Spell Guide Beta-0
 

After a year-long hiatus, here's the newest version of my spell-modding guide.

It includes:
Bitmasker.xls - this is a shortcut to help you calculate bitmask for #spec fields, or for the fields associated with some effect #s that take bitmasks in the damage. Also good for custommagic.

HexConvert.pl and howthisworks.txt - In case you feel a crushing need to convert binaries to .csv format. Use with caution.

Spell Effects and Damage Combos.txt - This is a comprehensive list of all of the effect #s and what they do with different damage values. Edi doesn't think this belongs in the mod manual :(. I say he is mean.

spells_320_VLOOKUP.xls - Ha ha! It's an .xls file! Kneel before your master, filthy hippies!
This is far from complete. The SPELLS sheet is slowly gaining the kind of functionality that would make it actually useful. For many spells, it may be informative.

The Raw Data sheet has the raw #s associated with each field in each spell record. This *is* quite useful. You can help me write more lookup scripts for these if you want, but for use in spell modding, you can just dump the values in this table (if numeric values are accepted) into the corresponding fields of a custom spell, and usually you will get a duplicate spell.

Very large numbers are actually negative.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Extremely funky. I can see that Edi has helped you out a bit. The words "true" and "false" are in finnish!

That effect number -5 (summon unique) seems promising.. Very promsing indeed..

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Thank you for the enormous effort.


What does "mallus" in the effect column mean? (Will this be my first lesson in Finnish?)

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

It's an english word http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif. It's the antonym of "bonus".

Benign -> Malign
Bonus -> Mallus
etc.

So a curse or detriment would be a mallus. If you look in the damage column, you'll get a better explanation.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Hi everybody, my first post here! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Thanks for the list DrPraetorious! I had some fun with it and webalized it, hope you won't mind. I wanted a way to figure out what spells my mages could cast given their magic levels. So I put (parts of) your list in an sql database, and then designed a web interface to ask exactly that question.

I took the opportunity to play around with some new web technologies, so I ended up using lots of buzzwords: XML, XMLHttpRequest, client side XSLT/XPath and so on. Very Web 2.0 http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Unfortunately it only works in Opera (9.5) at the moment. Firefox complains about an XSLT error which I haven't had time to investigate. It's also possible that it works in Safari or new Konquerors. I don't think IE supports anything remotely similar to what I'm using.

Even more unfortunately I can't actually put it out on the web yet since I don't have a host with PHP5, and I don't want to rewrite the DOM/XML generation stuff for PHP4. Hopefully I can nag them to upgrade their PHP soon enough.

But anyway I'll try to attach a screenshot of my prototype here if I can figure out how.

I also wanted to ask a related question. I noticed that all this spell data is (probably) extracted from the binaries, where they are all nicely listed with all their properties. Now, I wanted my list to also include all forgeable items, but I can't find any such lists in the binaries http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif Is such a list available anywhere? Ie: Magic item paired with magic path requisites?

In desperation I even fired up gdb but predictably got nowhere (other than to establish that get_item does something a bit more literal than I had hoped).

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

There are plenty of free web hosting providers that offer PHP5 (some together with PHP4, too). You honestly really don't want to mess around with it in PHP4. PHP5's DOM/XML on the other hand is quite nice, I can confirm that aswell.

Try Edi's Dom3 DB. It is linked in his signature.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Hello again everybody.

My host eventually upgraded to PHP5 which means that I could put the searchable spell interface up there. If anybody's interested, have a look at:

http://www2.onyx.nu/pb/dom3/spells.html

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I can't seem to be able to get it to work in Firefox, neither 1 nor 2. Something about the XSLT apparently doesn't sit right. If there are any Firefox fans out there with knowledge in this area, I certainly welcome patches to my javascript/xml.

It does however, work excellently in Opera 9.5. I'm guessing it works in 9.2x as well but I haven't tried it. It should also work on any later embedded Opera, such as on your Archos 605 media player, or on your Wii, though I've only tried the latter http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Anyway, have fun and search, and please let me know if you have any ideas for improvements. It should be easy to add functionality.

Bonus points for the first person to spot the SVG's! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

First thing to do, serve the right content type. Currently the xmlspells.php script returns the Content-Type: text/html, while it should be text/xml. You can set the right content-type via header()

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Snoddasmannen...looks good but it doesn't work on my machine. Probly a problem on my end.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Doesn't work on my machine either, but it's a great idea.

I'm going to put some more work in on this over the next couple of weeks (along with various mods in various states of non-completion.... anyone know anything about Thai or Prussian mythology and care to make suggestions?), and there should be a better version shortly.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Burnsaber, actually I've had nothing to do with this. The reason you're seeing the true/false values in Finnish is that you're using a Finnish language version of Excel, it translates the formula and the output. Nifty little tool, this one. I couldn't have done that, since I'm not current on the intricacies of spell modding.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Ah, nice one lch! Fixed that, so now it ... kinda ... works in firefox. For some reason, firefox doesn't pick up on the fact that the replacement div has the 'spelldiv' id, so it isn't styled properly. And even worse, when it tries to replace spelldiv the next time, it simply fails since it can't find it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif But you can get a list now in firefox, though it doesn't look like much of a list, and you have to reload the page to do a second search.

Any ideas on what I could do to fix that would, yet again, be much appreciated.

jimkehn and DrPraetorious, are you having problems in Opera or are you using some other web browser? Obviously, for the 99% of the world who are not yet using Opera, the page has some problems for now http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

If you care about your visitors at all you should either use a cross-browser solution like the last two mentioned in http://ajaxpatterns.org/Browser-Side...World_Examples or better yet change to server-side XSLT and a form.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

"Exception while loading: SpellDiv has no properties."

IE just sits there slackjawed and drools, but that's not a surprise http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Hihi, that's a fair point!

My priority right now is learning and exploring some interesting web technologies. Using a pre-packaged framework is not very interesting for me since I wanted to start with the basics. Using server side XSLT is indeed something I have considered as a fallback, and I'll probably end up there if I find time/interest to finalize this thing.

Yeah that's from firefox right? It's weird. Using the firefox dom inspector, I can clearly see the spell div, spell table and all the spells nicely tucked in there with the images and everything. But visually it still looks like it's just dumped the whole xml document in there without any xslt transformation. And getElementById('spelldiv') returns null ...

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

I guess that's because you are overwriting the element in <font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>parent.replaceChild(result.firstChild,spellD iv);</pre><hr /> instead of overwriting the innerHTML element or something like that. Usually Mozilla is the closest to implement the specifications, so I guess that you're doing it wrong.

Here's what the element looks like before the replace:
http://i10.tinypic.com/81qyqed.png
and here's what it looks like afterwards:
http://i7.tinypic.com/6ocxbnl.png

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Hihi, actually you can make it look fine in firefox by opening firebug and having a look at the BODY tag's innerhtml attribute. Just doubleclick on it and leave the field without changing anything. I assume this forces an update of some internal structure and voila the table appears nicely. So obviously some FF quirk involved here.

There's probably an easy workaround to force it to do that without using firebug.

Apparently no support in FF2 yet for the nth-child-of css pseudoclass, so all the lines are white http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

By the way, it's quite likely that I'm doing some kind of corner case here which is poorly defined in the specs. Or at least working in a way which is not well explored or commonly used. Obviously firefox has excellent support for this kind of stuff in general.

EDIT: Added this line:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>document.firstChild.innerHTML += "";</pre><hr />
So now it actually works in firefox as well http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

This workaround resets the whole formular, though, all the values are reset to zero. Don't use workarounds as solution.

If you want to have it working in Mozilla, then you should have read how Mozilla handles these things first. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif Your first problem is already mentioned in there:
The second problem is that you're replacing a DOM node by something of a different type. If I am reading the last paragraph in that article right then you can probably use transformToFragment() to have it working correctly. You are trying to put a DOM document into another one, not good.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

snoddasmannen, I get:

Exception while loading: [object error]

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Actually I'm putting the firstChild of a dom document, ie the spelldiv, into another document. The resulting dom tree is obviously correct, but Mozilla isn't updating it correctly for some reason.

Doesn't make any sense to me why I would need to specify the destination document of a node at the time of creation, but on the other hand XSLTProcessor is a mozilla invention so they can do whatever they want with it.

But enough whining, I switched to transformToFragment() and yay it seems to work even without the ugly workaround! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Thanks lhc!

jimkehn, which browser are you using?

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

That has nothing to do with the XSLTProcessor or Mozilla, but that is coming directly from the standard for DOM. You *always* have to import your nodes into the document first with DOM if you want to use them. Even though Mozilla isn't doing what you want, they're doing it very correctly here.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

i.e. 7 or whatever the newest version is. running xp.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Can you post that as a stand alone executable that we could download to our hard drive??? This looks like a really neat tool that we could use.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Good to know! I guess Opera automagically imported it in the replaceChild function.

I'm not necessarily as enthusiastic about the way ff did this at you are, but let's leave it at that http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif When I do things right, they seem to work in both Opera and Firefox.

Not so much for IE though I'm afraid jimkehn http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif As I mentioned before, I may rewrite the page to add support for all kinds of clients, but right now I'll continue on this track and try to keep supporting Firefox as well as Opera.

Next up I'll try to add some handling of the national spells, they are just mixed in with all the others right now which is quite annoying.

That would indeed be a neat tool to have as a standalone, but quite a different beast from a web interface. Not on my roadmap I'm afraid.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

I'm not enthusiastic about it, but as you confirm yourself, what Firefox does is strictly adhering to the standards while Opera does a little extra to fix possibly corrupt code. That's bad, though, because then people will stick to writing corrupt code. Which will then prolly only work in Opera. Thank god for standards! Without them you'd have to do exceptions for every browser, operating system, day of the week and lunar phase in your code. Just like some years back when Microsoft and Netscape battled against each other who could invent the best new tags for HTML. No thanks. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

That is because the code requires that the browser has support for the XSLTProcessor. KHTML, which is being used by Konqueror and Safari, does not. I think that support for MSIE can be added quite easily by adding the following code snippet from the XMLHttpRequest Wikipedia page: <font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>/**
* Bridge XMLHTTP to XMLHttpRequest in pre-7.0 Internet Explorers
*/
if( typeof XMLHttpRequest == "undefined" ) XMLHttpRequest = function()
{
try{ return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0") }catch(e){}
try{ return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.3.0") }catch(e){}
try{ return new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") }catch(e){}
try{ return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") }catch(e){}
throw new Error("This browser does not support XMLHttpRequest or XMLHTTP.")
};</pre><hr />I didn't get to test it, though.

Unless KHTML implements XSLTProcessor support, this page won't work for Konqueror and Safari. But in case Snoddasmannen wants to add support for them, I think that a cross-browser wrapper library named Sarissa takes care to add just this functionality for browsers.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

lch, does IE really have XSLTProcessor, or some ActiveX equivalent? If not it will take more than wrapping around XHR :/

Anyway, if I'm going to spend some time making this thing work for everybody then I think I might as well just move all the logic to the server side, with a simple form interface. Not many will be able to tell the difference, and even fewer care about it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Plus I really dislike browser specific workarounds ... I'm happy that this code is running in both Opera and FF without any iffery.

But instead of working on the spell guide, I spent time rewriting my map generator instead. Now with fractals http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif If it gets good, I'll release the source.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

That's a function of what language your software is in. He has it showing TRUE/FALSE.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

I honestly have no idea about MSIE, I'm on Linux. Maybe the Microsoft FAQ can help you on that. Here's a code listing how to do the same transformation on both the Gecko engine and Internet Explorer: http://michael-steiner.net/JavaScript_XSLT.php

For perfect wrapping in any JavaScript browser, I guess you should use Sarissa like I wrote before.

Hurry up then! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Actually, it's "malus". And it's Latin.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Latin words are generally English words as well.

googlefight!

Okay, you're right, it's Malus :(.

New version.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Could an admin prune and graft this into the mods forum?

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

moved.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Thanks a lot for the new version DrPraetorious! I'll update my online frontend accordingly.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Has anyone successfully created a spell from "scratch" (without using the copyspell command}?
Id like one to play with

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Yeah a bunch of people have.

DrP did a spell mod called black tome of somethingorother. Look in there.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Summoning spells are actually quite easy to make from scratch. Check the More Trollz mod in my sig for a few examples....

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Summoning spells are easy. Spells giving a spesific buffing effect is still simple, but working with just numbers can be cryptic.

I tried to do something tad more complicated, but I couldn't get it to work at all. I think I was trying to enter "wrong" numbers for something to see what would happen, but got nothing.

If you like puzzles, you might want to look at the #eff fields given to various spells and try to guess what number means what ability, if anything.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

Yes summons looked pretty easy. And I kinda figured if anyone had done it then it was probably DrP or Endoperez.

Im shooting for a variation of Eyes of God without the global (for the watchers mod so that non-players can observe games)

But the stuff on eff and spec started me thinking again of my program to create random nations. Im tempted to add generating 4 or 5 random spells for each nation just to see what those numbers do.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

That's a nice idea, but the game does not work like that. You can't make a global into an "instant" spell. For determining spell effects, the game stores two numbers, the #effect (which should rather be named "type") and the #damage (which would prolly make sense to name "effect" :)). When a spell is cast, then the game looks up what it does by its #effect value first - this determines if it is targetted, a global, or things like that. That's what happens in the client's GUI as well, you can then target a province, add more gems for dome-like spells or global-like spells, stuff like that. During the hosting phase, it will determine what kind of spell it is by #effect number, again, and then look up the hardcoded thing that happens by the #damage number. For example, "The Eyes of God" is #effect 10084 (a global) with #damage 15 (global number 15 - generates scouting reports for all the provinces). If you'd try to keep the #damage number and change the #effect number, hoping to keep what the spell does, it won't work: you'd have Flames from the Sky with #effect number 10041, or Internal Alchemy with #effect number 10111. You don't get the things that the global 15 gives.

That's poking around in the mud, and it isn't going to reveal much. The spell stuff is mostly hardcoded, regarding what a spell does. There won't really be hidden effects that you can't get via #copyspell as well - though there are internal, "invisible" spells that don't show in the spellbook which can be used as well. I guess that DrP's lists should have those, if not, I can provide the data.

So, it won't work this way. I'll reply in your "watcher nation" thread about what you can do instead.

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

I believe that lch is correct, but there is some sharing of damage codes - if you look at the list, it is clear the damage values for global enchantments, domes, scrying and some other things are drawn from the same list.

So, maybe, you can combine a dome spell effect with a global enchantment and get something different. This generally hasn't worked for me though (so I couldn't make a global quagmire, for example.)

Re: Spell Guide Beta-0
 

No. Trying to get a global Quagmire won't work at all, because AFAIK Quagmire is a battle spell. That's very wishful thinking, hoping that it can be made into a ritual spell.

You are right that globals and other map enchantments like Domes fall kind of into the same category, as they're stored the same. But the game primarily queries three parameters when it checks the enchantments list: the #damage number, the target province id and the nation id. Globals have a -1 set for target province id, which is the query value in all the checks concerning the Eyes of God, too. For other enchantments like Domes, this would instead be the target province id where the Dome is, and it won't match. (side comment: the game actually uses a value of -1 as wildcard for the queries, but specifically not so for the province ids)