PST Torment is redundant, but I think the redundancy adds to the clarity of the topic. Question #1: How hard (easy) is it to stop NPCs from gaining XP at all? Question #2: How hard would modding the NPC interface be? I'd like to add big portraits and add *what the player thinks* instead of just dashes. I'm not asking anyone to this, I just want to know if anyone has an idea of how hard this would be. I'm thinking of a long term (many months) mod to replace NPC looting, XP, etc. with dialog options unlocking new levels, etc. for NPCs ala Torment. At this point, it's just a vague idea, but I'm trying to determine how possible this is. Other than a few heavily scripted scenarios and [mostly Co8] banter, I see little positive distinction between NPCs and additional PCs. I'd like a reason to start with few (1-3 )PCs, keep a few constant NPCs, and usually keep a slot open for transitional NPCs. --thearioch
HK has looked into the big portrait thing and has not yet found a way to get them to work for NPCs. Not sure what you mean by the dashes thing - NPC stats?
About the dashes -- yes. If I could (and I probably could with enough time) I'd display stats, alignment, deity with the values represented to the party. Ironically, if I wanted deceptive NPCs, I would conceal the to-hit, skills, and probably Feats from the party. For spells, I would presume an NPC could bluff lower stats but not higher, so bonus spells would be per represented statistic. Realistically, as long as I could display "true" stats, I could easily display false stats (at least alignment and deity), which to me is more important than statistics. --thearioch
1) You could alter their scripts that fire at the beginning and the end of combat. The beginning script would record their XP at the start into some variable, and the end script would reset the XP to what it was at the start of combat. Note that there are also scripts for the start and end of *round*, so take care not to confuse them with one another. The drawbacks are that the game will still display a message saying the NPCs have gained experience, and if a particular combat gave them enough XP to go up a level, maybe the script will fire up too late. Also, they will be unable to craft anything this way, unless you grant them experience some other way. Oh, and they'd probably still gain XP from quests, traps, etc. You could deal with quest XP in a similar fashion, I suppose (though it would be cumbersome to rewrite all the quest completion codes to support this), and probably traps too by altering the trap script files (Livonya once removed XP for triggering traps by doing this). Or you could just leave it as is since the experience gained from those things is relatively little. The only alternative to this sort of method (adjusting their XP manually) is changing the game's code itself (i.e. DLL hacking), which could be difficult even if you know what you're doing (I certainly don't). 2) No idea. It's probably hard coded. I'd also love to alter NPC looting myself, but once again, this would demand changing the game's code for the changes I want to implement. Maybe if Atari goes belly up one day, we could get the ToEE source for pennies... BTW, what did you mean when you said PS:T is redundant?
@Sitra Thanks for the heads up on ignoring XP -- I honestly hadn't given that aspect much thought. I was assuming I could disallow player control of level ups and blank out the relevant levelup.tab entries and just leave the NPC "stuck." If not, I definitely have some more work. I said *PST Torment* is redundant because the 'T' in PST is Torment. I used both terms because I see people using both terms when discussing the game and I was feeling inclusive --thearioch
Actually, I hadn't thought of your method. Maybe it could work, but I don't know how to disable the levelup button for players, and in addition it's possible that the game has a default levelup scheme.
