Post by Ima Dufus on Sept 6, 2005 0:46:53 GMT -5
It brings undead to a completely different level of difficulty... what happens to Liches?
At the moment they behave in exactly the same way. However, when we actually have a Lich in the module (might be soon), I will fix it so that if you destroy their corpse it will just reform, unless you have already destroyed their phylactery. Something like that anyway.
I guess it does make sense to have some large groups...
I did some solo playtesting over the weekend on a copy of the module, which highlighted some problems. The main one was that nearly all the creatures spawned in with that pesky "invisibility" bug (ie. where you can see their title and health display but not their body, and you can't target them). It occured to me that this will always be an issue with creatures spawned by the standard Bioware encounter triggers. So I replaced them with our own encounter triggers in the first Hack'n'Slash dungeon area and that problem went away. However, I then hit the other problem where nearly all the creatures stood around brain-dead (previously this only seemed to happen occasionally). This was actually fortuitous, since it made the cause of the bug stand out enough that I could guess what it was (turns out that if you copy a creature with a non-default AI level it is still being scheduled as if it were at the default). Managed to work around that bug last night, so now everything is nice and active.
How is this at all relevant, you ask?
Mostly it isn't (I'm just letting of steam)
The bit that is relevant is that by using our own custom encounter triggers we can boost or replace every creature that is spawned, not just the "extras" (ie. those spawned in addition to the normal encounter creatures). This means that instead of getting, for example, 8 goblins and a goblin chieftan, you might only get the goblin chieftan (or maybe the chieftan and a shaman or something). So in many cases you will get a smaller number of more powerful creatures, which should help keep lag down a bit. Of course with a level 40 character, you will still probably get 21 creatures every time (unless you are spawning dragons or something), but until we have a lot more high-level templates you gotta expect that.
Now I just need to locate and replace all the other standard encounters...