First let me mention that I have spoken with Tekproxy and he has informed me that he will be adding checks for magic resistance soon. My questions pertain to the implementation of the basic resistances ie. Physical, Fire, Cold, Poison and Energy in the magic spells.

I am attempting to implement the spell scripts in my shard and I noticed that since the magery scripts use the ApplyDamageEX function and they send the damage type from the spells.cfg file this means that once magic resistance is added that damage will be reduced not only by the resisting spells skill but also by the call to CalcDamageAmount within the ApplyDamageEX function which reduces the damage amount based on the five resistance types listed above.

Was this intended to be the case where there is the possibility of having a double reduction in damage? If so then I suppose there is no problem but it seems to me that it should be only the resisiting spells skill that is used to determine damage amounts from spells. I was under the understanding, well maybe it was more of an assumption, that the afore mentioned resistances are meant to pertain to elemental damage added via the special hit scripts.

I would suggest that in order to correct this problem, the addition of a third and maybe fourth damage function be added to damage.inc; ApplySpellDamage and ApplySpellDamageEX. The only difference between these two functions and the others would be the removal of the call to CalcDamageAmount.

You could instead add the passage of the circle parameter to the ApplyDamage and ApplyDamageEX functions and if that parameter is present use the resisting spells skill to determine damage level and if not present use the CalcDamageAmount for determining damage amounts based on the five rssistances.

Anyway, that's my thoughts.

The way spell resist works now is it reduces the severity or duration of non-damaging offensive spells, like curse, weaken, poison, etc. It also gives you a minimum elemental resistance that doesn't stack with anything. GM resistance = 40 elemental resistance in everything.
http://uo.stratics.com/content/skills/resisting.shtml

Maybe if I add Resistable 0|1 to spells.cfg so that spellStarter will know which ones to check resistance on. Still not sure what I would use as the difficulty for the skill check since I don't know how it works on OSI. Apparently resist skill under 40 is difficult to resist GM mages, so caster Magery must factor into the skill check for resist.

If you want to spell resist to work the old way, you could change all damage types to forced and set Resistable to 1 for every spell.

These ideas are off the top of my head...

Folks switching to the way the new Distro handles resistance should take note that this is a departure from the way POL has handled magic resist up to this point. So be prepared for player bug reports about magic resist not working if you do go with the Distro system.

I simply scripted two new cfg settings to allow me to set it however I wanted it. I took the algorithms for calculating MR damage adjustment from POL 0.95 Distro and incorporated them into my version of 0.97 Distro magic scripts. Now if I want to I can combine both MR and the other resistances or use one or the other all by itself.

I just thought that people should be aware of the change though so that they can warn players and be ready for any complaints/bug reports that might come in.

The entire distro is completely new. I hope they notice more than spell resist.