Salamanders and Giants and Gnolls (Oh My!)

Liv added some scripts to get NPCs to dual weild. She put them in some strange places though, in Black Jay's script, and/or the Farmers Wife script. I could be wrong about those, so check Lareth in the protos, look at his san_* scripts. That should lead you (eventually) to the dual weild scripts that Liv put in.

 

now I'm not 100% sure what colum it is cos I'm not at home but its used on the halflings and gnomes but not the rest of the PCs - its about colums 28-31ish they're the walk run speed. when I adjusted those my charcters moved faster across the screen, I'm not sure what effect it would have in combat tho - (it might've ment that they could move futher but I can't remember)

 

Could we maybe just remove the potions from the bugbears? Rather than extending the duration or trying to modify the circumstances in which they use them? Or is that too drastic a solution?

Glad to hear about the Galeb Duhr's now having 4/magic, that seems much more reasonable!

 

Okay, if no one is going to bite on the ice toad/san_start_combat thing I will add my $pow(10, -1.6989700043360188047862611052755) worth to the potion thing. Personally I have never noticed a problem when bugbears drink potions. When they drink a cure potion its "Oh damn, now I have to start all over again." When they drink a potion of bulls strength it's "well there goes my wizard...." (that is unless I am testing spells and turn my Tenser's Transformed Wizard loose upon them ) Or maybe, "shit, didn't kill him quick enough. he drank the potion I wanted to loot from his steaming corpse."

Never really noticed the duration of the effect but I did do a test: consoled in Greater temple bugbear, got him with suggestion, gave him a potion of bull's strength and had him use it on himself. Result, the duration was 30 rounds. I even waited around while the timer ticked down to make sure it didn't mysteriously disappear before the time was up.

so, if the duration of the potion effect is less than that when fighting a bugbear who already had the potion in inventory then , it would seem, something else may be going on other than what is going on in the spell script. I don't know what that may be but ....

Oh and btw, (and this is very belated), I like what you are doing with protos and the approach you have taken, Kalshane. And ( again, very belated ), I appreciate the hard ( and surely tedious at times) work you are putting into bringing the game more in line with the rules while trying to preserve game balance. I don't think anything along these lines, of a similar scope, has been attempted thus far. May you have the patience of.... well some legendary patient thing, endurance such that, upon witnessing it, a bear would consider taking up jogging, and insight that would allow you to see that 1+1 does not necessarily = 2 ( at least when you are talking apples and oranges (or elmos and darleys) in a CRPG. )

DEW: watch for a release from me soon (all I will say right now is: I have posted about it before, it will be (somewhat) cogent to this thread, and it has the potential to make certain aspects of a modders life easier.)

Darmagon

 

Uh. Whatever you say. This is way beyond me. But if it's possible, this would be a good thing to do for say, Umber Hulks and the like, who waste turns "casting" their confusion effect instead of it just happening.

Ah. I'll have to look for those.

So, you're basically telling me I've just wasted hours upon hours of time "fixing" any creature that uses equipment and I'm going to have to change it all back?:tears: If so, it would have been nice for someone to have mentioned this back in the beginning when I announced my plans to replace the bugbear's AC bonuses with actual armor or later when I discussed creating special clubs for the Ettins to overcome the problems with Superior Two-Weapon Fighting no working correctly. (Not angry, FTR, but a little bewildered.) I had no idea manually spawning a creature myself would be different than encountering it in the game. I would say at least half my work so far has involved changes to the invensource.mes.

The problem is mostly with the more powerful bugbears. They're surrounded by their foes and instead of attacking, they'll pop down a potion of bulls strength. Action over. Enemies beat them to a bloody pulp. They drink a healing potion which restores maybe 25% of the damage they just took, if they're lucky. Party wails on them again and takes them out. Fight over, bugbear didn't attack once.

 

Couldn't find any san scripts that were common to dual-wielders listed in the protos.tab. So no help there.

And it's a moot point anyway. I started up a game and plowed my way through to the bugbears in the moathouse and yup, none of them have any of the armor I gave them in the invensource.mes. So, I've officially wasted untold hours playing with the invensource.mes in an attempt to make equipment using creatures rules-compliant. Joy.

 

It's a moot point, I know, but the dual weild scripts are in py00002black jay.py. I know that there are a lot, and I do mean a lot, of protos that link to this script. And I aslo know that the dual wield parts of this script were added by Co8, and most likely Liv.

Sorry about the mobbed in thing. Ultimately this is correctable, though it does mean an absolutely huge amount of work deleting the existing mobs for the creatures and recreating them with the correct equipment. It is an idea that has been suggested before, but so far no one has volunteered to to it. I can see why though. It would take months, maybe even a year or more, to do.

 

If it's ultimately correctable, though through a ton more work, I'll save what I've got done now and set it aside in the event sometime down the road someone does decide to do that, and then go back and "unfix" the equipment-related stuff for bugbears and goblins and gnolls and NPCs I've done so far.

I'm wondering why Troika even created the invensource.mes in the first place since it's not used by the creatures already in the game. If equipment is pretty much coded into the creatures, the file is pretty much unneccessary, except for modding purposes.

How are creatures going to be generated for KotB? Would equipment-based fixes be of any use there, or is it all going to be in the .mob files?

I'm a little frustrated by this turn of events, but I know going in I had only a vague idea what I was doing. Not a surprise it came to bite me in the ass at some point. And it at least means the remaining fixes are going to go faster (once I go back and undo the other changes) since I now know tinkering with the invensource.mes isn't going to make a difference. It also means certain things, like the Ettin's dual wielding, are going to be unfixable without some form of temple.dll hacking.

 

Ummm, as far as adding things couldn't we use the first heartbeat script to add anything we wanted and work from there? Might be alot of work in order not to script in things that are already there for the mobbed in creatures but it would be possible. I think..... (On second thought, it wouldn't be that difficult (I think, but remember I am morose (see here ,post number 8) today so I may be wrong))

going even further with that idea we could add our own file and have it be read from first heartbeat for just this purpose. Hey Kalshane, shoot me a pm and let's get talking about this. all of your work may not be in vain. (Hope you haven't deleted anything yet .) Of course I guarantee nothing as I haven't done a lot of research in this area yet but I think there is hope.....

And, damn it, I am no longer morose. I guess some things were just not made to last.

Darmagon

 

I haven't deleted anything yet. Like I said, I'm putting it aside in the hope it will be useful at some point. If we can make it work, great. In the meantime, I'm going to try to put together a version that is as close as possible with the current limitations.

A couple oddities:
1) Grank is a 4th level cleric. (Who also has Evasion. WTF?) Near as I can tell, his Bandits are 8th level Rogues. How the heck is he the leader? At the very least, I want to axe his Evasion ability. Going further, I'd like to give him some extra levels (possibly even Rogue levels to reflect his new bandit lifestyle and to give him that Evasion legitimately) to keep him on par with the rest of his band. What does everyone think?

2) The Assassin Leader (by the name of Darlia) listed in the protos has one too many feats. (I have a feeling she was either calculated as if she were human, or, as seems all too common, Troika just gave her whatever feats they felt she should have without caring if it was legal or not.) Also, the protos lists the inventory of the regular assassin as her inventory. Having never encountered her in the game, I have no clue if her .mob file actually matches this and spawing her is just going to pull from the invensource.mes, which I am now painfully aware means diddly-squat in the actual game. Has anyone ever encounted her in the game. Does she use the same weapons as the other assassin, because her feats are geared towards using bastard swords and shuriken? Do you even fight her where it would actually matter?