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chris421
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Posts posted by chris421
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Posted by charlievale at 2007-07-08 14:17:59
What about just making the creature slots available to the player? If you renamed them to be the face and arm slots, I think you could get some of the functionality you are after.
Alternatively you could have players equip their items to a bag (of holding) and then copy the properties to a creature slot. With a UI, and replacing the bag with a hidden container in the module you might even make it seamless.
As this discussion is not really related to my UI, please email me charlievale at gmail dot com to discuss this further. Alternatively start a thread in the bioware forums and PM me the link.
cheers
Basically the game was too new (or I was too lazy). But I had a similar plan way back then.
It'd leave the UI relatively unchanged except for those three new (mask, clothing, and hands) inventory slots. Give your new players (and force-equip) their three uniquely tagged invisible 1-slot, weightless bags onenter of the module.
I guess what the bag approach would break is every cursed item, disarming script, pickpocket, equip/unequip, and iterative slot checking function in the game.
Considered using the creature slots for extra player ones as well. But those I believe have specific item type rules which allow only normal weapon items or creature weapon items...just like you can't mount a helmet to your feet. Would take some kludging of baseitems.2da to fix this. But not impossible within the current 5-bit item slot scheme.
There is the oddball chance your player-race actually has an existing claw or bite attack already in one of those slots though, which would fall into inventory the moment they put something in them, if you didn't prevent this via a special IP intercept script. Curious how this would work for druids wild-changing.
Still though, mapping hands to primary creature claw slot, mask to creature bite, and clothing to creature hide oddly enough--makes sense. A Pit Fiend monk would just have to deal with not being able to equip Fists of Balance. Boohoo.
Best way is still for Obsidian to commit to ripping those hardcoded constants out of their DLL and use the damn 2DAs like the rest of us. With 2da caching working much better now, there's little excuse.
Thanks again for the insight!
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heh.... I think JE's collection scares the lady's away.
You know, in my early 20's I thought the same. One day I up and pawned all my childhood (mint condition) 1st edition D&D and AD&D books, box sets, magazines and modules to a hobby shop for next to nothing. Huge mistake. It was all really great stuff! And eventually would've been really valuable stuff. Just what do you think your PDF files will auction for in 50 years? My guess--not a damn thing. Will they even be readable, with shifting formats & dependencies on file converters?
PDFs are good for lightweight portability and immediate searchable access at the gaming table. Now in my 30's, I'm married, have a house, and take great joy in rebuilding my physical collection. I have over 130 hardcovers--literally everything 3.5, some late 3.0, all the Salvatore series, and some Dragonlance.
WotC is either hurting badly financially and/or is extremely shortsighted to abandon such a cherished institution (the magazines). Print is dead. But D&D isn't your local newspaper or your college textbook. The physical media to a certain degree is the hobby. How can I sit down and read about medieval mayhem while three popups flash by telling me I have new unsolicited email, I'm not running the latest XYZ, or my book's battery is dying. There's something to be said for an utter lack of technology.
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Crosspost from NWVault. Relevant to the forum, Obsidian, NWN2, and the evolution of PnP.
Posted by chris421 at 2007-07-05 21:55:19 Voted 9.50 on 07/05/07Love the new skin. Charlie, given you're probably NWN2's most experienced custom UI'er to date, what do you think the feasibility of overriding Obsidian's item slots with a system that follows closer to PnP standards? Here's what we're supposed to have:
FACE: Goggles, lenses, masks, spectacles, patches, third eyes.
THROAT: Amulets, badges, brooches, collars, medals, medallions, necklaces, pendants, periapts, scarabs, scarves, torcs.
BODY: Armor, robes.
HANDS: Gauntlets, gloves.
WAIST: Belts, girdles, sashes.
FEET: Boots, sandals, shoes, slippers.
HEAD: Circlets, crowns, hats, headbands, helmets, phylacteries
SHOULDERS: Capes, cloaks, mantles, shawls.
TORSO: Shirts, tunics, vests, vestments.
ARMS: Armbands, bracelets, bracers.
RING #1:
RING #2:
I know it would be a pain to manually update and segregate a bunch of item UTIs. But if one could 'fix' the back-end Constants, scripts, functions and 2DAs, would it be much a stretch to represent the new slots in a custom UI?
Posted by charlievale at 2007-07-06 11:35:21@chris421
Thanks for the vote and compliments.
For what you are proposing (changing the slot system to be more like PnP AD&D) I can see a few technical obstacles from a UI point of view. Primarily: how to get the item being equipped / unequipped. A lot of the UI relies on built in functions. It is easy to add new things to the UI from your own scripts or to rearrange the appearance of existing functionality. Changing existing functionality is generally much harder. I think what you are proposing would be achievable in some form.
For me this is not a project that really interests me. 'Realism' and 'More like PnP AD&D' are big turn offs for me - though they are obviously of importance to many others in the community. I won't commit myself to working on this project.
You probably realise that you are proposing a fairly complex change to the game. There are likely to be many side effects to this proposal: what happens when the engine tries to render two head items (head & face)? What happens to scripts that cycle through inventory slots? I'm not saying you shouldn't simply because it looks difficult - just be aware that you are trying to change something that is fairly fundamental to how a lot of other parts of the game work. I suggest that if UI is not your area of expertise, you try to get this working from script & conversation first. It is generally true that conversation scripts can be adapted to be called from the UI latter.
Good luck & cheers
Posted by chris421 at 2007-07-07 23:33:46 Voted 9.50 on 07/05/07Turned off by trying to promote the rules which ultimately piqued enough interest to create this, along with hundreds of other similar titles globally over the past 20+ years??? PnP is still pretty dang popular you know. But to each his/her own.
Anyway, it's impossible. Without decompiling and writing my own ManagedElectron.dll (which would be illegal), Obsidian's hardcoded inventory slot references ruin any chance of doing this via a simple combo of UI XML, 2DA and function changes. I tried.
For a "data driven" game, they sure hardcode the @&*! out of things.
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All 769 2DAs are showing a March 1st modified date, which is contradictory to the patch notes.
Thought maybe the much needed clean-up had occurred. But 'placeables.2da' still has its very obvious duped line #456. Also, fyi 'feat.2da' and 'baseitems.2da' extracted out into an odd place.
Before I spend hours cleaning up all 'modified' files, do the people responsible for data integrity stand by the patch notes below...these 2DAs and these alone were changed/added between 1.04.870 and 1.05.912?
It's a data driven game. When stuff jumps out this glaring, somebody has to tell the emperor his fly is down.
2DA ChangesThe following 2DA files have been changed in v1.05:
appearance.2da
baseitems.2da
classes.2da
cls_atk_1.2da
cls_atk_2.2da
cls_atk_3.2da
cls_bsplvl_arctr.2da
cls_bsplvl_eknight.2da
cls_bsplvl_harper.2da
cls_bsplvl_palema.2da
cls_bsplvl_wprst.2da
cls_savthr_barb.2da
cls_savthr_bard.2da
cls_savthr_cler.2da
cls_savthr_cons.2da
cls_savthr_dru.2da
cls_savthr_fight.2da
cls_savthr_monk.2da
cls_savthr_pal.2da
cls_savthr_rang.2da
cls_savthr_rog.2da
cls_savthr_sorc.2da
cls_savthr_wild.2da
cls_savthr_wiz.2da
damagelevels.2da
feat.2da
hen_companion.2da
hen_familiar.2da
iprp_damagecost.2da
iprp_srcost.2da
keymap.2da
placeables.2da
racialtypes.2da
spells.2da
In addition, the following 2DA files have been added in v1.05:
cls_featmap_arctr.2da
cls_featmap_eknight.2da
cls_featmap_harper.2da
cls_featmap_palema.2da
cls_featmap_wprst.2da
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Harped on this before NWN2 released. But neither NWN nor NWN2 implemented character item slots correctly.
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/MagicItemRecordSheet.zip
Wouldn't really take much to fix...a few new constants, script changes to check the additional slots when equipping/unequipping, revise a few items to make them graft to the appropriate slot when worn, the inventory UI, etc. I think most of us have given up wanting more visually from NWN2. so just give us PnP slots, logically instead.
The number of hidden creature weapon/hide slots is extremely limiting as well. Would be cool to see slots for limbs beyond 2. 8 could cover simultaneous gores, bites, wings, extra limbs, spell-like abilities, grapple/snares, etc. seriously, the tail slot should not be forced to double as a bite (unless your creature likes to talk from his ass).
would also love to see the current 1 slot for hide become 3. a slot for race, a slot for type and a slot for template. In the long run that could help the community (and OE) bang through the creation of unique creatures via a system of pre-defined skins. write scripts to target the appropriate slot would save time instead of iterating through an overwhelming number of IPs on a single hide.
NWN2 hard-coding & PnP slots
in Computer and Console
Posted
wow, thanks so much for moving that post. this whole 'internet thing' is way too complicated for my dim wits to know what's relevant to what subfolder of a f'n game site. thank geebus for ego-driven, pseudo-academic forum Nazis.
7,339 posts in 2 years. mighty busy RL life you have there, Mus. I wonder why they haven't made you a moderator so you could've just deleted the post yourself.
Edit: Ehhehe--wanker.