Questions regarding the OOTF editor
Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:53 pm
Recently I've been messing around with the OOTF editing tools.
It was certainly enlightening, in many ways - but at the same time, also raised a few questions of its own:
1. How long is the engine's "length unit", anyway?
A quick 1st order estimate puts it at around 3 meters. Or, in pagan units, roughly 10 feet - which I guess would be the more likely case?
2. What the heck is the "death crystal" supposed to be?
Going by the name, it sounds like the big daddy of the other elemental crystal items. But the editor also says it's a "ghoul weapon", whatever that means.
And it doesn't seem that the actual crystal even exists, only its effects. Weird.
3. Arokh has a whole bunch of canned lines defined in the editor - some of which I can't remember ever hearing him say. (although it's been almost a decade; could be just my bad memory)
In particular, I can't recall hearing the "can't land here" lines.
Also the "enemy killed" taunts, at least not when riding - do they only activate if Arokh scores a kill while Rynn isn't riding?
4. Arokh's ludicrous OP instakill flame breath does exactly... 1 measly point of damage. "Least damaging", all right...
What in hell...
Sure enough, changing it to "0" effectively removes the direct damage's instagib property (by removing all of the direct damage...); the enemies simply catch fire (the "medium fire" effect) and take the usual fire damage-over-time (5 per second, IIRC).
Unfortunately, only integer values of attack damage are permitted, so there's no easy solution there
And last, but certainly not least:
5. Related to (4) above - the only way I can think of for nerfing the flame breath's power to a more sane value is to edit ALL of the other damage sources (weapons, effects, etc.) to deal 10x (or maybe rather 100x) the damage, and then raise the HP of ALL the actors by the same amount.
Would doing that cause any significant issues with the game's engine? Well, other than making the multiplayer inaccessible due to the changed resource files, obviously.
It was certainly enlightening, in many ways - but at the same time, also raised a few questions of its own:
1. How long is the engine's "length unit", anyway?
A quick 1st order estimate puts it at around 3 meters. Or, in pagan units, roughly 10 feet - which I guess would be the more likely case?
2. What the heck is the "death crystal" supposed to be?
Going by the name, it sounds like the big daddy of the other elemental crystal items. But the editor also says it's a "ghoul weapon", whatever that means.
And it doesn't seem that the actual crystal even exists, only its effects. Weird.
3. Arokh has a whole bunch of canned lines defined in the editor - some of which I can't remember ever hearing him say. (although it's been almost a decade; could be just my bad memory)
In particular, I can't recall hearing the "can't land here" lines.
Also the "enemy killed" taunts, at least not when riding - do they only activate if Arokh scores a kill while Rynn isn't riding?
4. Arokh's ludicrous OP instakill flame breath does exactly... 1 measly point of damage. "Least damaging", all right...
What in hell...
Sure enough, changing it to "0" effectively removes the direct damage's instagib property (by removing all of the direct damage...); the enemies simply catch fire (the "medium fire" effect) and take the usual fire damage-over-time (5 per second, IIRC).
Unfortunately, only integer values of attack damage are permitted, so there's no easy solution there
And last, but certainly not least:
5. Related to (4) above - the only way I can think of for nerfing the flame breath's power to a more sane value is to edit ALL of the other damage sources (weapons, effects, etc.) to deal 10x (or maybe rather 100x) the damage, and then raise the HP of ALL the actors by the same amount.
Would doing that cause any significant issues with the game's engine? Well, other than making the multiplayer inaccessible due to the changed resource files, obviously.