SR V4 Beta 15

[Bartimaeus]

 

Yeah, spell durations were the only thing I "uncapped"

 

I suspect that would create more confusion than it's worth, as players would starts worrying about which aspects of which spells scale past 20, in addition to the already-confusing question of which spells scale in the first place.

 

Frankly AD&D is a mess in this regard (naturally, since the content can via literally hundreds of different sourcebooks, written by many different people with many different perspectives for many different kinds of adventures). SR goes a little way toward making this better - I think Demi tended to standardize the new spells on durations that make sense for the game, i.e. 1 turn/2 turns/5 turns/4 hours. Something like that. It would be cool if SR would do this to all of the spells in the game - maybe as an optional extra component.

 

Incidentally I have a mod that actually does that - code starting at line 1090 here:

https://github.com/UnearthedArcana/Low_Magic/blob/master/low_magic/low_magic.tp2

 

It's geared toward reducing spells' duration to make magic more ephemeral and less powerful (Confusion only lasts 3 rounds!) but it operates by user-definable .ini settings so it easily standardize spells on longer durations too.

 

 

"I suspect that would create more confusion than it's worth, as players would starts worrying about which aspects of which spells scale past 20, in addition to the already-confusing question of which spells scale in the first place."

 

That's the thing - in SR, everything else mentions its caps. Burning Hands says "up to a maximum of 5D6 at 9th level", Magic Missile says "up to a maximum of five missiles at 9th level", Command says "up to a maximum of -4 at 9th level", etc. And if it wasn't there already, I changed it so that it was. Spell durations, though? Outside of just a few exceptions that specifically mention a limited scaling duration, if you never looked at the .spl file itself, you could be forgiven for thinking that they keep scaling. Two turns is a bit of time, and unless you're sitting there measuring the seconds, you're probably not going to notice that it's not going to 3 turns like you might've expected (if for some reason you have an absurdly high level character, that is). So that's why I didn't like it. The change actually makes very little difference, because you're generally not much higher level than 20 anyways, but like I said earlier, I hate random end points and I wrote an autohotkey script to fix it via hex editing.

 

Agreed on AD&D. Many spells aren't really concretely described at all from what I researched - and BioWare just made up their own versions of them as a result.

 

That's pretty cool, actually. A neat idea for people who get tired of mages' (and to a lesser extent, clerics') dominance of everything beyond level 5 or so.

 

@SR: I have been writing up some notes for stuff that should be fixed. It won't be as comprehensive as actual SRR, because like IR I crawled through every file and noticed literal dozens of incorrect stuff that I can't remember anymore, but it'll hopefully at least get the official version of SR in a more working state. IIRC, you can't even play with SR on non-EE games without the Big World Fixpack due to the invalid opcodes on some spells. That's kind of a problem.

Edited August 31, 2018 by Bartimaeus

[Wyrd]

Hello, I tried to install Spell Revision Beta 15 on BG: EE V 2.5 (only other mod installed before is IRR V1.15a main component), but it fails to install due to errors.

 

After that, I tried to use Big World Fixpack (latest version from github) on SR beta 15, but it says the fixes are only for SR beta 14 only.

 

Anyone can tell me how to install SR beta 15?

 

Thanks

[DrAzTiK]

I also tried to install spell revision beta 15 on BG EE V2.5 and I get this error :

 

 

ERROR locating ressource for 'COPY'

Resource [spin203.spl] not found in KEY file :

[./chitin.key]

Stopping installation because of error

Stopping installation because of error

Stopping installation because of error

Stopping installation because of error

Edited September 6, 2018 by DrAzTiK

[Luke]

I also tried to install spell revision beta 15 on BG EE V2.5 and I get this error :

 

 

ERROR locating ressource for 'COPY'

Resource [spin203.spl] not found in KEY file :

[./chitin.key]

Stopping installation because of error

Stopping installation because of error

Stopping installation because of error

Stopping installation because of error

Make this change in the lib file and save before installing. It will fix the problem I'm pretty sure.

 

"The spin203.spl issue is on line 2924 of /spell_rev/lib/kreso_eestatSR.tph:

ACTION_IF FILE_EXISTS_IN_GAME ~spin105.spl~ THEN BEGIN // innate bhalpower
COPY_EXISTING ~spin203.spl~ ~override~
LPF ADD_SPELL_EFFECT

It should COPY spin105, not spin203."

[subtledoctor]

Mike is b15 still only available from the dropbox link in this thread? I have forked the mod on Github, and replaced it entirely with the b15 version, and then:

- added some ACTION_IF clauses to make it install on IWDEE

- fixed that damn SPIN203/105 typo

 

You want I should do a pull request to the main G3 branch on Github? That would get the Github version up to including kreso's latest code, and you can review the IWDEE changes as you like.

 

Note, however, that kreso got a little EE-happy, and included opcodes in several places that crash BGT. So if b15 is merged into Github, someone should be ready to fairly quickly go through and deal with those instances. (I have no idea where they are or how many there are... perhaps Bartimaeus has some insight?)

 

Alternatively if someone who's had some dealings with the EE-only opcodes wants to work with me, we can make the fixes in my fork, and offer the whole thing back to the main G3 branch once everything is running smoothly. Anyone who feels like working on this, let me know.

[Mike1072]

Either way works - we'll hold off on making the new release until the EE opcode stuff is fixed.

[Grammarsalad]

Mike is b15 still only available from the dropbox link in this thread? I have forked the mod on Github, and replaced it entirely with the b15 version, and then:

- added some ACTION_IF clauses to make it install on IWDEE

- fixed that damn SPIN203/105 typo

 

You want I should do a pull request to the main G3 branch on Github? That would get the Github version up to including kreso's latest code, and you can review the IWDEE changes as you like.

 

Note, however, that kreso got a little EE-happy, and included opcodes in several places that crash BGT. So if b15 is merged into Github, someone should be ready to fairly quickly go through and deal with those instances. (I have no idea where they are or how many there are... perhaps Bartimaeus has some insight?)

 

Alternatively if someone who's had some dealings with the EE-only opcodes wants to work with me, we can make the fixes in my fork, and offer the whole thing back to the main G3 branch once everything is running smoothly. Anyone who feels like working on this, let me know.

Yeah, I was thinking of doing exactly this.

 

So, how can I help? Should I fork your repo and send you pull requests? I have recently gone over all 1st level spells, so I'm happy to commit to them for now to avoid duplicating work

Edited September 7, 2018 by Grammarsalad

[subtledoctor]

Should I fork your repo and send you pull requests? I have recently gone over all 1st level spells, so I'm happy to commit to them for now to avoid duplicating work

Sure. Might as well collect any fixes we can make in one place so we can keep everything straight.

[Grammarsalad]

 

Should I fork your repo and send you pull requests? I have recently gone over all 1st level spells, so I'm happy to commit to them for now to avoid duplicating work

Sure. Might as well collect any fixes we can make in one place so we can keep everything straight.

Cool cool!

 

Edit: forked. I'll start on 11st level spells this weekend

Edited September 7, 2018 by Grammarsalad

[subtledoctor]

 

@Mike1072 The following spell descriptions have a bad character/are corrupted: Summon Planetar, Summon Dark Planetar, Monster Summoning V, Summon Djinni, Summon Efreeti, Monster Summoning III, Waves of Fatigue, Summon Death Knight (and possibly others....)

 

It's caused by the English ARCANE.TRA, which is already in UTF-8 format. It will produce garbage characters, since it's converted to UTF-8 a second time by the mod's HANDLE_CHARSET routine. The file should be converted to ANSI before installing the mod.

 

 

How do I do that? When I look at the encoding with Textwrangler, these are my options:

[Mike1072]

It should be Windows Latin 1 (aka CP-1252). You can confirm by opening divine.tra or one of the files from v4b14.

[subtledoctor]

Cool thx

[subtledoctor]

Question to players about Haste:

 

Haste has always been a moving target in v4 - I think it was changed in almost every revision. For a while both Haste spells were single-target, but this got some negative feedback and was problematic for the AI.

 

So how about going in the other direction - by making Improved Haste an AoE spell?

 

Of course the effects would have to be reduced if they are spread to the entire party (not to mention summons etc.) Both Bartimeus and I have, in the past, separately advocated this:

- Haste: +0.5 APR, fatigue after 10 rounds

- Imp. Haste: +1 APR, no fatigue

 

Another option would be to limit the effects, snd make the fatigue more of a factor in fights, by giving the spells a short duration.

- Haste: +1 APR for 5 rounds, fatigue after

- Imp. Haste: +1 APR (or so?) for 10 rounds, no fatigue

 

I also think Haste spells should benefit casters as well as warriors. Most obvious idea is -1 casting time for Haste, and -2 or -3 casting time for Imp. Haste. (I toyed with the idea of Imp. Haste being a "minor alacrity" effect, letting you cast 2 spells per round. But I think that would be anfair boost for the player, which the AI could not use.)

 

Thoughts?

[Jarno Mikkola]

..

I also think Haste spells should benefit casters as well as warriors.

It does. Mage is not just a caster, it can attack, while primarily using spells ... it might be bad at hitting stuff in melee, but give them a bow/sling and up their ApR, and they can be ranged attackers. Now that doesn't mean that they can take on party of 6 fighters, unless you summon stuff to aid, but that too just powers up the hastes effects. In my opinion, the hastes should have restrictions like, "up to 6 creatures". Casting time of +anything is OP as HELL, as well as any alacrity, as there's a specific spell for that AT 9th level.

We are talking about the custom fatigue that fades away in a real world minutes, K? That's fine. On hastes spell duration is somewhat in definite about. It's a combat spell, so the 10 rounds sounds fine... or it could be 3 +1/3 levels rounds starting from the level 5, up to 10.

[DrAzTiK]

In my opinion vanilla haste (level3) is op and unfair on vanilla because we can have a lot of benefits from better speed while IA will not take advantages about it so much.

 

If haste (level 3) remain to be a AoE spell, at least it should be less powerfull in comparaison to vanilla one.

 

 

 

Of course the effects would have to be reduced if they are spread to the entire party (not to mention summons etc.) Both Bartimeus and I have, in the past, separately advocated this:
- Haste: +0.5 APR, fatigue after 10 rounds
- Imp. Haste: +1 APR, no fatigue

I like it

 

For what is worth I always play with the component " use BG walking speeds" (tweak anthology forum) because the increase of speed really makes fights easier and unfair for IA.

Edited September 9, 2018 by DrAzTiK