Battles With Issues

Well bear in mind it's only the thing gazra mentioned - listed HP. As far as I know the other stuff can't be removed.

 

Update 2 on SBD:

• Deggum and Barkinar now have gloves.
• Deggum and Senshock now have weapons.
• Deggum and Barkinar now have some jewelry and potions in a chest in their room, as per the module.
• Deggum, Barkinar, and Senshock have had their memorized spells revamped.
• Deggum, Barkinar, and Senshock no longer do wacky inventory switching by heartbeat.

Next I will revise their strategies so that their spell casting works and makes sense.

Also, good news, gazra - I think we can avoid the sudden apathy that overcomes everyone when Senshock teleports out (which I verified) by scrapping the stop combat routine and simply turning Senshock off (with appropriate sparklies and sound) on his turn when conditions are right. I will work on that soon.

I'm also going to see if we can do the alert points/sentry routine between Deggum and Barky's quarters and Senshock's quarters at night so that we don't have that goofy thing going where one group is blithely buffing their nails in one room while next door the other group is fighting for their lives.

After that, auto-talk routines, dialogue node reviews, dealing with intraplanar elementals, seeing if we can get Senshock to pop up for battles he is not involved in, and pondering the possibilities of the meeting room et al.

 

Update 3 on SBD:

• Auto-buffing is now working properly.

Poor Barkinar had never actually fully buffed all this time (as near as I can tell) due to naming errors of his buffing spells in protos.tab. He actually has three buffs, though I have switched out two of them - Resist Energy and Protection From Energy - as they seem ineffective and cause the script to terminate. Ineffective as in the game automatically selects water as the energy type, and terminates because I think that generally happens when the game is forced to choose stuff like that. Anyway, now he's rolling with Shield of Faith, Magic Circle Against Good, and Blur. Deggum rolls with Shield of Faith and Protection From Good, and Senshock rolls with Stoneksin, See Invisibility, False Life, and Mage Armor. Woo-hoo. (Senshock's are all Livonya selections. Deggum used to have Mage Armor instead of Protection from Good but he now wears armor so that was a dud.)

[edit]

Heh, thanks to Agetian's WorldBuilder documentation I figured out Senshock's problem. He has the ONF_USE_ALERTPOINTS NPC flag set, which specifically makes an NPC go to his night standpoint only when global flag 144 (Temple is on alert) is set. That explains gazra's report.

 

Update 4 on SBD:

• Senshock now teleports out without stopping combat. Those who remain stay hostile. Yay!
• Forgot to mention - Deggum and Barkinar have had their strength upped so they don't get (as) encumbered by wearing heavy armor. (That's one of my pet peeves with D&D - you have to be really strong to wear armor, and yet clerics are meant to wear armor, and yet not all of them are really strong. Also, how would a comparative weakling rise to the level of power that Barkinar and Deggum have? Their PnP module stats are actually pretty lame.)

It looks like there will be no going for backup. The guards can't be set to do this automatically because scout points are all or nothing, and we can't have guards running off to get help if the party is friendly for whatever reason. That leaves doing it after combat starts, but as I think Sitra discovered before, it no longer works at that point. That in turn leaves teleporting backup in. Meh.

Thinking out loud ... it seems like in reality, any skirmish on any level of the Temple would result in basically the entire level mobilizing against you, and the other levels quickly getting the word as well. It's cool that we now have level 2 reactive thanks to SA, and the alert flag does make everybody KOS, but why would they just wait around for you to show up? You'd think they would immediately go on the offensive and assemble search parties and put everybody else on lockdown, etc. Can you imagine an entire level homing in on your location once you have a battle? That would up the danger ante significantly. I would think the only exception would be if you stealthed everything, but even then they would get alarmed when the first unexplained corpse was discovered. This lack of proper reactivity is likely the single most significant reason for ToEE being what a is - a simple dungeon crawl where you go from one isolated battle to the next and are thus able to clear the Temple with little real trouble. It's too bad, but making it any different is basically impossible, or at least a herculean task.

 

Update 5 on SBD:

• Deggum has been switched back to bracers and a magic ring instead of a shield and armor because he was miscasting too many wizard spells. You'd think he would know better than to multiclass like that.
• Downgraded Deggum's strength accordingly.
• Upgraded Deggum's weapon to an unholy mace +1.
• Rather massively overhauled Deggum's AI so that he casts his normal spells, casts self-heals, and melee's fairly intelligently.

Deggum is done. Onto Barky.

 

Cool, thanks. ^

Update 6 on SBD:

Barkinar is done.

• Overhauled Barkinar's AI so that he casts his normal spells, casts his self and friend-heals, and melees fairly intelligently.
• Gave the bugbear bodyguards a new strategy combination that will allow them to five foot step when using healing potions.
• Redid the bugbear bodyguards invensource entries. (They were using custom inventories.) At this point they don't have Bull's Strength potions, and they should get either a CMW, CSW, or CCW potion.
• Gave the bugbear bodyguards Iuz shields and one-handed weapons according to the former custom inventories (done by Livonya I assume).

Barkinar now has a few tricks up his sleeve. I want to get him to have help arrive in the form of more bugbears, trolls, or ogres, but it's very difficult to actually do that effectively without just teleporting them in. You can't turn on existing and pre-positioned mobs while in combat, apparently. That's too bad because then they could follow alert points and charge the room, which would be cool. Also, if you spawn them outside LOS (like in a nearby corridor, which is where they should appear from), they won't go hostile and join the combat queue even if you script them to do exactly that. If you spawn them right in the middle of the room so they can see faction opponents and get pissed and then move them to the corridor, they still won't join in. :blegh: That pretty much leaves spawning them just barely but actually not quite around the corner so they can see what's going on and then get involved, but that still means they kind of magically appear.

The Troikans were really lacking in some of their technology.

 

The next one - 7.7.

^ Thanks, SA. I'm exploring the beacon possibilities now, though I agree that a total level overhaul is probably not in the cards.

 

Update 7 on SBD:

• Got bugbear backup to run in via a simple start combat script to detect party members and attack.
  
  I'm sure the reason this works is because the rooms are pretty small, but now they do appear sort of in the hall or entryways and run in as opposed to materializing right on top of everybody.
  
  I didn't have much luck with beacons. Spawn a damaged, invisible ally mob at a point along the path to the battle and instruct the bugbears to target friend hurt and approach? No go. Bugbears don't give a sh*t. :blegh:
  
  
• Senshock is giving me problems, the bastard.
  
  It's amazing how touchy AI strategies can be. Any kind of typo will wreck them, to be sure, but sometimes they even get wrecked without anything being wrong. e.g. if a caster can't acquire a target as defined, he may just switch to the default strategy. Sound like a good failsafe type thing? It's not. It's what causes low AC/HP NPCs to run around like idiots whacking at people with their little sticks. Basically this means the AI is not robust enough to adapt very fluidly, which seems to suggest just plain crappy coding.

This stuff just takes waaay too long. Should be easier but it's not.

 

http://www.co8.org/forum/showpost.php?p=117228&postcount=49

7.7 will probably have some new Merchants Row merchants.