Always a pleasure :bowdown:

I love the fact that I can't remember how NPCs used to walk.



To be honest, the alpha is more so for anyone curious about my scripts, not really for "playing." And though I have repackaged newer versions I haven't uploaded them yet. I can do so in a bit, though. My current plans are to :

(1) flesh out a few more Fire spells, possibly one or two more Frost spells for now (I'm thinking about transplanting Meteor Shower into a Hail Storm)
(2) work on Lightning spells, and release a questless version as an open beta.
(3) ....
(n-1) Finish working out all bugs and release a final quested version
(n) Celebrate!

cool, you can has cookie (...)

Groovy. I think the guys are right when they say it'll be an instant classic :goodjob: . How about a crystal shard blast? Some geomancy spells like menhirs that burst from the ground, a dust storm, a spell that turns people to stone(paralyze combined with a nice shader), earthquake that knocks NPCs down?

Nice ideas.I like the petrification one.Maybe it could go in the fire category by burning your victim until they turn to stone with a little magma like effect. :flamethrower: :nod:

Would most likely be the hardest spell to pull off.

Ooooh, shiny!

These look awesome. I'm not crazy about the idea of making them weather dependent, though. (Mostly because I like to screw around with it for purely aesthetic reasons.)

New spell idea in general (could go with any of the elements): damaging shields. I don't know if this is possible, but I think it would be cool to cast a lightning/fire/frost shield spell on the player that does damage to an enemy when it attacks the player in melee. Like maybe for as long as the duration lasts, when an enemy hits a portion of the damage done is reflected back at the enemy? Probably not possible, but it would be cool.

Also, I was thinking it would be neat if there was a way for the player to not have immediate access to all the spells upon finding the book...like he'd start with one or two basic spells, and then as he gets more powerful or learns more, more of the spells would become available? That would be cool.

Actually that's (more or less) how the vanilla elemental shields work - but since the damage is a tenth of their magnitude, it's not very noticeable (but that can be changed in the CS).

Added two new Frost spells -- Hailstorm, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yTY26HXuBM

Those look awesome!

Yay! http://www.svatopluk.com/hexenscn/hexen2.png!

New Fire addition -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V1Ofkt2rSQ

The area of effect could use some adjustment, but I wonder how I should balance the damage against the dispel...

No, you misunderstand me. Vanilla shields don't reflect damage back onto the attacker. I mean having a lightning shield up. A guy hits you in melee. You don't take the damage, but rather your attacker takes lightning damage equal to or a little less than the damage he WOULD have done to you. There's nothing in vanilla morrowind that does that.

A simpler implementation that I'm considering might be to have the player cast the "reflection" shield spell, and get several "charges" stored. When the player's health drops, if there are charges remaining, there is a percent chance that a charge will be expended to unleash frost damage. There would be an internal timer preventing more than one expenditure per time frame (something like four or five seconds). The shield would expire after perhaps one minute.

that would work too. It's just nice to be able to give mages some magical options for close-combat encounters other than either run or paralyze the attacker.

Cauterize looks really cool, but...what exactly does it do?

in the description:

Cauterize sounds good. So does that mean that mean that anything in that area will have all magicks currently affecting them dispelled? Wouldn't that work against you sometimes as in if you cast a DoT spell and your enemy walks into cauterize won't it get rid of the DoT spell you put on them? I guess it would also dispel any positive effects they put on themselves.

I just had an idea - how about a spell that lingers and acts as a sort of magicka barrier over time - if someone walks into it they are silenced immediately. Sort of a wizard-free zone. I think thats a good idea for a Dwemer device, actually .

Your new spells are incredible, NMZmaster. I have not been able to avoid comparison with the flaming hands of Powerslave. Good work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBnERZXl6e8

This looks like a really cool mod. I think maybe you should withdraw so much from the weather effects being required for all of the spells. That way you could give different elements more character. Like the fire spells work anywhere but are not as powerful as the frost spells. Or they are affected by the day night cycle but not completely disabled. Also I would really like to see some earth spells.

That'd be neat. Hard for me to implement, I think (though possibly with MWSE...), but neat nonetheless.

It'd also be a good device for usage against the player. I always thought that the NPC casters made too little usage of Silence, Burden, and Blind, amongst others.




Thanks! And cool video... that gives me an idea =)



For these elemental spells, in particular, I want to stick with my original implementation and have weather dependency. When I am finished with these, though, I may have some ideas for other types of spells with different activation requirements (in particular I'd like a few based on star light / nighttime). But that's a while away, still...

Earth spells are not impossible, but I feel like they will be more difficult to pull off convincingly. What sort of earth spells did you have in mind? Rocks, as in closer to Earth Bending (for the avatar fans =P)? Or nature/plants, as in things like healing, entangling vines, etc? No promises at this stage, but there are no bad ideas in brainstorming =)

---

After class tomorrow... scripting time!

totally! I think it would be a great addition to the game if there were spells tailored for use against the PC.

as for earth spells I think it would be cool to have spells to alter the field; stone walls, stairs, hills, ect.
I'm not sure how possible that is (and it sounds like it could be really abused), but it would be for very creative battles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR7WTTM7Vqc


I feel that this emoticon is rather appropriate: :flamethrower:

This sounds really great, I'm on a really slow internet connection so I'm about to start loading a video so maybe I can watch it tonight. :^)

Just one question, will NPCs be able to use these new spells?

edit - OK two questions, is the sub-title of this thread a reference to the Dead Ale Wives' Watchtower?

Nice spell! I think the fire spells are going to be my favourite.

Though, could you have the flames rotate in a circle around the player instead?
Maybe an animation could be used?

1) These are being scripted for the player, but with some additional work, I could maybe make it so that certain NPCs can cast certain spells (some are much easier than others to adjust), though I can't just check "autocalc" and allow any NPC caster to have them -- they'd need to have some sort of token item allowing it to be used, just like the player needs the book, since that's how I have the scripts set up. The alternatives would involve using global scripts, which I intend to avoid altogether, so that there cannot be a performance hit if the spellbook is not in the player's inventory.

2) It absolutely is... I attack the darkness =)



Thanks!

Initially that was my thought as well, that it'd be cool to have them swivel around instead of remaining static. Currently the way they move is to SetPos to the player's position (with an offset) every frame. I couldn't think of a decent way to script a circular path (while still moving with the player) except for a series of "frames" for it to parse through, but when I tried to work the numbers out, it looked rather choppy so I had scrapped the rotation idea.

However, if they were instead placed exactly at the player's location, with an animation swiveling the mesh around at some radius to that centerpoint, that might work. I don't know how easy or hard that is to animate, but if you want to take a crack at it, that'd certainly be neat to see! :bowdown:

As for the stuttering problem: are you tying the position updates to the time passed or are you using a frame counter? If you tie the updates to time you will get nice, smooth motion but if you use the frame counting method you will get stuttering. Especially at high speeds. In the case of a circle rotating around the player you should tie the rotational change and the translational change to the time passed.