A Land Far Away

Interesting date is interesting, yes, though I have to release before the weekend on account of expecting to be on business travel this weekend, and next weekend being the last weekend before U.S. tax day (may you all be spared from the wrath of the audit gods).

So, another set of updates to the ACR, mostly centered around movement:

• Ridable horses, restricted only to warhorses (as we didn't have the people to really invest in untrained mounts in combat). Modules will have to add merchants to deal in them, they will cost 150 gold each.
  • Horses behave similarly to ALFA1 horses, in that they may not be targeted while mounted and provide the mounted PC with a walking movement rate of 2.4m/s and a running movement rate of 4.8m/s (default unencumbered PC is 2.0 and 4.0)
  • A new feat that all PCs acquire allows them to mount horses. The feat may be used on any horse owned by the PC to climb onto it, and may be used again to dismount.
  • A PC may also dismount a horse by removing their cloak (a related restriction to this-- due to the nature of models available, we had to link the appearance of horseback riding to cloaks. Mounting a horse will create a plot-item cloak on your PC, which will copy all properties of the currently-worn cloak if there is one. I am recommending to HDMs to allow exchanges of items that boost charisma, due to the NWN2-level problem of drained spells when swapping spellcasting ability score items on spontaneous spellcasters, to rings).
  • A horse may be instructed to follow its owner by speaking to it, provided that owner is in the same area.
  • A horse may be instructed to cease to follow its owner by speaking to it again. (anyone can do this, mind, though abusing your abilty to "grab" another PC's horse might be CvC or griefing; such distinctions would belong to the PA if necessary)
  • Slain horses are permanently dead. You have to buy another one. Precedent says that stealing or destroying another PC's property is absolutely CvC, and players should be aware.
  • Horses spawn when you log in, and despawn when you log out. Error cases fail over to the horse spawning next to you, instead of where you left it. We have some outstanding issues with persistent location which currently results in often waking to an affectionate horse nuzzling its owner awake-- this will hopefully be resolved in time.
• Related, movement rates that are not damaged by movement-altering spells (like haste or expeditious retreat) and are not thwarted by Freedom of Movement are available for use on overland maps. These rates are 0.2m/s (on foot) or 0.4m/s (on horseback).
• Barbarians in heavy armor, or barbarians who are heavily encumbered, do not receive their 0.2-0.4m/s bonus to walk/run speed.
• Legacy clerics with the travel domain no longer receive a 0.2-0.4m/s bonus to walk/run speed. (they, of course, still get the freedom of movement spell-like)
• All non-magical bonuses to base movement rate stack. (magical bonuses still do not)
• Paladins get warhorses at level 5, with stats per the SRD.
• Some bad heads we released in ACR v1.92 base are removed
• Bastard swords may now be used one-handed with the Exotic Weapon Proficiency (Bastard Sword) feat. Dwarven Waraxes may also be used one-handed with their exotic feat. PCs who have not yet replaced their exotic weapon proficiency with a weapon-specific one are still shockingly broken, and should get that replaced.
• Prefacing a request with #dm now sends the text of the statement to a request queue, separate from the sometimes-spammy chat window. Players should only make use of this with the permission of the DM (and something that will probably be more-commonly used in large parties when a DM can't follow all of the conversation and manage the encounters).

Download size is 158.66 MB; if you have any schedules to keep, be sure to account for download times.


As of this post, servers are mid-update, though some might only acquire functional horses once HDMs get their mitts on them, as we haven't really had very hard requirements on the state/availability of the script compiler on the hosts. However, any delays won't prevent you from portaling as it has in previous updates; there should be no risk of data loss when moving between different-versioned servers.

Wow.
That's a really really cool update.
Thanks to you and team for doing this for us.

Thanks to all who contributed to this!

Thank you.

Fantastic work! We've been so lucky to have a tech team for the last few years. No one really remembers what it was like when everything was all broken and things were so far behind from other NWN2 servers. Now we are all caught up and able to do wonderful things we never thought possible in 2009.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very very much.

A thing to note is that the Paladin warhorse changed in the 3.0->3.5 transition, and ALFA2 is using D&D3.5. The paladin warhorse ability is thus not a regular companion-type relationship (as detailed in the 3.0 PHB), but a daily calling ability (as detailed in the 3.5 PHB). This means that paladins get a usable ability that just makes their horse show up. Because it's magic like that.



Calling doesn't come up often in ALFA, though for the information of those not super familiar: a calling spell is similar in use to a summoning spell. It brings a creature to your place, typically with some expectation that they do stuff for you, and keeps them there for a defined duration. At the end of the spell, the called creature gets a free ride home. Calling is unique in that the creature called is literally transported to the caster, and thus can permanently die and typically retains some degree of free will.

// edit-- and we seem to be missing some icons in the actually-released stuff. I'll try to track that down. Until then, the missing-texture feat called "Mount or Dismount Horse" is what it sounds like. It just isn't what it looks like yet.

I want to buy a horsey.

Glad the 'hole-y' heads are removed for now.

As for horses, check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_MMJCR ... e=youtu.be

((would look even better without the big marker circle underneath the avatar, especially for screenshots and videos, but still looks quite amazing))

so will i need a new feat in order to use my dwarven waraxe? right now its only letting my dwarf use it two handed.

Awesome!
Steller job guys.

kiyoti wrote:so will i need a new feat in order to use my dwarven waraxe? right now its only letting my dwarf use it two handed.

We have thus far been following the NWN2 rule for dwarves and their axes (that is, all dwarves get proficiency in waraxes) and not the PnP one (that is, dwarves acquire no special proficiencies, but may treat a one-handed waraxe as a martial weapon), so I would say that it is currently "working as intended," but that you could make a convincing case that we ought to change it to the PnP rule (as it would mean taking a fancy proficiency away from dwarven clerics, who are notoriously overpowered, and giving a little help to those non-magical fightin' sorts, who have historically struggled here).

Seems that horses are losing some valuable information about who they belong to when mounted/dismounted, and despawns are being fussy. They also don't want to follow their owners once mounted, but that's less likely to cause a horseocalypse (or horseplosion? Let's go with 'horsesplosion'). If you acquire a horse, please mount the horse before logging off until I get fixes in.

How does this effect the arcane mount spell? My PC uses it IC for travel along the Moonshaes.

Are there any places to buy em yet or is this just a teaser till HDMs get a chance to put in working stables?
Can I spawn these on the DM side or is that also up to HDMs?