temnix

Is it possible to script NPC to run away from a region so that they don't fall into its trap? It would take an object name. I've tried RunAwayFromNoInterruptNoLeaveArea("fire",35), "fire" being the name of the trigger, but this doesn't seem to work. I have also tried using this with ActionOverride from the trap's own script, but the overriding only succeeds in interrupting the approaching creatures, they still don't know who (what) to run away from.

The thing to do is not to limit the ability as it exists but find new uses for it, and then old uses would not be so important even if they all remained. Introduce real illusions - illusionary creatures, and use them in a variety of ways. Invisible minions, for example, could substitute for some static illusions - possibly walls and so on. It's not easy to make these work well with the way sight works in these games, but possible. Detect Illusions applies an EFF, DETILL or something like that, the same one applied by True Seeing, I believe, which eliminates all ILLUSIONARY creatures (including minions-bearers of effects, if they were assigned that type). This is potentially a very powerful application and one that makes sense: the character has figured out the illusion and it is as good as gone, but in the absence of such creatures, not counting two werewolves in a tent in BG2, this proper use of the ability is impossible. Instead it does things like tear enemies out of invisibility and dispel Mirror Image, which is just ridiculous. As far as invisibility is concerned I made a simple change in my game: switched all spells and effects of this type to the GENERALIST school. Their scrolls still have the checks in place forbidding learning by necromancers, the only difference is in spell learning probability - illusionists don't get their learning bonus any more, but that's minor.

Look at effects in one item ability and copy them to another? What I really need is to copy an ability as a whole so that I can make some changes to it later, but there seems to be no code for doing that in Weidu's documentation either.

(never mind)

Had you gone about this the way you are supposed to, you would have made a simple AOE with your explosion in the center, no blending effects or drawing control, and been content. But you wanted more than basic-level effects, so pay the toll to cross the bridge. There is going to be much more of this if you intend to make complicated effects or spells that do more than "save or take 1d6 damage." You could make a permanent explosion, for example, with a zero-speed missile. Like this: Any point, in the effects put 72 (change AI type), pick an impossible combination, like a switch to NIETHER gender and WOLF race, target Self. This only needs to be one for a few ticks. In the same list add Cast spell at point, Self, a huge custom projectile as in my last tip, but on the first page of the projectile set the flags "IWD style check," "Neg. IDS1" and "Neg. IDS2." In the menus below pull the combination you chose. This will be the only variety of target explosion projectiles, the ones that deliver the payload for the AOE, will be emitted for. Now go to the AOE page and in "Explosion projectile" choose something other than "None," something with a file, like MAGMIS. It needs to be a single-target projectile. Edit this one: give it speed 0 and some considerable projectile width (try 100 for size), set "Face target" and "Pass target" as well. You can pick a different BAM for the projectile in those properties, too. The one that's the most fun will be the lightning bolt, because it has a direction. Now save everything and cast your spell at some point away, and walk about like Satan. Fun, right? This will expire when the party leaves the area or reload the game. Tick "Allow saving" in all of the projectiles to enable saving in the first place. And if you want something permanent for your effects, you may have to resort to summoning invisible minions at the target point, carrying While equipped items and scripted to do what you want. This is how beauty begins in these games. But you should have a concept to go with all this, a name, a story. Ramalaksha's Lightning Hound, Paprika Gas, Caltrops (here you would just give the item ability more than one target to toss out bunches of them.) Something fun!

I was nearly done with my area when I realized that I had overlooked a few spots in corridors, making them impassable. Here and there terrain type also needed to be changed. I exported the search map from Near Infinity to a simple 16-color bitmap and proceeded to correct it. When I put the file back in override, I found that terrain types had been thrown off, and what used to be wood now sounded like water (shallow water, to be exact). I opened the area in DLTCEP and saw that the search map, all of the maps actually, have become garbled to this program. There is no actual problem with them inside the game, but DLTCEP shows the search map this way: The error with terrain types I could perhaps fix myself by editing the pelette in the program. Somehow the colors had been moved around the place, and the turquoise that used to mean wood had been assigned to shallow water, hence the wrong footsteps I had heard. If I restored the meaning of the colors, I could probably get correct sounds to play. But I had to save the area afterwards, and saving it with the search map looking like it does here gave a predictable result. I don't really understand why the maps had been skewed so, maybe because I had recreated the tileset a bunch of times from a PNG, with corrections, since last checking the area out in DLTCEP. I only need this program for search map editing - everything else I do in Near Infinity. But there you are, DLTCEP is astigmatic about the map now, even though there is no problem in game, and I'm not going to save a garbled map. Recreating the map is not an option. Any ideas?

How did you calculate the XP from kills to split? Invisible minions?

Don't be so surprised, Shin. This is the order of business for these things: if you want to make a complicated spell or item, you may need this many effects and projectiles or more. But you could probably tuck in some stuff better if you tried. It's not usually worth the trouble, though, to reduce the number of subspells to an absolute minimum. It's not like there is a prize for elegance, only for results.

I suggest letting tagalong NPC gather experience little by little while they are out of the party. "Use repeating EFF." 1 point for every 2 seconds doesn't seem too much, considering that they won't share in kills and quest rewards. This will help keep them on the level somewhat. The XP trickle would need to be dispelled in the join-party dialogue and applied again in the tag-along dialogue.

The visual effect targeting quirk is inherent to opcode 215, it's not about "Any point." For your application add a secondary Cast spell at point effect to the item, target Self, as usual. This spell needs to have a custom AOE-type projectile, make it something very large just in case, Explosion area 3000 or so, "Ignore LOS." In the effects of the spell put your 215, target "Original caster."

I'm making some floor traps, scripted, and I find that they are unreliable. They don't always release with the standard Entered() trigger. The regions are modest-sized, and perhaps the traps would trigger more readily if I made them into huge mattresses to stomp over, but that's ridiculous. And I don't remember existing traps ever failing to react, even if the regions are thin strips. In this case, though, I also need a timer among triggers so that traps respond only once every 7 seconds: IF Entered([ANYONE]) !GlobalTimerNotExpired("RESET","GLOBAL") !Class(LastTrigger,THIEF) < - This excludes some thieves in the area IsOverMe(LastTrigger) THEN RESPONSE #100 DisplayString(LastTrigger,@135) // Trap Sprung <- A duplicate string with an attached sound file in the hopes of avoiding sound override from the next action PlaySound("TRAPCO_#") ReallyForceSpellRES("ACIFIR_#",LastTrigger) // <NO TEXT> SetGlobalTimer("RESET","GLOBAL",7) END The timer may be complicating things, because it makes using IsOverMe necessary. Without it when the timer expires the trap will fire at LastTrigger, even if the character is already away from the region. Perhaps IsOverMe makes Entered redundant in turn, but I didn't notice any improvements without it. These traps are just sluggish. Are there any life hacks for improving their reaction?

I've thought of making a mod for hiring mercenaries, but this is better.

Well, this will be more useful to others who decide to plant items of some sort on the ground, but thanks.

Can Weidu be used to draw a random number of random trigger rectangles in areas? If so, is it possible to make sure their vertices aren't outside of explorable area, to avoid crashing? I would like to be able to fill areas with various irregular regions - large, compact, across the whole area, any way they end up.

In effect this is the extreme coordinates for the vertices.

I created a trigger region for an area in Near Infinity. I added five vertices to it, from what I understand that takes nothing more than clicking them up, as many as you need, with coordinates. The region was brought out and I can preview it in the toolset, but it is not detected by my thieves when actually playing, nor does the trap (this is a trap) release its scripted spell when walked over. I have got "Trap detectable" ticked on, of course, and the difficulty isn't high, so there must be something wrong with the settings. I was working from an existing region for this trap, I moved it to all new vertices, and the coordinates for "Bounding box" must be different now, so that may be the reason, but I have no idea what a bounding box is in the first place. Why does it have four coordinates, when this is a pentagonal region? Or is there another reason?

I must finish the others first. The smallest things are holding me back. I hope someone has answered my question about trigger vertices in DLTCEP.

That's good to know. May be useful for my herbs idea.

@Endarire @Caedwyr This really is off-topic. The author is getting garbage notifications, if he is subscribed to this thread. I will just say that it's a complicated situation technically, culturally and personally. Ultimately I may just be unhappy that videogames don't permit the freedom of live games and storytelling and that the strengths of the genre that represented this freedom uniquely have been sapped away over the years. But there is also a dark cloud of oppression hanging over the whole world, it has been getting denser, and no one is going to escape its shadow - writers, inventors, artists, musicians all feel it interfering with their dreams and thwarting their hopes. This could make a pretty good game plot, but we're living in one now.

I'm following the readme of DLTCEP to create some triggers. This is what the readme says: "25. Now lets set up an Info Point, click on Regions Tab. //you are on the regions tab now 26. Add a blank region. And change Region Type to 'Info'. 27. At this moment vertex editing is done solely by hand. Lets build a single rectangle info point. Click on Add Vertex four times to create four nodes." There is no Add Vertex button here, however. What gives?

Nobody here can tell what interactivity costs today, let alone 20 years ago. Fully destructible environments are probably not feasible, especially if every kind of feature is going to have a wrecked version: smashed lamp posts and so on. Obviously none of this could even be attempted in a 2D game. But trees as objects that can be turned into stumps with fireballs, stone blocks made to appear and disappear with spells, fillable lakes or making new holes in the ground - this is not beyond the mechanics of a 1998 game. It was just not attempted by Bioware and Black Isle for their engine. They chose a very simple scheme, pulling sprite figures over parts of sprite backdrops flagged as passable. That's all that happens in these games, and all that can be done. Maybe money really was the reason, as simple as that. As I said, I got over my disappointment with these games mechanics - unlike with their players and modders. But it's a sorry situation that there is no other game to make stuff for unloaded by gameworld assumptions and style. I don't care to make mods for Skyrim or Witcher, even if my computer could run them. Neverwinter Nights' Aurora was supposed to be the toolset for fantasy world-making, but NWN and the sequel would have needed many, many more object models, and be better games in their own right. Ardanis is right, the solution is to get the hell out of the rut and found your own developer company. Or stop complaining, and I managed this recently very nicely. I don't know about the others here, but since this "community" isn't going anywhere, no new ideas are coming in and we can't make a world of our own, I'm tying up loose ends, finishing the last mods and packing up.

I want to bump up this thread and ask again: what is the purpose of polygons? I solved the problems mentioned here in my own area, but the area-of-effect drawing strangeness is probably due to polygons cutting in. What is it polygons do that simple search mapping can't?

As much as I did in the beginning. Well, I might make it some time. The trick is to make it interesting for myself, not players. I would have to come up with really original abilities, not a grab bag of old stuff. But like I said, a ranger with no differences from the standard, only limited to evil alignments, is not a bad idea.

And Stone Shape or another druid spell like that is on a scroll for one quest in Icewind Dale, I hear. What's your point? I, on the other hand, have made a real spell for traveling under the ground and under walls, usable anywhere. I don't know if I have it anymore, but maybe I should get back to it. That's a real change. But I'm all too aware of limitations of this engine and game concept. Not only doesn't the engine have, say, destructible environments (which some games around the same time already did have, with trees to burn down and so on), which would make immense difference, but the games are structured as pop-up books, with fixed sets and tasks to go from A to B to C. No company has even tried to represent any of the richness of real role-playing experience. Which is not wholly impossible, using text at points, minigames, things like that. But I have gotten over the regret.

I'm making an area from a copy of an existing place, whose graphics I edited a great deal. The area ends up looking scrambled in Near Infinity and in the game. Could this be because the original's WED file lists a wrong number of tile columns - 57 instead of 58 (I added a column to the area to beef it up on one side)? No matter how many times and in what manner I convert the PNG file for the area into TIS, whether in Beamdog's format or in the large original, the WED continues to claim that this overlay's width is 57. If the TIS is loaded in DLTCEP and the "Guess dimensions" button is used, the right number of columns appears along with the sizes, but saving the tileset doesn't fix this information in place. At least that's my guess about the scrambled representation. Any ideas?