13 réponses à ce sujet

[Dann-J]

Does anyone know why there are duplicates for some entries in the 'Special Abilities' list in the toolset? Darkness and Improved Invisibility seem to be some of the worst offenders (at least half a dozen duplicated entries each).

I'm in the process of updating the various dragon special abilities (breath weapons, wing buffet, tail swipe), adding new visual effects for the breath weapons and tweaking the animations for other two. Some of the breath weapons have two entries, although I can only find one script for each of them in the toolset. Unfortunately the standard Bronze Dragon blueprint appears to use the first 'lightning breath' entry, whereas my updated script with the visual effect only fires if you use the second one in the list.

Is the 'Special Ability' list somehow counting all of the copies of spells.2DA, rather than just the most recent version (the SoZ version in my case)?

[Morbane]

duplicates usually are a sign of override + hak conflicts

[Dann-J]

I have no HAKs attached to my test module, and there is no copy of spells.2DA in the override. I certainly don't have six copies of anything with Darkness or Improved Invisibility scripts in them!

I have local copies of certain dragon ability scripts in the module itself, but they should override the OC versions (and indeed do). Plus, most of those entries are still in the 'Special Abilities' list in the toolset only once.

Does anyone else see multiple entries in the toolset in the 'Special Abilities'  tab under creature properties?

Modifié par DannJ, 24 juin 2011 - 03:51 .

[The Fred]

Yep, there are lots of "spells" with the same name. Some of them even fire the same script, but they are each for a different row in the spells 2da file. Some of the time this is because monster spells have been given the same name as their actual spell equivalents (given players will never see these names) when they should probably really have different ones, like "Invisibility (Vampire)", say. Some of them are PrC spells, as CW says.

[Dann-J]

What other than dragons could possibly use two different lightning breath weapons, I wonder? I've checked spells.2DA, and there is only one entry for it that I can see. Plus the only script I can find automatically adapts to any dragon level, so it's a 'one size fits all' script.

Or are Special Abilities using henchspells.2DA? There are lots of entries with duplicate 'names' in there - unfortunately there seems to be nothing but 'strref' values in it (or something similar), so it's not exactly a user-friendly 2DA to look at.

[The Fred]

There are two lightning dragon breaths, spell #241, normal lightning breath, and #796, which appears to be HotU's Shifter Wyrmling form lightning breath, a legacy from NWN1.

[painofdungeoneternal]

Special abilities are often duplicated, this is due to them being granted to different races. This allows each to have it's own vfx, and it's just how the dev's set things up. This is not something which needs to be fixed.

Some of them are not in use, ie they are for classes from NWN1 or which were never finished, but those are useful in that eventually those will be implemented by the community.

[Dann-J]

The Fred wrote...

There are two lightning dragon breaths, spell #241, normal lightning breath, and #796, which appears to be HotU's Shifter Wyrmling form lightning breath, a legacy from NWN1.

These the dragon ability scripts that I recently updated:

• nw_s1_dragcold  (cold breath)
  
• nw_s1_draggas  (gas breath)
  
• nw_s1_draglight  (lightning breath)
  
• nw_s1_dragparal  (paralysis breath)
  
• nw_s1_dragfear  (fear breath)
  
• nw_s1_dragbuffet  (wing buffet)
  
• nw_s1_dragtslap  (tail slap)
  
• x2_s1_dragneg  (negative energy breath)

Thankfully most of them have only one variant in the Special Abilities list (although a couple of them have two).

The Bronze Dragon blueprint already in the game doesn't seem to use nw_s1_draglight, since my new visual effect doesn't show up when it breathes lightning. It appears to be using the first lightning breath entry in the list, whereas my updated version replaces the second version. Does this mean that the existing Bronze Dragon blueprint is actually using the Shifter Wyrmling version of the lightning breath weapon?

I might go through spells.2DA and make my own custom version, changing the  display names to differentiate between the various duplicates (wish me luck tracking down the half-dozen Darkness variants!). It would only be for my own convenience though, so that I can assign the correct abilities to my own creature blueprints. I wouldn't have to include it with any modules I released.

Modifié par DannJ, 27 juin 2011 - 11:07 .

[painofdungeoneternal]

I put the correct values in my spell constants, usually it's got the creatures name there as well.

I was looking at your dragon changes on the vault, look like they are in line with what i am doing with my CSL so will be looking at integrating them with my other systems if you don't mind.

Been slowly ( and i mean slowly as not much at all is done yet on it ) working on the various issues to enable me to add feats for monster special abilities, to a level which makes them work as well as actually player feats. This involves icons, proper descriptions, and proper AI support, soas to make it easier to add wing buffet to another creature and/or allow proper support of the shifter type classes which can use special abilities of the forms they shift into. ( things like a hurl rock feat, you get the feat you can then pick up, throw and catch boulders for example )

[Dann-J]

I've had another look at the 2DA, and it helps to sort it by the 'name' field (which is really just the strref for the display name in the Special Ability list).

It turns out that both the Bronze and Blue Dragon blueprints in the toolset are actually using the Shifter script, rather than the 'true' dragon script for their lightning breath. I'll therefore alter that script as well to include my new visual effects.

I've found that simply replacing some of the duplicate strref values with **** in spells.2DA forces the Special Abilities list to use the Label value instead (which is often unique). When the Label value is also duplicated, the 2DA entries are often pointing to the same script anyway.

I can't help but wonder how much better this game's performance would be if the 2DAs weren't stuffed full of mostly useless NWN1 entries. Then again, I wouldn't have had all those cool dragon breath weapons to update and make functional...

Modifié par DannJ, 28 juin 2011 - 10:43 .

[The Fred]

Oh, I didn't realist you could do that with the string refs. They added the functionality to a couple of 2das in NWN1 (such as appearance) so that you could use custom content without needing to worry about using a TLK, but I thought that spells.2da had never had it. Oh well, useful to know.

[Dann-J]

Here's a list of most of the duplicates in the 'Special Abilities' list, as far as I can ascertain. The order below is the order in which they occur in the toolset interface:


Blindness/deafness (racial)
Blindness/deafness (standard spell)

Bull's Strength (black guard)
Bull's Strength (standard spell)

Contagion (black guard)
Contagion (standard spell)

Create undead (standard spell)
Create undead (black guard)

Darkness (assassin)
Darkness (?)
Darkness (?)
Darkness (racial) [one of these used by red dragon]
Darkness (racial) [one of these used by red dragon]
Darkness (wild shape, drider)

Dragon breath, fire (shifter)
Dragon breath, fire (dragon)
Dragon breath, gas (shifter)
Dragon breath, gas (dragon)
Dragon breath, lightning (shifter) [used by bronze & blue dragons]
Dragon breath, lightning (dragon)

Entropic shield (racial)
Entropic shield (standard spell)

Fireball (infinite range)
Fireball (standard spell)
Fireball (catapult)

Gaze, dominate (vampire)
Gaze, dominate (?)

Gaze, petrification (Gwildshape_stonegaze)
Gaze, petrification (?)

Ghostly visage (assassin)
Ghostly visage (standard spell)

Greater Invisibility (standard spell)
Greater Invisibility (assassin 'improved invisibility')

Inflict critical wounds (black guard)
Inflict critical wounds (standard spell)

Inflict moderate wounds (black guard)
Inflict moderate wounds (standard spell)

Inflict serious wounds (black guard)
Inflict serious wounds (standard spell)

Invisibility (grey dwarf)
Invisibility (vampire) [used by blue dragon, not used by vampires in NWN2]
Invisibility (blur)
Invisibility (faerie fire)
Invisibility (?)
Invisibility (assassin)
Invisibility (racial) [used by red dragon]
Invisibility (?)

Light (racial)
Light (standard spell)

Storm avatar (standard spell)
Storm avatar (stormlord)

Tanglefoot bag (buff constitution grenade)
Tanglefoot bag (heal grenade)
Tanglefoot bag (tanglefoot bag grenade)
Tanglefoot bag (buff strength grenade)
Tanglefoot bag (buff dexterity grenade)


The last Darkness entry in the list (wildshape/drider) just plain doesn't work, nor does the 'vampire' version of invisibility (which unfortunately is what the Blue Dragon blueprint uses). The 'assassin' version of Greater Invisibility doesn't seem to make hostile creatures transparent (so you don't know they've cast it).

The 'heal grenade' entry is intriging though. An alchemical version of one of the mass healing spells perhaps? It'd be especially useful if it also did damage to hostile undead at the same time.