175 replies to this topic

[Arkain]

Is Morte immune to fear? One could think of him as an undead and thus being immune to it although I find that debatable (the race displayed on the character sheet is called "Morte", iirc but in NI he shows up as General: Undead [whatever that means] and Race: Human). The problem with an immunity might be that he's actually afraid at some points in the game (at least while talking to Ravel and the Pillar, iirc) which wouldn't make that much sense if he's supposed to be immune to fear. On the other hand one might interpret it as another kind of fear which has nothing to do with the sort induced by magic.

Edited by Arkain, 13 December 2008 - 03:50 PM.

[scient]

Currently, NPC's can land horror on Morte.

[scient]

I just tested and they stopped for both Fire/Ice and Curses. This may have been something Qwinn fixed because I haven't made any changes engine wise related to this issue.

Edited by scient, 13 December 2008 - 07:25 PM.

[Qwinn]

BLA is correct actually. I noted it a short while ago, when I was fighting the Rubikon wizard. Mechanus Cannon is one of those spells that "freezes" the game, but while it was in the process of being cast, Fall-From-Grace ran up and started healing me, heh.

I'm really not sure how this could be fixed, though. You can't simply -pause- the game, because then -everything- would be stopped. If you could issue every critter a ClearAllActions() and then get scripts to stop executing for the duration, then that would stop the FFG healing thing, but it would also kinda suck that you'd have to reissue your attack commands to everyone, and spells you were casting would get interrupted/lost, etc. And I can't think of -any- way to get the Adder's Kiss damage to stop while it happens.

So, yeah, it's a real issue, but one I'm not sure there's a logical way to handle it. May just be a price we have to pay for the coolness aspect of spells with cutscenes.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 13 December 2008 - 11:37 PM.

[Qwinn]

"Note: Might be related, IDK. While critters generally walk, those under the effect of "Litany of Curses" or "Horror" run."

http://www.shsforums...showtopic=38041



Oh, and I'm okay with Morte remaining vulnerable to fear. As pointed out, he regularly shows he's quite capable of the emotion.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 14 December 2008 - 01:24 AM.

[Qwinn]

Note: On BLA's issue with spell candy, it occurs to me that some creatures are -scripted- to run away when morale is broken or their HP is less than a certain amount or whatever. So if new calls to creature's scripts are still running (and the FFG healing thing confirms that to be the case), that would explain why some critters do continue to run away.

It occurs to me that everyone does freeze when the flashy spell is initially cast, so something in the engine is already clearly capable of handling that and having them resume their previous activity when the spell finishes. I'm thinking that just getting the engine to stop running any -new- script rounds while a flashy spell is showcasting would eliminate 99%, if not all, of the issue. It would at least definitely stop FFG's healing AI working during them, anyway.

Scient, you're going to have to teach me how to do all this engine stuff so I don't have to keep bugging you for it. Sigh.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 14 December 2008 - 03:14 AM.

[scient]

Well, you'll need 5+ years of RCE under your belt.

Just when I thought I got most of the bugs...when it rains it pours.

[Daulmakan]

I don't think the issue with the spell animations and NPCs actions qualifies as a bug. Completing the game is not hampered by it in any way, IMO.

[Qwinn]

I don't think the issue with the spell animations and NPCs actions qualifies as a bug. Completing the game is not hampered by it in any way, IMO.

Well, I dunno, I'd say that spells with spell effects essentially giving Fall From Grace a Time Stop spell allowing her to cast multiple heal spells on you mid combat would qualify as a bug.

I don't think a bug is defined as "that which hampers completion of the game". If that were the case, might as well play the game unmodded cause it's perfectly completable as shipped, and anything that qualified as a nerf, regardless of the merits of the fix, would be a non-starter by definition. Honestly, "making the game easier to win" isn't anywhere on my priority list of what to evaluate about a potential bug. If this game has any major problem, it's that it's too easy (and the issues to be fixed by the fixes under discussion in the "Profound Changes" thread is a big reason why, IMO)

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 14 December 2008 - 10:23 AM.

[Daulmakan]

I don't think a bug is defined as "that which hampers completion of the game".

I agree, perhaps I phrased that poorly. What I meant is, I don't recall the game being affected by it the way it's being described, for better or worse. I never came upon the thought of casting a certain spell to gain leverage for other actions, and I surely don't recall Grace having free timestops as you put it. And if it did happen, I'm guessing the spell conditions are the same for everyone (for Trias, the construct from the modron maze, etc).

Somehow I get the feeling that this is more about policing the player rather than making the game work better. I don't see anything in this that amounts to being *fixed*, as it doesn't read as broken to me in the first place.

[Qwinn]

It didn't even occur to me to "police the player" on this, Daulmakan. I will dismiss the rather insulting insinuation on the basis that, if you actually saw what we're talking about, there's no rational way you could dismiss it as not a bug, so I'm assuming you're having difficulty picturing what we're talking about.

Okay, you remember that scene in the Matrix when Keanu Reeves leans way back in ultra-slow-motion as a dozen bullets slooooowly fly over him?

Imagine that same drawn out slow motion scene, but in the background there's a jogger running from end of the set to the other at normal speed. Never mind the healing issue, it's quite jarring and totally breaks the fourth wall.

That's why it's a bug.

It's easy to recreate, by the way. If you have a save game right before the Evil Wizard fight in Rubikon, load it up, go in, and don't give Grace any commands when the battle starts, just run in TNO and let him get whacked enough to need healing before the Wizard gets his Mechanus Cannon spell off, and you'll see Grace run up and start healing him during the "time-frozen" cutscene. I suspect most people don't see it because I suspect most people just "select all characters" (including Grace) and tell them all to start whaling on something. Grace won't do it if she was given the order to attack before it started.

P.S. It doesn't necessarily -always- happen... Grace's script just needs to kick in during that brief interlude. Sometimes scripts rerun really quickly and sometimes not, it's kinda random. But once I knew how, I recreated it several times.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 14 December 2008 - 11:41 AM.

[BLAH]

This fix would be far from "policing the player". After all, it favors the player more than it does the critters. When you cast a lengthy spell, as it is now, those under the effect of Litany of Curses proceed to bash in poor Morte's defenseless skull. Those, affected by Morale failure wander off somewhere.
As for Adder's Kiss before lengthy spell, this might qualify as smart spellcasting, rather than exploiting a bug. Either way, it might be difficult to correct.

[Daulmakan]

I meant no insult, Qwinn.

After all, if there's a certain way in order to make this thing happen (which not everyone knows) and then take advantage of the situation, the issue might never arise ingame. And when it does, it's not necessarily a problem.

This fix would be far from "policing the player". After all, it favors the player more than it does the critters.

Nothing new there. Human AI > Game AI.

The problem here is that it's something that's potentially exploitable (even though it goes both ways). I can't say for sure that this wasn't intended (and I haven't been convinced otherwise) or not. To use a clear example, this isn't like fixing Hamry's dialogue to prevent infinite XP loops.

[Qwinn]

"I can't say for sure that this wasn't intended"

Then you haven't seen it. It is very very obviously not intended. It's very clear that what is supposed to happen is that everything - all combat, all movement, everything, -stops- while the spell effect plays out. And almost everybody DOES stop, they freeze in their tracks, in mid-swing. It's supposed to be like a pause button while the fancy graphics play. When the spell effect is over, the game is unpaused, time resumes and the combat continues.

Can you explain to me under what possible circumstances it could be -intended- that almost everybody on a battlefield stops and freezes in midswing EXCEPT for Fall From Grace healing and the guy beating Morte to death after he used Litany of Skulls while Morte remains frozen in place?

If you were to hit the space bar to pause the game, and everything paused -except- FFG kept running around healing people and fleeing creatures kept fleeing, would you consider that possibly intended? Because that's exactly what's going on here.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 14 December 2008 - 01:01 PM.

[Daulmakan]

Indeed, I haven't seen/noticed it. That's what I've been saying.

If you were to hit the space bar to pause the game, and everything paused -except- FFG kept running around healing people and fleeing creatures kept fleeing, would you consider that possibly intended? Because that's exactly what's going on here.

If that's what's happenning (never to me IIRC), then it's certainly an error.

Anyway, what would be the way to resolve this? I'd rather the way the spells are depicted ingame is changed in the most minor way possible, or preferrably none at all (ie the game will still pause for the fancy spell animation).

[Qwinn]

No one's suggested eliminating the pause. The idea would be to get whatever is causing those specific creatures that aren't pausing to also pause.

The way the game works, every creature has an AI script attached, and the game is -constantly- rerunning every AI script for every creature in the area every few seconds (or even multiple times a second). At least in the case of the Fall From Grace healing thing, what's happening is that in that brief interlude while everything is frozen, the game is rerunning her script which is causing her to run around healing people. It makes sense that during the frozen spell-casting cutscene, that the engine stop running every creature's AI script until the spell effect is over. This would have no impact on the graphics or the spell casting itself, it would just stop her from being weird.

The morale fleeing thing -may- be script related, and it may not be. I'm not sure. Some creature AI scripts do have code that specifically says things like "If you're at less than 50% health, run away", so it could be that that's causing the behavior. I'd need to know precisely which creatures were observed running away during a spell effect to tell you if their script contains code that could explain it. If it's not in their script, then the engine's morale/flee mechanism must be overriding the pause.

The Litany of Curses thing is also another matter. If there -is- a .BCS script out there that creatures get switched to for the duration of "Litany of Curses", I haven't noticed it. More likely it's also something in the engine that is overriding all other behavior.

Qwinn

Edited by Qwinn, 14 December 2008 - 02:00 PM.

[BLAH]

Since so many controversial changes are actively being discussed at the moment, I decided to add one more for the extra fun of it. If you're all fans of heated debates, you might appreciate my good taste in uncomfortable topics. This one is a clear exploit, since it gets you different results solely based on when you distribute your attribute points, not - how. What I'm referring to is the way strength increase works, something every half-decent power-gamer picked up right away.

You all know that you need several attribute points to boost your strength from 18 to 19. This is what the developers intended and no one could possibly argue otherwise. This isn't -always- the case, though. When you gain strength due to reaching lvl 7 or lvl 12 Fighter (AKA specialization bonus if I'm not mistaken), you can get from 18 to 19 directly, saving a few attribute pts that way. The magic items also work that way, bypassing the huge step from 18 to 19, but you might argue this was intended. I'm fairly certain Whispering Flask was meant to raise Dak'kon from 17 to 19 directly. Strength and Power of One spells are the only temporary effects I can recall that raise Strength in small steps.

OK, that's enough from me, let's hear where the rest of the community stands.

[scient]

The whole STR 18/00 is already on my list of stuff to look at but it won't be featured in this next update. Barring some major game breaking issue (I think I've resolved all of those), I don't want to hold up the release. Almost all the stuff left revolves around incorrect handling of stats and a few minor issues regarding engine spells.

The only thing left on my end for next release is to get the 1/10 hp on lvl up working for TNO (won't be too hard, already know what needs to be done). I've already got a tentative fix for +1 hp on level up for levels already reached in the other classes. The main function that looks up amount of hp to give from 2DA files was returning zero, it was an issue inside level up code where it was checking this value to see if it was less than 1 and if it was setting it to 1. I think this was just a redundant safety check, so I just set it to check and set to zero. I still need to run some QA tests to make sure this is ok. Last, is the enigmatic mortuary crash near end game. I'm woefully behind in my playthrough so if Qwinn can duplicate it I'll see about sorting it.

[BLAH]

This is good news. So that means we're getting the HP fix and the next release is soon! I can't wait! I promise I'll report whatever I discover on my run.