Rassadihn's Content

#103621 Tashia is not from Wisconsin

Posted by Rassadihn on 11 March 2004 - 02:25 AM in Tashia

CRE files only have one gender field.

Then Near Infinity should be fixed.

Either that, or "gender" is no longer a synonym for a specific meaning of "sex".

#99476 Tashia is not from Wisconsin

Posted by Rassadihn on 03 March 2004 - 06:30 AM in Tashia

Anyone who removes Peani's immunity to Time Stop shall Face my Wrath ™. I spent a whole day on figuring out how to put it in. :-D

Seriously, though, as far as my ?0.02 go: make the uber-loot undroppable, nerf some of Peani's resistances if you must but don't touch the HP (it's supposed to be low) or the TS immunity (come on, it's not like he can shapeshift into a Mind Flayer or summon the Infernal Host while in there :-). Regular liches fall way too easily to cheese anyway. Tactics' smarter liches make mincemeat out of Peani, TS immunity or no. Don't read more into it than there is.

Tashia's resistances are just Mary Sue indulgence on Arian's part -- I asked him once, and basically she's got MR because she's a sorceress and cold resistance because she used to live somewhere cold. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's reasonable, but I can tell you now that lots of NPCs should get some bonuses based on that :-) That said, removing them will only make the worshippers at the Temple of Realism happy, and theirs is a cruel god.

Finally: Peanelian is a he. ("He has aided me more than once in most perilous times... Treat him well, please!") Don't fall into the "your name sounds female" trap. And don't look at the .CRE in any case (actually, I don't know what it says. :-)

#93710 Transferring Triggers/Contingencies

Posted by Rassadihn on 20 February 2004 - 06:42 AM in IE Help

I read and re-read it carefully, but the contingency trick is not in there. Only potion swap for various nefarious purposes is mentioned (including Contingency, of course).

Since I know I read it, it may be from a previous version of the cheese guide. Thanks for the info, anyway!

#93698 Transferring Triggers/Contingencies

Posted by Rassadihn on 20 February 2004 - 05:15 AM in IE Help

Paging userunfriendly and any other cheesemeisters out there... I know this is possible (or *used* to be possible) and I've done it once, but I can't repeat the trick: having someone cast a Contigency/Trigger-type spell and having it end up on someone else (or having someone cast a C/T spell but getting to select spells from someone else's repertoire).

I believe an Image or Simulacrum was involved, but the obvious thing doesn't work: having an Image or Simmy cast a C/T spell gets me an empty spell list. I can't even cancel the spell, so the only way out is Alt-F4. Ouch.

I know I read about this somewhere, but can't find it. If it was fixed by a patch or mod, that's fine too, I just want to know about it. Anyone?

#55574 biffing and overriding

Posted by Rassadihn on 20 June 2003 - 01:51 AM in IE Help

--biff should be the command used to list the contents of a specific biff but I can't make it do a damned thing! (Possible bug?)

No, WeiDU is just picky about how you specify the biff. You *must* use the filenames from CHITIN.KEY (those from "weidu --list-biffs"): filenames not in CHITIN.KEY will not work. For example, "weidu --biff data\dialog.bif" will work from any directory, but "weidu --biff .\test.bif" will not work even if there is a test.bif in the local directory. It ought to give an error in this case, but it fails silently. WeiDU wasn't meant to be a generic BIFF tool.

CHITIN.KEY is a maintenance nightmare, and a poor solution to the problem of having BIFFs scattered across CDs. The designers dropped the ball a bit on this one.

#55331 Undispellable berserking

Posted by Rassadihn on 18 June 2003 - 01:44 AM in IE Help

Tried CTRL-R yet?

#53588 Imoen's sexuality

Posted by Rassadihn on 06 June 2003 - 02:10 AM in Imoen Relationship

Wait... is this the Imoen Relationship forum, or did I stumble in General Discussion without knowing it?

How about sticking with the discussion instead of making some smartass comment? ;-)

Could you assign percentages?

I'm sorry, I'll shut up now.
How about joining the discussion instead of making some smartass comment?

One does not exclude the other. I was merely encouraging you to further detail your most excellently specified opinion.

But since that's *another* smartass comment, I'll humor you: I'll join the discussion if it looks like anything worthwile might come of it. Then, I will peek out the window to see if pigs have acquired means of aerial propulsion yet. And now I'll *really* shut up. No matter what. Promised.

#53085 BAM madness

Posted by Rassadihn on 04 June 2003 - 05:06 AM in IE Help

Alright, we hereby have confirmation that the Infinity Engine is even weirder than I thought it was. Sheesh, a creature's animation shouldn't have anything to do with anything other than its appearance.

i replaced the VOLO BAMs with that of a GLABREZU's. the feedback circle was still as big as the VOLO BAMs were when the creature was CLUAconsoled in.

I smell the germ of a possible cause. Animation ids (and thus quite likely feedback circle sizes) are hard-coded in the engine. Perhaps this discrepancy is causing the engine to twitch -- try replacing it with other creature anims from HoW (not the effect you want, I know, but we're trying to narrow down a cause for now). Try to replace other animation ids in BG (something stupid, like, hmmm, wyverns or so :-)

The only other thing I can come up with is that the BG engine somehow doesn't like the BAM and is corrupting the in-memory image of the creature, or something equally bizarre. Stranger bugs have happened.

#53073 Imoen's sexuality

Posted by Rassadihn on 04 June 2003 - 04:54 AM in Imoen Relationship

So, in conclusion. Hetero, Homo, or Bi? Well, I see her as either a very open minded and possibly bi-curious hetero, or as a bisexual leaning a little more on the Hetero side.

Could you assign percentages?

I'm sorry, I'll shut up now.

#53063 BAM madness

Posted by Rassadihn on 04 June 2003 - 04:16 AM in IE Help

Ummm... Being quite ignorant of BAMs, this may sound like a stupid question -- but it's not, because I don't ask stupid questions :-) -- exactly what creature are we talking about? The BAM may have an influence, but that would make the Infinity Engine even weirder than I already think it is.

Do you get status messages? Do they speak of damage (that is "0 damage") or nothing at all? Are you sure you didn't copy some monster with an immunity item in its inventory? If you replace the BAM with something standard, is it still invulnerable? Can you pick up that mountain over there and bring it to me? Errr... just kidding about that last one.

#49176 Code blocks

Posted by Rassadihn on 13 May 2003 - 02:42 AM in IE Help

For an example of a syntax description that is unhelpful (and contains a few errors ...), check out Sun's official Java grammar (also given in BNF notation):

Incidentally, how many BNFish notations have you seen? I stopped counting at 5, but people never seem to run out of novel variations.

http://java.sun.com/...syntax.doc.html

I especially love the way they give every operator and keyword its very own line. And how they succumb to factoritis by trivial productions like `Expression1Rest'. Speaking of which, let's not discuss the relative merits of tokens named `Expression1', `Expression2', `Expression3'...

But I digress.

#48394 D won't turn into DLG

Posted by Rassadihn on 09 May 2003 - 02:20 AM in IE Help

Perhaps Wes knows the answer instantly, but let me make a few suggestions for a bug hunt while we wait for the sensei.

Go to the `reyna' directory and try `weidu reyna.d --log reyna.log --tlkout reyna.tlk' and see what that gives. Is there anything in the logfile that looks odd?

Try the `--nogame' option (WeiDU may complain about not finding things, but at least it complains. :-)

Give us the beginning of the .D file. Flying blind is very hard. If it looks anything like

BEGIN ~rayna~

IF ~NumTimesTalkedTo(0)~ THEN BEGIN
        first_meeting
SAY
        "I saw a ship a-sailing, a-sailing on the sea."
        ...
END

WeiDU should at least produce *something*. Warnings, errors, anything?

Incidentally, ignorance is only stupid if it's not acknowledged. There is such a thing as a stupid question, but asking questions is itself never stupid.

#40287 Question about dialogs.

Posted by Rassadihn on 11 April 2003 - 01:59 AM in IE Help

Do note that the board does not correctly display posts with multi-level escaping in the preview, and re-mangles everything if you edit them (this happened to my original post -- that [CODE] tag was supposed to have been escaped).

Conclusion: you're best off not using any special characters. So < CHARNAME > it is.

#39600 Question about dialogs.

Posted by Rassadihn on 09 April 2003 - 04:44 AM in IE Help

Actually, the problem is that the forum *will* allow you to write that. Then it appears in the HTML code and your browser thinks it's a tag. This allows you to do horrible things like write in different colors and nonsense like that.

If you need to quote longer pieces of dialogue, use the

tag to get, e.g.,[CODE]IF ~~ THEN BEGIN
        insult
SAY
        "<CHARNAME>, you suck."
        IF ~~ THEN EXIT
END

or use parentheses ( ) or insert spaces: < CHARNAME > will work.

People who are absolutely determined can even make it work in regular text, but this is unnecessarily tricky. I finally managed to get <CHARNAME> in the preview, but when I posted it, the forum managed to thwart me yet again so I had to re-edit. Don't try it at home, kids.

#34440 SPIN894 (Red Dragon Breath)

Posted by Rassadihn on 27 March 2003 - 02:09 AM in IE Help

Try SPIN693.SPL -- "RED_DRAGON_HIT".

Moral: always decompile the scripts that cast the spells. Or at least page through SPELL.IDS looking for similar spells.

#31247 Assigning different synonyms from IDS

Posted by Rassadihn on 18 March 2003 - 02:47 AM in IE Help

And there´s also another problem: What happens if there´s a bug in the dialogue that needs fixing? But I don´t want to make a new version, I just want to write a patch? But how can I do that? I´ve 'no idea' what WeiDU has really written in the action/trigger lists (and it could be different on different machines).
Oh, wow, Dyara makes a great point. I KNEW there was a legitimate reason I was weirded out by WeiDU changing my IsValid to IfValid, and this is it.

REPLACE_ACTION_TEXT_PROCESS should do the job. :-D

Of course, that doesn't work for trigger lists, and it replaces things globally.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose to always compile scripts under the hood, and deprecate simple textual replacement altogether. This works only as long as the BAF -> BCS conversion is invertible, and as we've seen, situations where this is not true are too easy to imagine.

This still doesn't solve the "WeiDU doesn't give me *my* BAF back" problem, nor the "what if the IDS files get changed" problem. The only sure-fire way to solve those is to never *decompile* on *your* system (and work on BAFs only) and never to *compile* on *someone else's* system (and work with BCSs only).

OTOH, such draconic measures may be overdoing it in most situations. If only Baldurdash could be retrofitted with all the relevant IDS fixes...

#29283 REPLACE_ and translation ids

Posted by Rassadihn on 13 March 2003 - 03:02 AM in IE Help

Muchos gracias, señor. This makes me a moderately happy camper. :-)