temnix

It looks like an either-or situation with scripts. If the container throws a fireball, then it's disarmable, and then it doesn't throw the fireball or do anything else. The engine doesn't distinguish between trap-character blocks and other conditions that may be set there. On the other hand, shelves are sometimes scripted to sound the alarm, but they are not disarmable. This sucks, because I had the notion to challenge players to go through the catacombs under Candlekeep without disturbing any of the coffins. There is no reason for good or lawful-aligned characters to pillage the tombs of distinguished sages of the past beneath home, and Tethtoril asks to leave them alone. I would introduce a reward from the grateful dead on exit, if the party abstained from taking any of the treasure in those sepulchres. But it turns out that it's impossible to do this fairly simple thing, take stock of opening containers.

No. I do Lock it myself, but only after the CloseDoor action. I need to do some more testing of this, with other doors, but it should be easy. By the way, can someone confirm that a door with Lock difficulty 100 gives the "This door does not have a conventional lock and may be warded..." message? I get that message even without setting "Magic lock."

That's right. I'm too tired. But flattered that you materialized on the forum specially to correct me.

Is it possible to take account of the party's opening a container, other than by writing checks in its script? The problem with scripts there is that in addition to any checks and globals they also control traps, and when the trap is disarmed, the script is deleted. Also if the container uses a key, having the key in the inventory lets the party bypass the script. There is an action, OpenState(O:Object*,I:Open*BOOLEAN), that looks like it's meant for this, but it doesn't do anything.

The second part's too complicated. But the first - there is no one blocking the door. The party is well away. It's just not getting shut.

There are serious dangers in becoming a lich, if the Monstrous Manual is to be followed. The process ends with the caster drinking a special potion that fails to work or kills him permanently about half of the time. If I were role-playing someone aiming for that threshold, I would direct my resources on improving that d20 roll with better ingredients, more exact formulae and so on. A good dungeon master would meet me half-way. This would all be dangerous and take me to faraway places, no doubt, as would even the basic process. But liches are not so rare as roc's teeth in the Forgotten Realms. It's not such a bad proposition either, to those who don't want to die. They don't all fall apart and limp about, there is magic to stop the decay or conceal it. One of the zulkirs of Thay is a lich, if I'm not mistaken, and he only looks like a pale, gaunt man. Undeath will also liberate one from the muddling of emotion and set the mind free to truly develop. I haven't read van Richten's Guide to Liches, for Ravenloft, but it probably gives a very good treatment to its subject. I know that the Guide to Vampires does, and it quite expanded my concepts about what they may be like. Yes, vampirism is another way to immortality, but the drawbacks are more obvious here. And the game says that Bhaal did his inseminating during the Time of Troubles, no two ways about it. String number 24415. It's just another hole in the story, not the first, not the last.

Bartimaeus is right. It's not just powers you have to weigh against the price, though. They are not the reason wizards choose to become liches, they do it because they don't want to die. If the main character doesn't conveniently ascend to godhood in a pillar of green fire at the end of Throne of Bhaal, he can look forward to descending to mother earth in not too many years. Lichdom is the only more or less commonly available, well-studied way to avoid death. All others are local, partial or unique. You need to develop the mod with this in mind, although a ten year-old is not likely to worry about that distant prospect, and Charname is ten. The Time of Troubles was in 1358 DR, and Baldur's Gate begins in 1368 DR. Which explains a lot. Anyway, he's young, and why would he want to become an undead creep? If you were writing a story about someone older, you could make the case... But I'm making a fool of myself. You aren't writing any story, you just want to give bootlegged powers. Well, if this transformation can be made attractive at all to the hero, there is no reason why he wouldn't pay everything for it. But I suggest making the ingredients expensive rather than forcing him to cart in 120.000 geepies. He ain't bribing death, you know.

In one of my mods the party is transported outside of the area to spots in front of the building where they were just now. One of the regions there runs a script that does the rest of the job: disables the travel region that leads inside the building and shuts the front door. This last part, with CloseDoor(), isn't working. I'm writing there the name of the correct door, there are no errors, but it simply doesn't shut. What could be causing this? And also, is it impossible in the BG version of the engine to disable a door so that it's no longer highlighted? I think Torment used to do that.

Deleted.

You have the reason to during the dialogue. Ask her, convince her to wait for, say, a day while you rest to memorize Remove Curse or dash to a temple to buy a scroll. Charisma could play a role in this, although that would be a departure from BG's usual way, where stats don't matter.

Never mind.

Create, or for starters better just copy, one of the STO files whose name you already know. Search for the Nashkel store, for instance. A copied file will have most of the settings already in place. Use NAME2 in the tp2 file to give the shop a name. A store is type 0, but you can display items for sale at an inn, tavern or temple also. "Can buy" and "Can sell" refer to the party. "Store purchases" is about what type of items the store will buy and also what it can identify, if identification is available. Temples don't buy anything from the party, because "Can sell" is off, but they can identify every kind of item, since the categories are there. Identification is limited to the store's Lore value, however. "Sell markup" and "Buy markup," on the other hand, are store-side, which is confusing. The party will want "Sell markup" as low as possible and "Buy markup" as high as possible, but you have to be careful here and do some testing: Charisma and Reputation can lower prices considerably, and if there is not enough of a difference between the two values, the player may be able to buy items for less than their selling price at this very store and get infinite money. The rest of the settings are self-explanatory, except "Storage capacity." I don't know what that does for stores, maybe it's only for containers. Your merchant's dialogue needs to have a branch that ends with DO ~StartStore("STOfile",LastTalkedToBy)~ EXIT.

I want to delete a song from an area's songlist, something I've never done before. The Weidu readme says that "songlist" is the string variable I need to give to the fj_are_structure function, but this code fails: COPY_EXISTING ~AR1113.ARE~ ~override~ LPF fj_are_structure INT_VAR fj_delete_mode = 1 STR_VAR fj_structure_type = ~songlist~ END I'm surprised, because this sort of thing exactly works for deleting actors. Here I can the "not found" error for the area, but it is definitely there.

This is unnecessarily detailed. To say that the SoA engine mostly doesn't have these extras would have been enough. I know some of the workarounds myself - using EFF files with opcode 177 instead of 318 and 324 for some parameters. But the absence of effect removal is a big problem with the old engine. It is making half of the things I can make limited to the EE. For this case I don't need any more information. I changed green slimes to be closer to the pen-and-paper version, removable with Cure Disease and not related to poison. Although Cure Disease patching still involved opcode 321, so this had to be restricted to the EEs again, to BG:EE in particular. I'm going to make it possible to save the innkeeper of Ye Olde Inn.

In the Enhanced Edition, for the first game in the BG series, some items, monster weapons, for instance, use advanced opcodes. The spit of the green slime, for example, starts with an effect 318 to exclude targets with Poison resistance >= 100. I like my mods compatible with "classic" installations, when that's not too difficult, but I'm struggling to represent this protection with "classic" opcodes. And this monster weapon must be different in Shadows of Amn, if there are any green slimes there, because 318 will cause a crash. So, how does the old engine go about these exclusions and protections?

It needs to persist through death. But it's all right, I changed the interpretation to suit the mechanic.

Prefixes are an interesting side topic, actually. If whoever had that idea originally had wanted to avoid interference of file names, he should have gone with personal suffixes. Prefixes make all files of a modder appear in the same place in the tree of Near Infinity. This is convenient to avoid looking all over for them, but it has the same problem as keeping one large drawer for all of one's things: finding something there is a hassle. When hundreds of files begin with the same two letters, the eye struggles to get past them to those that have meaning. On the other hand, with a suffix I can begin a file name just as I want it and I see what that file is, at the price of two characters in the end. In effect, suffixes allow free file naming, only shorter. I'm not surprised this "community" has stuck with an inferior solution through the years, though. As far as this mod goes, I said what I wanted to say. I gave a good idea, CamDawg can make use of it or not.

Are hit points added with effect 18, with a permanent duration, dispellable? I give this bonus as an Instant/Permanent, dispel mode 3, power 9, and I test with a very powerful Dispel effect. Everything else in that spell fades, but the hit points won't go away. "Remove effects" isn't appropriate in this case, even if that works. I must use Dispel.

The older mods are on top of the log, and that's where the standby mod is. But everybody surely knows that Weidu will reinstall all later mods in the stack if an older mod is changed. I don't know why it tries to reinstall the standby mod, come to think of it, when the newer mod is reinstalled, but it tries. In both cases, I hate that behavior.

The point of appraising items, if there is to be a practical purpose at all, is to increase their value. In principle, appraisal should sometimes leave the value as it was or discover flaws and lower it, but in any event the goal is to take the item to a store. Plot items should be excluded, and then there will be no problem for any checks. It is also not too difficult to patch dialogues and scripts with an OR(2) condition admitting the differently-priced items and add duplicate take-item lines for them. Overall, this should not cause much trouble. But it is even easier to do none of that and leave this mod in the "theoretical meh" category.

The dialogue of this mod should replace appraised items with copies with higher value.

In these games, does all regeneration come from creature rings? There is also the potion and the removable ring, and Constitution works to heal at higher levels, although that doesn't use the Regeneration opcode. Are there any special sources or ways of applying it? I don't really need to know the names of all items with the R opcode, I can just patch them, but I would like to know any special accents there. Is there any reason not to replace R with a cycling Current Hit Points bonus? The point is that the latter can bring creatures back from the dead, while R stops with death.

I have at the moment two mods installed, both mine. There were times when I had many more. But even these are big and it takes a long time for them to be installed or reinstalled. I'm working on the later of the mods, making changes and reinstalling frequently to check them. Every time I do this Weidu tries to reinstall the older mod. It's fortunate that there is an error in that one's tp2, so the installer simply shows an error message and skips it, and I can get the stuff I'm interested in. I'm not fixing that error on purpose, because if I did, I would be treated to an interminable reinstallation of the sleeping mod every time. On the other hand, I don't want to simply remove the older mod. I go back to it every so often, I make use of its resources in the override folder, sometimes I improve them and then copy them to the sleeping mod's Files. And I should have the opportunity to edit whatever I want. Disable or make optional the reinstallation of previous mods on the list!

What is it about the wings item that makes them only compatible with the elven avatars? Can that be edited out somehow? I would like to see winged dwarves, for sure.

It doesn't mean anything. It's an empty value.