Curious about ;magic

[Jodinor]

Just installed Lich 2 days ago and so far its nice. once I figure out how to do everything, I'll be ok. But when I use the ;magic command, it doesnt display the right times remaning for my spells. On my cleric and ranger, it is only displaying & adding the base amount of time for my spells, IE my ranger has 36 ranger spell ranks, but when i either incant or prep/cast 602 (which should be 56 minute per cast) ;magic only adds the base 20 minutes to the time.

I've tried ;magic clear/reset, but that doesnt help. is there someplace i have to manually put in my spell ranks?

[Methais]

While we're on the subject, is there a Lich FAQ anywhere? I have it installed but I really have no idea what it does or how to use it. I might be using a lot of its features and mistaking them for PsiNet features for all I know.

[mgoddess]

Before you prep/cast 602 (when ;magic does NOT register you as having 602 on), do a run of INFO, SKILLS, SKILLS FULL, EXP, HEALTH so that Infomonitor can pick up the info it needs to track what what stats/skills you have.

Once it has this, when you prep/cast 602, ;magic should register that it should be 56 minutes/cast for you.

[BigWorm]

Magic (and other parts of infomonitor) could use some improvements. I'm hoping to turn some ideas into notes and post them up here up here in the near future.

Off the top of my head, some areas for improvement would be:

Sharing correct durations between characters using lichnet
Correctly calculating durations from scrolls and magic items
Going through spell-list.txt to make sure all durations are correct

[Shaelun]

Jodinor: mgoddess gave the same answer I was about to; it shouldn't matter if a spell is currently active or not though. Every time Lich adds to the currently tracked duration of a spell, it re-evaluates how long a cast should last. It won't correct previously calculated casts though, no.

Methais: You'll find a number of text documents in your Lich program directory that you can read if you like. Tutorials, tidbits, a lot of stuff... it may help to bear in mind it was meant first and foremost as a tool for users that would allow them to implement features, not a prepackaged "do it all for you," utility like PsiNet was meant to be. I wrote a whole mess of stuff along the way though, some of which I polished a bit and included in the installer, some of which is kind of hit-or-miss because it's best suited for my character.

As for the other points... Well, here's why it is the way it is...

Originally I wanted a script to be able to check what spells are currently active without any round-about ways (bouncing a "magic" off of PsiNet the way Wizard scripts often do, for example), so I wrote in tracking of them so that scripts could make use of that info.

Then, since it was tracking them, it was pretty trivial to write in a quick way to actually look at the internal tracking of them. Voila, ;magic was born.

If Lich sees a message saying a spell melted, it ignores the duration and removes it from the list. If a duration hits 0 but no melting message has been seen, Lich just keeps tracking its duration as "0" but leaves the spell in the list. That lets a script at the bare minimum check if a spell is active or not. It wasn't actually meant to be a clone of PsiNet's magic feature, despite how it ended up, and I never intended on bothering to make it as robust.

I still don't really intend on ever making it more robust than it currently is, but who knows... I do strange things when I get bored.