Despite the fact that I'm only halfway through level 8 maneuvers large amounts of progress has been made. I had a bug with Rising Phoenix which was preventing it from displaying on the maneuver selection screen. This led to the discovery of a larger, much nastier bug which was periodically hiding maneuvers that should appear. As this was in my largest files (4000+ lines) it took a lot of time to fix. Most of that time was identifying the error and the rest was adding about five hundred lines of "else nVar = 0;". The good news is that the maneuver selection screen loads a hell of a lot faster. Well maybe not a hell of a lot, a few split seconds, but I've been working on this for so long that split seconds feel like decades sometimes.
Another bug cropped up for no reason other than to annoy me where strikes would randomly turn the martial adept menu off and on and not actually run a strike. I tracked this down to my recent changes to allow the martial adept menus to toggle on and off (clean up some screen clutter) and as it turns out I had made a slight mistake when I originally assigned a successor feat to the filter feat which enqueues strikes. I had meant to assign it to a feat which had no function and therefore wouldn't bother the filter feat when it was called, thus preventing it from being accessible in the hotbar. As it turns out I'd actually set the feat for an empty entry and things ran exactly like I wanted, until I needed to add a feat which toggled the menus off and on, which was that entry and where my problems started. Live and learn.
I also had a hell of a time getting Immortal Fortitude to work until I discovered that a routine I had added to prevent resurrection in the case of an ability stat being reduced to zero was preventing the the maneuver from ever firing. Fun fact: NWN2 apparently treats all abilities as zero when a player drops below one hit point. Fun Fact 2: despite this, creatures can still be at zero in a stat and not automatically drop, as per the rules.
At this point it should be apparent that I was in the full passionate throes of debugging. While I was at it I took the time to finally enforce the rule about crusaders having to select all of their maneuvers. I implemented this simply by preventing the screen from closing while they were under their maximum allotment. The screen's kinda big and leaving it open gets in the way of a lot of things. However, for good measure I also added a gateway variable for Crusaders that prevents them from using any maneuver while their screens are open. Along the way I also found an old bug that would rarely shut down the Crusader's recovery method and curb stomped it. I really hated that bug.
So while the maneuvers have come along slowly, I have done many things that would have had to have been addressed before release. The fact that I didn't have to actively go out of my way to find them saves me the time spent looking for them, so I'm going to file this week under the 'win' column.
Currently I'm working on One With Shadow. It is both interesting and problematic. It is interesting because it's a counter which is initiated exactly like a boost. That is to say, there is no triggering event, it doesn't actually counter anything and nothing is implied in the description that would indicate what is being countered. The only two reasons I can think of for this are 1. Human error, it was supposed to be a boost and the editor missed it. 2. To prevent it from being used with Dual Boost, somewhat plausible as the maneuver as written is exceptionally strong. That brings me to the problematic part of the maneuver. it is really strong. Really, really strong.
It grants the incorporeal subtype for a round. Let's go over what that does for a moment. Attacks ignore armor and natural armor, you become immune to all non-magical attacks, even then these have a 50% miss chance. The ability to pass through solid objects, no natural armor, but a deflection bonus to AC based on the character's CHA mod. No STR, but they can use DEX instead. They don't have to let anyone make a listen check against them unless they want to. There are plenty of exceptions to all of these rules.
Some of these are at best hard to pull off, others are just right out. And I don't mean hard as in it'll take some time to do it. It'll do that too. I mean hard as in, makes many things incompatible and threatens module integrity. At this point I'm deciding what to keep if any at all of the original maneuver. It'll come down to balance issues for NWN2 in the end.
Despite this, I plan to be finished with maneuvers by next Wednesday. Crap, Dragon Age beat me. I'm optimistic because I've put most of the hard maneuvers behind me now. Hopefully, with a little luck the long awaited release won't be far behind. Here I go.
