This is a collection of spell VFX I am working on. It's basically just me trying to clone or upgrade Bioware's Infinity Engine spells and other vfx.
Bioware must have used model-based structures to create most of what you see in Infinity Engine games, however, they all got released as sprites. Not so useful in a 3D world, and so most spell vfx from Infinity cannot be nicely used with Aurora.
What I am doing is watching a video playback of various spells from Infinity and trying to mimic them as accurately as possible using Gmax.
Release 0.0 "Infinity Casting VFX", only has "default" animation cycle, so you can't use them as "duration" cycles nicely, but they do work good as "impact" or "cast01". I use them as "cast01" substitutes currently.
Note: Any time Infinity uses a waterfall-like effect, I instead use a pull-particles-from-every-direction effect.
Alternate VFX for each school of magic. You will need to edit spells.2da. Animations are 4 seconds long, so change your "ConjTime" column in spells.2da to 3000-4000 (I use 3000 just fine). Entire animation should finalize at about 4.67 seconds. Place the model name in the "ConjHandVisual" column in the same 2da file. These are not override files, they are alternate files you can point individual spells to. NWN does not use per-school fx, they use per-energy-type fx, so there is no 1-to-1 correlation from my fx names to theirs.
I played with trying to get skins and animesh to act upon placement and attachment of auroraRef nodes. As far as I can see, that is a huge game-stopper, dead. So no potential of making skinned beams, or bubble making projectiles. Awwwwwww.....
I've been toying with some animesh spell fx. I got an interesting start with infinity's cure light and cure moderate sounds fx. I think this could lead into some really interesting globe fx, especially when combined with environment fx and txi filters. Animesh really doesn't effect game speed at all with any of these vfx I've made so far, so its really looking like a good source of new vfx content.
Slightly on hold, but I have been patching some of the projectile animations into these. Currently working on some skull models for use with floating skull creatures, as well as for death spells.
I'm holding off voting until it develops further, but from the screenshots I can tell this is beautiful work and can progress into something much, much better.
Keep it up! _________________________ "A dagger in the night is worth a thousand swords at dawn..."
I'm still working on Feb's CCC Morbol plant beast, but as soon as I get finished with a few more skins, I'll be tackling all the other animation cycles, so these will be much more than they are now.
If you have an infinity engine effect you would like to see cloned, let me know. I have a few in mind already, like Mavalon's Rage (sp?) Mind you I won't be doing spell conversions, just the VFX, because d20 spells don't fit my custom gaming modifications. If you have "infinity explorer", just reference the game name and the file or file group you would like to see cloned.
I didn't modify any 2das for you since these are just the casting graphics. But if you wanted all your divination spells modified then you'd have to go through and edit ALL your divination spell lines to use my divination casting fx (filename vca_divin). So I mean I wanted to leave it optional so you could just edit ONE line you wanted to test on, for a spell for whatever class you use as your testing character. I personally use a custom class-less system and wrap that around the sorcerer class in-game so every class can use spells and easily recharge powers. But that doesn't help you at all...
Its very basic though. Just open your spells.2da and go to the ConjTime column, change it to like 3000, then in the ConjHandVisual column put the filename you want to use for that spell. So if you want divination casting fx for (just as my own example) cure light wounds, then enter in cure light wounds' ConjHandVisual the name vca_divin. Having a table-layout 2da editor is very helpful here.
NWN doesn't use standard school-based casting graphics, they use energy types mixed with schools, mixed with OTHER, so getting them all would be time consuming for anybody not just doing find-replace in something like notepad++. If you guys really want something like that done so you could play vanilla NWN with only my casting FX, I could certainly do that. I just expected you all to maybe want to pack just a few spells here and there with one or two casting fx in your own custom content, not use the whole thing as a total conversion.
The thing was certainly not intended as an override package, but ShaDoOoW's suggestion is also completely doable. Internal name and filename seem to have no effect in-game if they differ. I won't personally change my filenames, unless its to say put a "md" in front of the file suffix for disambiguation. The reason being is that these don't line up one-to-one with the school-to-casting-fx that NWN uses (which is unfortunate, but useful at the same time). Like I said, you have NWN electrical casting fx, one for fire, mixed with some generics for holy, etc. Its kinda messy in spells.2da.
I don't mean to confuse, its just not how I intended it to be tested, nor did I expect anybody might want any total replacements.
Here's the line I was talking about edited for you already, just replace the same numbered line in your override spells.2da.
I have an idea how to solve the ol FP's issue Merricksdad. You could rename your models to use same name as the default conjure anims that are closest to these by purpose maybe? Then, a player could immediately test them simply by adding them to the override. _________________________ [Boost System] [Door System] [Devastating Critical Immunity] [HIPS remake] [Circle Kick Mode] [1.69 Full 2da Source]
I understand what you're saying, Merricksdad, but what to edit? What spells are to be modified for the columns you mention? All of them, a specific spell? Which module name does one put for what spell to see how it works? There's many of us who don't have the knowledge of what you intend to be able to do for ourselves. A spells.2da file packaged will give us those examples. and help us use it in our own modules.
FP!
Posted by Bharbaruss at 2013-02-08 13:53:05 Voted 10.00 on 02/08/13
The how-to is already listed in the download section for that download. I test all my stuff by simply doing the listed-above details in my spells.2da on the "cure light wounds" spell entry (entry 32 I think). Its not a complete new spell, so making a 2da line for it seems off to me. If it were a complete new spell, I would do a hak complete with 2da and spell script.
Currently working on a collection of alternate smoke and fire VFX. Honing my renderOrder and combination of normal and lighten blending techniques. Hoping to keep emitter poly very low but give a much better non-sprite fire effect.
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