adding new talents

[honestRope]

I'm working on a sort of "practice mod," to familiarize myself with the new spell/talent process; the idea is to add a new four-talent tree to the Champion specialization. So far I've run into two problems that I'm hoping to find some help with.

 

The first is custom icons. I've got four nice distinct color-coded icons to go with my four new talents. I dump them in Override, call them with the GDA, and they crash my game. About one time in three, I'll get an abrupt quit to desktop the first time I open the talent menu; the other two times in three, the talent menu will open, display my custom icons, let me put them on my quickbar, then crash to desktop about ninety seconds later when I open the inventory screen or just... reach the limit of the game's patience, or something (probably the quickbar GUI refreshing and stalling out). If I go in and switch to vanilla game icons, I've played half an hour thus far with no problems.

 

Is there another GDA somewhere I need to edit? Am I compressing them wrong (I remember that being a constant issue in Morrowind, but in that case, a texture compressed in a way the engine didn't like just wouldn't show up, not show up then crash the game two minutes later.)? Is there something in the toolset I should be tweaking (apart from compiling scripts, I've been avoiding the toolset and working in Packages\Override rather than MyDocs\AddIns)?

 

The second issue is with one of the talents. I've got a talent that attacks with the equipped weapon, generates an automatic critical hit, and converts weapon damage to spirit damage. I based my GDA and script on Critical Shot, since it's one of the simplest auto-crit talents and required the least messing with, so my code looks like this:

 

		case ABILITY_TALENT_DEEP_STRIKE:
{
		object oWeapon  = GetItemInEquipSlot(INVENTORY_SLOT_MAIN, stEvent.oCaster);

		// if the attack hit
		int nResult = Combat_GetAttackResult(stEvent.oCaster, stEvent.oTarget, oWeapon, 5.0f, stEvent.nAbility);
		if (IsCombatHit(nResult) == TRUE)
		{
			// autocrit
			if (nResult == COMBAT_RESULT_HIT)
			{
				nResult = COMBAT_RESULT_CRITICALHIT;
			}

			// normal weapon damage, but spirit-typed
			float fDamage = Combat_Damage_GetAttackDamage(stEvent.oCaster, stEvent.oTarget, oWeapon, nResult, 0.0f);
			eEffect = EffectImpact(fDamage, oWeapon, Ability_GetImpactObjectVfxId(stEvent.nAbility), stEvent.nAbility, 8);
			Combat_HandleAttackImpact((stEvent.oCaster, stEvent.oTarget, nResult, eEffect);
		}

		break;
	}

 

Which works really nice!

 

With a ranged weapon.

 

With a melee weapon, it just... does nothing. Talent activates, burns stamina, starts the cooldown, does no damage, calls no attack animation. Apart from weapon prereqs and range, the 2da entries don't look noticeably different between Critical Shot and, say, Mighty Blow, as far as I can tell, but for some reason it just isn't liking swords. Any thoughts?