Underwater Effects?

Are there basic Bioware scripts to add effects such as the bubbles and feel of Worm's Undersea tileset to other tilesets such as caves or tunnels?

I have downloaded a swimming/drowning erf but it does not give a delay to drowning without having the specific underwater eq. Is it possible to adjust this to make it give a delay like in Aenea or should I search the vault for a different program?

Split off to it's own topic...

There are three bubbles placeables provided by BioWare. There are blueprints for them in the Placeables > Visual Effects palette.

There are placeable blueprints for kelp, sea weed, shells, and even schools of small fish in Placeables > Plarks & Nature.

For the underwater appearance of an area, I set the area to have blue-tinted lighting and blue fog. Not pure blue, but just enough to give the sense of being underwater.

As far as the delay in drowning, I do it via the module's heartbeat script. I have it initiate a counter that ticks off once per round (if the PC is still in an underwater area), with actual drowning starting after about 1 round per point of a PC's Constitution.

Ah, okay. I had read someone's explanation once about visual effects which read as if you had to activate a certain script. Sorry, I have gone through so many haks and such that I do not recall where I read that at.

About the ticker, I'm not quite sure what you mean.

I know, I have more questions than the world is indebted to its self, sorry.

With "visual effects", there are two types.

You have "placeable visual effects" (like the ones I mentioned above), which you can just drop into any area in the toolset. CEP includes a bunch of them, but they don't have blueprints in the palette...in which case you can just drop down a different one in your area, then edit its properties to change the appearance to one you want. This type is controlled by the placeables.2da file (just like any other placeables in the game).

You also have "true visual effects" that are applied as an effect to an object, creature, or location (and which may be instant, lasts for a while (duration), or permanent) and are added via scripting. This type of visual effect is controlled largely by the visualeffects.2da file (this includes anything from a fireball's explosion to the ring of holy symbols that appears when an Aenean cleric turns undead to the VFX quivers and arrows).

As far as the ticker and drowning, here's basically how it works...

1. PC enters an area marked as underwater.
2. Module's heartbeat script (which runs once every 6 seconds) runs a check on PCs' locations. If the PC is in an area marked as underwater, it runs an "underwater script".
3. The underwater script checks for waterbreathing gear/spells/subraces. If not, it then checks for the "drowning timer" variable stored on the PC.
4. If no "drowning timer" variable is set, the script will set one based on the PC's Constitution score. If one is already set, it will instead decrement that variable by 1 and set the new value on the PC.
5. If the "drowning timer" variable is low enough to trigger drowning, the script starts the drowning process (damages PC for 1/3 of current hitpoints, next round another 1/3, 3rd round the rest of the PC's hitpoints + 20 (doesn't matter if PC is healed of current damage, this one one is meant to kill).
6. Entering an area that is not marked as underwater, or getting a water breathing spell or something similar, removes the "drowning timer" variable and stops the drowning checks.

Questions are good. If you never ask questions (or try new things), you never learn.