Further Respawning & a Feature Request

I've been playing with this all day, so far I can't even get the black dragon to cast spells. I've had various failed attempts to make the spell work propperly as well. I had it casting a cone of acid (no particles) and using the wrong number of damage dice, and various other failed attempts. I did however come up with a better way of calculating the DC for the white dragon's breath weapon.

 

Hehe, I figured it out, there were 2 too many "black dragon" entries in strategy.mes, he casts just fine now, added the AI to cast the spells you listed in the protos, but the breath weapon itself needs some work (currently it targets everyone on the map for 10d4 points of acid damage and has no spell particles).

 

Ok, I have a (sort of) working breath weapon, based on the ice breath weapon script. It has the "gust of wind" spell particles (not quite what I wanted, but it doesn't look too bad) does the correct damage, and near accurate spell DC and range. I actually made it as a cone spell (not ray like Lightning Bolt as I intended) with a 1 degree radius (a long thin line that get's slightly thicker as it goes further away from the dragon). the spell particles dont indicate the range of the spell, but due to the VERY stupid way spell.particles are called in the spell scripts and partsys1.tab there seems to be a limited number of choices that end in spell.caster that aren't either cone area's of effect, completely inapropriate for the acid breath weapon or used all the time by casting spells of a particular school of magic.

[EDIT] I'll post it below.

 

Here are the files needed for the black dragon breath weapon I've written, I might just continue to play with the script to get it to work as a lightning bolt type spell, but this one is fairly accurate.

 

The (now) 2 dragon breath weapons that are in the game are set up in such a way that you can select the strength of the breath weapon by electing to cast it at a certain level, There are 6 different dragon age category's that can be implemented with the ToEE engine (larger dragons would loose out on other physical attack types due to the fact the engine can only support 6 different attack types.) EG...

Wyrmling - cast the breath weapon spell as a level 1 spell.
Very Young - cast the breath weapon spell as a level 2 spell.
Young - cast the breath weapon spell as a level 3 spell.
Juvenile - cast the breath weapon spell as a level 4 spell.
Young Adult - cast the breath weapon spell as a level 5 spell.
Adult - cast the breath weapon spell as a level 6 spell.

Level dependant stuff (DC, damage dice and range) will be determined by the spells level.

The other creatures "breath weapons" are pretty much built the same way, except the DC range and damage dice are defined in the spell script itself. EG...

Gorgon's petrifying gaze

uses a cone (Shout spell particles) to generate a target list, sets the DC if the caster is a Gorgon (has the Gorgon's proto ID number) checks to see if the players save against the effect, fizzles the spell if they pass the save, or adds the Hold Person efect if they don't pass the save.

 

Nevets would be a good choice, Zorn could no doubt add a custom line or two for him. As for when, I rather liked Spike's idea of this having XP potential for a fledgling party in lieu of doing those ridiculous fed-ex quests. Which would mean pre-Moathouse if we were going to go that route.

Hell, why not just make it one of the very first possible battles, along with the Deklo Grove spiders. In other words, just ship them on out.

On second thought - maybe make it so you have to have already visited Nevets once. That way it's not one of those "Hello I've never met you before but I've got a little something special I need you to do" things. If that's doable.