So, I've been working some on Evard's Black Tentacles. It seems like it'll mostly work out, although there are a lot of details to work through. I thought I'd mention, though, in the vein of the recent stormlord post, that if someone with more skills wants to try to tackle the visuals, that might be for the best. I've fooled around a lot with sprite-based particles, but I would probably only describe what I've come up with as "adequate." I'm not much of an artist. I'll see if I can get a screen capture of what I currently have and attach it later, just as a reference.
Grapple checks were easy enough to replicate in Python. Black tentacles doesn't say it requires the touch attack (presumably because if you're in the area of effect, there are many tentacles, so you have no chance to not be hit), so I didn't bother with that, although it wouldn't be difficult to replicate. The grappling works similarly to the frog tongue. It's not like a complicated grappling scenario with multiple characters and movement and such. The tentacles can't be damaged at all, so they're basically just an area affect that works according to opposed grapple rolls rather than saves or what have you. The tentacles just attempt to put you in the grappling state (which restricts your movement and such), and the grappled characters can attempt to break free on their turn (which is based on a grapple roll). The tentacles make grapple rolls each round to try to deal damage to creatures that they have previously caught. All the events for entering and breaking out of the grapple state can be managed in python.
@dolio THANK YOU! Maybe Sagenlicht sent you a memo (because I sent him one) about how Evard's black tentacles has been one of my favorite 3.x spells I wished was included in ToEE! From my tabletop experience, there is no touch attack, merely a grapple check. (This spell is also effectively a Warlock's chilling tentacles invocation, which I also want in-game!) Entangle seemed useful as a visual base, but recolored to be dark purple so as to stand out from the black fog of war.
Yeah, I copied and modified some of the Entangle particles for the basics. The area of effect of Entangle just looks like a green haze, though. I kind of wanted something that looks like there are tentacles moving around in the area of effect. I was able to make something passable, but it could probably be a lot better. (My particle effect for the actual grapple effect on a character is not very good, either).
Most grapple mechanics don't make sense with respect to this spell, though. You can make a grapple check to be allowed to move at half your speed, but this spell only allows you to move half your speed while in the area of effect. If you move in this way, you can drag the creature you're grappling with, but that doesn't really make sense for this spell, because you're not really grappling a specific creature. So this option is inferior to just breaking free. You can pin an opponent, but none of the actions you can take against a pinned opponent will affect the tentacles. The only advantage that matters, I think, is being able to automatically escape the grapple, but that's also the same as breaking free. You can draw weapons and attack and stuff, but the tentacles are invulnerable. There are consequences to grappling for spells and whatnot, but those are just penalties that need to be applied. Essentially, this spell is an area effect debuff where the debuff is 'you are considered to be grappling.' The tentacles don't try to do any fancy actions to you (just damage), and no fancy actions will affect the tentacles, so there's no reason to do anything (grapple related) but try to break the grapple. If someone implemented more complicated grappling rules, maybe they could be used. But I'm not going to implement them when they don't matter for the purpose of this spell, and the existing stripped-down mechanics are adequate.
Here's an example video. I've done a lot of fiddling, and some previous iterations may have looked a little bit better than this. But this is reasonably close to as good as I've gotten it to look. In case it's not obvious, the main area is just a couple of tentacle sprites I drew being wobbled around and scaled. The targeted effects are a pretty poor attempt to draw a spiral with particles. I was originally going to try to do everything with the spiral type stuff, but my geometry has so far been too weak to guess how to get something that looks good.
Yes, I see that now. In any case - great job! Don't forget to implement EK_Q_Is_BreakFree_Possible. The query is used by AI. I'm speaking on behalf of monsters))
That works well Dolio, damn good show on a spell I would have regarded as un-doable. @Endarire has expressed a knowledge of 3d modelling tools, perhaps he can start to improve the graphics.
@Shiningted The last time I tried to make Evard's black tentacles based off entangle, I got a renamed version of entangle.
