Ten Things You Never Knew About ToEE

That is, in the CRPG of course, not the module ;^) You probably did know some of these.

1) There are no paladins in the game. (Thrommel doesn't count, however you look at it he was never an LG paladin).

2) There are no followers of Heironeous in the game. (There ARE followers of Ralishaz, Procan and Pyremius!)

3) The author of the keylog was a smartass. If you look at Keys in your logbook, they say things like:

Belsornig, the high priest of the Water Temple, probably didn't give you this key.
Kelno, the high priest of the Air Temple, always kept this key on his person.
Commander Feldrin of the temple forces used to have this key. Now it's yours.
This key belongs to Supreme Commander Hedrack, High Priest and Most Honorable Emissary of Iuz Himself. You are a thief.

4) There are cow portraits in the innards of the game. There are no cows.

5) If you talk to Riana while polymorphed, she says, "Mary, keep your animals in your own room, please!"

6) If an athiest character encounters a moment when he (or she) should invoke a divine name (ie yell "By Corellan's tights!" or something), he or she yells, "I rule!"

7) Half-elves and half-orcs are referred to as 'mudbloods' by some angry townsfolk (seriously!!!) Dwarves who are shrunken by spell are referred to as kobolds.

8) Jaroo's bear is named "Mobley".

9) The numbers that appear next to dialogue options - 1. 2. 3. etc - can easily be changed to letters, or words, or whatever. In fact, I may, for no reason at all, slip a change into a mod one day. Drow numerals, anyone?

10) Troika's site STILL refers to job opportunities with their company :-(

Well, enough shenanigans. On to business.

Update

Or, how to waste an entire afternoon's modding due to a stupid mistake.

Firstly, I found the bailiff's dlg for KotB. I scrawled a few lines for when the party encounter him in the pub, then lost it. I searched EVERYWHERE for the damn thing, ran searches on my computers (both OSes and my lappie) and even went to werk and checked the PC there. Nothing. Finally remembered where it was - I had LITERALLY scrawled it in a book. Thats a load off my relief, as we say here! So I can get on with KotB modding which had ground to a bit of a halt while I hunted around (for the last several days).

In the mean time, I have been working on the remake of the Thrommel encounter. Thats where my wasted afternoon comes in. I made a Wampyr, but I couldn't .mob him in! Well, not so he worked... Firstly, he always showed up nekkid (O good lord it is St Cuthbert all over again...) All I wanted him to do was wear some black gear like in the module, but he wouldn't. Finally I forced the issue by assigning the gear a slot number, that did the trick. BUT he wouldn't appear properly, just stood there with 'damage: 0' under the name instead of 'unscathed' in green, wouldn't fight back, wouldn't die if u whacked him. Not that there is meant to be a fight with him of course, but I need to be able to damage him to make him lie down! There's a little bit of info for you - OCF_SLEEPING seems to do jack, and OCF_PARALYZED just freezes the charcacter, won't make him tumble over (think an NPC when u enter a room, just before it crashes - I have seen lots of them for one reason or another ;-)). So how to make him lie down? Well, thump him down under 0hp, thinks I. But he's gotta be able to take damage to make it happen, and my .mobbed wampyr wouldn't. [sigh] Wouldn't even enter combat mode, just stood there getting whacked. WOULD enter dialogue though. Bizarre.

Why do I want him to lie down? To lay him on that slab in the room of course, as he is meant to. Anyways, after several hours fiddling I think "To heck with this, I'm gonna spawn him of Thrommel's heartbeat". I do this, works nicely (he shows up clothed ;-)) and I also add a thing to OF_OFF Thrommel while I'm at it (he can show up later after you've dealt with the whole vampire thing). Thanks to Allyx for finding that! Thrommel already has switch-off flags in his .mob for when he gives you a reward, so I just hit the switch a la Mickey and its all done.

That actually worked too - whodda thunk it? - BUT I couldn't get the little fella onto the damn slab. See, I had made the slab passable in the sector thingy, but it had clipping so when he stood inside it, only his top half showed up, the rest was clipped! For those of you who don't know, this '3d' clipping thing is a mystery to us modders - it is apparently done in the same proprietary format the 3d models are done in, and we don't have access to that (being proprietary, of course). So there is nothing I can do about it. In .mob mode, I was offseting on the z access to raise him above the clipped bit, but you can't do that in the proto so you can't spawn-by-script. Another couple hours of fiddling presented no solutions to this.

So then I tried .mobbing again, couldn't figure out why it suddenly shouldn't work. Still no luck, despite remaking new .mobs from scratch.

Finally after a very frustrating afternoon, I wandered off to the shops to return DVDs and have a coffee to clear my head (had a 'free coffee' card thing all filled up, so I got on of the most expensive coffees they had, mocha caramelatte, covered in whipped cream and caramel stuff and chocolate stuff too. VERY nice, and free!)

Then it hits me.

I was starting on the same map when I introduced the .mob, instead of coming in from a new map. I was starting outside that sector, but still on the same map, so some of the savegame stuff must have been interfering with it. Stupid, just stupid, I should know better.

Came home, loaded up the map (sans mobs), leaving all the doors between the stairs and the room already picked (theres about 2), moongated downstairs, saved, quit, added the .mobs, cleared the cache (God bless Agetian, Dulcaion, Sapricon etc for Toffee!) and tried again.

There was the Wampyr. UNSCATHED. WORKING.

FINALLY.

But now its time for church, so have to wait til I get back to see if I can knock the bugger over. *Best John Malkovich voice* "Die you f***ing vampire!"