temnix

That's something you should write to me in a message, not drag it out here. And I don't agree.

It's funny how every "generation" has to discover the same facts for itself. If there was some universal grand tome that would be obligatory to read, something much better than the guide to effects here, new learners would start from a higher ground every time instead of ground zero. As it is, we spend a lot of the creative interval that we are given on learning the ropes, and when we are quite done learning them, 3/4 of our creative potential has evaporated. I, too, have had to discover the irregular character of this effect. So has everyone else before me, probably... because it's not getting fixed. Beamdog is doing anything with its patches but addressing real problems with the engine. But then, maybe these aren't fixable. In answer to your question: the effect is unreliable. Although I don't think I have seen it fail to apply at the given time, it can trigger before. What you need to do, then, is to build in a protection that will block this effect until the right moment. First, you need to set up the EFF to Cast spell (opcode 146) or, if you are making your mod for the Enhanced Editions only, Apply effects list (326). The EFF must deliver this spell, with further effects down the line, not bring to bear the bonuses directly. From this spell cast another with the bonuses and below put a block for this, second, spell. So: Your item or Spell 1: Use EFF file on condition, interval X. EFF: Cast/Apply Spell 2. Spell 2: Cast/Apply Spell 3, below Protection from Spell 2 (206 or 318), duration... Here is the tricky part, the engine is not too precise with delivering effects. They can be off by a couple of ticks. You need to find a balance between leaving Spell 2 open to duplication and blocking it so near to X that the engine will miss and Spell 3 won't be delivered this cycle. From my trial and error (where is the grand tome?), X minus 3-4 ticks is the most effective block. Another thing to consider is that sometimes a simple self-recasting 146 is a better option. You cast a spell, include the effects in it and tell it to cast itself again with Delayed/Permanent at X. Every second, maybe. This is very accurate. The problem then is ending this cycle once, say, your item is removed. For that you include a removal spell in the combo but add a While Equipped Protection from this spell among your item's effects, target Self. That's going to look like this: Your item, While Equipped (or Instant/Permanent...): Cast Spell 1. Spell 1: Remove the effects of Spell 1, to avoid duplication. Second effect: such and such bonuses, to last X + a few ticks just to be on the safe side. Third effect: Cast Spell 1, Double/Penetration at X, Self. Fourth effect: Cast Spell 2, an instant duration, Self. Spell 2: Remove the effects of Spell 1, i.e. the bonuses and recasting. Your item, White Equipped: Protection from Spell 2, Self. You are not so dense, but it'll give me pleasure to elaborate that so long as the item is held, Spell 2 will never stop the cycle. When you put down this piece of gear, the bonuses will quietly expire after X. It is best to make X 1 second, which is the shortest interval for Delayed/Permanent anyway. Flying with Captain Obvious here, only the Enhanced Editions allow targeted removal of effects, so this arrangement is only for EEs, but you have to think about how your wildly cycling EFF's effects are going to end, too. In an EE it's always possible to include Remove effects by resource on top of a spell and clean out any overlap.

I want to make a trap that activates when a creature walks over it instead of appearing half a screen away. This requires a very small Trap size value - around 30, I think. But the trap does not always discharge and disappear after triggering. Sometimes the monster can get hit by it several times before it vanishes at last. Is this something that can be fixed or worked around? P. S. Never mind, I figured it out.

I don't expect to get much traction with the tweaker crowd here, but those who can think should be able to appreciate that shortcuts, simplifications, macros and streamlining in games diminish the experience. Under the banner of relieving players of menial tasks, they take away the satisfaction of the process. All that legwork, all that memorization and note-taking, how tiresome. At the logical extreme the makers of these conveniences would eliminate the process and just flash a big "YOU WIN" before the player. Like dating app-makers or the idiots who enthuse about driverless cars (except that the car makers are clever: they are peddling new hardware and software, and the futurology is just a colored smoke screen, a little hemp aerosol). Of course, moments of gameplay that are clearly dull or awkward ask for euthanasia. But effort as such is the essence of interaction. There is no substituting challenge for effort, no cutting out travel times in favor of harder combat encounters, for example. Expending time is also important. Because we exist as bodies, we can't take seriously anything that doesn't take some hustling, which is the visible form of time. The achievement after the hustling only confirms that the time was well-spent, it is not the aim. Had the purpose been to gain the best effort-to-result ratio, we could all have done better with more modest and nearer goals. When it comes to gameplay, many features that historically, as they say, had given players delight, have been streamlined away. I haven't done very much playing of "golden box" games and the like, but I remember how involving and exciting it was to draw maps of areas, room by room, wall by wall. The area became mine, because I discovered it quite literally, piece by piece, like a new continent. This exploration and the incidents that happened on the way and made it memorable have been eliminated by automapping. Another feature that looks antediluvian now but was quite, quite interesting was text journals. The bits "spoken" by NPC, discovered inscriptions and rumors were contained in manuals that came with the games, in jumbled paragraphs. It was impossible to read them from start to finish, but the player was called upon to open them at entry number such and such. This had three effects, at least: it made designers keep their texts short and exactly to the point, made the bits themselves memorable (many came with small hand-drawn vignettes, too) and combined two media, the videogame and the book. Books are physical, and this parallel existence substantiated the pretense of being in a different world. When the books and the other box "goodies," as those bonuses are fondly but generically called nowadays, were done away with, game worlds became sheer fantasies - no meat, just butter. At first their quality was maintained by strong talent, but the tendency towards irresponsible virtuality was planted with removal of these snags. Even some very immersive and detailed all-virtual worlds from the 90s, like that of Darklands, were already missing these hooks to an outside dimension. They were already self-contained the way nothing should be. Obviously this was all a great cultural shift, uneven and not known to anybody in full. There are probably experts on the history of computer games, and they probably suffer from experts' myopia. Nobody really knows how many crossroads humanity has run by, on how many it happened in the night and stumbled past them without even noticing. I spot some stages along the way, little thresholds, and the destiny of the written word also curiously wavered back and forth. Planescape: Torment, for example, can be seen as a point in game development when it was felt that a universe could be raised from words alone, tons and reams of inspired words. Everything drawn and recorded in that game is supported and enveloped in writing. Before no one would have wanted to make a graphical game with so much language - interactive novels had been just that, novels; after the decline of literacy made this kind of game impossible, and when one was attempted, it came out clearly anachronistic, weak and pointless (e.g. Tides of Numenara). Would I bring back those primordial features - the absence of a map, printed manuals, if I could? Yes, I would. The conflict here is not between old and new but between the good and the best. A virtual reality delivered on a plate may be good, so good that one forgets what can be even better - a genre that makes claims upon real life, involves the body and the brain so that an imaginary world can become real - or remain... The dating of hand-mapping and text aids speaks neither in favor of these features nor against them. Modernity is indifferent in this, and probably in everything else. Now, this being an obscure forum about modifying a very old RPG, oratory here is equivalent to lecturing down a tree hollow, so I'm wrapping up. The practical thrust of my address is to stop eliminating the features of the Infinity Engine games that make them believable and engaging. If you have ideas for how you can spare players doing this and that, put them in a sack and drown them. Come up with others, about how you can excite them and engage them. Quash your conveniences. If you want to eliminate travel between areas in favor of teleporting everywhere, stop. If you want to do away with shops so characters never have to move a foot to buy or sell equipment, cease and desist. If you want to erase spell schools and put all spells in one school, don't take the example of Microsoft, who has been eliminating Documents and Control Panel items and dumping every feature in one place. Less is not more. Easy is not sporty. You may be erring on the opposite side, too. Instead of opening new interactions for players you may think it a good idea to burden them with features that have no continuation, no depth, no complication, no echo, no bounce and therefore no meaning for players. Mechanics like hunger and thirst, or age. I have thought about adding food and water and forcing players to eat and drink on a regular basis. So have others, no doubt. Make characters rest by a fire. There are inevitably mods like that for any role-playing game. Their creators think they are adding realism. But when the rest of the game world does not eat and drink, when there are no special encounters around these mechanics, when they are physically more cumbersome than in real life, adjusted for scale (all that clicking, and I can just stretch my arm, take a pear and bite it), they are simply pointless micromanagement. This is just what the well-meaning inventors of automapping and DIALOG.TLK and character auto scripts wanted to get rid of back in the day, no doubt, and ended up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They simply could not tell which features needed pruning, which - cutting, which - watering, which - pollinating and which ought to be left well enough alone. So how can one tell? Well, no how. Just anyone can't tell. It takes perspicacity, as Baeloth would say. It takes talent and ideas. Experience, learning and reflection help, too, but they are not everything. Then again, how many even have those? So if the only notions for improvement you have is another damnable conversion of one category into another, some ease-of-use or new dead bricks for players to carry, why don't you have a moment of truth with yourself, admit that you are not a creator and take off the modder jacket? Go do something else. Stop beating up a dust cloud and obscuring the work of those who contribute something meaningful with your totally irrelevant hard work and your countless dutiful updates.

Is it possible to edit or delete, to replace then, a note on the automap?

What does that flag in store properties indicate? There can be "Tavern quality 1," or "Tavern quality 2," or both, or neither. With and without, a tavern seems to be just the same.

You mean, I can extend ITEMTYPE? I didn't know that. But truth be told, I don't want to spend an extra minute thinking about how I would add new rows, fetch those numbers, paste them into every item of mine from the new type, and not forget to repeat that for any item that I add later. This is absolutely not creative and a total waste of time.

Is there any point to STATIC creature animations? They can't walk, can't even run away. Why did Bioware make them up, to save performance resources? Plus there are a few of these static animations that end in MATTE: 16642 - STATIC_PEASANT_MAN_MATTE. Does that do anything?

I don't know about Nalin, but Beamdog didn't do anything to Shand and Bjorn, and who else out there? That's my question. And I'm okay with these exploits, actually, like killing everyone to get everything. It means the players are taking the game world seriously, rather than its abstractions like alignment and so on. They are interacting with it and experimenting. Just like in real life, nobody stops until stopped.

They are still innocents.

I'm playing BGEE.

I guess so. The difference seems to be, reputation effects in REPUTATI take into account current reputation, and the CRE file field is a straight change.

There are many item types that are given pick-up and drop sounds in ITEMTYPE.2DA, but not used. At least, in BG games. For example, BGEE's file lists the usual sounds for armor categories, such as 64 - Plate mail, and assigns slot 1 to it, but actual plate mail is type 0, Armor, as are wizard robes. The sounds are determined by the item's equipped appearance, apparently. Why is this duplication there? Are these armor categories used in Icewind Dale games? I want to repurpose some of them for my own items that need to have different sounds and slots, but I already hijacked a few less usual suspects. All these armor sub-types look ripe for rewriting, but I don't want to mess with IWD.

A paladin in BG has -30 in that field, and the party loses 3 points of reputation when they kill him. Is that how it works, every 10 points count as a point of reputation?

I'm discovering that there are creatures of the INNOCENT class scattered around the first BG, when by all rights they should have proper classes. This really throws off testing of things like SHOUT.BCS, because they don't respond the way you expect them to, and you break your brain trying to understand why before you look at the class they've been given. I would like to know just who is so bloody innocent besides Shandalar (not a mage) and Bjornin (not a paladin; kill everyone at the Jovial Juggler, and he won't move a brow).

What does it mean? There is a field for that in every store's item, and something similar called "duration" for creature items. Is this how it will take before the store product or the piece of equipment disappears? In seconds? Counting from what point?

That's it! I should have read identified. Thanks! That explains all of them.

I'm patching items with names that contain "silver," "gold" and other precious words, like "flamedance," to include flamedance rings. For this I'm using a series of conditions of this kind: ((~%name%~ STRING_CONTAINS_REGEXP ~gold~) == 0) | | ((~%name%~ STRING_CONTAINS_REGEXP ~flamedance~) == 0), and so on. But the results are strange. Silver rings don't get patched, and neither do gold ones, but golden pantaloons do. I don't mind that, but with jewelry I can only guess that letter case gets taken into account, even though it shouldn't, according to Weidu's documentation for that command. I'll try adding conditions for ~Silver~ and ~Gold~ and see what that does, but it's more confusing with ~flamedance~. Here the standard "Flamedance Ring" does not become patched, but "Joia's Flamedance Ring" does. Other than for the name, they are identical. And no, I didn't slip a space into my condition that would make the first condition not return true. Any explanation?

When the party starts a fight somewhere in a slave area, in a house, and then runs out into the master area, the main town square, enemies can come out of the doorway and follow it. Can they do that if the "door," the physical openable door, has been closed? Locked?

But these aren't usable in ready form, are they? I mean, if were doing a patch of a template BAF with two %%s in [x.y] for coordinates, then you could... no, I don't see how data from a local variable set inside the game could be inserted in any of these. But these two actions are interesting, 245 and 246. They are not in the Gibberlings' Triggers section, so I have to ask. They don't have to refer to the same area, do they? It's possible to save the location of one creature in area A and create another creature at those coordinates in area B? Like this: SaveObjectLocation("AR2616","WHERE","innke2") CreateCreatureAtLocation("WHERE","AR2617","innke2") To put another Winthrop on the second floor of Candlekeep's inn directly above the original.

Apparently, the local variable setter can take coordinates. But is that good for anything? Is there an effect that records the coordinates of a creature or a point? Or can this information from 309 be inserted somewhere?

About your performance questions: I've heard on pretty good authority that you shouldn't worry about putting load on the script compiler. For most things you could care to try, OR(2) vs. GT-LT doesn't make a difference. Just write what you need. But I prefer to run my script actions from scripts of invisible minions that I summon for the occasion. This doesn't clutter BALDUR.BCS, and for performance, I can say that it takes a minion, say, one fifth of a second to process 30 trigger lines. So there is a small delay, in addition to the delay before the minion appears and starts processing the script. Sometimes even in the same script it makes sense to separate code into blocks to help the engine out. I've noticed that setting verbal constant lines for creatures (if you want to make an NPC mute and erase the string references for his right-click responses, yeses, insults/compliments etc., or give him a different voice) cause the engine to halt unless there is a break after the first 20 or so of these commands. The block needs to be ended with Continue(), and the rest of these actions put in the block below. But this is the only case I know when the engine really can't handle too much code... although I have never piled hundreds and thousands of lines on it. There are a few ways to speed scripts up a little. One possibility is to put the least likely conditions on top of the block. If, say, I'm checking for the death of Xzar and then somebody's gender, a variable and so on, I put Dead("xzar") on top. If that one doesn't return true, the compiler moves along. Another way is to prepare a replacement script for when the original is going to run only once. When you have selected some mode of action for this minion after a long list of triggers, switch it to a short script with ChangeAIScript("SCRIPT",OVERRIDE), where there will be only the one or two blocks that you need. As for BALDUR, I only put blocks there that must be triggerable everywhere or that kick off my mods, i.e. I check a global, apply a custom spell to Player1 that gives the current party new spells and abilities, then set the global. This lets me avoid requiring that players start a new game for their characters to experience those changes. Every block added to BALDUR must end with Continue(), of course. And about that question in the end: !Exists and !Dead are both unnecessary, you are right, unless this Chloe has appeared somewhere before and has been moved to this area with one of the area-traveling actions without setting a global or has been killed elsewhere.

There is no SCRLP_# in this mod, and the tp2 doesn't mention it. I don't know where you are getting this from. Must be a file from one of the other mods, but I can't find it there either.

What complicates things is complicating things. This game is simple at heart, don't turn it into a checks-and-balances nightmare. Nobody will care, and what matters is to have fun. I gave an example - use Lore to lower resistances. It's just one possibility and you don't have to embrace it, but letting chances slip by because something somewhere may go wrong or end up presented imperfectly is no way to create. Take my other idea, reading books. There are obvious limitations in the way books work in this engine, and it's neither possible nor desirable to complicate them. How complicated can a sheet of paper with words on it get, anyway? In Morrowind there were many books, they had stories in them, and the moment the player opened the book, he got a bonus point to one of the skills. He didn't have to read the contents if he didn't want to. Taking a clue from there, why not make books a clickable item that will give a lore point and, for effect, display its text in the bottom window? Never mind nightly reading sessions when there is nothing to read - just one click, and the player is done with it. Or rather, the character. Give the book to someone else in the party and have him read it, too, to improve his own lore. This, I would say, is how complex the whole thing merits being either for the player or for you, the coder. There are better uses of life than to crouch in a chair growing a big ass coding three-part presentation for what is just a 32 pixel icon from 1998. In the space you spend on minutiae you could create several more game additions. The part about monster descriptions is better left to a tracking mod. P. S. I was going to do this for bards: gather experience from surrounding creatures. A self-centered repeating EFF channeled through lore, dripping small amounts of XP on the party. A reason to rub shoulders in crowds. But, of course, you are going to second-guess yourself into the ground, aren't you? P. P. S. Another idea I thought I might make into a mod but won't now: a potions mod. Make all potions unidentified and requiring some modest lore level to identify. With Identify at temples 100 gp a pop, high lore will quickly become important. This would only work to the fullest, though, if you randomly made some of the potions found in containers and on creatures cursed (Weidu's RANDOM function). Instead of several different-looking cursed bottles that we know by sight and stay away from after the first playthrough randomize cursed potions so that they look exactly the same as good articles. If you do that, no party will feel safe just tipping over the bottles they come across. A character with easy power of identification will be able to earn his keep.

For my part, I have no idea what that is. You simply need to put while-equipped effect 290 ("Change title") on all weapons, including fists, and insert the threat boundary as the text string. Someone will probably explain to you soon how to do this kind of patching. But it seems to me that you want weapon specialization to be reflected in that information, because otherwise everything except the vorpal sword is going to be 20... And I'm quite sure there is no way to display the effective range. Not as a sum total of all factors, in any case.