temnix

4 minutes ago, Endurium said:

I would guess so. It would explain why many enemies in the various games have their loot list starting in the quick slots rather than the backpack.

That's just because the designers didn't care which slots to assign it to. It gets dropped, that's good enough.

7 hours ago, Endurium said:

Apparently the Quick Slots are a subset of the MISC0 through MISC19 inventory slots. Which end, I don't know.

CRE Format (scroll down)

The link shows the actual order of the slots but doesn't correlate it with the slots.ids values, so you'll have to experiment to find out which of the MISC slots are backpack and which are quick item.

I tested under BG:EE and MISC0-MISC2 correspond to the quick item slots. The rest of the MISC slots must then be the backpack. The question is, is it the same for the rest of the games and editions, not counting Torment?

6 hours ago, Endurium said:

For the games you're concerned about (even IWD2), all have 20 such MISC slots for backpack locations, and all have them declared in SLOTS.IDS. That includes classic as well as EE. Incoming 20-trigger OR!

Except, BG1 classic doesn't have the OR trigger, so you'll have to resort to other means if you intend to support that game. Perhaps an AND block consisting of checking all non-MISC slots. That would almost work for the other non-PST games too, except IWD2 which has additional equipment slots.

Actually, I need a negative, "nothing in the backpack." A creature with an empty backpack will have no item in any of those slots, so this won't be an OR() but just a list of !. But which MISC slots refer to the backpack? SLOTS.IDS doesn't say it, you know. The full story is, though, that I would like to check for items in quick item slots too, and the games seem to differ in the positions referring to them. Or not? All this is for making a dice game with NPC for stakes. They and the characters should have something to wager, so I need these checks to make sure they have something there before rolling begins. At conclusion the winning side will grab the loser's backpack and quick item contents. I doubt BG1 supports the modern actions I'm going to apply, though.

I'm looking for a script condition that would check if a creature has anything in the backpack. There are no ready triggers for that. I think I could do this with a list of HasItemSlot(Myself,SLOT_MISC0), covering all backpack slots. Which slots are for the backpack, though? And are they going to be different between these three games: Baldur's Gate, its sequel and Icewind Dale? I don't need Torment. If the list is the same for these three, what about differences between "classic" and Enhanced versions? Different slots or the same? This should be a universal condition, if possible. I've searched the boards and looked in the Guide, but I haven't found clear answers. If the systems are different, I would have to write different scripts.

Except duration 9, Instant/Permanent. And maybe a couple of exotics on the durations list, too. But a propos keys, here is my question to anybody who wants to answer: X gives coordinates of a point and the area name. Is it possible to get and give this information - well, the coordinates - another way? In character? I'm thinking of sextants that would tell current coordinates, and then characters could be sent on search missions or look for buried treasure at such and such a point.

I have some mods underway, and the more involved and original I make the features, the more often I run into the necessity of making them for the Enhanced Edition. It's the technology. What the classic engine can do and what the EE engine can are not as different as night from day, but as the Bronze Age from the Iron Age. Small mods may shift to accommodate sometimes, but my big mod just has to be for the EE. The problem - many people hate Beamdog's take on the games. Now, there are some things about the EEs that can't be changed or would be difficult to change, like the interface. Nobody has recreated the original stone interface. Some features go deeper than this, but a large measure of Beamdog's changes are superficial. They took away Safana's scimitar proficiency and gave her the wakizashi, that sort of thing.

I want people to play my mod. And I want to be able to realize my ideas. So, even if I can't win over conscientious objectors to the EEs who will sooner slit their throats (with a scimitar!) than reconsider, I want to chip away at the smaller changes and make a general case for coming back, or rather forward, to the EEs. Here it is important to know just what annoys people the most. One notion I have myself is to move around Beamdog's NPC. There is no reason to delete them, and they are not bad at all, but they ought to be made less intrusive. This is for me to do, though. Here I would like to know what people hate about the EEs the most. Yes, what do you detest? What wakes you screaming on your pillow? Safana's wakizashi? That you can pay Taerom extra to make the ankheg plate in one day? That one almost wakes me. 

It shouldn't be difficult to roll back some of these changes gradually. It would be perfect to make this a collaborative project, with several modders working to undo some features side by side, but if not, I can at least make the notion of playing the EE a little more palatable.

I like to think that I know what I'm doing.  But thanks for the info. I'll try that with Range(), if all else fails.

I have two NPC, one is supposed to recognize the presence of the other in the area and the fact that he is not dead and his quest has not been completed. The branch in the conversation of this one has these triggers: ~InMyArea("calkan") !Dead("calkan") Global("CALKAN","GLOBAL",0)~. The simplest stuff, really. Calkan is, of course, the other NPC's name and script name. He does have that script name and scripts react to him properly, but for some reason these conditions in the dialogue of the other NPC do not trigger. Substituting Exists() for InMyArea()~ does not help. Anybody has suggestions about why that might happen?

The effect's limit is useful because you don't want creatures to end up on the other side of walls or across rivers, which can easily happen with teleporting. Wing Buffet doesn't recreate an existing function, it is original and quite different. The Teleport effect (124) is also limited in where it can send creatures. It only has options for sending the caster to the destination (two varieties of this, one for Point in range and another for Living actor, but they work the same), returning to the starting point (unpredictable and for out-of-area NPC throws them in the northwestern corner of the map) and exchange. If you want something else, like some kind of blast that will scatter people, you only have Teleport field to fall back on, where distance is random within the range and there is the problem of ending up on the other side of obstacles I mentioned. Wing Buffet, on the other hand, moves people at the same speed to the same distance. If you put in a duration of 2 ticks (the minumum, 1 tick is too brief to matter) and play around with speed, you can imitate the force wave of a fireball or similar.

There are other uses for it, but I was talking about a quasi-teleport. In response to your idea about moving to an ally, you would need to use a very short duration for Wing buffet, because it is not going to end when your two characters meet face to face, it is going to stay in effect, squeezing them together while it lasts. You should use a very short duration, a few ticks, and accordingly very high speed. Also, as I said, Wing buffet is going to crash the creature it moves into others who are on the way. You could try No collision detection or Override creature data with Personal space to 0 (but in this case make the creature untargetable for the duration, or weird things will happen).

It was simply my quick choice of 0 as the default language for Weidu. Who knew that 0 will be Czech?

In my mod's tp2 file I have SAY NAME1 and SAY NAME2 commands for custom creatures, referring to entries in the TRA. This works for BG1:EE and BG2:EE, but somehow not for IWD:EE. In fact, it looks like the TRA is not being used at all, because I get no dialogues either. Why? Is there something to be done for IWD different from the other games? Here is the header of my installation:

BACKUP ~See No See/backup~
AUTHOR ~Chimeric/Temnix/Goida~
VERSION ~1.0~
AUTO_TRA ~See No See/TRA/%s~
LANGUAGE ~English~ ~english~ ~See No See/TRA/Setup-See No See.tra~

BEGIN ~See No See~

It goes on, and no errors, but no text either.

You know how NPC that are present in areas can have schedules? For example, the Nashkel Carnival empties after sundown, the next morning everyone reappears. That's very nice for the atmosphere, but entering NPC into ARE files as actors with all of the settings using Weidu is difficult and limits the number of NPC you can have in an area. Especially if you plan on doing something dynamic with NPC, like spawning them off-screen, quietly removing or replicating them, and so on. Here is a little script that you can insert somewhere in any creature's slot to make it appear and disappear at the right hours:

IF
    TimeOfDay(NIGHT)
    Global("ACTIVE","LOCALS",1)
THEN
    RESPONSE #100
        SetGlobal("ACTIVE","LOCALS",0)
        Deactivate(Myself)
END

IF
    TimeOfDay(DAY)
    Global("ACTIVE","LOCALS",0)
THEN
    RESPONSE #100
        Activate(Myself)
        SetGlobal("ACTIVE","LOCALS",1)
END

Of course, you can be more specific with hours - simply use Time() instead. You can add other conditions, too. For example, do not reappear if the party's reputation is below a certain value. This will make towns desolate around a villainous party.

I also tend to move from one idea to another without finishing. Worse, I tend to get so inspired that I take the mod to about 60% through - and then I have another idea which, I imagine, will be small, temporary departure.  Implementation turns out to be more involved than I thought, especially because I can't bear to release it without extra features and bells and whistles, all of which have to be done by yours truly, there being no one else to help; and in that mess of new work I make a discovery about the possibilities of the engine that gives birth to another idea, which makes me start another mod. I don't so much abandon mods for lack of inspiration as for too much of new inspiration. Unfinished mods string along behind me as untightened knots, one inside another.

I used to blame myself for lack of patience - YOU SHOULD HAVE JUST SAT DOWN LIKE A STONE GOLEM AND FINISHED IT! - but now I understand that this falling-out is only natural, because the process is unnatural. Looking at my own situation and reading other people's mods, I realized a few things:

• We get exhausted because we are each of us a one-man band. We plan, we write, we design, we code for the mod, we sort and arrange and tidy, we have to find the graphics and sounds for our new features, we have to test all this for bugs and balance. In any software company these are full-time jobs. A project head hardly ever does routine programming, and the artists and composers, the testers all have completely different responsibilities. In small companies people sometimes multitask, but that's only possible for smaller-scale games. Bigger ones, with high production values and good budgets, require professionals. Think of Vampire: The Masquerade or Morrowind. They only came together because talented people pooled their strengths. If Jeremy Soule had to write the lore books for Morrowind... if Vampire's physics testers recorded the voices of NPC... They would all be probably bored to death and tired even before the ultimate flop. I realized the importance of help (though it should have been obvious enough!) only recently. I was lucky to find an excellent bug and balance tester for my current mod, and I literally felt a load being taken off my shoulders, leaving me to do what I'm better at.
• Because everyone is pushing his own ideas, there is very little actual communication about our plans and projects either here at G3, or at Spellhold, or at Beamdog's. People just drop by to ask a question, then quickly retreat into their obscure fantasies. There is also a harmful individualism around, the notion that everyone has his own game and that what modding is for is making customized, almost solipsistic universes. That's nonsense. Modding is just world-making from a ready base. Although it can't ever be fully original, there are bigger and better possibilities than balance tweaks or soapy shromances. But we don't talk, and when we do, it's each shouting out of a window of his own impregnable fortress... For you it may be better to stop thinking of yourself as a complete auteur who does it all and join somebody else's project. Then it will be your project also.
• Many mod ideas are compatible. A lot of the concepts we develop as separate projects can just as well be combined. If one modder is making knights and another is making lions, let them come together and publish a Knights & Lions mod. Even if there is no connection internally, a tandem of features, finished, is better than two separate concepts so small as to be almost unnoticeable and perhaps, to many people, not worth downloading. In my opinion, the purpose of modding is enriching game worlds, it doesn't matter with what. A mod does not need to be a world classic for all times, seamless and atmospheric and meaningful like a freaking "War and Peace." Just make some good stuff, some fun stuff.
• Old-timers are pretty much through with these games. They are too tired. This does not apply to everyone, but it's only natural that after 12 or 20 years of playing a game and making content and following updates and versions - all too closely - people will up and move on to something else. And it is better to really quit than to hang around as a jaded jade jackdow, a sphinx of quartz from a Chinese museum and piss yellow urine on new ideas that do well up - because new modders come in; not knowing what to do with these innovations, too stuck in the rut, too confused, also proud of past achievements, of forum recognition. Because of this exhaustion the environment on all three boards is desert-like, with very little movement, as if to preserve remaining bodily fluids in the scorching sun. But if nothing moves, there is no reason to explore either. Among long-time modders nobody really wants anything from these games anymore, and that's the truth. Stagnation perpetuates itself, keeps fresh people out. Because whatever your ideas may be, it's important to find appreciation of them, support, admiration. Somebody has to say that they are damn cool, otherwise you have to go on willpower alone, and what is the point if, your mind reaches ahead to tell you, there will be as little interest in the finished mod as in the discussion? But this is a warped perspective. The usual suspects on these boards, the people most likely to respond, don't represent players. Topics get many more reads than replies, which means there is interest in everything with a grain of newness being said, and trust me, players would be happy to play something original, oh yes! But the boards with their prejudiced "old guard" and meddlesome, often stupid moderators drain all of the joy out of the process. And joy is the only juice in the motor.
• Jungle guerillas keep fighting the Enhanced Editions. By the will of the gods it so happened that the Age of Bioware is over and Beamdog rules. Has ruled for several years. Many modders haven't grasped the notion, though. They don't understand that whatever future these games have (and maybe they will never be updated any more, but we can still use them as a form of adventure toolset), that future is in the hands of Beamdog. The Enhanced Editions need to be embraced for their technology and their troublesome changes rolled back, bypassed, managed. Most can be, and those that can't - fuck 'em, we can live with them, if we get more in return. But there is so little enthusiasm left in the old timers that they simply don't bother to discover just how much more powerful and flexible the EEs are, to be worth the effort. Instead they harp on about the great classic interface and how it made more sense for Safana to have a scimitar proficiency than wakizashi, as if that's more important than having adventures. Most only have a vague notion of what can be done with the new toolset if one is creative and perverse enough. The EEs are the way. If you don't embrace a new technology that actually opens doors for you, instead of wasting your time, as so many do these days, why bother with modding? So they sit back. One can, of course, make perfectly fine quests with monsters, dialogues and rewards with the familiar powers of the old engine. But I want to say this: a mod may be an adventure and a journey for players, but modding itself has got to be an adventure and a journey for me. And I can't travel on the spot. You too will be more motivated if you make mods for the Enhanced Editions.
• This ain't Shakespeare, anyway. And there are few Shakespeares around to butt heads with, too. No matter how high you reach with your ideas, don't expect a mass of people to understand and share your enthusiasm, especially if you do reach somewhat above the least common denominator. Converting arrows +1 to arrows +2 is understandable enough, if too boring for description, but for everything else... These boards are visited and these games are played mostly by people of a certain kind, with a certain level of education. Years have passed, and they have dumbed down the masses. That's a fact. Count yourself lucky if your players have read Fritz Leiber instead of just Joan Rowling, and that's still not Eddington, not MacDonald or C.S. Lewis; and all that is still only fantasy! If you have aspirations to character drama, to poetry, to something beyond flashing swords (not that I don't enjoy flashing swords in their own right), only few and exceptional people hereabouts will meet you half-way and understand you and work with you. And those exceptions don't amount to a scene, alas.

Now to practical advice. I can't tell you where to put up your ideas - perhaps in the Tutorial section, if you can present them cogently enough. Your understand, of course, that particular dialogues and bits of unfinished scripts and scaffolded quests that only you know about can't interest anyone. Finish some, then they might. Combine your ideas, in most cases it is possible. Or cannibalize old stuff for new inspiration. That happens all the time. For example, a couple of years ago I spent quite a lot of time on a mod I was going to call "Uncommon Elements," with unusual spells and quests. After I realized that it's not worth the effort to really write anything for these people, I let the quests wither, but I made a number of spells. They were left to sit in the folder. Now, some more unfinished projects later, I'm well on my way with another mod, dead-set on completing it in some satisfactory manner, and I simply pull up some of the old stuff. What doesn't fit the new framework I simply redraw or toss out; who cares? Unfortunately, the best variety of modding work is still only the creation of fanfics, and there are no or almost no people on any of the three forums who have shown much originality, curiosity and creativity to help make modding anything better than a waste of time. But perhaps a little something worthwhile will be created, nonetheless. My best advice to you is, focus on the ideas that still interest you, don't overreach, don't rush; meanwhile, ask around about what others are doing, and perhaps it will be interesting enough for a rejuvenating miracle.

And hell, boast! Tell us what you've been doing! Make us want to suck you off! Make us want to service you with our mouths in adoration!

What it says. I've been looking at using Wing buffet at very great speeds, like 500 or 5000, instead of Teleport. What it takes is an area-of-effect at target point, a very large one, big enough to include the caster, and "Original caster"-targeted Wing buffet, Towards target point. It is actually faster than teleporting at those speeds, completing even before the caster is through with the finishing pass of the spell. The only difference between them is that, unlike Teleport, Wing buffet is movement in a straight line, so it is stopped by water, cliff sides, houses and bodies of other creatures encountered on the way, unless you include an Override creature data that sets Personal space to 0. That should get the traveler through creatures, and the blocking effect of impassable terrain may be used as a nice limiting factor.

How to use this? Well, you could dispatch enemies to different ends of a large hall without sending them through walls, as with Teleport field, and at predictable distances. Although with the addition of No collision detection the Wing buffet will just as easily get you across that impassable terrain. At these supersonic speeds you only need the shortest of durations, like 5 ticks, to get anywhere in an area. And, unlike Teleport, Wing buffet can be used for avoidance, either with the Away from target point option or simply with a negative speed value. Just power it up and target an enemy to put a mile of space between you.

An interesting property of Wing buffet, not easy to appreciate when it appears in the form of sliding across floors of dragon lairs, is that it can be used to control direction of movement. Use the Away from source option and set a fairly low speed, cast on someone, then walk around in this and that direction and watch how their direction also changes. This way you can herd creatures where you like.

Why not just use effect 320 to start your snowfall? It certainly works in Enhanced Editions, though I can't speak for old stuff. Weather is a little difficult, though, in that no matter how you start precipitation, it only continues for so long before naturally petering out, and if you apply the effect or script action again, it will clear the sky before starting over instead of continuing smoothly.

Now here is a fun thing to try: use scripts to change area type to WEATHER, start rain or snow, then disable the area type.

I don't think this is practical. I ended up making the creature hurt itself instead - put a bouncing spell chain on it, with the final spell to cast back Self targeted with damage.

Maybe not as interesting as the other one, but here it goes: with Teleport Field the game engine counts distance from the position of the target creature at the time the effect is directed at it, not at the time it actually applies. I mean the Delayed/Permanent duration: if you put Teleport Field on someone delayed by, say, 60 seconds, enter maximum range 0 and walk him around, when the time comes he will be transported within 0 points of the original location - that is to say, teleport right back. I discovered this by trying to move creatures whom I gave No Collision Detection from unpassable terrain where they occassionally ended up. Creatures can't walk ON TO cliffs and water, there is no space to click, but they can be moved across them, and the problem was that they were getting stuck there at the end of the movement, after No Collision expired. I had a hunch that putting a little Teleport Field on them after they had rematerialized would eject them to the nearest patch of passable terrain, and I put it on them timed, but instead they reappeared at the point their trip started. I realized that instead of Delayed/Permanent TP I would need to use a secondary spell: cast it at Delayed/Permanent and put inside an Instant/Permanent TP. That indeed does the job and rescues people from impassable places.

Or you could give XP to the dead. Normally characters who die in the big boss fight miss out on the experience, but the connection remains here for healing even after they die, it's probably possible to channel them some XP the same way. Cast it on them beforehand. I haven't tested it, though. Or you can use the reverse of this mechanism - 366 on Preset target, but the spell would have effects for Original caster. You could make spies out of people this way, for example. Cast it on a number of perambulating NPC and let them gather XP for the caster when they move. Or use this in a wide AOE that can be thrown across a dungeon and applies the Wizard Eye effect to creatures. As they walk, they will reveal terrain around them, in a sort of "look through their eyes" telepathy.

A few more details about this. This property of 366 can be used in a cycle, recasting itself to work continuously. When a spell is set to cast itself at Instant, an infinite loop will result and the game will crash, but not if it is applied at Delayed/Permanent by, say, 1 second. In combination with 366 it becomes possible to have a constant linking effect between two creatures, one of whom will keep feeding the other by moving.

For example, I'm using this to make an "energizing" spell. One character casts SPELL 1, Living actor, containing Apply spell on movement, Self, SPELL 2, on the other. SPELL 2 has two effects: Current HP bonus, Preset target, Instant, 1 point, and Apply spell on movement, Original caster, Delayed/Permanent, SPELL1. This will restart the cycle. Now the first character can run around and every second that he does the other one will be healed by 1 hp. I even checked "Raise dead" in the healing settings so that this energizing will run the companion out of the grave if he dies, but reduced the chance of healing from 100 to force more legwork, for hilarity.

This is not a question, more of an answer. I found something interesting about effect 366, "Apply spell on movement," that I would like creative people to know about, should they decide to stop by this place. It turns out that if in a spell targeted at someone else this effect is put on Self, the caster can trigger it for the target by moving. In this case the spell is not applied to the caster at all. For example, if you put in a Self 366 casting a custom spell that does 100 points of damage, target someone with this as a Living actor, then walk, the other creature will explode and nothing will happen to you. I don't know if this is a bug or not, but it's wonderful.

I'm looking for a way to prevent NPC from turning hostile when damaged by a friendly. Looking for suggestions. I've used Feeblemind before to temporarily block scripts, but it isn't working with the NPC I'm testing with (Tenya). She turns red as soon as Feeblemind wears off. I need to be able to do a point of damage to people without turning them into enemies. It's possible to use invisible minions for this, because they can be neutral and damage from them doesn't provoke hostility, but it's problematic.

Leaving aside that this method would only be good for a specific creature, whom I could more easily convert to another specific animation than try to remove the old one, the item would be dropped on dying, together with the animation change. But I've handled this problem already. The change refused to go away when applied as a Delayed/Permanent effect. Instead I cast a subspell with that timing, and the subspell had the change with the Instant/Permanent timing. I managed to remove the animation by targeting the subspell instead of the original.

I need to turn someone into a fat man, permanently in and out of death, until such time as a special removal effect is applied. Can that be done? This opcode has three options, two of which, in principle, could fit the bill - "Permanent change" and "Temporary change." Since the creature is not supposed to revert to the old shape on dying, though, duration in any case has to be Instant/Permanent, and I can't seem to remove that with anything - neither with "Remove effects by resource" nor "by opcode."

I would like to display some custom characters in texts. Not replace fonts but show something like, let's say, Windings symbols from Windows in a description or dialogue, or another character set. Can that be done?

I had a long nice answer written here, addressing some of the objections, but the fucking editor of this board went and deleted the text. Hooray! DavidW is right, though, this is not about SCS. Keep calm and carry on, as they say.