my mages cast crap spells?

[MaxWilson]

Sombre said:
I don't know how hard it would be for them to add a toggle function to researched battlefield spells (I can't think it's that hard, all you have to do is flag the spell as not researched when it's 'off'), but I do know it would /drastically/ lessen the need for scripting, for the less hardcore players.

Specifically, I think the spell research (F5) screen would be a good place to do this. Perhaps clicking on a researched spell greys it out again. This will prevent it from showing up in your list of ritual spells to cast if it's a ritual/global (makes it easier to hunt for the ones you want) and will prevent it from showing up in the tactical scripting AI list if it's a battlefield spell, as well as prevent it from being cast.

Edit: I can think of a potential complication, actually. Once you turn a spell off, how do you turn it back ON? The game would need to maintain a separate list of spells that are "really" researched, either because the right school level has been researched (Evoc-6) or because map commands started your nation out with that spell. What you'd do is keep the existing code for telling which spells are researched, but also maintain a separate, monotonically-increasing list of "really researched" spells. Every time a spell becomes available you add it to both lists; when someone grays out a spell you remove it from the "researched" list, when they click on an unresearched spell it adds it back into the "researched" list if and only if it's in the "really researched" list. That way the battlefield AI can keep its existing code for checking the "researched list," etc. I'm not sure how changes to the research lists would be encoded in .trn and .h files, though. It might be nontrivial.

-Max

[Sombre]

Yes in terms of multiplayer it's rather more complex because different people will have 'banned' or 'greyed out' different spells. The game would have to keep track of all of them, although it isn't like that would be any more complicated than anything the game currently keeps track of.

This isn't the sort of feature that can just be stuck into the game, unlike new units and spells and alterations to message text. On the other hand, it can't actually be /that/ complicated can it? I mean to the people who made the game from scratch. It's not like we're asking for a major altertion to the GUI or to the way the game works.

Currently the game checks your research level against the level of the spell and says yes you can cast it or no you can't (ignoring other costs for the moment). All spells are simply given a required level, there's no 'I've been researched' flag. But you can restrict spells to nations and via modding (every turn) you can do it on the fly, provided the mod is loaded from the start. That means it's currently entirely possible to alter a spell so it's no longer available to cast (by resticting it to a non existing nation). The complication here is that different people will want different restricted lists and the AI will want nothing restricted at all. But again, that doesn't seem like something too hard for the coder(s) who made Dom3.

[MaxWilson]

Sombre said:
Currently the game checks your research level against the level of the spell and says yes you can cast it or no you can't (ignoring other costs for the moment). All spells are simply given a required level, there's no 'I've been researched' flag. But you can restrict spells to nations and via modding (every turn) you can do it on the fly, provided the mod is loaded from the start.

The way I read it, that means there must be a "I've been researched" flag. That is, if I'm understanding you correctly, you're talking about the #startspell map command, which flags a spell as researched at the start of the game. So the tactical AI must be checking an explicit list of researched spells and not just school/level constraints, and that explicit list must be on a player-by-player basis.

Reportedly #startspell is broken at the moment, though.

-Max

[Sombre]

I was thinking #startspell probably just removes the check for level or somehow moves the required level to 0. I suppose that's similar to a 'researched' flag.

But no, I wasn't actually talking about startspell. When I say 'modding' I mean .dm commands, not map modding - if you create a mod and load it up at the start you can alter the requirements of spells whenever you want. But you do this only by changing their required level etc.

Even if startspell works, does it function on a player by player basis? If it does, that would seem to bode well for getting this put in a patch. I really think allowing us to grey out our spell lists would be a serious improvement to magic in the game and, to an extent, reduce micromanagement.

[MaxWilson]

The documentation says #startspell is #startspell <player> "Spell name", so yes. Unfortunately the spell goes away on turn 2 and never comes back, so maybe managing spells has changed under the hood since Dom3 and made this harder. (Maybe it is just checking researched school levels now.)

-Max