How To Make A Spells That Summons A Custom Made Creature??

[erican_lord]

Ok Hi Does Anyone Know How To Make A Spells That Summons A Custom Made Creature? i have looked everywhere but i get no detailed or easy description on how to do it plz help me ASAP and Today March 3rd would be awesome!! thanks in advance!!

[Vagrant0]

First define your creature, make sure that the creature has between 5 and 25 aggression, more than 30 personality, less than 50 responsibility, and is not part of any hostile factions. Do not give the creature any scripted items or weapons. Do not attach any scripts to the creature. Give the creature 2 AI packages. The top one should be a follow player package, with the condition of disposition >= 80. The bottom one should be a generic wander current location radius greater than 256.

 

Bascially, create a scripted spell effect that is duration based and cast on self.

 

Attach the following script to the spell

 

scn yournamesummonmycustomthingscriptofmegaawesomeness0310371;; or whatever

ref caster
ref summoned

begin scripteffectstart
set caster to getself
set summoned to caster.placeatme <id of creature>, 1, 32, 1
summoned.moddisposition caster 100
summoned.pme zdre;; or zskh if undead
end

begin scripteffectupdate
if summoned.getdead == 1
summoned.removeme
endif
end

begin scripteffectfinish
if summoned.isactor == 1
summoned.removeme
endif
end

or something to that effect. There are better alternatives out there, but you kinda need to spend a bit more effort with scripting and setup work. For most cases, this method should be fine, and shouldn't cause too many problems. Summoned creature should be removed on death, or when the duration of the spell runs out. You should NOT attach this to an ability since summons don't work like that, nor should you attach it to an enchantment since constant effect enchantments don't function. If you are looking for a more long term summon, there are better, safer, more reliable ways of doing this.

[dunmermaiden]

Sorry I spoke.

[Vagrant0]

The bloat caused from a summon without scripts, scripted items, or weapons is temporary and is actually much less than the sort of bloat caused from knocking a few dozen pieces of clutter around. Actors created with placeatme are cleared as part of the normal game processes, and when used with removeme, this clearing is immediate.

 

The information about bloat and placeatme is actually rather misleading, people assume that it is bad in all cases, thus making placeatme a worthless function. In regard to placeatme references, bloat really only occurs when you are creating items in world that don't get picked up, or references which don't get cleared (such as activators). QQuix who has done extensive studies on the subject can back this up. If the placeatme reference has no scripts, creates no items, and is cleared from memory, then no bloat can occur. The only things which might remain from a placeatme'd creature is if they happen to have a weapon which drops due to 0 durability, and if that weapon is not picked up... and even then it should be cleared when the cell resets or when that information gets too old to be considdered useful by the game. As far as placeatme's things go, most of the bloat only occurs from activators or scripted objects, everything else could be used several hundred times before any effect would be noticed. As the savegame size tends to increase slightly just from standing in one location, doing nothing for several hours on its own, trying to determine savegame bloat is not an easy thing to do, and requires several thousand uses of the thing to be tested, as well as a considderable amount of time between the testing and when you check (so that you can know what data isn't being cleared). Most initial tests on bloating did not accurately factor in time or what the game did eventually clear up, to the concern of bloat has been exaggerated. It's still not something one should do excessively, but is certainly safe enough to use for a summoning script. Hell, even OOO uses placeatme for their summon scripts, yet you don't hear everyone who uses OOO summons bitching about bloat.

 

The problem with having a persistent reference for use in a summon spell is that usually this ends up leading to other complications, such as that summon eventually getting sick of you occasionally hitting it, and attacking you every time it is summoned unless you're constantly maxing out its disposition. It also becomes something which is only useful when you have a single actor using that spell, since only one creature can exist at any one time. Not an issue if you are just giving the spell to the player, but problematic if you happen to want to make NPCs have access to or use that spell. Not to mention that it requires quite alot more setup to make work. Tutorials or example scripts should be the sorts of things that people who are not particularly familiar with the CS can do. People who want to make a summon spell don't want to spend time making global variables (bad idea), holding cells, or other semi-complicated things. More to the point, your variable isn't even being used by anything in your script, and could easily be substituted by a sirenref.getincell <holdingcell> condition. But of course, that would require having the script move the creature back to a specific location... which you didn't really explain. All of this to prevent the same creature from being called by 2 separate actors. All of this already taken into account for and solved with a placeatme/remove combination. I somehow get the feeling like you're one of those people buying carbon credits for their dog, no offense.

 

There are some things which you do have to go to excessive lengths to accomplish safely, and then there are those things where it simply isn't practical for what you want to accomplish. In the case of your standard summon spell, this is one of them. Even if you rely purely on summoning creatures to fight for you, you won't ever use the spell enough to create any significant bloat, even if the creature had scripts, scripted weapons with 1 life. The main reason why a moveto summon might be more practical would be if you wanted to retain something about that summon through all uses, such as a creature which got stronger the more you used it. But of course, doing so kinda limits the spell to being something that only the player can use, unless you create a queuing system. Your alternative is appreciated, and your intentions are correct, but probably not practical in the more generic scope of such a spell.