Hello everybody! Welcome to my first mod; It's nowhere near complete at this time, but if I post this here it will motivate me to actually get it done instead of getting lazy on the project because of ACCOUNTABILITY. Anyway, this mod will introduce at least 2, maybe more wizard skills to the game, all of which based on ideas I've had rolling around in my head for a while. I will be working on the Vicar of Lutefisk first, and I'd love any ideas you have on getting some of the more complex things to work (such as most of the Cryogeneticist skills, and Sacrosanct Sacrifice). Also, I'm not an artist, so I can't do sprites, skill icons, or whatever. But I have an artist friend who may be willing to help, so we'll see. Vicar of Lutefisk: As an ordained devotee of the Lutefisk God, you can call upon him and his mysterious power for aid. Starts you with The Word of Cod, a collection of the Lutefisk God's scriptures (grants righteous damage and resist, has a low chance to proc an acid (really BASIC, but we can't have total precision) damage hit and lutefisk on hit. The tree grants increased resistance to Righteous Damage (and/or Putrefying Damage) Sample Skills: Holy Odors: By channeling your Lord's Most Holy Stink, you can repel enemies around you. Also grants some Dodge bonuses . Odorous Orison: To most, lutefisk is a vaguely unappetizing foodstuff. You, however, have seen its true power, it's TRUE POTENTIAL! You can sacrifice a piece of lutefisk to your Fishy Father to empower yourself. Gain a bonus to your magic stats, and deal extra righteous damage on hit. Just a Little Fishy: Summons a Fish Paladin to be your celestial companion. You know, to get in the way of stuff trying to kill you and to die horribly in traps meant for you. A Little White Lye: hurls a blob of lye at the foe dealing some acidic (yes, I know, but BASIC damage isn't in the game) or putrefying damage to the foe. There is a 50% chance nothing will drop, a 25% chance to get soap (useless) and a 25% chance to get a bit of lutefisk from damaged foes. Leaves some lingering Acid. (See Obvious Fireball, but with Acid and a little damage removed for the lutefisk benefit) Sacrosanct Sacrifice: You are now so close to your god that you can tithe lutefisk to him without need for an alter! ...only works at half rate though, because He REALLY LIKES those alters. Power Word: SKOL: The most powerful skill in the tree. Deals hefty transmutation damage as it transforms your foes flesh into the Food of the God. Leaves behind a stack of Lutefisk roughly proportional to the amount of damage dealt. Cryogeneticist "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." Thus spake the great wizard Clarke. And behold, the capability to use the incredible infinite possibilities of the structure of life to control the laws of thermodynamics. It's VERY highly advanced magic. Gives the player a pair of "Cool Jeans" at character creation. Stat block left to your imagination. Also, the tree gives stacking cold resist. Histone Cold: by carefully spooling your dish of eukleotide DNA with special histones, you take thermal energy out of the air and you create a blast of sudden, severe cold. typically meant to be directed at one's foes. A short range projectile of hyperborean damage (similar to Dragon's Breath.) Leaves a lingering field of hyperborean damage (like Dragon's Breath) (Ok, to be honest, this IS Dragon's Breath, only Hyperborean) Carbonite Freeze: by creating sympathetic reactions between the common carbon atoms within your foes and your spell components, you can freeze your foes solid. Stuns a foe for a short time and turns them into an immobile impassible, un-targettable block of ice. When the foe is frozen, it cannot damage or be damaged in any way. Castable on self (just be careful not to kill yourself). Fimbulvetr: Fimbulvetr is the harsh winter that precedes the end of the world and puts an end to all life on Earth. (Credit: Wikipedia). And for the low, low price of bits of your genetic code, you can call a bit early! Creates a frigid storm of cold air around you, dealing hyperborean damage in an area around your person for several turns. This field moves with you at its eye. Deep Freeze: You and the North Wind are drinking buddies; with his help, you can freeze enemies that are made entirely out of ice. Deals hyperborean damage and debuff's a foe's hyperborean resistance. Summon Maxwell's Demon: Calls forth a demonic servant of the dread wizard James Clerk Maxwell. This damage deals hyperborean damage to everything it hits and conflagatory damage to everything that hits it in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. Ice 9: The most powerful hyperboran spell of all. Uses specially modified thaumites to deal damage over time to your foes. When the foe dies by any means, this spell explodes, damaging all targets in the square around them and infecting them with the mighty, but somewhat less powerful Ice 8. When those foes die, they in turn explode and inflict the not quite as mighty Ice 7. And so on and so forth. These ice spells do not stack; foes are only afflicted by the most powerful form they have been exposed to.
Also, I've begun work and WOW is this ever more complex than I thought it would be. Oh well. Have to eat the elephant the only way I can: one bite at a time. EDIT: Could I get a code-person to look over this? This is my first attempt at a spell. What it is SUPPOSED to do is trigger a small amount of damage (3 Tramsutative) and drop a lutefisk at the feet of the enemy. It's meant to be an on-hit effect from an item (the Word of Cod)... I should give you the item too, while I'm at it. Code: <spell> <spell type="target" name="Mini-Skol" wand="1"> <effect type="damage" transmutative="3"/> <effect type="spawnitematlocation" itemName="Lutefisk" amount="1"/> </spell> <item> item overrideClassName="Tome" iconFile="items/tome_of_tmi.png" name="Word of Cod"> <price amount="112"/> <armour type="shield" level="1" artifact="1"/> <damagebuff righteous="1"/> <damagebuff crushing="1"/> <resistbuff righteous="1"/> <thrownBuff name="Mini-Skol" percentage="10"/> <crossbowShotBuff name="Mini-Skol" percentage="10"/> <targetHitEffectBuff name="Mini-Skol" percentage="10"/> <description text="This book contains the collected scriptures of the Lutefisk God. For such an enigmatic entity, he is sure chatty to prophets."/> </item>
Some likes, but I can't... really... interpret that. Did I do things correctly? I'd like to know before I proceed (so I don't develop nasty coding habits that make my mod work, but are horrible to work with.)
Well the first thing is that the <spell><spell .. > would fail horribly if that's actaully it. I can't see much else that's incorrect here. The convention for spells is to put the name before the type btw. Same with items. Assuming the main <item/> and <spell/> tags are correct it should be fine. If something doesn't work then you can always put it through some validation website. And for cryogenics I will heavily suggest making the spells more unique. You have at least three and a half spells there that are nearly exact clones of other tree's spells with hyperborean stuff instead. Please do change it and give your tree a unique feel to it. Especially try to make your skills synergize in some way and not just be a giant mess of stuff. Why do you have a dot spell combined with a spell that grants targets immunity to damage? In fact nearly the entirety of your damage is over time and you make targets immune to damage. You'd probably be much better off making them still vulnerable (at least to damage) and shortening the duration. If you want it to be a long blockade why have it even affect the target at all? Why do you want this blockade when stuff like Fimbulvetr is centered around the player? The other spells are short-ranged as well. Only really Ice 9 heavily benefits from this but then it ends up being exactly like Golemancy with Thaumites and Unliving Walls. Really you're just putting a ton of stuff from other trees in, changing a few numbers and the themes and calling it a good product. They don't mesh together well at all they're just a bunch of spells with an ice theme and you'd do a lot better to rethink them and come up with unique ideas that create a cohesive tree.
Yes sir! It makes a lot of sense. I will rethink the tree; thankfully I am not working on it right away. EDIT: For the item, I basically copy-pasted the XML code for an existing tome item and changed what I needed to my own thing. Is that a bad practice? EDIT x2 COMBO: Is modeling it after the regular spells just a BAD IDEA? Not a lot tend to put the spell name first. EDIT x3 COMBO: Skill Ids: Are they still needed? I see something about skillName... what is the preferred method nowadays?
Copy-pasting and all that is fine Modeling after the regular spells is a good idea. Afaik every single last spell in the core and all expansion DB's has the name first, unless you consider 100% not a lot. If you're talking about design you could model after the core spells but blatantly copying them is bad. Generally skill ID's have fewer bugs than skillNames and at the moment it's better to pick an id assuming it isn't used (which means use arbitrary large numbers)
Thanks Null! I just checked the spellDB. It looks like they don't have the name first in my files. Code: <spell wand="1" icon="skills/spells/fireball32.png" type="missile" name="Obvious Fireball"> <requirements savvyBonus="0.15" mp="18" mincost="8"/> <effect type="damage" affectscaster="1" blasting="4" blastingF="0.2"/> <anim sfx="flame" framerate="50" frames="6" sprite="sprites/sfx/flame_buff_loop/flame_buff_loop"/> <impact sfx="explosion" centerEffect="1" framerate="90" frames="7" sprite="sprites/sfx/fireball/fireball" firstframe="0"/> <effect type="trigger" amount="0" spell="Flamefield 1"/> <effect type="trigger" amount="0" spell="Fireball Effect"/> <description text="It's a giant fireball. It goes BOOM. Then with the burning. Oh god, the burning. What more do you want?"/> </spell> Also, does wand="1" or "0" do anything at all, or is it simply an artifact of the old coding methods? Also, I totally agree with you about changing up Cryogeneticst to be a lot more original. I just haven't given it a lot of thought yet because I've been busy.
wand="1" is an artifact. And for some reason every single one of your tags there has the attributes in a different order than mine (and basically everyone else). Most of them are completely reversed Code: <spell name="Obvious Fireball" type="missile" icon="skills/spells/fireball32.png" wand="1" > <requirements mp="18" savvyBonus="0.15" mincost="8"/> <effect type="damage" blasting="4" blastingF="0.2" affectscaster="1" /> <anim sprite="sprites/sfx/flame_buff_loop/flame_buff_loop" frames="6" framerate="50" sfx="flame" /> <impact sprite="sprites/sfx/fireball/fireball" frames="7" firstframe="0" framerate="90" centerEffect="1" sfx="explosion" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="Flamefield 1" amount="0" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="Fireball Effect" amount="0" /> <description text="It's a giant fireball. It goes BOOM. Then with the burning. Oh god, the burning. What more do you want?" /> </spell>
. . . I have no idea? I pulled it straight from ... I figured it out. When I opened the file originally, with whatever my computer's default for XML was (it looked like Internet Explorer, actually) it had the funky reversed order. When I looked at it with NotePad, it was in the correct order. I have no idea why that is, but it is. I'll actually use the right program now. ...Weird!
Did you post these ideas somewhere in the past? I seem to remember some of these skill ideas and names from somewhere.
I did, back around when Realm of the Diggle Gods was just fresh news and hadn't been released yet. I've found myself with time and as nobody else was making them, I decided to!
Summon Maxwell's Demon: Calls forth a demonic servant of the dread wizard James Clerk Maxwell. This damage deals hyperborean damage to everything it hits and conflagatory damage to everything that hits it in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. What if this skill turned into a defensive buff instead of a summon? Cryogeneticist sounds like the non-pet dependent magic skill I've been wanting(besides Necronomiconomics-blood debt scary) without being too strong and punishing. A summon kinda feels out of place with the tree as you've made it out so far. Deep Freeze: You and the North Wind are drinking buddies; with his help, you can freeze enemies that are made entirely out of ice. Deals hyperborean damage and debuff's a foe's hyperborean resistance. Will this skill need to have targets frozen to work or is it meant to be usable on frozen targets as well? Fishy Eyebrowed Lutefisk Paladins sound fun as well. Looking forward to see what else you come up with.
I like that for Maxwell's Demon. It is a thought experiment after all! And no, Deep Freeze wouldn't require the targets to be frozen first, it's just that it cripples their Hyperborean resist, meaning your cold spells will be able to damage them.
