Dirty little secrets

Well I am finished my little C08 5+ job and can get back to KotB, its all dlg files from here on in (and mobbed characters. And new items. Well all sorts of stuff, but all NPC related, no more sectoring maps and such for a while). I have some new data for Animations Part 2 ready to go as well but for the moment, an aside.

I was recently poking around in the game files looking for an example of san_end_combat in action: that is, the script that plays for designated NPCs at the end of each combat round (in the same way san_start_combat plays at the start of each round, san_enter_combat when a fight initiates and san_exit_combat when a fight ends). I had been trying to fix the Spiritual Weapon issue - hubris, I know, since Liv did a workaround only after making a huge effort to fix it (as the Co8 documentation shows, if u look hard enough) but I had dreams of glory. Anyways, my idea was to have the weapon flagged no_attack or aloof or something, switch that flag off at the beginning of its round so it attacked, then switch it back on at the end of the round so nothing else attacked it (and maybe remove it from the shitlist of the other critters in the fight at that point - meh, whatever it took). Well, for the record no_attack just meant it sat there passively while everything else whaled on it, but the thing is...

san_end_combat was NOT firing. I tested this pretty extensively and couldn't get the simplest script to work (just a game.particles thing to fire). The weapon sorta hesitated like it was trying to do something, then moved on.

Bizarre. So I went looking in the game for one that was already there in action. I found 3 for memory: an ogre chief, 'ogre for Fire', and Hedrack. That is, calls were made to scripts in the san_end_combat column in protos.tab (col 284 according to ProtoEd). Curiously, the files called did NOT all contain san_end_combat scripts (which is probably why Phalzyr doesn't name this column: he couldn't be sure it was calling the san_end_combat script when not all the files it called had them, fair enough if u ask me). This in itself is a good indication that the call itself doesn't work, since if u set a call to something with no script, it will often break the object: I found this out when I spawned some zombies in ToEE, set (as u might expect) to KOS. When I wandered past them, they did nothing. Much hair-pulling-out later I realised why: there was a heartbeat attached to them in the protos.tab (put there by Liv, to make them auto-destroy and replace themselves with some of her upgraded variants under certain circumstances, if I am not mistaken): but Liv's scr files by and large have not made it over to KotB where they refer to critters ToEE-specific (such as Lareth, or these zombies who were designed for the Emridy Meadows fight). No heartbeat script meant the zombies broke and didn't even recognise a KOS flag.

BUT Hedrack, the wild cave ogres etc do NOT break at the end of each combat round, so I take this as further evidence the order is not executing properly. I made a mental note to refer this to SpellMaster for .dll hacking, then went looking for whatever Hedrack was meant to be doing.

It turns out it was all to do with his death thing and the reaction the Green Coconut and the Curry Puff have to it. So I found myself searching through Murraya's dlg file. (And hence we come to the point of this blog).

Now, I don't know if anyone has mentioned this before, but I for one have never noticed it. There is a whole sub-plot of sleazy sex in there, to do with Barkinar and such. Many folks know that, but some of the stuff made me sit up and look twice: it is quite explicit. I think this was yanked by the censors along with the brothel quests: it is much worse than those. (Note the comment in PC Gamer: "D&D franchise censors required content to be ripped out at the last minute".)

So of course being a good modder I have put it back in :-D

Well, I have fixed the basic "do more with Murraya when u meet her than just say hi" bit (simply 'restored' - afaik - a call to a section of dialogue never accessed otherwise). The whole Barkinar thing, well I have never played the game that way to see what works and what doesn't, and it is tied into the whole "run into Hedrack with the girls in his bedroom" deal which is an interesting idea but frankly better off left out - assassinating him alone in his room would deprive the game of one of its best encounters in all its fullness. Not something to fiddle with idly.

Anyways, thats the story behind my latest contribution to 5.0.2, so be sure to chat to the ladies before u kill them this time. It will also contribute to a reputation under certain circumstances.