"Hazardous Spell" dialogue keyword search

Post » Mon Jun 18, 2012 8:42 pm

I'm trying to fix the issue with Cloak spells where casting a cloak dispels any summons you have active at the time of casting. I'm 99% sure that the issue is caused by the fact that the Cloak spells have the "WISpellDangerous" keyword attached to them. That keyword is also attached to summons and a few other spells. The Cloak spells are also set to Dispel effects sharing their keywords (which is the way to make it so that you can't stack all 3 cloaks at the same time, casting one dispels others since they also share a MagicCloak keyword).

Since removing the Dispel flag would allow all 3 cloaks to be stacked and thats not nessicarily good, the easiest way to fix the issue of cloaks would be to simply remove the "WISpellDangerous" tag. However, I suspect that keyword is what makes the NPCs in the game say their "Be careful with your spell" dialogue when you have such a spell active on your character. Its a minor thing, but I'd rather not remove that, since I actually kind of like it (even though I know it annoys people).

So... does anyone know where the dialogue flag is that reads the "WISpellDangerous" keyword and yields the dangerous spell dialogue? I figure if I can find that, I can add a second conditional that also gives the dangerous spell dialogue for spells marked with the "MagicCloak" keyword, that way I can remove the "WISpellDangerous" tag from the Cloaks and prevent them from dispelling summons.

However, my search seems to be in vain because searching for a keyword via the "Edit>FindText" function doesn't lead you to entries that use that keyword, only to the keyword itself. Which is utterly unhelpful.
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Skivs
 
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Post » Mon Jun 18, 2012 4:48 pm

If you really want to find out where it's used in the dialogue... Find the keyword in the object window (Miscellaneous, Keyword, filter by part of the keyword), right-click on it, and click "use info". That will give you a list of all the places it's used, and you can double-click on the entries to take you right to them.

However, what you'll find is that the WICommentMagicDangerous quest already checks for the MagicCloak keyword, as well as the WISpellDangerous keyword, but the WICastMagic02 quest does not. You could work that in there, if you wanted... Though I'm not sure I understand all the interactions between the different pieces there, so I couldn't tell you how to go about doing that.

You could also consider removing the WISpellDangerous keyword from the various summoning effects, several of them already don't have it, though it's hard to tell which is the oversight. Really, they should have made it so that the dispel flag was set and checked on an individual keyword basis, rather than being all-or-nothing for one spell effect.
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Manny(BAKE)
 
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Post » Mon Jun 18, 2012 8:08 pm

Ah, I didn't realize keywords had their own listing in the editor. Guess I skipped over that section when I was doing a quick run through the different sections. That'll certainly work perfectly and be extremely useful in the future as well, as keywords seem to govern quite a few interactions between perks and such, so thanks a lot for that.

Yah, its pretty silly that Dispel is an all-or-nothing condition. The keyword system seems like a pretty great tool that grants a lot of freedom to cause interactions between different entries without specifically coding every individual thing, so I can't really fathom why they took such an adaptive system and then turned around and made the Dispel so restrictive. I imagine you could work a script to fufill the dispel function on an individual keyword, but I'm not even remotely familiar with scripts so I wouldn't even know where to begin on that front, and it doesn't seem particularly nessicary in this case luckily.
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Britta Gronkowski
 
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