Schattenländer - v0.1d released (Feb 10/07)

Schattenländer v0.1d has officially been RELEASED.
Available from the M&B Repository here.

Features list, explanations, hints, and bug reports all to the Schattenländer thread on MBX, please.  The 0.1b was mostly a bugfix release for things our early adopters caught, but it adds one major piece of new audio content as well.  The 0.1c finished off some incompletely squished bugs (especially with potion brewing), and added functionality to a couple of new families of potions (bringing the total to five).

The newest 0.1d release adds:

• More variety in random encounters
• Weapon and armour quality deteriorates with use (although a high Artifice skill will largely prevent this)
• Full functionality on all potion types.  Heal with New-Wind, slow your foes with Stone-Tar, enhance your bow with Trueflight, and many more.
• Full functionality on all saints' blessings, except those dealing with local reputation, and the special ones which are unique to one or two saints.

(Content moved)

Please go check out the new forum for the up-to-date description of Schattenländer, and further discussion.  See first post in this thread.

Regarding skills - you can also have skills ouside of the skills box - so to speak.  No reason not to.  This is probably better, because a 1-10 skill limit with skills tied to stats that have nothing to do with the skill is not going to work well.

(Note - the previous thread, including the stuff that puts Bryce's comment above into context, is here  That discussion is now movin' over here.)

On the dual difficulty level:

Fisheye said:

No need. Just keep a global variable, set at character creation, for "hardness". Then modify the game parameters on the fly. Not hard. I've got encounters that scale in difficulty based on characer level in Extra NPCs mod, you just spawn different / more enemies at each encounter. Simple stuff.

Click to expand...

Fair enough.  I had been thinking that we might not have the 'budget' to make two duplicates of all enemies, which is more or less what I'd want to do. Then again, I suppose that even if we run out of troop space along the line, unlikely as that is, we can implement a "harden" script which runs before combat and beefs up the enemies in this instance.  Transparent to the user.  'Kay, I'm convinced.

On skills:

Fisheye said:

One more useless skill is Spotting. There's nothing to spot. We're not having visible parties on the overland map, just like in the original game, you can't see the goddamn bishop coming to collect your taxes. So we have one more spare skill.

Click to expand...

Dude!  Do you not remember the number of times when one of your Darklands party said "Shh! I hear someone up ahead.  Can't tell if they're friendly or not.  What should we do?".  Spotting is totally that skill (in Darklands, it was a Per stat).  So, yes, technically it may have lost its original function, but it more than holds its weight in Schattenlander terms (depending on how many encounter types we make this possible for).

I'm honestly not sure that priest/alchemist should be doable at all.  Not only is it iffy from a game-balance point of view, the two functions are conceptually somewhat at odds.  I'm certain that I do not want it to be possible during character creation, and that there will exist no companion who fills both roles.  We might want to make it possible to gain either of these statuses during play, much like in Darklands you could in theory work someone up to being an alchemist even though they started as a thug.  In such a case, we're not just talking about raising the skill - we're talking tough quest sequences culminating in getting the variable set.  And if it's tough for a thug to become a priest, it should be tougher yet for someone who's already an alchemist to do so, because of those philosophical conflicts.  For instance, perhaps there's a saint - one who does not appear randomly in kloster lists, but rather needs to be learned as the end of a quest - who is patron of astrology etc., and a priest wishing to become an alchemist must successfully invoke him as a part of the process nobody else needs to do.  Likewise, perhaps an alchemist wishing to become a priest must find a difficult formula or natrual-philosophy tract, which allows him to reconcile his knowledge of the world with his rising piety.  Those are all interesting to me, and if someone wants to make a kick-butt priest/alchemist of their PC after all that work... power to 'em!

Whereas, with regards to Bryce's comment above:

Regarding skills - you can also have skills ouside of the skills box - so to speak.  No reason not to.  This is probably better, because a 1-10 skill limit with skills tied to stats that have nothing to do with the skill is not going to work well.

Click to expand...

I am personally much happier to have the skill remain "normal" - appears on the character sheet, limited 1-10, bought with XP normally, etc - but be associated with an attribute which, while not completely inappropriate, is not the most appropriate we could have chosen, than to bring things "off-page" like that.  Especially because the odds are good that we can, someday, just alter not only Larceny's name but also its governing stat, at which point we do so.

Edited to fix broken hyperlink.

I am just donwloading the original Darkland.
I can remember i wanted it as it was brand new but my parents hab a different opinion.
I belive a M&B in Dark Germany could be quite ineresting.

Ahh I see the error of my ways. Yes, Spotting is not just a skill, it is a stat unto itself, Perception! Crucially important. Spot checks are like the most frequently made checks in D20. I'm an idiot for forgetting it. Well we should note this on the skills description and the tutorial screen.

As for alchemist/priests, I totally agree that the combination should be barred. Both from a game balance point of view and from a scenario point of view. It's inconsistent in the 15th C to be calling down saints with one hand and blasting your enemies with arcane potions with the other.

So, now I'm in complete agreement on the skill set.

Just a note on the incompatibility... it's not completely so.  There were "church philosophers" who would still have been plenty learned about natural philosophy; their objectives would generally have been different, but it's not a one hundred percent mismatch.  Check out the novel Ars Magica by Judith Tarr.

But, since we're starting out with the cardinal rule (replicate first, change after), adding the quests I'd require to make it feasible will be a later-stage portion of the project.  So, for now, yes - incompatible.

Hah!  I'm busy doing the triage of the menu files... luckily, they're well grouped by area/encounter, and the classification is even in alphabetical order (Camp before Cathedral, etc).  It's going pretty well.  That is, until I ran across this, between two different descriptions of entering a city...

This is text message 01, a necessary evil.

Click to expand...

I like these guys.

Note that Larceny need not be capped by the Charisma stat once skills.txt is moddable. It will be capped by the Agility stat.

Given the long projected development period I think we can just work on the assumption that skills.txt will be moddable before a beta is released. It will be fine.

If you want to borrow anything from the Warhammer mod, don't hesitate to ask.
The Empire is based on the Holy Roman Empire in the early 16th century, so there might be a bit of overlap.

Just wanted to voice my support for this mod. I've spent many happy hours playing Darklands, especially as it reminded me of Warhammer (the 1986 rpg version, which was considerably less 'fantasy' than its tabletop counterpart). As a matter of fact, the first time I played M&B i couldn't shake off the feeling that I was playing Darklands. Especially the old town-menues invoked that feeling.

Good luck lads!

Thanks, Ursca!  Once I see in more detail what we've got in terms of period models, etc., I may well ask.  And thanks for the vote of confidence, Xawery.


Status update - triage is done. 


Repository now contains about 150 files roughly categorized according to which encounter set or location they belong to.  Some of them (dragon, mines, raubritter) are large and need sub-sorting before they'll be all that useful.

There's a lot of material in here which I, at least, never saw in Darklands.  Jeweler's street, soldier's road, the mechanics of unrest and rebellion, nunneries and hospices in cities, a random encounter with Templars burning a Franciscan friar at the stake... all sorts of content which it's pretty clear they had to leave out of the release, but left in the code.  (For instance, the authors spent an estimated 10% of their total effort, a huge amount, on the mechanics to convince various residents to rebel or not rebel, or on finding blackmail on guild leaders.  Neat stuff.  I've never seen a whisper of it while playing - maybe that had to do with playing v.05, or maybe it's just me.)  As far as I'm concerned, this is all still grist for the mill, but it's at about fourth-order in priority. The fact that we might conceivably not only equal the Darklands content we all remember, but in fact breathe life into the designer's uncompleted notes as well, is tremendously exciting.  Have to keep my eyes on the immediate work.

We now have ready-made task number one: build a city navigation template.  Here's a sketch of how I'd like to see that go:
1) Build the map of menus-that-are-nexuses.  Every location that isn't a dead end (only exit is back out to where you came from) should get a menu.  Map that out and crosslink it.  Assume a minimal city, no University, no Fortress, no Soldier's Road (?), no Nunnery (?), no Hospice (?), no Jeweler's Road (?).
2) Construct the nexus menus (daytime only) which carry you from place to place, linking them all to each other as per the map.
3) Add menu options to the nexuses, and menus, for all the destinations which dead-end off of these nexuses, including actions (like checking rumours) which can be taken from within a nexus.  These should start out as placeholder menus with no significant text and a 'back' button only; ultimately, some of them will end up as scenes, their content shuffled into dialogue.  At this point we ought to have essentially all the "go there" buttons that we'd see in a Darklands city.

Ultimately, I think what I'd like to do is to have each city have a series of attributes (in slots) defining the presence/absence of a University, a Fortress, and so forth, and the city-specific names and face hash seeds for its inn/market/leaders/Medici reps/patron saint/etc.  Not to mention the quality factors (we can affect merchandise quality in 0.8!) for the various types of goods, and prices outgoing and incoming.  And the group's local rep.  But then, we build a single master city, and the individual bits (like the University) only show up when the current city supports them.  This is all notes for later, though, not things I'd expect to see in the first nav template.

Anyone want to step up to the plate to handle the city navigation task?  I'm not going to offer to do this bit; I'm going to put my energies into developing our random-encounter code.  Once we have a city template and a functional random-encounter script, then it's all insertions and instances from there for quite a while.

Not having to write the text of all the encounters is going to expedite this twohundredfold.

Sounds Swish!

Incidentally, I've had one PM from someone wanting to help with "plain english skills" parts, and wondering if the triage being done means this is no longer required.

Not at all!

Next I need people to do the grown-up's equivalent of the little kid's exercise, "can you put the pictures in order?"

Specifically, I have unlabeled text snippets by the tonload.  I need people to go through and put them into logical sequences.  This being a game, the logical sequences will include things like:
"Use this piece, call it X, if they chose the menu option labeled Y but failed a Persuade skill check" ...and so forth.

This could take the form of pure pseudocode, like I've shown above in red.  That's still a big help.  Double points, however, to people willing to read Winter's mod system documentation on menus, and to put it into the proper syntax structure for M&B menus.  You don't have to learn the whole coding process!  Even if you leave absolutely everything within an operations or conditions block (the stuff which is placed by convention inside square brackets, you'll see what I mean if you follow the link) in the form of pseudocode, you'll still have made a huge dent in the workload.

PM me if you're interested in starting on this next phase of the work.  If I get folks doing this sequencing work, then when we have the more difficult code structures written, we'll have a really easy time doing the incorporation stage.  That would rock.

I should be able to do the city template. The more experienced coders all have their own projects so I don't expect any volunteers to magically appear.

I am really excited about this...  diddn't think anything would actually happen when I first posted.  Glad to know others have the vision for the perfect marraige of two great games.

I wasn't sure if I should send this via PM or not, but seeing as how others might be interested in the sequencing work it might be relevant.

I decided to take some baby steps in tackling this menu setup by doing just the basic starting menu.  In doing so, it's raised a few questions for me regarding the usage of variables.

-I'm not sure how Hellequin wants to approach these town menus.  Would you prefer a variable-based template for all cities (ex. ...spend some time here in the %INN%, the local inn.) or should I just create individual menus for each city, like in the code below?

-Party member reference variables--what's the code for them?  I noticed the need for these right off the bat when each character of the party voices their concerns for the group after the oath-swearing.  I can do it with pseudo code, but I figure the less work you have to do on menus means the more work you can do on the meat of the project.  I understand that for non-coders like me, some pseudo code will be unavoidable, like when needing to reference the character with the spot high enough to detect an ambush, etc., but I think the most basic form can help.

In any case, here's what I tried to replicate into M&B menu form:

After discussing these issues, you decide to…

…spend some time here in the Gasthaus,the local inn.
…immediately leave the city of St. Joachimsthal for the open country.
…go out to the main street.
…slide out the back into a side street.

Click to expand...

And here's my code:


Comments/help appreciated.

Thanks, oo?oo of the unintelligible name.

Variable-based, please. I don't need people to generate code for me, it's easier for me to do that myself instead of having to correct other people's errors (which are unavoidable since they can't read my mind and anticipate my coding structure).

Essentially we just need the links from one menu to the next to be deciphered. Which menu leads to which, and when. What checks are performed, etc. Annotated in English will be fine. In fact code is actually harder to read and more annoying to correct. For example, in the code you created above, I have to go through each one and remove "st_joachimsthal".

Thanks, Fisheye.  In fact, you have the greater experience with module_menus.py; can I get you to help Seengs and 'Firefly' with their pseudocode, with the ultimate standard being "this will maximally help, and not hinder, Fisheye if he were the one to do it?"  The same balance will likely be close enough to true for myself or anyone else who goes on to the next bit, so if you're happy with the structures the sequencer guys are producing, then I'm happy.

Ditto the strong preference for variable-based.  I want one inn menu, which is structurally generic.  It'll grab its data (things like the name of the inn) from the properties of the city when invoked.  Similarly, if a menu needs to reference a particular character in the party (such as the best speaker), it'll calculate that at runtime.  We'll get to that once we're past the pseudocode stage.  For now, guys, just strive for maximum clarity in variables - feel free to leave the Darklands' $Variable references intact, they're generally just as self-explanatory as anything else we might do.  Syntactically if all the parentheses and quotation marks are there, that's really all I'm going for, to speed up the next stages.

I might be mistaken, but i think this is the most ambitious project MB ever seen.W0W. Darklands. Very daring indeed . If you guys can pull this off that would be something totally grand, since its one of those things that "if you do it - do it right, or dont do it at all". I am a little sceptical about the MB's ability to reflect the true feeling of Darklands and some of its more complex features, but hey what do I know?

Just out of curiosity, do you guys think it is indeed possible to implement (with a good degree of similarity to the original) praying/alchemy and all saints/formulas, lock picking, wild hunt, evil worshiping villages, bandit's castles and so on?

In any case - rock on guys!