Questions on spells and such

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

1) Have you implemented Mark/Recall spells in U7BG?

How do they work? I remember extremely unclear usecode for them.
Where the coordinates are memorized? What savegame file in the original engine contained the marked coordinates?

I suspect that 2 region coords can be saved as the stone's quality to teleport to the region to bring the 4 regions in, and then the Egg can fire, causing one more teleport. Is it really so?

The stone must be put to ground - not in the backpack - while Mark. Mark will also fail if you're on a barge.

2) What does the Firesnake spell in SI does? I never saw any result of it except reagents and mana being spent

3) Delay engine. Usecode intrinsic #2 in BG (called ScheduleMacro in my UCDUMP).
The game can be saved and restored during the delay, which is set, for instance, when using silver serpent venom on people (the macro scheduled lowers the stats).
Have you implemented this?
What original savegame file contained this?

4) NPC schedules.
Do they use the same script as usecode "macros" like the one executed at the very beginning?

[wjp]

1: the virtue stones have a container-sized (12 byte) IREG entry, with the coords stored in the 5th-8th bytes. Usecode intrinsics 0x5f and 0x60 are used to respectively set and read those coordinates

2: it should do what the 'fire' ability of the black sword in BG does

4: we currently have schedules hardcoded in exult. (not using any usecode/script, but just plain C++). Jeff mentioned wanting to change this to 'usecode script'.

[drcode]

3. Yes, we implemented this a few weeks ago. It didn't matter much in BG, but was essential in SI where there were often plot-related delays that were several minutes long. The original U7 stored these in a file in gamedat ('actions.dat'? can't recall), but Exult stores them with the objects in the IREGxx files and npc.dat.

[Lord Rat]

Thanks for the "Must be put on ground to mark". I've been having fits.

Also, can you remark the ones you rip off from the museum?

And, are there stones you can mark with that are not from the museum?

I've never gotten this to work.

[wjp]

AFAIK, the only eight Virtue Stones in the game are from the museum.

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

Maybe reverse-engineering the native schedules would be better idea then to write a personal C++ code for each NPC?