Cool mod! Though I was expecting a sort of PVP mod where you control some or all of the monsters and players and duke it out in an arena, instead of just summoning two groups of monsters that fight (or at least, that's the impression I get). That might be difficult to implement though. Entails a bunch of character joins party scripts and editting the skilldata so friendly fire is possible for all skills (since I don't think you can really make two different parties or set different factions within the party.) Not sure what the maximum party size is, but I know it's at least 6. You could have 3 v 3 at minimum, perhaps with other non-controlled NPCs (including neutral ones that attack both teams).

If this is main dependent with a rift leading here, you could take a party from your main game into the arena with all their gear or abilities. Plus you could add a bunch of vendors and character level up and stat modification stuff to make the arena double as a cheat-level for those who want to just try a bunch of different builds or rework their character or what have you. Not sure if this is part of your vision, but it's an idea.

Good luck.

Thanks for the kind words ^^. I tried the PvP approach once I got everything in place, and it just ends the combat once every NPC is transformed to a player. It would also make the PvP aspect cumbersome because the host would have to assign which player actually gets to control the fighter that just got assigned as player. I can mess around with it but I don't think it'll lead anywhere with those drawbacks. With the PvP for DOS2, though, I'm hoping I can translate it into that system easily and then effectively have battles with actual control. I think there's a reason why PvP is a new thing in 2 and not a mod already in 1. Do you know if I can actually make functions on a higher level for the scripting? Like there is no way to handle CharacterTemplates the way there is for ItemTemplates, and you can make a character a player, but you can't easily unmake them through a single call. Being able to add such functionality would be pretty cool.

I was thinking of branching it into the main game as a sort of tactical challenge, where you can see a premade group of enemies on the other side, and you have to construct a team from the available fighters. If it beats the opposing team, you win gold and maybe small bits of lore about the arena :). This would include adding arena-dedicated currency, with each fighter costing an amount of currency to use. And of course a mode where you have to fight against these groups yourself, earning loot and whatnot in the process. There's a lot of directions to take this thing, thanks for the suggestions :D

Yeah for the PVP thing, I already messed around with this a bit when the editor first came out.

In the classic version this was doable(and there was a mod for it called Divine Arena) but there seems to be something new that's hardcoded in the EE that makes it not work. Targeting is also a problem.