temnix

I'm looking for the string on the character creation buttons, the ones to be chosen from when selecting class, that reads MAGE. When this option is selected, on the right appears a long description of this class, properly called "wizard," that also begins with the word MAGE. That one I could find in DIALOG.TLK, but not the short name string for the button. Since all of the names are translated for the different language versions, I take it that this is an actual external string somewhere, not a repainted button or a hidden engine feature. The other button strings are also unfindable, like "APPEARANCE." Does anybody know where to look for them?

kjeron, only GENERAL is bugged and unremovable. Race, class, allegiance changes all go away, specific I don't know. There is no need for a cleaner solution.

You're a one-trick pony. Or a one-track record. Oh, boy. When do I bother suggesting something to you, you miserable vole?

And that's a good idea too.

I've read somewhere that when invisible stalkers are seen with magic, they are faceless, nondescript humanoids. You could give them the doppelganger animation with high transparency and Set character tint solid at the bottom. Or some combination of these.

I'm adding a mechanic to dialogues that apply a certain spell to the speaker on every GOTO or EXTERN line. This spell has a 177 effect, Use EFF File, pointing to the bard class, because bards doing the talking will get special bonuses. This effect in the first spell, which applies during the dialogue, is at the 100-0 probability, but what I actually want is a 50/50 chance, and for subsequent bonuses even smaller. The EFF casts a second spell, and this one starts with opcode 206, an 100-50 block, for the effects down the list. The result normally would be that they apply half the time. On the bottom there is another 206, at the 100-15 probability, that cuts off the low tip of the stack where the third spell, with more bonuses, is being cast. The problem is that in conversations probabilities aren't rolled correctly, if at all. I added a glow effect to the stack in the second spell to see how often it actually applies, and it's gram-positive every single time. I can't even estimate whether the rest of the adjustments apply correctly, because there are a few explanations: a) dialogues may always ignore probability numbers, b) the first effect, 177, may dictate probabilities all down the line (but if I cut the chances at this one and that even brings results, how will I decrease the odds farther down?), c) conversation or not, in the second spell the blocks may apply simultaneously rather than in sequence, being of the same type. It's a possibility. I would block the third spell with 318 instead of 206, but this mod is to be compatible with the "classic" Shadows of Amn engine. So, does anybody know how to manipulate probabilities in dialogue? I'm looking at a whole lot of elusive testing here, and I would just rather hear the answer from somebody else. I will pay him in choice porn. Ebony, grannies, his pick.

What is superior about it? You piled on a garage sale's worth of tweaks, when all you needed to do was to swap the allegiance in and out. I've done that a million times, including for simulacra, it works fine. You can't be blamed for not knowing it, but you can be blamed for sticking with a lousy solution now and messing with the basic simulacrum mechanic in a way that might interfere with other people's use of it.

When using effect 177, Use EFF file, what controls the length of the effect: the duration in this effect or the duration in the EFF file? This seems to work differently for different effects. I don't want surprises in the spells I still plan on making, and they can be very unpleasant. For instance, I had a mechanic just now that puts an area-of-effect 177 on NOTEVIL (the EA value) around the caster. The duration of this effect is Instant/Permanent until death, but the duration inside the EFF is very short. What the effect there is unimportant, but it's a good thing I decided to test this and changed it to a color glow to see if it would indeed apply. And they all glowed alright, only they wouldn't stop. It was permanent. Had I shipped the mod with the original effect, it would have wrecked the game of any player. So where is the direction that works? Is this really on a case-by-case basis? If so, this would be valuable information to put in the guide to effects.

That's a lot of bullshit from the guide. There is nothing wrong with changing allegiance with effect 72. With GENERAL there is. But you just don't know the difference, do you? Well, go ahead, build a tower of Babel.

I'm working on an ability to compose poetry. The bard will set out to prepare a poem, and some time after it will be created in the inventory. Success is only 90% of the time, though. The rest of the chances the bard will produce an inferior work. The way this is arranged is that there are effects for making the good poem, at 100-0 probability, on the bottom of the SPL, delayed by so many seconds, but higher up, at delay X-1, is a 100-90 Apply effects the list that points to a second spell, which removes the effects of the first before they resolve, puts a short block just in case and creates the scroll of poor verse. The problem with this is that if the bard has been left out of the party to work on his poem in peace and the band has adventured elsewhere and returned to his area to pick up him and the poem, all of the delayed effects resolve at once and the bard makes both scrolls on that 100-90 roll. The intervening subspell is not quick enough, or the engine does not run the effects in real time when its durations catch up, or not in sequence, I don't know. It makes no difference whether I use a delayed Apply or Cast spell. So, any suggestions? One thing I could do would be to put the removal in the body of the main spell instead of the subspell. It could be a 100-90 effect 321. I think this would work to stop the effects below, but how would it channel in the poor verse subspell? If I could combine the casting of the subspell and the removal with 321 on the same probability roll, I would have it synced, literally, but they use different rolls. I can remove and not get the subspell or get the subspell and not remove like the first time around. Can somebody think of an alternative to dividing the probability of good and bad subspells from the beginning so that only one will be cast? I have a lot of effects there, and subspells of subspells, and this is not the only type of poetry that can be written. Adding an extra fork in all of them... I feel like I drank a spoon of vinegar just thinking about it.

The MASK_GENEUTRAL and MASK_LCNEUTRAL alignment types are bugged. The only alignment they come through to is True Neutral. I'm talking about using them with effect 177 now.

Only effects with the Instant/Permanent duration get carried over to a simulacrum. The way to assure its allegiance is to put an Instant/Permanent EA change on the target, farther down the list the cloning effect, then a removal of the switch. There is no need for a repeating EFF or to mess with the basic mechanism for simulacrums, it would be interfering with players' other uses of this effect.

You could switch them out of the kit through a script. Make them into ordinary thieves. Then switch them back in. This would take a custom spell that summons an invisible minion on the target, using a Summon creature EFF with some gibberish like fsdsd in the Parameter2 field to avoid the default puff of smoke. The second spell would call a second minion reversing the change. And you would need a line added to the kit's CLAB.... .2DA file, whatever it's called, with the first spell as the class ability for the 1st level and the second for the level you want them to be able to start hiding. This would make shadowdancers into something like a prestige class from the 3rd edition of D&D. Come to think of it, any kit could be made available as an alternative development venue at a certain level instead of from the get-go. Why can't a mage decide to specialize in invocation at, say, level 5? I don't know why you want to nerf your own game, though. If the kit feels too powerful early on, you can just not click on the button when the enemies are near.

No. There are enough glitches and problems with this one, but it's playable. And stop asking for stuff. Go make your own.

Why would a character want to be left without ranged attacks? This isn't for something characters do, it's something to be done to them. Anyway, I guess there's isn't a way.

Is it possible to prevent the player from using throwing daggers and the ranged attack type of throwing axes? I can disallow full-time ranged weapons, but I don't want to implement a total dagger ban nor outlaw all axes for the distanced attack on some of them.

Over the years I've gotten pretty sick of figuring out on a daily basis which spell effects in the G3 guide correspond to what in Near Infinity. In Near Infinity I get "Movement rate bonus," in the guide it's "State: movement modifier." In NI it's "Reflect spell level," the same thing calls itself "Spell: bounce (by power level)" in the guide. The guide's "HP: Damage" is tantalizingly close to "Damage" in the software, only it's wearing a bowtie. Someone really likes fancy names and colons around here. Well, with all allowances for the DLTCEP die-hards, I think almost everybody uses Near Infinity for modding these days - and effects are not called in DLTCEP what the guide calls them either, I bet. Leaving that piece of software aside, why the double lexicon here? If you don't remember exactly how an effect works and have to look it up, it's like translating between Russian and Bulgarian. Yes, there are the numbers. They are the same, thankfully. But I, for one, don't remember them all. There is a handful of opcodes that I deal with often, like 318, 326, 206, 177 - but isn't this enough of shop talk already? Make modding simpler for newbies, make the guide use the same plain names Near Infinity does. Tooling mods for the Infinity Engine is not nuclear physics, let's not pretend that we are toiling at vertiginous heights towards a Nobel.

I can tell you that the "spell" of Hide in Shadows is probably a 0-level one, it is probably from the NONE school and it probably uses projectile 0. I know these things for a fact for Turn Undead. You can try to use these properties, but reflecting, blocking and so on 0-level spells also gets in the way of other hard-coded mechanics. For example, reflecting Turn Undead back on the priest can make him controlled by the undead or blown to bits (but not routed, likely because that part of the mechanic uses the "Retreat" effect, 110, which does not work externally but may internally), however, it also makes the undead unkillable while it lasts, because the damage mechanism also uses something from the 0th level.

Sometimes you say something that is perceived as offense, and you feel sorry for it and want to explain, but then you realize the person doesn't understand what you are talking about.

I haven't played that one, in fact. Not that I'm looking for something that plays like BG anymore, necessarily. But if it's fantasy adventures on the seas and not just going through them for an occasional random event, KOTOR-style, then that might be the game for me. The characters can't swim, though, can they? That's probably the dividing line, whether it's possible to immerse in the water and meet and find what's there or it remains a blue outline for hard landlubbing. Anyway, thank you for the tip.

Call it the ultra HD, then. Yes, I have seen unrestored black-and-white movies, and they are foggy. Some of them, anyway. I don't think much of the documentary footage I've seen has been specially restored, and those scenes from a hundred years back look acceptable, fairly sharp and detailed. Why wouldn't they be? The quality of still photography in 1922 was no worse than in 2022. But for big-screen material the conditions might have been different. Or they were shot differently. Or just kept badly. In any case, nobody back then would say that a foggy picture is like what they eye sees - if indeed the pictures were foggy at the time. But neither is the sort of thing you get in digital porn today natural. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Whether that's a property of the material, the technique or the wandering and dreaming human perception (we see associations and ideas as much as the physical medium), nobody stares hard at surfaces like this, all surfaces and all points at once. Maybe because nothing matters so much that it's worth staring at for so long, and one demands the right to shift one's attention and ignore certain parts at leisure. The natural look, in any case, is comfortably slightly-blurry. Besides, you don't get any more of real detail by sharpening pictures. The information simply isn't there. Now, if you were to take a stylus and draw a tiny pattern on that rug before the entrance, then you would really be giving players something. As it is, they are being dipped in a pseudo-fresh world where they expect more meaningful details that they could, for instance, zoom in on, which is always very nice, if they can then zoom out to the business level. But the details aren't there. What you are giving them is an empty box of promise, candy wrapper. I don't bash anybody without a reason, but this is yet another type of mod that deludes people into self-contentment. As with tweaks, they think they are getting something, when they are not.

I don't like this. Normal vision is not that sharp. And it's a small thing, but everything has consequences. When they started shooting films in high definition, it wasn't only an unnatural crispness that resulted.

No. There is a ship in Shadows of Amn already. A strange ship and as huge as the Titanic on the inside, but anyway it's not that. I would like a watery area to move around in. Obviously there is the problem of locomotion, since there is no rowing or even moving about in any kind of vessel, but, as I said, water-walking could help. And there might be clickable boats on the islands, working as teleporters. This is all awkward imitation, of course, but where is a proper fantasy game set on the seas? The problem here is drawing a classy area. Then there would be others, like adding the water layer, and more things to imitate - a kraken attack using spell effects, for instance - but without an area it's a non-starter.

I wish someone would make a sea area. With a few islands, possibly. Some device to move about the water - have a wizard cast water walking on them, possibly. The problem with these games now is that all of the areas have been visited and gone over and modded into time and again. A few people have drawn new maps, but those are always on land somewhere. Another temple or dungeon. The old "golden box" games at least let us imagine wonderful places, because so much there was text. Here it's land, ogres and some merchant in a corner selling upgraded swords. Irenicus running with Bhaal blah. Where is my brig to sail across and to an adventure?

What reasons?