temnix

On 7/7/2019 at 11:09 PM, DavidW said:

There’s no great difficulty in letting the AI detect that a spell is being cast, but as for doing something clever with that information... let’s just say you might be overestimating what the IE scripting system is capable of. 

There is no need to use scripts with this. Effects are enough. And it is true that for counterspelling opposing a spell of one caster with another spell or the same spell of a different caster (depending on the system one has in mind) would be both difficult to implement and not useful. Characters memorize spells for a reason, to achieve something with them, and expending one's Mirror Image to prevent somebody else's Mirror Image is a dubious proposition in most situations, to say nothing of less common spells. I have, however, sketched a counterspell system myself some time ago, and while I'm not going to finish it as a mod, I can tell the curious how to implement counterspelling without much hassle and with use.

1. The basic principle: opposition schools cancel each other. Never mind particular spells and text information. Casting glows are sufficient. To stop a starting spell of Alteration, cast anything from Abjuration on anyone. This will, among other things, make low-level spells useful even at high levels. Carry around Friends to cancel Fireball, for instance. On the other hand, long and unwieldy high-level spells may be useful for quick counterspelling, and a limited assortment of powerful spells would find more application. 9th an 8th wizard spells are not numerous to begin with and one comes by them slowly, so it is quite possible to go around with just Wish on page 9 and no desire to summon that stupid pseudo-genie. Or with Incendiary Cloud and no opportunity for wholesale destruction. If Incendiary Cloud could counter any Enchantment/Charm spell instantly and if Wish could counter any spell at all, players would get a bit more breathing space.

2. Implementation: patch all spells that are not from the GENERALIST school with two global effects, applied during casting. The first is a combination of rare spell states unique for every school. Let all Abjuration spells put the caster under EYE OF STONE, HOPELESSNESS and ARMOR OF FAITH. Duration should be the same as the spell's casting time, and here a good specialist on Weidu would come in handy to automate this, fetching casting times and changing the spell states' durations to match, perhaps. This prepares the caster for being countered. The second global effect is for countering: "Apply Effects List" - > Everybody - > Enemies -> (Spell) "Apply Effects List" - > Preset target - > Spell state 1 of the combination for Abjuration - > (Spell) "Apply Effects List" - > Preset target - > Spell state 2 and so on. Now casting the spell will break Alteration for all enemies. The last spell in the chain should include a "Damage" to Original caster, 0 points, or another interrupting effect so that the Abjuration spell ends on distupting someone.

For limitations one can introduce some range limits in one of these spells. If breaking all Alteration spells that might be going by one casting of Abjuration is too much, insert another subspell in the beginning of the chain. Instead of "Apply Effects List" - > Everybody use "Cast spell at Point" - > Self, and here put an area of effect, for example, equal to sight range. That's about 550 Explosion size in the PRO. Or limit countering in another way: in the final spell put effect 206 or 318, targeted Everybody, blocking this spell. Now only one enemy caster who might be in the middle of an alteration will be distrupted (the nearest one).

This system's flaw is obviously that counterspelling is not optional but happens between any opponents casting from different schools. Characters would have to be aware that their spells may cause other ongoing spells to fizzle instead of achieving the end result. No trying Finger of Death when someone is in the middle of Illusion/Phantasm unless you are prepared to expend a high-level spell to terminate what may just be Reflected Image (if you can beat casting time 1). And enemies may accidentally disrupt the party's spells by casting their own. But this, on the whole, should end up adding to excitement rather than detract from it. What are the enemies casting? Do I agree to adapt and choose a different spell from the one I wanted or should I try to be quicker the next time and whip out the essentials before the other side does? Is this spell being cast worth disrupting or should I let it happen and then bring my own spells into play as I wanted? Mages, too, would finally get a boost over specialists because of their wide spell selection and therefore broader counterspelling options. Curiously, in this system specialists have no way to break the spells of their school - necromancers get no Illusion/Phantasm access to disrupt somebody else's necromancy. I think that is a fair description of a narrow specialist, though. 

Besides, one can role-play the situation easily. Who is to say the enemy mage did not mean to break the coming Alteration threat with his flash of Abjuration? What was going on in that duel? And these are, may I remind everyone, role-playing games. But if a modder absolutely wants counterspelling optional, he can go ahead and give a Special Ability to all spellcasters, target "Caster (keep spell, no animation)". This would simply block or unblock the first of the linked subspells for Everybody, turning the counterspelling mode on or off. I think the system is better without, though. NPC get no such controls, so giving them to the player to be even more clever with his tactics while NPC stumble around on scripts tips the balance in the party's favor another step.

Gives imps, mephits, quasits and the rest of the pesky flying critters, including familiars, a leg-up. Imps and quasits get colored skin (dust mephits are still gray), and all of them get more, new and better sounds. They will snicker, mumble and generally make themselves felt, and they move with a hop. Should be compatible with any version that allows adding animations.

My thanks go to kjeron for help with this.

Download

They had to be renamed to MHAGG1 and MHAGG2. That was not intuitively obvious, to say the least.

These animations belong to HAG_NIGHT, HAG_GREEN and HAG_ANNIS, but the BAM files are nowhere to be found. They are supposed to start with MHAG. Miloch's Infinity Animations includes the animations, but in a useless format. Instead of being divided into separate files for walking, attacking, casting and so on, with proper structure, the frames are all pressed into two large BAMs the engine can't recognize. Does anybody know where proper, separate, engine-recognizable hag files can be found?

I have seen different outcomes when this effect ends and the character is over impassable terrain, like water. For one thing, if it were dispelled, the character would always become stuck. But when the effect expired normally, characters would be displaced to the nearest walkable terrain. I have also seen them remain over water even in this event. Who has tried using this effect and can tell me how to make sure there will be no sticking? Would it help to include a delayed switch to No Collision option 2?

This effect may be key to making a Fly spell for this engine, the closest thing possible, at any rate.

Again you don't know what you are talking about. Enough from you. For others I will say: yes, I've tested this and you can test it for yourselves. Reach the summoning limit, then try casting Gate (where the gender is SUMMONED_DEMON) and see what happens.

Imp, I'm long used to the fact that you don't know what you are talking about at least half the time. And a third of the time you just ramble. So I'm not offended. But I must point out that this reply of yours falls into the first half. Pit Fiends and Cacofiends are also subject to the summonning limit, as are all other creatures, SUMMONED or not. It works like this: if the limit for SUMMONED has being reached, no other creatures can come in. This is something that was only just now brought to my attention. I had no idea, and I had made many spells and abilities that used invisible minions, because there is no other way to do a number of things. So I was dismayed to find out that, if the player just happens to have gotten his max of SUMMONED (a whopping 5 by default), all these spells and abilities will fail.

By itself it's remarkable and telling how people have gotten used to these built-in, unjustified limitations, and others. Searching about this topic on the Beamdog forum, I came across someone's question whether there is a maximum of minions in the AD&D game. The man was asking about Pen and Paper. Now, why would a role-playing game, conducted in the imagination, have an arbitrary built-in limit on anything? The racial level advancement limits at least were explained by the nature of the races and it was an attempt to present "unlimited human potential." But why would a rulebook say that you can only have 5 goblins under your control, max? The guy never played Pen and Paper, clearly, and didn't know the rules, but what a question like that shows is how habituated players have become over the years and decades to lousy adaptations of role-playing for the computer screen, to primitive out-of-the-blue mechanics, flat process - and other things, monty hauling, power gaming, min-maxing. There was a time when those were considered the Three Bad Habits of D&D, and staying in character was praised. But now we're deep in the world of numbers, rule lawyership and imposed restrictions in place of self-restraint.

Once, there wasn't any. Then - around the time of Throne of Bhaal, I hear - it was implemented. Must have been by Bioware, though it doesn't make any difference whether it was them or Beamdog. I ask, what's the point? They just wanted to limit players' power, is it as banal as that? I see no other purpose for it. Granted, there could be some spell or event that would summon a crazy throng of creatures that would bog down the engine, but that's the problem with that spell or event. I know there are mods that do away with the limit, but just the fact that it's there is making me pause and ponder and burn incense to the gods asking whether I should include a removal in my mod, which uses invisible minions (blocked too, when the limit for SUMMONED has been reached). Just that stupid feature alone, by virtue of being there. Why, it's traditional now! Somebody might become unhappy if their game were suddenly liberated in this unforeseen way! Maybe people have gotten used to relying on that limit instead of observing a limitation to a sensible number of creatures. Maybe their installations will explode if the limit goes away. What this order of things reminds me of is running with handicaps hanged about one's knees and ears. Or phoning police instead of solving your own problems.

Sure, I'm probably overreacting. But there are already so many roadblocks to making what I want for these games, it's infuriating that there is some stupid crap like this installed by default on every machine.

The Loop Garoo... I have a spell that dangles some chains, that is, has some chain Play Sound effects in it, and it is supposed to trigger whenever a character bearing those chains starts walking, for a certain duration overall. Take a step, sound a dangle. Naturally, I used the Apply Spell on Movement effect, but that only works once, because it is itself removed after the dangling sound plays. The spell needs to be reapplied to start the whole ready-to-play-sound business all over again, waiting for the character to start walking after the next stop, and so on. But if include an ASM effect in the sound-playing spell itself, the whole thing goes into an infinite loop, and the computer locks up. I don't know why exactly - the spell is not to be cast on itself straight away, it should just play the sound and set up the system to recast it again, and otherwise go away. Anyhow, there has got to be a workaround for this, two spells casting each other in a sequence or some such, to avoid a lock-up. This is probably a familiar situation to many, so I'm asking here. Advice appreciated.

I'm in the process of making a module that will change the way invisibility and especially illusions work in these games. There will be a number of new spells and characters will be able to pursue a stage artist's career, earning considerable experience, reputation and money from their performances; when they fail to impress, the audience will get disbelief. The rewards will scale with character level. Among other features there will be a new 9-color alignment system, detection spells as sight cones and, probably, apples. Here are a few screenshots of the magic already implemented...

The mod wouldn't be rounded out without narrative, however, without quests and dialogues. For some of those I need somebody experienced and interested in making areas (adapting them from existing ones) and cutscenes. Write me a PM if you are interested. 

No relation to this topic. A garbage post just to upload an image I could insert in a private message to somebody here. Why? Because the PM system doesn't let people upload images from their computers, only use images already uploaded for topics. Hooray for the intelligence of this!

I would like to add that the original poster should really decide whether he's going to be making mods for the old engine or for the Enhanced Edition. If all the OP wants is to convert one of the preexisting BG1-BG2 mods to BG:EE-BG2:EE, then jastey's advice is sufficient. But if he's going to make mods of his own, he ought to consider whether he's going to stick to the old engine, which might possibly have more players, or make use of the functions of the new engine, which is far more advanced, and not just in convenience or compatibility, but in the tools of expression that it offers. I'm used to making mods for the EEs from the beginning, so I only recently became aware just how restrictive and poor the old engine is.

It was something of a shock. Trying to fit my creativity in what it can do, I found, is less like painting with basic colors after a full palette than with having no colors at all, only a lead pencil to sketch. It's no wonder, honestly, that there is so much less activity in this place than on Beamdog's forums, and that old-time modders are pretty much done with these games. In the old days changing arrows +1 to arrows +2 was the height of ingenuity, or making a simple quest, and that has been done. People have tried to make the best of the tools, but they are too tired to appreciate the new stuff now, too angry at Beamdog. So my advice to the OP is, decide what do you want to create for and for whom. A 2D engine like this is not just our old bad habit, you know. It actually has one important advantage - it's very easy to add new visual content here. In a modern 3D game you would need a team of programmers and lots of resources to make a creature, but here you can import some old sprites or redraw them yourself, and voila. There are also a few modders who can draw areas. For this reason an engine like this is an outlet not just for nostalgia but for creative expression, limited but not ridiculous. If you want to push things, however, and see what you can do with it, you pretty much have to take up the Enhanced Edition and deal with Beamdog's content - edit it out, change it, live with it. 

I've gotten to changing scripts for both unmodded and modded games so that NPC start using my sight cone-type detection spells when party members are near on them rather than themselves. This is a simple change, but I want to make sure I get all of the situations and don't end up with wrong syntax. Generally what I'm doing is replacing lines like

Spell(Myself,WIZARD_ORACLE)

with

ForceSpell(LastSeenBy,WIZARD_TRUE_SIGHT)

True Sight replaces Oracle, because that spell will now do something else. I want to make sure I don't accidentally rewrite scripts with ForceSpell in them with my own ForceSpell, which could result in errors. I'd like to get the exact match, with just these characters, for Weidu to work on. What code do I need? Not simply EXACT_MATCH, because that gets anything containing my expression.

The second problem I thought of right now. I suppose that NPC who detect PC with their spells expend them, that's what the Spell action does. There is then only a limited number of times they can pull off these detections. I hope it isn't any more complicated than that, because if they actually have ForceSpell there (talking about Sword Coast Stratagems now mostly, whose author is too cryptic in his self-importance to answer a question) and something like timers, then a simple replacement like the one above may not work. On the other hand, if they have Spell conditioned by HaveSpell(WIZARD_ORACLE), then casting True Seeing instead isn't going to wipe Oracle from their memory, and they are going to do it again and again.

I don't know how much of a problem this will really be, but short of tearing Oracle from their spellbooks when they cast True Seeing, how can I make sure they cast one instead of the other? Perhaps what I need is to patch spellcasters so they all have True Seeing memorized instead of Oracle, but I have no idea how to do that. There is a good news, though: the G3 guide is wrong that NPC need to meet level requirements for the ForceSpell action. They don't, at least in the Enhanced Edition. They will be able cast True Seeing no matter what their level is. Still, I would appreciate any advice on tuning Weidu so that it patches all such possible casting actions in the broadest and most correct way.

I think not. Charisma plays a role in reactions, but not in happiness. Unless you want to reverse their alignments. If you want to keep them from leaving the party, you can use the Ignore Reputation Breaking Point opcode (I think that's the name). They will still complain but not leave. That opcode is bugged, though. The last time I've tried putting it on, before the last patch for the EE, at any rate, it wouldn't expire and wasn't even removable. It's only good for swearing characters in forever, so to speak.

I'm adding a new entry to ALIGNMEN.IDS and ALIGN.IDS for UNALIGNED, to which I'm going to convert a number of creatures who mistakingly show as True Neutral (NONE doesn't work). There will also be a spell that eliminates alignment and its restrictions and benefits. Don't bother saying it's not going to work - I've tried it and it does work in all situations. What I would like to know, however, is, first, whether it is possible to add a new entry with Weidu in a flexible way rather than at a fixed offset, in case, though unlikely, there are already new entries in those files - at the moment I'm just writing it at 0x30; second, whether there is a risk of an overrun of data from those files into the next files or somesuch; and third, whether I could get a string to show in the interface for "Unaligned" instead of a blank space. Interface string references are all in ENGINEST.2DA, but is it possible to assign a new one here?  

Detect() sets LastSeenBy too. I don't know how complicated this is going to be, but if all those actions do is check for detection and apply a round-area dispel to Myself, then it shouldn't be hard to change them to beam a sight cone on LastSeenBy instead.

Ideally detection spells would not break stealth. But it's in game mechanics that anything directed at an outside point will uncloak the character. It would be perfect to avoid this by changing the spells so that they are Caster-targeted. This is possible, but, like I said, casting on yourself makes the cone face the wrong way. I've exhausted the engine's possibilities for reflecting/cheating this back on the caster last night, I think. Not breaking stealth would be a nice bonus, though.

Thank you. You are more helpful than the creator of that mod. (I wish you would reply to messages, though...)

So how do those lines run, if the spells are Myself-targeted? Do they follow LastSeenBy checks? I'm changing most detection spells so that they work as sight cones. Those cones face the wrong way if Self-targeted in scripts or if the spells have the Caster target. Casting something on yourself makes it go out your back. And by the way, if someone knows a particularly clever way of redirecting-reflecting these self-casts so that they end up going out forward, I would gladly hear him out (even if he doesn't reply to messages). If self-targeting projectiles could be made to face the right way, these spells could be kept as Caster-type and wouldn't have to break stealth, as they do when targeting Point in range. Then it would be possible to go around an area cloaked and investigate encounters without becoming seen.

With script lines, if they check for LastSeenBy before casting Spell(Myself,WIZARD_ORACLE), I can rewrite the scripts to target LastSeenBy instead, and then the cones will face correctly.

But you can tell me about your mod, yes? I don't have it installed.

Which ones in particular? And what do those spells target? "Myself"? As in, Spell(Myself,WIZARD_DETECT_INVISIBILITY)?

Detect Illusion? Do enemies ever do that, or are those spells just for the party? What about script changes in Sword Coast Stratagems?

I'm thinking of some changes to the way these spells work so that they exclude the caster side but include neutrals instead of just working on enemies to the casting side, but it's extra work. If enemies never cast those spells, it's easier to block GOODCUTOFF specially.

Hide in Shadows, I hear, applies an invisibility spell to the thief. Do we know the name of the SPL? What about the one Detect Illusion casts? The skill.

I mean that when I would like to reply or start a new topic, there is just no body field for me to type in on my Firefox. I'm again using IE to say this. I've tried clearing cookies and cache, doesn't make a difference. It's Firefox Developer Edition, but that one is not so different from the regular edition.

The problem with clearing projectiles turned out to be that only AOE-type PROs get cleared with Zone of sweet air, including their bolts. I still would like to know how to use APPEND to put in a projectile's number minus 1, though.

I know about ADD_PROJECTILE, thanks. The last line is what I was looking for. Weidu inserts the number automatically, I see. But the numbers in those 2DAs need to be the assigned number minus one. What would be the syntax there? Also the projectiles aren't getting cleared for some reason... Even with the correct number. The name in front of the number is just for show, right? Hmm. My PRO is an Explosion projectile PRO in an Area of effect PRO, not something fired independently. I want those streaking projectiles to vanish when the clearing takes place. And they are set to "Draw as background." I wonder if that matters?

By the way, to anybody who is reading this. My newfangled version of Firefox doesn't want to show the body field on these forums at all. Just the header and tags. I'm having to use Internet Explorer to write. Didn't use to be a problem. Cleared cache and everything. Anybody familiar with this?

When I delete a file from Near Infinity, by right-clicking, the file does not go to the Recycle Bin. Where does it end up? Also what happens to files in this situation: you were in the process of changing your mod after another test, took some files from the mod's folder for another tweak and put them in override, but, after changing them, forgot to put them again in the mod folder. You left them in override. Then you ran the Weidu installer, which for some reason or other produced a reinstallation error, perhaps because those files were missing or something was written wrongly in the tp2. The reinstallation was aborted and files from the backup folder replaced your current override contents with old versions, cleanly destroying your modified files. But it's just called "destroying." Really deleting anything from a computer is difficult and takes special software. Still, these files are gone and also not in the Recycle Bin. Where did they go?

@DanielFranks There is nothing to apologize for. Any question is a valid question. I gave some thoughts in a PM.