bunch of hacking questions...

Just been trying to play with the arcanum rule /proto files for the main game. I have several questions:

1) Is the armor-ignoring property of the rifled cannon hard-coded? What about for the filament sword / other neat weapons?

2) Where exactly is the tech schematic difficulty (for the individual component) set? Is it the magic/tech complexity?

3) Is there any easy way to remove an item from a map in the main arcanum game? (say, for example, I want to make Mech. Gauntlets more powerful, but don't want it easily available in the BMC caves(

4) Can anyone give me a quick run-through on how the Mad Texan accomplished his Machined Plate hack? (how to attach a script to a proto) I glanced through DKoepp's and Otto Krupp's proto docs but didn't see too much about it.

5) Monster definitions in npc.txt, unique.txt etc. have lists of spell *names* -- ie. "Spell: Harm" which seems like a weird way of doing it. Does it mean that if I change Harm to Foo that creature will no longer be able to cast a spell?

6) Changing monster AI seems very limited. I haven't experimented much, but is there any way to make them cast (esp offensive) spells more often?

7) I'm guessing not, but is there anyway to make unstackable things stackable? Nothing more annoying than a screen full of healing salves...

Does the grenade launcher actually do Area damage?

Finally, I've been looking at dlg files/script files. What are the "skip defaults"? Any tips /important things to know about dlg /script editing? ScrMonkey is pretty un-userfriendly, are the fan made ones any better?

I'm basically trying to weed out all the useless spells/tech schems and fix things to my own enjoyment. (Arcanum has so many great ideas, and so many bad ones -- I can't believe this game was actually put through beta testing) All the spell schools (except Meta and Divination, which I don't know what to do with) are useful now...going on to the techs...and I got rid of that awful Vorpal bunny (where's the holy hand grenade? HUH?) I'll post my changes when I'm done if anyone's interested.

Thanks in advance :smile: