Talk:Magic Effects

Is it possible to create your own magic school? -FViral

Technically no, though I'll have no grudge against anyone who proves me wrong. There are some things that are hard-coded and can't be added, changed, or removed. If you wanted to get tricky I bet you could find a way to "add" a school in deed if not name by using scripted spell effects and a script to track their "level" progress and spell effectiveness and the like. But the player would never have a skill shown in their stats and etc.

And please remember to sign your posts. I figured out how! You can do so by typing four tildes (~), or by hitting the tool button second in from the right. --Stickman 17:21, 26 March 2006 (EST)

Hm, seems you can't edit spell effects either. Such as, making a spell last longer than it's coded for. Or perhaps I'm missing something, will have to look into the TES more. Landeyda 08:03, 27 March 2006 (EST)

--Kkuhlmann 08:40, 12 April 2006 (EDT): Pretty sure you're missing something. Magic effects are the basic effects that the code recognizes (i.e. Fire Damage, Invisibility, Turn Undead, etc.). You can make any spells you want in the editor using any combination of these effects, with whatever duration, power, etc. that you want.

You can't edit spell effects, but you can activate a script using a spell and use whatever visual effect you want. --Sagron 18:58, 31 March 2006 (EST)

Some effects like spray are not used in the game at all and therefore can't be used without changing an existing effect. This inability to make new magic effects is pretty lame. --Lap 17:05, 2 April 2006 (Central)

/signed, I thought after five years we'd be able to add spell effects. This is supremely annoying. --Halo112358 04:03, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

To clarify: there's no way to create a new conceptual spell effect that can be used with the custom spellmaker in game. As an example, say I want to create a fire spell effect that damages undead only, and I'd like to be able to create custom spells with the spellmaker that incorporate this effect. Ideally I'd be able to clone the fire damage effect and specify an effect script that runs while the effect is active - it would be something like if ( targetActor.isUndead ) { targetActor.applyFireDamage magnitudeOfSpell }.

I can fake this right now by creating custom spells and attaching scripts, but there's no way to use the spellmaker to generate custom spells with the script attached.--Halo112358 21:23, 9 April 2006 (EDT)

Yeah, it is lame. The amount of stuff they have hard coded seems unnecessary. I've been messing with enabling bound enchantments. I checked the enchanting box in magic effects, looked at the spells, looked at the settings, etc... I can't get it to work. Either I'm missing something not covered in the wiki or obvious in other spell effects or something hard coded is preventing it from working. Seems to me they could easily release a patch that moves this stuff out of the program code and into a new ESM, with an updated CS to add settings for new effects, schools of magic, skills, or anything else we wanted to add. Its also possible that its not hard coded at all, just hidden in the ESM in some section the CS isn't designed to access. Putting that stuff in the actual engine code just doesn't make sense. MegaBurn 03:40, 12 April 2006 (EDT)

--Kkuhlmann 08:40, 12 April 2006 (EDT): There's nothing "hidden" in the ESM. The CS that you've got is exactly the one we used to make the game. Magic effects being hardcoded became a headache for us as well, but there were other priorities for the programmers and we worked around it.

To add to that, I just tried "forcing" the CS to add the bound enchantment effects to a test ring. It doesn't work, at all. Something is clearly preventing the bound item enchantment from working but I have no idea what. I also picked through the XML files to see if there was some kind of list of effects or something, no luck. Why did they have to screw with enchanting? Nothing wrong with having a bound item enchantments and cutting out the cast on-target enchantments seriously weakens mages (I really miss my dire fireball rings). I guess I can script something with on equip triggers but this is still driving me nuts. The new spell casting method is a major improvement but the enchanting and spell making systems are a major step backwards. For that matter, what happened to making scrolls? I remember seeing a preview mention something about a rune based scroll writing minigame or some such, what happened to that? And enchanting arrows, why can't we enchant them? And only one constant effect per item, why? Why can we not change this stuff via the CS (without using scripts), why?!? This is the kind of stuff that just pisses me off. MegaBurn 05:17, 12 April 2006 (EDT)

--Kkuhlmann 08:40, 12 April 2006 (EDT): I've been on the project for the duration and there was never a scroll-writing minigame proposed or designed. It's a cool idea, but we couldn't include everything... As far as "one constant effect per item" -- not sure what you mean. You can make an enchantment (in the CS) with any number of effects that you want.

--Mrflippy 12:32, 12 April 2006 (EDT) You can only have one enchantment per item however. If you want to have more than one effect, you have to create a new enchantment. This makes it more difficult to have items with multiple effects because you'll end up having to make a bazillion enchantments.