Sim Sourcery - Working wand for magic sims

"People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end. All over the entire room, sometimes."
-- Terry Pratchett

Fortunately this isn't a risk for your simmies... But if your simmies are a bit on the evil side it's certainly a risk for their enemies!

** Update 20/11/2007: As pointed out by fireflies, there is a chance that furnishings which are being levitated may permanently disappear. The chance seems to vary from machine to machine. It looks to me like this is an issue with an EA global function for ghosts, and so I can't do much about it short of a global hack. Make sure your sims don't get the chance to levitate anything valuable, and if there is sufficient concern I'll put together a global hack to fix the issue. **



From the catalogue point of view, this set only includes one object, with one additional recolour. This object is a wand, which placed on a table or on the floor, does absolutely nothing. Placed into a sim's inventory however, and that sim will be able to learn and cast spells on their surroundings... And on other sims!

The wand adds a new pie menu option to sim menus called "Magic", which can have up to three submenus under it. It uses the magic skill originally created for the "Harry Potter Project" to track their capabilities, but these spells are not HP specific. The spells included here are as follows (the required magic skill level is in brackets):

Mischief
- Disappear furnishings (lvl 0)
- Levitate furnishings (lvl 1)

Bless
- With creativity (lvl 3)
- With irresistability (lvl 5)
- With long life (lvl 6)

Kill
- By electrocution (lvl 7)
- By choking (lvl 8)
- With flies (lvl 9)


Mischief is only available when you click on the active sim. The Kill and Bless options are available when you click on a different sim. Options will not appear until reaching the required magic skill level, and will only appear on eligible sims (ie, no killing kiddies!). Children cannot cast spells, although they can be blessed with creativity and long life.

The wand REQUIRES Nightlife, AND the "DA_Echo_magicskill.rar" file from the below link in order to work:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...893#post1149893
If you do not have these installed, you will get jump bugs!

The magic skill is used in the same way as it is in the HP set, so skill gained with one will transfer to the other (if you earn skill reading the HP magic books, it will count towards spells with this wand, etc). This wand is not intended to be HP specific though.

WARNING! This is a fairly complex hack, and as such is considered IN TESTING for the first two to three weeks after release. If you are not comfortable with potentially risky code in your game, then I suggest you wait a week or so before downloading. By then any big issues should have been found and fixed.

For the technically curious, the files contain the object mesh, two new custom sim animations (_anims), a social plugin object (_spellset), six new socials (_socialobject), and the object recolour (_recolourblack).

Known issues:
- There is a little bit of foot sliding in the animation when sims start/stop brandishing their wands. It's a custom animation, and they're a bit tricky foot-wise.

Polygon Counts:
Sourcery wand: 94

Custom Content by Me:
- Magic social object
- Magic social plugin
- "Sourcery" wand
- Animations for magic wand
- "Sourcery" wand recolour

Additional Credits:
Atavera for the handy notes on sim social plugins, Wes for the animation tools, Quaxi and Peter Jones for SimPE and PJSE, and Delphy, the ranchies, and everyone else at MTS2 for being generally awesome!