I'm in the process of heavily modifying a few mods I've gotten to overpower my wizard-character skills. One spell in particular, though, is giving me troubles. The idea for my spell was with "concentrated entropy," one of the spells I was stuffing into J-factor's Chronomancy skill. The theme was to accelerate time in a local area by a massive amount. Flesh, metal, magic, and masonry all crumble through the procession of the ages. I've mostly gotten it to work, but it still looks ugly. I have a set of custom templates to make the spell bloom outwards nicely, but I have two effect types that don't work well together. I have a smaller set of templates that do a wall-digging effect and high damage, and another template set that has a larger radius, but does less damage and no digging. I haven't found a way to make them look nice all together, though. First, I had the main spell trigger the four parts of the digging spell in order, and each of those parts triggered the corresponding damage effect. However, this ended up animating like digging effect 1, damage effect 1, digging effect 2, damage effect 2, etc. I then decided it might be fun to make the spell itself be slow - take effect over a few turns. My first try was to make each part of the spell go by amount="0", amount="1" etc, but that didn't work. It only showed the first step of the spell. I tried looking at mines, but the only way I could get the next part of the spell to trigger would be to step on the mine. I'm not sure if having the spell be a small buff on myself would work, since I don't want the spell to be travelling with me. So.... First, is there a better way for me to do my spell originally, to have two different effects with two different templates to trigger simultaneously so they don't look like crap? And second, if not, is there a way to make the spell in a way that I can cast it and walk away, and it'll finish its effect over the next couple turns until it's done? I kinda wanted to keep it as the entropy is concentrated to the center of the spell, and does more damage near there, but diffuses off from the main area to the surroundings for a bit of larger area damage.
I would make the spell have a custom animation/effect and then while it only plays one animation--in the background it is actually casting the multiple effects you want
Only spells that have a valid target (a monster or a corpse) are to last over a number of turns. This is similar to the way Grandfather Clock Paradox works - it relies on a 'clock monster' in order to save the state of the spell. In your case you could try summoning a monster, immediately killing it and then casting the various triggers on its corpse. Other than that I'm not sure what problem you're having with the templates and digging/damage. Doesn't the spell 'Mass Destruction' also apply a dig and damage over a large area?
Currently, I've stopped avoiding messing with the spells' animations, and changed them to something that doesn't look quite as stupid as the previous one did. However, I do like J-Factor's idea about using monsters to run the spell. The main problem I can think of with using something other than the player to cast the spell was that it may not be anchored to go in the right direction. I think I remember reading something in one of these threads about an archmage skill triggering different effects depending on where the spell was cast. I'll see if I can make it so that depending on the direction the spell is cast, it can set off one of four different sets of events that will make the spell travel in different directions. edit: So far, I'm able to summon a mob that will repeatedly cast part of the spell effect. I'll have to make more templates and monsters for each direction the spell can be cast in, though, because at the moment it just runs around destroying random sections of dungeon walls depending on where it's facing at the moment. I also found the thread I was looking for, about Essence's Elemental Archmagic question. Would it work to instead of having the triggered spells have different targeting types, to have them all be template-type spells, and which one of the four directions the spell sets off in depends on which template space is clicked on? for example: Code: template 1 @ # template 2 # @ template3 @# template4 #@ Code: <spellname="spellname" type="targetfloor" icon="icon" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="spellNorth" type="template" templateID="1" anchored="0" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="spellSouth" type="template" templateID="2" anchored="0" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="spellWest" type="template" templateID="3" anchored="0" /> <effect type="trigger" spell="spellEast" type="template" templateID="4" anchored="0" /> </spell> having anchoring for the templates off so that hopefully the right one will trigger, and since custom templates for each spell exist. would this actually work, or would it just trigger all four spells at once?
that type doesn't have anything to do with it and that won't cause it to trigger. The way he did it was haivng spells of a certain type be triggered, eg rook or targetmonster that required that they be on specific spaces to trigger. I don't know if it will properly anchor to a monster but you could use the shout effect so it notices and faces the player before killing it and then turn it based on that.
