Creation Kit Dual Casting

[shevan610]

Hello Everyone,

 

I'm looking to create a mod in which dual casting a spell produces an enhanced effect other than simply increasing the magnitude or the duration of the spell. As an example, I want dual casting an apprentice fire bolt spell to produce an area of effect explosion dealing damage, not unlike a fireball.

I've tried doing this using the conventional means, by creating two magical effects; one, a copy of the vanilla fire bolt effect, with the target condition "EffectWasDualCast == 0", and the other, a copy of the fireball effect with the target condition "EffectWasDualCast == 1". I've then proceeded to assign the two effects to a duplicate of the fire bolt spell. To a certain extent this worked but I have run into the following problems:

 

1. When left to auto calculate the cost of the spell, both magical effects were considered separately, rather than overlapping one another and the total cost of the spell became quite high. Is there a way to set the cost of the effects to overlap and cancel out, rather than setting the cost of one of the effects to 0?

 

2. When casting the spell with either hand at the test dummy (Ralof at Helgen Keep), the spell worked as expected. However, dual casting the spell produced the desirable effect only some of the time. Usually, dual casting the spell at Ralof or on the ground or wall next him would damage him.

At other times dual casting the spell at ground next to him would show Ralof catching fire, however, no damage was dealt. This usually happened when I tried dual casting the spell several times in rapid succession. The first time the spell would deal the damage, while the subsequent casts would fail.

Otherwise, dual casting the spell close to his feet would deal no damage, but casting the spell some distance away would deal the usual damage. I believe that this is due to the fact that the target condition is checked by scripts, which work with a certain delay, hence the issue, but I need confirmation. I have no idea why dual casting the spell close to Ralof fails.

 

3. When casting the spell with either hand, the usual animation for the fire bolt would play. When dual casting, the same animation would play despite the setting for both the area magical effect and the dual cast data for the spell set to display a fireball explosion. I've had little success in finding the root of this particular problem.

 

I was able to find very little regarding dual casting and the way it is handled in the creation kit, and I'm hopeful the someone has dealt with this before, and can advise me. I have tried various combinations of magical effects and parameters but had very little success. I've concluded that the creation kit was not meant for such work and that I'll have to use scripts. If this is the case, what should I try to make it work? I want to avoid using scripts as much as possible, so instead of going through a complete magic casting procedure, is there a way two write a simple script and attach it to the magical effects ,which would monitor if the spell was dual cast or not and set the magical effect to be applied accordingly?

 

Many thanks in advance.

Edited January 13, 2014 by shevan610

[Xander9009]

For 1: the best solution I can think of would be to reduce the cost of the effects you're using. If you haven't duplicated the effects themselves yet, that's what you'll need to do.

[aaa9]

Hi, not sure if it still matters to you, but I've been trying the same thing, and I also couldn't get the explosion data to work correctly. However, I found a workaround that seems to be working very well.

 

1) Make a new projectile with the Explosion checkbox checked and the explosion data filled out

2) Create a new Dual Cast Data entry with the projectile you made in step (1); and all other fields filled out like they are in the fireball effects window.

3) In the Firebolt effect window, under Dual Casting, select the Dual Cast Data entry you made in step 2 in the dropdown menu

4) Set the spell cost of the Fireball effect to anything below Firebolts spell cost. (The game engine only uses the art and dual casting data from the effect with the highest spell cost)

5) Modify the Firebolt Spell like you explained in your first paragraph and press ok.

6) Open the modified/copied Firebolt Spell and press ok without changing anything. (There's a but in the CK that sets the area of AOE spells to 0. To fix the bug you must do this step every time you modify the spell)

 

I believe this works because the game calculates all of a Spells effects based on the projectile, but since the game only uses the projectile data from the highest costing spell, you have to modify the projectile of that spell and expect that the effect of all the other effects in the spell will be carried by that source, irrespective of whether the magic effect has separate data for that.

 

I know this doesn't solve problem 1, unfortunately I don't think there's a way for the CK to do it for you. You'll just have to play around with the numbers in the respective effects to get the casting cost that you want the player to experience.

 

Hope this helped!

 

-AAA9

Edited December 26, 2016 by aaa9