Spells:Effects

EQ2Emulator -- Spell Effects

Spell Effects are those sparkly, bursty, explody visual effects you see around a player or objects while spells/abilities are being cast. An example would be when you are casting Call to Qeynos, and your player starts waving his/her hands and the columns appear, til the spell is done and you float away! That is a Spell Effect.

The data we use is taken right from the client assetslib.vpl file using Eq2VpkTool, a utility created by blazlabs.com in 2007. Using this tool, in the root of the assetslib.vpl you can see some *.dat files, one being spellcast.dat. Extracting and opening this spellcast.dat file, it is a plain-text list of spell effects IDs and paths to internal client effects processes.

An example of this data in it's raw format:

id  effect
13  priest/buff_limbs
14  priest/heal_ball
15  priest/root

Above, you see a priest class effect for buffing, healing, and rooting.

In our DB Milestone 1 database, we provided "fake spells" in the database to try out these different effects yourself. All you have to do to "cast" one is type /useability {id}, where id is the number shown in the file or spells table itself. If your local database does not have spell id's 1-2500 or so, you can source in the current database from the EQ2Content SVN and zap your buddies to kingdom come!

The first 2500 or so records in our `spells` table are this effects test data, and one of the (many) tasks on the Content Design team is to identify these spell effects so we can assign them to spells/abilities as they are developed.

(more info needed on using spell effects in spells records)