Classic Spell Effects

[Aeolwind]

Originally Posted by Furinex [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Azxten figured this out. He was able to fix the origin with the old file however the direction wasn't right. I'm still waiting to hear back from him on how he accomplished this. If we can figure that out, we may be able to hack the old particles into this new spell file to call the same effect and get it in the right direction. This Might be the easiest method to fix it however not the best since the gravity is still screwy.

If he can get it back with the old files; direction/gravity should be there as well. If it works right at 0,0 it will work right everywhere. You just have to undo what isn't.

[Furinex]

And that's exactly what I thought. I sent him a pm but his RL is hectic during the week so I haven't heard back from him. When I can duplicate this, I will mess with it until its right or I'm dead... Whichever comes first.

[Razdeline]

Originally Posted by Furinex [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I doubt they would do this nor would I ask for it. I, as many others, enjoy this experience and I would rather not ruin it for myself by accepting chars that I didn't earn. Even if it were just to test. I have found another way to test this. I set up my server to accept these spell changes as well, and things are going pretty good. All I need now is a few more pictures and exclamations about other class spells that I am unaware of. I believe all of the druid spells are completely fixed and any other class that uses the same type of spell animation would also receive these fixed changes. I know that harmony and Matiz need some work with the level adjustments but this is kind of like the shielding problem where the values in the hex file are hard to determine. In the .eff file, If someone can find the entry that effects Mezz and harmony, that would help me a lot.

Nothing wrong with asking for a specific test environment, but you already have it figured out.

Cheers

[Furinex]

Originally Posted by Razdeline [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Nothing wrong with asking for a specific test environment, but you already have it figured out.

Cheers

Not entirely, but we're getting there. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[azxten]

Here is the old spells.eff change I made that you asked about. This is the shielding spell and changing that 00 to 02 causes the origin to be the caster instead of 0,0. You can change it to several other values as well which change the way the effect looks but 02 was the best I found.

If you only make that change and nothing else the effect is a circular green particle and some strange falling orange particles at the caster. During my testing I was able to make these particles behave as expected as well, using the "jet" effect or whatever.

What I couldn't figure out was:

1. How do you get effects to follow the caster/target if they move?
2. How do you get the effects to come from the hands instead of the center of body?

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As for my methodology of how I figured this out, I just noticed that all the effects in the file say GENXYY_SPRITE where X is a letter A-Z and YY is a number (10, 20, 30). I did a replace all on GENA with GENB, see if that was the shielding effect, then replace all on GENB with GENC, see if that was the spell effect, repeat until the shielding effect particles change in some way to know you've found one of the sprites involved.

Then I reset the file to normal and changed the particle I found, GENC I think it was, one effect that used it as a time. That allowed me to identify the spell block for the shielding effect.

Next I noticed that the frost nuke effect actually had the origin at the caster instead of 0,0. I repeated the above process to find that effect. Then I copied that whole spell block over the shielding block. Then I went back and changed 1 line at a time back to the original shielding lines until I identified which line was responsible for changing the origin.

Unfortunately there seems to be no spell effect in the game which will stay with the caster/target if they move or that originates from the hands as expected. This is why I gave up. Without a working example to use as a template its extremely hard to just change random characters and then check and see what happens. If you look through various spell blocks you'll see that they all seem to have "random" areas changed to "random" values. I can't identify any kind of pattern to work with.

As Aeolwind said, I think the involvement of the character model hands and staying with the model may be outside of this file. I just fixed the origin location.

As for the gravity effects of particles, this can be adjusted in spellsnew.edd. I accomplished this during my original testing but didn't take any notes on how I did it. It was an unintended consequence when I was trying to get the particle direction to change. I was able to create particles that flowed out and then began falling down in an arc like pattern. I also identified a change that increased velocity and various other things. This is why I said I was confident these changes could be made. I've made all the necessary adjustments at one time or another, just forgot to write them down.

[Telin]

Great job. I'm going to isolate spells.eff and spells_us.txt when loading Mac client to make sure those are the only two spell files required for the classic particles. I could also play with offsets to find out what else they control since the spells are working right to begin with. It's interesting the old genb is now like new spelb and genc is like spelc. I bet a gena would be for the blue healing sparkles.

[Furinex]

Originally Posted by azxten [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Here is the old spells.eff change I made that you asked about. This is the shielding spell and changing that 00 to 02 causes the origin to be the caster instead of 0,0. You can change it to several other values as well which change the way the effect looks but 02 was the best I found.

If you only make that change and nothing else the effect is a circular green particle and some strange falling orange particles at the caster. During my testing I was able to make these particles behave as expected as well, using the "jet" effect or whatever.

What I couldn't figure out was:

1. How do you get effects to follow the caster/target if they move?
2. How do you get the effects to come from the hands instead of the center of body?

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

As for my methodology of how I figured this out, I just noticed that all the effects in the file say GENXYY_SPRITE where X is a letter A-Z and YY is a number (10, 20, 30). I did a replace all on GENA with GENB, see if that was the shielding effect, then replace all on GENB with GENC, see if that was the spell effect, repeat until the shielding effect particles change in some way to know you've found one of the sprites involved.

Then I reset the file to normal and changed the particle I found, GENC I think it was, one effect that used it as a time. That allowed me to identify the spell block for the shielding effect.

Next I noticed that the frost nuke effect actually had the origin at the caster instead of 0,0. I repeated the above process to find that effect. Then I copied that whole spell block over the shielding block. Then I went back and changed 1 line at a time back to the original shielding lines until I identified which line was responsible for changing the origin.

Unfortunately there seems to be no spell effect in the game which will stay with the caster/target if they move or that originates from the hands as expected. This is why I gave up. Without a working example to use as a template its extremely hard to just change random characters and then check and see what happens. If you look through various spell blocks you'll see that they all seem to have "random" areas changed to "random" values. I can't identify any kind of pattern to work with.

As Aeolwind said, I think the involvement of the character model hands and staying with the model may be outside of this file. I just fixed the origin location.

As for the gravity effects of particles, this can be adjusted in spellsnew.edd. I accomplished this during my original testing but didn't take any notes on how I did it. It was an unintended consequence when I was trying to get the particle direction to change. I was able to create particles that flowed out and then began falling down in an arc like pattern. I also identified a change that increased velocity and various other things. This is why I said I was confident these changes could be made. I've made all the necessary adjustments at one time or another, just forgot to write them down.

Well... Im interested in 2 things. Can we call GENB sprite in the spellsnew.edd file. AND, im especially interested where you found to control the gravity in the spellsnew.edd file. That would make things MUCH closer to classic.

[Telin]

........GENB10_SPRITE (Green Level 1)...................GENC10_SPRITE(Orange Level 24)...................GEND30_SPRITE(Blue Level 39)

Spells_us.txt, Spells_en.txt and Spells.eff are all three required to load game.

The effect 02 gave it was like other spells using the shielding particles instead. This must be why most of the target's effects work properly except for some, and of course not at all when target moves. I think 00 is meant as the source for the hands, but the game isn't loading the hand spell bind points.

[Bamzal Sherbet]

great work. looks like we'll be able to see proper spell effects some day

[nilbog]

Stickied.

I encourage people to try the downloads from the OP. Even if this isn't 100% complete, it is substantially better than particles vertically rising from the hands.

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