Custom Spells Tutorial?

[NeonAvenger]

tl;dr - Are there any decent tutorials on how to make custom spells? Every time I see something promising it turns out to be: "For a more detailed look on this topic check out 404 RESOURCE NOT FOUND".

The long version:
I've been considering a suggestion for a store but I thought "Heck, the stuff I'm looking at is just slightly edited versions of existing things. It can't be hard to just script-kiddie them together" so I started poking around the toolset.
I worked out how to build a little room with a trapped shopkeeper and set up a dialogue for them.
Edited the spells.2da to add the new spell
The i_prp_spells.2da to allow the new spell to be added as an item property
Worked out how to add a line to a copy of the dialog.tlk to give it a useful name when looking for the effect.
But after that I'm lost... as far as I can tell most of the features I want to alter (area of effect, damage) seem to be buried in an object generated by the "EffectAreaOfEffect" function and it seems to be called with only a single int as an argument and I can't find a 2da that references to these ints, nor can I find a script that defines how the AoE object is created from them, so I'm stuck in a dead end at the moment.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[Valefort]

Lacking time so very quickly two things :

http://www.nwnlexicon.com/index.php?tit ... eaOfEffect

[Valefort]

To be clearer now that I have more time forget the fireball script that I opened, what matters is on the right ! You can find the usual effects used by AoE in the toolset in the script help window, look for AOE_PER_* (persistent) AOE_MOB_* (mobile) and various VFX_* like VFX_DUR_* (applied for a certain DURation).

There are ways to do custom visual effects if you're not satisfied with what you'll find there but I have yet to try that so I can't help you.

[NeonAvenger]

Aha, cheers. You've put me on the right track. Turns out the magic word was "Persistent".
Most of the AoE information is stored in VFX_Persistent.2da, not something like AreaOfEffect.2da where I was looking.