Possible noob-ish question..;-)

[Nightchilde]

..but I guess we all have to start somewhere, no?

Is there a way to set it up so that when one chooses a feat, it replaces an ability that the character normally gets for "free?"

In case you're curious, I'm working on getting some Eberron data scripted in, and I'm working on the warforged. As a standard ability for the race, they get Composite Plating, which is, for every intent and purpose, armor.

However, if they take a feat like, say Adamantine Body, that replaces the Composite Plating with better armor. My current workaround is to just select Adamantine Body when equipping armor rather than Composite Plating, however I'd like to be able to make Composite Plating go away when Adamantine Body is chosen.

I've tried playing around with the "Replaces id tag" selection, but this just automatically replaces Composite Plating with whatever I have that field entered for whenever anyone chooses a warforged for the race.

Any ideas or help would be most appreciated.

 

[rob]

Definitely NOT a noob question....

Doing this is actually quite easy. Except for the minor detail that we haven't really documented in any clear way how to do it yet. :-(

The following explanation assumes you've got a good handle on what HAS been documented, and that you've gone a bit more indepth on your own to get a good understanding of how things work. If this doesn't make sense, keep this answer handy and skip down a few paragraphs for the good news.

One very simple approach would be to have the Adamantine Body thing add a tag to the hero (e.g. 'warforged.adamantine'). Within the Composite Plating thing, you define a Condition Test that declared the thing "live" only if the 'warforged.adamantine' tag doesn't exist on the hero. The condition test would therefore be "!warforged.adamantine".

This would cause the Composite Plating to effective disappear as soon as the Adamantine Body is added. If the Adamantine Body is ever removed, the Composite Plating would reappear immediately and automatically.

This is a perfect example of how convenient tags are, since they can be added by anything and tested by anything. The only thing you need to be sure of (and this applies in teh example above) is that your evaluation sequence is correct. You need to assign the tag BEFORE the condition test actually checks the tag. Otherwise, when you check the tag, it won't be there and the Composite Plating will stick around. You can use the debugging aids to check this if you run into problems.

The next release will contain substantial documentation on tags, tag expressions, condition tests, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Our current plan is to release the update LATE Tuesday. So you ought to be in great shape on this stuff shortly. And if you run into issues, just post the questions here and we'll do our best to get you pointed in the right direction.

Hope this helps,
Rob


At 05:03 AM 1/13/2007, you wrote:

..but I guess we all have to start somewhere, no?

Is there a way to set it up so that when one chooses a feat, it replaces an ability that the character normally gets for "free?"

In case you're curious, I'm working on getting some Eberron data scripted in, and I'm working on the warforged. As a standard ability for the race, they get Composite Plating, which is, for every intent and purpose, armor.

However, if they take a feat like, say Adamantine Body, that replaces the Composite Plating with better armor. My current workaround is to just select Adamantine Body when equipping armor rather than Composite Plating, however I'd like to be able to make Composite Plating go away when Adamantine Body is chosen.

I've tried playing around with the "Replaces id tag" selection, but this just automatically replaces Composite Plating with whatever I have that field entered for whenever anyone chooses a warforged for the race.

Any ideas or help would be most appreciated.

 

[Nightchilde]

Ah! Definitely looking forward to that documentation for sure. That'll make things way easier.

Now to figure out how to make Adamantine Body give the warforged.adamantine tag...

 

[rob]

Using the editor in V1.0e, you can assign a "User" tag to the Adamantine Body thing. So instead of a "warforged.adamantine" tag, you'd add a "User.adamantine" tag.

Assigning this tag puts it on the Adamantine Body thing, so you also need to make sure this tag gets forwarded to the hero. That is accomplished by adding an Eval Script on the thing that consists of the two lines below. This causes all tags from the "User" tag group to get forwarded up to the parent, which happens to be the hero.

var result as number
result = forward[User.?]

Then, on the Composite Plating thing, you would add a Condition Test of "!User.adamantine", indicating that the Composite Plating thing is live as long as that tag is NOT present. When the Adamantine Body is added by the user, the tag is added to the hero, which causes the Condition Test to fail and the Composite Plating to disappear.

Hope this helps,
Rob


At 05:49 AM 1/16/2007, you wrote:

Ah! Definitely looking forward to that documentation for sure. That'll make things way easier.

Now to figure out how to make Adamantine Body give the warforged.adamantine tag...

 

[Nightchilde]

That worked perfectly. Thanks!