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Editing spell properties
07/21/2017, 12:12:02

    Pokota writes:

    Let's say I wanted to change how much a spell costs. I saw spells.txt in icon.lod, but changing that only changed what the spellbook said, not what cost the game actually gave to the spell. Where should I be poking in?

    How do the Outdoor/Indoor only spells determine if it's being invoked indoors/outdoors?

    Is it possible to fix Mass Curse, or (more likely to be useful) change what effect it applies?

    And finally... is it ever possible to paralyze a Gold dragon? :3





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These are great questions. Someone with modding experience will have to answer, and I'm looking forward to reading that.
07/22/2017, 22:28:29

    Bones writes:





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Some educated guesses, if you would like them.
07/23/2017, 14:26:25

    Ramillies writes:

    I didn't play, leave alone modified, the game in ages, so this just comes from the top of my head.

    Costs: probably a dumb question, but there is a separate cost for Normal, Expert and Master skill levels. Did you take that into the account? If the number in spell description changed, I guess you changed the Normal one. Maybe you tried it with an Expert?

    Ad indoors/outdoors: I think that, from the game's point of view, these are fundamentally different. Rendered by different engines, stored in different file formats (I guess) and so on. Even the game rules are different (skydiving outdoors hurts, if you do it indoors, you make it unscathed). That being said, I have no idea about what exactly determines if the map is going to be treated like indoors or outdoors.

    Ad Mass Curse: No (at least not without hacking the game executable itself), I'm afraid.

    Paralyzing a gold dragon should be impossible. If you look the spell up in spells.txt and have a look in the "Res" (=resistance) column, you'll see "Magic" for Paralysis. And if you look up the gold dragon in monsters.txt, you'll see "Imm" in the magic resistance column .





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re: educated guesses
07/23/2017, 20:52:59

    okota@live.com">Pokota writes:

    re Costs: That's actually how I found out that spells.txt wasn't affecting the real costs - I left Basic costs alone, the Expert and Master levels were 75% and 50% the Basic costs, respectively. The only spells whose cost-at-cast were actually changed were the ones that change to begin with (Spirit Arrow, Fire Arrow, Cold Beam, Static Whatever, and Magic Arrow). The spell description reflected the expected values, but on-cast was still full cost. Which I guess is a good thing - can you imagine being able to throw around Dark Containments at only 100 per?

    re Mass Curse: It's hardcoded? That's a bummer. Still, I've wanted to learn asm for a while. The main issue with curse is that it applies a chance of failure when casting spells. Which makes it next to useless against most enemies (and the ones where it would be worth using against are virtually immune to it anyway!) Since monsters either cast one spell or else do an 'attack' it's meaningless. Because of the cost, feeblemind is better (since that actually shuts down the spell instead of giving it a chance to fail - the only thing MC has is group effect).

    re In/Outdoors: Yep, they're different file formats. Probably some header shenanigans that gets checked. I'll poke around the map files some more. As for skydiving, fall damage is still applied indoors, it's just once it's relevant you've always got Day of Protection running anyway.

    re Paralyze: I'm not sure which would be cheesier - changing the spell's resist type, or removing the immunity. Lore-wise no magic at all should work on Gold Dragons, but you can still shrapmetal them to death (not that you'd usually WANT to - it works best at point blank).





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Too bad, I'm not able to help you then
07/24/2017, 04:12:10

    Ramillies writes:

    Ad costs: I thought as much. It's hard to miss

    Ad mass curse: Yes, it's a useless spell (like many others ). MM6 is nearly as old as me . Those days you wouldn't think of being friendly to modders and you would just hardcode everything. (And I don't think I ever found anything that would classify as a "script" in the LODs.) Which is sad because a lot of other spells would need to be fixed (like mass fear, turning undead, mass distortion &c., you know what I mean) // And I wouldn't ever bother with feeblemind either. As you correctly say, the monsters have only a chance to fire one spell.

    Ad in/outdoors: Yes, it's quite possible that the game recognizes it just from the map file format. As for falling, there was a discussion on the board some years ago. People tested it and concluded that the fall damage is not applied indoors. Try searching for "Skydiving in VARN".

    Ad Paralyze: Yes, you can shrapmetal them to death, because the "magic immunity" doesn't mean immunity to all spells. It's just an immunity against the "magic damage type". The direct damage spells just throw a missile that has another damage type like physical, fire, poison &c.





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I've only used Grayface's "Datafiles" feature to adjust the game...
07/23/2017, 15:00:27

    ragwort writes:

    In spells.*txt* have only seen text in descriptions change. Haven't seen any reference to indoor/outdoor. Suspect that all spell characteristics are hard coded in program.

    Paralyse is "Magic" type spell to which Gold Dragons are immune. In Monsters.*txt* you can change resistance under magic from imm to some number. Lower the number the less resistance.





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