While I continued on with my little project y...

June 26, 2003 by Adam in NWN1

While I continued on with my little project yesterday (pun intended), most of my work focused on things you can't really appreciate in a screenshot.

I worked on henchmen AI, trying to get the spellcasting down right. I'm using a generic "Bob the Henchman" to test things out. You can now ask him to cast a spell and he'll list them for you. Keep clicking "more" and you'll get the next set of ten. The list comes from the spells.2da file, which is somewhat handy.

Something that has an even cooler factor is being able to shout out things like "cast aid on me". The henchman listens for the word "cast", figures out the spell name, then figures out the target. Pretty cool.

It's not perfect yet. The targeting of things beyond "yourself" and "me" is currently broken. Also, the performance hit of looking up .2da files in a loop is prohibitively lengthy, so I'll write an "index" version of the spells.2da file. It's too bad, as it forces it to be English only (previously I was translating the spell name into the language-specific name). Still, it should be a handy addition.

I'm thinking about other AI things that could be done in this area. Being able to shout out directions to your associates feels is something I'd like to pursue more of. Ideally, those would be tied to custom text macros so that you can direct them in battle.