

I'm not a fan of the miscast penalty myself, so I'm always open to new ideas. Unfortunately, combat scripting in the IE gets very dumb when casting times start matching or exceeding 10 (one full round). The engine assumes any spell is cast within a round, and can sometimes just go to the next round's action--e.g. the mage sits there casting for six seconds, then throws the spell away to use a sling. This is one of the reasons why Fixpack and the EEs actually use maximum casting times of nine (as in nine-tenths of a round) even for spells which say their casting time is a full round. While it's easy enough to adjust casting times based on a fixed or percentage-based penalty, there's no way to specify a maximum cap.

Hmm, a new Roxanne version of Amber has reappeared in the EET Install Tool, along with a slate of other mods. Strangely these mods already have working EE versions, yet are not forked from their original repos and are only used by the EET Install Tool. How odd.

It's a subtle change that allows this. The original transformations use the polymorph opcode (135) to effect the change which, among other things, disables spellcasting. Rebalancing instead uses an animation change (53) on its new claws (wwwere.itm and wwweregr.itm) for the two forms. Rather than swapping back to a polymorph, you'd probably be better served by adding a few other effects to effect this change. Disable spellcasting (145) targeted at priest spells would do it; you could supplement it with a disable button (144) for the spell select button. You can look at spcl234.spl and spcl234d.spl for examples--these are applied to fallen paladins and rangers to (permanently) disable their spellcasting.

It's just the forums that are down--the main site is still up.

Try the alternative hold opcode, 185. It's reserved for holding undead and nothing on the party should block it--the selfishness demon in the hell trials uses it to immobilize your party member via spin769.

There was a typo in the topic title that I fixed.

The option to send an NPC to an inn doesn't appear until you visit the inn in question--e.g. you can't send Imoen to the FAI until you visit it. Tweaks doesn't do anything with NPC portraits.

The mind flayer's respawn is on a ten-round (60 second) timer. If it doesn't respawn after you wait, you can reset the variables with CLUAConsole:SetGlobal("spawnill","AR2400",0) CLUAConsole:SetGlobal("SpawnillTimer","GLOBAL",1)

0x113 seemed like a really random number, so I guessed and did some mental arithmetic.

0x71 = 113, so it's a misunderstanding of notation.

This one is not as clear cut. The correct, but not terribly helpful, answer is that it depends entirely on whether you think an item ability should be stopped by MR or spell protections such as Spell Immunity. I guess I can try some general guidelines: If it's casting a spell directly (e.g. via op 146/148) then have it bypass MR, no saves, and use 0 for the primary/secondary, as the target's protections will interact with the spell directly. Spell scrolls and other items that cast fall under this. If an item ability is emulating a spell or spell-like effects, but not casting a spell directly, use the closest spell's MR and primary/secondary. Most wands fall into this category; e.g. the Wand of Magic Missiles uses invoker/offensive damage and does not bypass MR, just as the spell. Outside of that, wing it. Note that not all items adhere to rule #2 terribly consistently. The reason is that, for the most part, Fixpack (and by extension EE) was conservative about changing these.

When you see a spell say it makes you immune/blocks/absorbs spells of level X, what the engine is actually checking is the power field on an effect. A power level of 0 will bypass any such spell protections. Generally, effects from weapons should use 0 and spells should use their level as their power level. Anti-magic spells will sometimes use 0 if they're supposed to bypass spell protections (e.g. Dispel Magic) and summoning spells generally use 0 so they don't fail if you target someone with the spell.

The Item Upgrade mod allows Cromwell and Cespenar to upgrade additional items in BGII. One third of them are convenience functions (e.g., they save you ring or boot space), one third of them try to beef up categories of weapons that are "weak by comparison" (e.g., clubs and spears), and one third of them upgrade NPC-specific items. Version 45 contains a pair of bugfixes--one to allow the alternative Reaching Ring in BG2EE to be used in formulas, and the other to resolve a compatibility issue with SCS (though this will also require a new version from SCS). Download v45 Discussion forum Project page Readme

^^ This. It's designed to eliminate the need for a thief, so it only disarms traps and opens locks that a thief could.

That's already been fixed with its move to The Calling. Once that's out of beta, Exotic Items is being removed from tweaks.

Then BGT is doing something really stupid, as only two of those traps are removable in oBG. edit: And only two are disarmable in my BGT install.

That's something I hadn't considered. Cheers. That being said, in the set piece fights where the traps are part of the difficulty they typically can't be disarmed. For example, only two of the 15 traps in the Sarevok finale and none of the six in the Belhifet fight can be disarmed so the impact on difficulty is somewhat mitigated. Any of you folks who use the component want to chime in? Especially if you're, say, an SCS solo'er?

And it's incorporated, mostly, for v10.

A huge thanks for all of this! For the most part, I've incorporated this, with two notable exceptions: Even though lock difficulties get set to zero, I'm retaining the locked flag as it serves as an important indicator to the player. E.g. in many homes, the guards will be called when opening locked containers, and removing the flag means the player has no warning to be careful. For now I'm going to keep it as one component as I've not seen any demand for these to be separated (and the more natural separation is likely traps vs. locks). If someone out there wants these as separate components, let me know, and also how you'd like them separated.

No, the second and third levels are not responsible for this. The game polls for levels in the relevant class, doesn't find any, and defaults to 1.

This is in for v10.

This is noted in the readme:

It is now! She's not literally on the road; she's in the area along the north edge off to the west a bit.