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

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?

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Heck yeah!

I already have the outlines of how I'm going to do saints, and I know where to find full lists of them (including game stats).  Much the same system will cover alchemy to the extent we plan to use it at first (out of combat / surrounding combat only).  Lock picking is just menus and a skill check, what could be easier?  The evil worshipping villages and robber's castles are a piece of cake - about the only complex thing about each one is where you set the inevitable fight scene.

The wild hunt I have some cool ideas on.  Ever been shouldered by an unridden charger in M&B?  Well, imagine fifteen of 'em meshed like huge ruddy dogs, trailing fire like their eyes were torches, and charging in a mob.  Wait for it; I hope to do that one some serious justice.

Tatzelwurms and giant spiders, I'm less sure about.  But I'm sure we'll find a way.

Request for assistance posted on Post No. 2 (front page)

Task for any volunteer:
Basically, can anyone decode the contents of DARKLAND.CTY.

For each city, we need:

(a) Name of Overlord (e.g. King of Denmark)
(b) Name of Local Ruler (e.g. Duke of Schleswig) (contained in Darklands FAQ)
(b) Names of City squares (Sadermarkt, Stadtplatz, etc)
(c) Name of Inn (Bodega, Gasthaus, Leihhaus etc)
(d) Name of Cathedral (always called the Dom?)
(e) Name of University (always called the Universitat?)
(f) Name of local church (Katherinekirche, etc)
(g) Name of citadel (Schloss, etc)

You can do this by staring hard at, or figuring out how to automatically parse DARKLAND.CTY, or by just visiting every city and writing it down.



On an unrelated note, I figure the Leader of the Hunt would be a faceless man in black armor and furs, wearing an antlered helm and astride a massive elk, with numerous similarly fearsome outriders... and of course the ghostly animal charge Hellequin mentioned... nice! The Wild Hunt would be almost impossible to defeat and the goal of the combat would be just to escape with your life... unless of course you had the saintly (or alchemical) power to banish them.

I am impressed. For once I rly mean it. It is a shame that all stats can not be incorporated in MB. One more thing that worries me a lil is AI of NPCs. A PC would have to be a cleric, alchemist and fighter to be able to use all skills to its potential.

When you want to start putting items etc. in, here's a few mods which have declared their models/textures freely available which might come in handy:

Mesoamerica (a few helmets and weapons, maybe the Spanish armors)
Dukes and Mercenaries
RR_Raptors weapon pack
Craftmod

Any other ones people know about that fit in with medieval Germany?

Woot!

Random encounter code version 0.1 is operational.  It shows no warning on the map, it currently selects one of three menus using a d% roll, and appears to do so cleanly and properly... it's all good.  (SVN isn't set up yet on my home machine, though, so it'll go up into the repo tomorrow.)

Next up I plan to have a "Local Risk Type" determined by where you are (in city, for instance, versus in the wild) which will be rolling on a different table, and a skill check to determine whether you get the "you spotted them" initial menu or the "you've been surprised" initial menu for a given encounter.  These should be relatively easy refinements.

Got another volunteer task which does not require coding skillz.  This is lower-priority, but won't actually be that hard, if one of our non-coders wishes to undertake it; just takes a copy of the map and a compass (or circle-drawing function in something like Illustrator).  I want to work on setting up an implementation for how we reckon the Risk Type and Risk Level by where you are on the map.  If someone is interested in contributing to this part, grab the map (a copy of the official Darklands map, btw, can be found here, although the nifty Flash version here is pretty sweet too), and go over it planning circles of dooooom.

By which I mean this: this is going to be my trick for establishing the difference between the road and the deep wilderness.  Take that map, and start drawing circles on it.  Each circle should encompass no major roads on the map, and indeed should steer clear of the roads by a decent margin.  [If you look in A4 on the map, you'll see Xanten and Wesel.  A road should get a span about as wide as the distance between these two cities, which is considered safe.  This gives plenty of room for player sloppiness and M&B's weird pathfinding algorithm.]  Don't get fanatical about circles, because the number of them will matter to us; to use another example from the jpeg map, in the area near Xanten/Wesel labeled "Bern", I'd put only one circle, with its center a little below the "d" in "Sauerland".  I wouldn't bother to "fill in" the western or southern tips of the vaguely triangular area between all these roads.  Mark the circle on a master map in something like Illustrator which can provide me with coordinates of the center and radius of this circle.

Once we have a bunch of those, what's going to happen (basically) is that an invisible map marker will sit at the center of each of those circles.  If you're within radius Y of map marker Z, you're in the wilderness, and your Risk Type is different.  There are plenty of ways we can conserve processor time and not scan all of them, merely the ones anywhere near you, if we find this is an issue.  I'll code it.  I would just appreciate some dab hand with a circle to go through and do the prep work.

Lots of jobs, folks.  They'll all get done eventually, but every volunteer is a help.  This mod is turning out to be surprisingly nontechnical - it's all about the voluminous content, really.

fisheye said:

Request for assistance posted on Post No. 2 (front page)

Task for any volunteer:
Basically, can anyone decipher the contents of DARKLAND.CTY.

For each city, it contains:

(a) Name of Overlord (e.g. King of Denmark)
(b) Name of Local Ruler (e.g. Duke of Schleswig)
(b) Names of City squares (Sadermarkt, Stadtplatz, etc)
(c) Name of Inn (Bodega, Gasthaus, Leihhaus etc)
(d) Name of Cathedral (Dom, etc)
(e) Name of University (Universitat?)
(f) Name of local church (Katherinekirche, etc)
(g) Name of citadel (Schloss, etc)

You can do this by staring hard at, or figuring out how to automatically parse DARKLAND.CTY, or by just visiting every city and writing it down.

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Do you know how to open the .CTY file and get the info or are you asking someone to figure it out?
If you know how i wouldn't mind going through it and getting the info for you. Otherwise i'll just send you info on cities as i get it
since i'm playing a game of darklands now.

I found a list of cities in a Darklands FAQ and updated each city to show if it has a university or a cathedral. Here is a typical entry:

Augsburg (Moderate Size)
    Rich Imperial Free City, home of the Fugger Bank
    Frager handles affairs for the Rat of the Reichstadte
    Docks: Ulm, Regensburg
    Cathedral

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It doesn't contain all information, but maybe you can use it while we figure out how to extract more info from the actual DARKLAND.cty. So far I have tried opening it in different text-editors (shows how much I know about binary files). If you want the document with the entries like the above example, just say the word.

Breyean said:

Do you know how to open the .CTY file and get the info or are you asking someone to figure it out?

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Thanks for the offer.

I don't know how to parse the .CTY file. Right now I'm just peering at it using a hex editor and I can see the text strings embedded in there in a jumble of data. The suitably patient could probably pick through that and extract the relevant info... or they could just visit every city in the game and write down the names.

jeansberg said:

I found a list of cities in a Darklands FAQ and updated each city to show if it has a university or a cathedral.

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Thanks jeansberg. I'd forgotten the FAQ actually has the political descriptions of each city. So now all I need is the name of the taverns and squares and such.

Help request updated.

This is exciting stuff. I really wonder how the city navigation will turn out. Maybe, after all, doing it the old way is much better. Allthough this part is hard for me too see yet. I understand that scenes will appear sometimes, what about dialogs? What about city trouble/battles?

I must also say that Holy Roman Empire is an exciting setting.

Hello Hellequin,
I have been trying to pm you, but if they have gone through I cannot see it from my end. 
I really like the darklands setting and would like to offer you my services as a quest/subplot writer. I am a experienced rpg scenario writer and have done a few quest suggestions for Khalids lombard Leagues mod(you can find them and see for yourself in the LL forum-and be assured that regarding gramma and spelling those are secondhand work for me).
  I think that a large number of subplots involving the politics, intrigues and characters of the setting will make the world more immersive and believable. (when writing rpg scenarios I often do "realistic nonfantasy" medieval occult detective tales, so I think I could be of assistance to the Darklands mod)
I have one major problem though, I am no modder and need to be told what is possible and what is not, Khalid thought my quests were doable, but difficult to script-even though I do not know what was difficult.
Best hopes and good luck with your project
Grendel

Don't forget the sounds.  Mods can have modular music now.  I have no idea what format the music is in, though....

The Darklands Jukebox utility will play every song in the game: we can simply record and encode to MP3.

Of course we also have the efforts of others to rely on:

http://www.darklands.net/dl_music.html

But since my Midi capability is crap, all these midi files sound like Daleks singing in a choir. EX-TER-MIN-ATE!

On a side note, were the knights in the original explicitly identified as Templars? I always thought that was unfair to the poor chaps....

EDIT: Yes, they're definitely Templars. My vote is for rewriting it so that the Templars don't get the shaft... I bet I'm in the minority though. Grendel, what do you think?

German crusader knights would certainly be the Teutonic knights, if that is any help.

fisheye said:

The Darklands Jukebox utility will play every song in the game: we can simply record and encode to MP3.

Of course we also have the efforts of others to rely on:

http://www.darklands.net/dl_music.html

But since my Midi capability is crap, all these midi files sound like Daleks singing in a choir. EX-TER-MIN-ATE!

On a side note, were the knights in the original explicitly identified as Templars? I always thought that was unfair to the poor chaps....

EDIT: Yes, they're definitely Templars. My vote is for rewriting it so that the Templars don't get the shaft... I bet I'm in the minority though. Grendel, what do you think?

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I downloaded the jukebox and VDMsound (to emulate a soundblaster card) and the original midi music sounded really primitive. This may be due to the VDMsound program, though. I also got the midi for Summer is icumen from the above site and managed to create an mp3 with real instruments from it. Unfortunately only some of the original songs can be found in midi-form.

jeansberg said:

The original midi music sounded really primitive. This may be due to the VDMsound program, though.

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I think the original music only has a few tracks (2 instruments?), so it's pretty primitive. I don't blame the VDMSound, I think it does a fantastic job, better than the midi on my sound card.

jeansberg said:

I also got the midi for Summer is icumen from the above site and managed to create an mp3 with real instruments from it. Unfortunately only some of the original songs can be found in midi-form.

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We don't have to restrict ourselves to the tunes from the original game. Of course the more originals, the better; but there's this huge library of classical tunes we can choose from, with the same feel. If you could pick a few from the links from the darklands.net page (midiworld, pbm, etc), and encode them into MP3 using your awesome synthesizer / sound card, that would be excellent.

I'm inclined to say that we leave the music for now; I'm no expert on it, either.  We may well want a mix of the originals (whose MIDI sounds pretty decent on my machine, for the most part) and some new stuff, like Gregorian Chant or some Hildegard von Bingen and so forth.  (Crossposted with the above).

But frankly if we lose a coder to the inevitable complexities of music and file formats, I'd call that a net loss at this time.

Grendel, I appreciate your offer, and don't know why your PMs have not come through (they haven't).  However, our initial guideline here is that first we replicate, then we expand upon.  The temptation to do otherwise is strong, but I'm resolute on this one.  However, there's a huge chunk of already-written code - much of it really fascinating, like finding out that a guild leader was actually commoner-born instead of merchant-class and thus is illegally holding his position - which is currently a low priority on our sequencers' radar.  If you wish to volunteer to sequence those and try to rebuild the coherent whole they were aiming for, that would be an excellent foundation for some similar politics/intrigue work, and would get us that much closer to the point where we are willing to talk about adding new material.

And as for Templars, I've always liked it being blamed on them.  Once we get to additions I'd even support filtering them a little more interestingly into the material of the land, such as seeing a Templar in close consultation with a particular lord, and so forth.  But the whole worshipping-a-mummified-head thing and late-period Templars is, to me, a nice tension between honour they deserve (in the medieval mindset) for their valour in the Crusades, and the corruption of power and secrecy.  So my vote (but it is just a vote) is that we keep it as the Knights Templar.  If we do anything I'd like the mummified head to make it in in some form; just makes them that much creepier.  (Imagine a final encounter in the fortress monastery where they must cross a large room to get to this relic, but it starts singing discordantly and they must fight their way through ghostly, nightmarish foes who seemingly cannot be hurt, and they must smash the head to end the fight - something like that.)

Hellequin said:

But frankly if we lose a coder to the inevitable complexities of music and file formats, I'd call that a net loss at this time.

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There is no complexity. It's just a music playlist. We get the MP3s, tag them either as "peacetime" "battle" or "both", and that's it. No coder involvement, it can all be done by the music maestro (Jeansberg?). Well unless the music maestro is ALSO a coder. I don't think that's the case?

As for the templars thing, we'll keep it as it is. Too complicated to change it. Maybe we'll add some other baddies to keep them company later so they don't feel so maligned.

Yeah. You shouldn't assume I know any coding.

I'm just not touching that, no sir.

Sure - if you're interested in maestro'ing, Jeansberg, then that'll mean one more thing off the eventual checklist. I'm just not sweating it for the nonce.

Hang on a second, Jeansberg if you want to contribute code that's even better....