Circle of Eight Modpack 5.9.x/5.9.xNC General Commentary & Discussion Thread

Yes, animate dead is quite worthless. And it disappointed me even more when I looked at the script, as all it does is apply the animate dead effect (which is hard coded) to the targeted corpse(s). That means that it's actually hard coded to stink in the engine. It's possible that something better could be scripted up, but it'd be a significant amount of work.

And on a related note, trying to implement some new spells resulted in my taking a look at a lot of existing spells and such. And there are quite a few little (and some not so little) bugs with details of various spells (including plenty that Troika wrote). I'm game for going through and trying to bring them up to rules compliance where possible (I have too much free time), but I was wondering how best to get the revised stuff to you. Should I comb through it all and only post one big zip at the end? Would it be better to post multiple zips, keeping the changes as isolated as possible? Is there a better way than posting zips here? And what's the policy on things like Co8.py, since there might be some functions that would be useful across several fixed spell scripts?

 

I don't remember exactly what gets reanimated in that fight. If it's just dudes with class levels, then the current animate dead behavior is about correct, because class levels don't count for the strength of your zombies and skeletons. So any human will turn into a dinky 1 HD undead. The main difference would be that they retain their equipment, I think.

But, if he's animating more interesting monsters, then instead, their hit dice should turn into d12s, and they should retain most of their combat abilities. So if he's got an ettin corpse, with stats like:

Then what he gets out is an ettin zombie that looks like:

which is far better than the 1 HD zombie he gets. And skeletons are a similar deal.

I don't necessarily mean adding a lot of new stuff. But I'm rather afraid that if I poke here every time I find a nit, I'll get annoying. On the other hand, if I don't keep a log, It'll be harder for me to remember what exactly I fixed to tell you about it later, unless I keep track.

For instance, Circle of Death doesn't have the [Death] descriptor, so it isn't stopped by Death Ward. Weird doesn't have the [Fear] descriptor, so it isn't stopped by immunity to fear. Weird could have a more rules-accurate targeting mode, too. Neither death ward nor negative energy protection actually protect you from negative energy. And there are probably other examples.

Conceivably, fixing some spells might require more new content than you're comfortable with for the upcoming stable release, though, yes.

I meant more like, if I have some functions that I want to use in several different spell scripts, should I feel free to add them to Co8.py, or do you have more of a vote about what goes in there?

 

About version 6.0.

You plan to have the NC material after the temple is done.
I finished most of the temple before doing any of the NC except welkwood bog.
I was level 12 with 4 characters, no npc, and i find that both the moathouse and hickory bransch is way to easy now.
I haven't tried any of the verbobonc stuff at this time but i feel that only the slaver fight and the two newly implemented missions will provide any challenge.

Are you planning to buff up the two mentioned and maybe the drows aswell?

 

Yes. I have the .txts modified here, and they work. Death Ward will automatically counter any single target spell with "Descriptor: Death", and multi-target spells won't receive such creatures in their target lists. And the game will automatically float a message to that effect. It works similar to spell resistance. Also, the same is true of "Descriptor: Fear" and fear immunity, such as from Greater Heroism (I tested with this), or a paladin's class features.

You actually get to decide. If you want skeletons, the flesh falls off (so says the spell). The reverse isn't true for zombies, though; you need a relatively fresh corpse.

The script pretty much just passes the radial menu argument (1 or 2) to the sp-Animate Dead effect. However, when Iuz does it, it passes 3 to the effect. I don't know what difference that makes, though.

Okay. I'm certainly not demanding that everything I find be fixed in 6.0. Hopefully everyone isn't just quitting after that, so there will be subsequent releases.

I'll do my best. And RAW was my gameplan, at least for my above proposal. I think all the bugs I listed above are deviations from the spells as written, and I found some more looking through the As and Bs last night.

Fixing the .txt spell descriptions (which have mostly minor effects, aside from the [Death] and [Fear] type things) is probably something I can get in by the deadline. If I make it, I'll post a zip with the new files and a changelog of what all I did.

 

Glad to hear that Gaear, both that it will be done first in 7.0 and that it will be beefed up.

 

Okay, that was more of a marathon than I thought. But, I'm done.

Attached, you should find a zip file containing the following things:

1) The rules/spells/ directory, containing all of the .txt files as of the Co8 5.8.3-NC beta patch, together with some that hadn't yet been modified by the mod pack (I got them from the Troika dats). All the relevant ones have been checked against the SRD website, and in many (90-some) cases modified to make them as close as possible to the official rules with regard to targeting, area of effect, spell components, etc.

2) A changelog generated by the version control software I was using. Every time I changed a spell txt (or imported one that wasn't already in the modpack), I recorded what I was changing.

3) A text file with notes I took during the process. If I wasn't comfortable just making a change, or I thought it wasn't really possible to do it right, or noticed something that wasn't directly related to the .txt files, I wrote it down there instead.

Oh, and one note I forgot to make was that I didn't touch Horrid Wilting, because as I posted a few days ago, there's no absolutely correct solution.

By far, the most common mistake (even amongst Troika's spells) was using the 'Primary 30 Feet' targeting mode (which is for Chain Lightning and pretty much nothing else), instead of the 'Any 30 Feet' mode (which is how a lot of mass effect D&D spells are actually written). I think there was only one spell (possibly two) that correctly used the latter.

I also checked the spells in game to make sure I didn't render them uncastable or something. Hopefully I didn't miss anything there.

Anyhow, I realize this is a lot to dump on you. So if you don't want to look at it for the upcoming release, that's quite all right. Most of the changes aren't a big deal. However, I'd recommend looking at Weird and Circle of Death, because the changes to those were somewhat serious oversights.

Oh, and maybe this is old news. But in the process of doing this, I managed to decipher what the negative numbers for max_Target means. I'll go write it down in my thread in general modification.

 

I didn't. It didn't really occur to me, since I think NPCs probably ignore a lot of it (see below). But, if you're wondering if adding 'Descriptor: Death' to '737 - Death Gaze.txt' allows Death Ward to protect you from a bodak, the answer is yes (I just tested it). So perhaps I will look into those, although that may be another that'd be worth changing immediately.

Yep, sorry. Luckily I correctly typed 5.9.3 when I tagged the initial import, so the changelog says the right thing, at least.

4 spells (I think; bless/curse water and con/desecrate) have 25 GP material components, so I added 'GP 25' components (and I checked that the Emridy Meadows skeleton can still cast desecrate even with this; NPCs might ignore GP components).

As for V and S.... In theory, if a spell has no somatic component (which is the entire purpose of the still spell feat), you should be able to cast it while grappling, or paralyzed. However, ToEE just seems to disable all spell casting in those situations, so I don't know if not having an S actually has a function. Similarly, no verbal component (the point of silent spell) allows you to cast it while silenced. This actually works, I think (although there are almost no spells without verbal components).

Well, let's see....

1) Quite a lot of spells had 'Primary 30 Feet' as their targeting mode. That means you get to designate one primary target, and then designate secondary targets that are within 30 feet of the primary target. This means, though, that you can cast it, potentially, on people 60 feet apart, as long as you put the primary target in the middle of them.

However, most of the spells that had this targeting mode are actually stipulated in the SRD to affect targets such that no two are more than 30 feet apart (which is closer to a 15 foot radius than the 30 foot radius that Primary 30 Feet allows). This is accomplished by the targeting mode Any 30 Feet. So, I fixed this where possible, which, skimming the changelog is:

Weird, animal growth, break enchantment, clam animals, chill metal, halt undead, haste, heat metal, magic missile (it's supposed to be 15, but 30 is better than no limit), mass charm monster, mass heal, remove fear, remove paralysis, scare, slow, rage, good hope, mass bull's strength (and others), mass cure/inflict wounds, mass hold monster/person, and scorching ray.

Some of the above were missing any targeting restrictions at all (so, you were even able to target the same person with break enchantment multiple times), or were area effect spells instead. The notable one I didn't fix was Horrid Wilting. Its targeting mode is supposed to be Any 60 Feet, but the engine doesn't implement that. Right now it's a 60 foot radius area effect which includes friendly targets, though, which is definitely not the most accurate it could be.

2) A few other spells had the wrong number of targets. Mass bulls strength was allowing 1 + 1 per level, so I changed it to 1 per level per the SRD. Animal growth was allowing 1 per level, but it should be 1 per 2 levels. Remove fear was allowing 1 per level, but it should be 1 + 1 per 4 levels.

3) Some of the files had the wrong information about what type of save is given by the spell. However, I don't know if those actually do anything (saving throws take place in the spell scripts), so I only fixed such spells that were already in the mod pack, or if they had other mistakes.

4) According to the SRD, sleep, deep slumber and enlarge/reduce person should be full round actions, not standard actions. And dimension door and eyebite should be standard actions instead of full round actions. So I fixed those.

5) A couple spells were castable in combat while their SRD casting time was in the minutes, and in fact, the ToEE help, in one case I checked, actually listed the casting time as "Out of Combat". So I changed them to that. The one I specifically didn't change, though, was Raise Dead, since it may be a good idea to allow that one in combat. Reincarnation, by contrast, is out of combat only, though.

6) Clerics were missing mass eagle's splendor.

7) Circle of death was acting as a 40 foot radius centered on the caster, which means your wizard would have to run into the center of some guys to kill them. The SRD says it's a 40 foot area at medium range. Meanwhile, prayer is in fact supposed to be centered on the caster (like bless and bane), but it was allowing ranged targeting.

8) Some descriptors were missing. Death for Circle of Death, Fear and Mind-Affecting for Weird, Mind-Affecting for Hold Animal, and Phantasmal Killer had just "Mind" instead of "Mind-Affecting." And Prismatic Spray had the Cold descriptor, but shouldn't. These can actually trigger immunities to spells, so they're somewhat important.

And I think that's about it.

Edit: Oh, I forgot. One other casting time I didn't fix was break enchantment. That has an SRD casting time of 1 minute, which would put it out of combat by convention in ToEE. However, casting Break Enchantment (even on your own people) actually initiates combat. So if you set it to Out of Combat, it becomes impossible to cast.

I don't really know what causes certain spells to initiate combat, though, so I just left it as is. I suppose it might be important to cast break enchantment in combat anyway (if I remember a certain temple NPC correctly).

 

Huh, weird. It works here even in Windows.

Anyhow, I extracted it, and rebuilt it with winrar, so hopefully that works.