Amtal said:
Hiho.
M&B:WB nub here . Stumbled across it roughly 8 weeks ago, was awestruck . Then got bored with native pretty quickly . Did not hesitate to find the MOD boards, found Perisno -> awestruck again . Still busy on my first playthrough on .75 . While reading and learning more and more, learned about Rigale/Phosphor . From what I read...awestrucking XD . Will download v20r7 later today to have my first look at it .
Heres the question: What does v20r7 incoorporate ? From what I gather, its Rigale with diplomacy 4.3 AND Perisno .76 . Did I get that correctly ? Is there anything more packed into it by now which I simply failed to notice while reading through all the information provided by gsanders?
@gsanders: I read you are working on manual/documentation for Phosphor . If so wanted, I would be glad to provide assistance with that .
p.s.: maybe time to get a dedicated Phophor subforum, I can not imagine how you are able keeping track with everything between the Rigale and Perisno sections...
Hi Amtal:
As for the subforum, the main issues that were keeping me from asking for yet another forum were:
1) I wasn't sure if being a blend of Rigale and Perisno meant I was stuck with being under either of their forums. But I've pretty much overran Rigale with Phosphor stuff, which isn't fair. When I inherited Rigale from Cromcrom/Cernunos (same person), I promised to keep it "alive" by adding to it. But the last update was late march/early April and there are many things that I've put into Phosphor that I haven't copied back into Rigale.
2) until last week, BRANDING was an issue -- I had not clearly understood how to remove Perisno logos, Rigale logos and so on from a combined mod, but last week I solved that.
3) Unique content not seen on either I have had covered, for quite some time. I have a huge amount of posts here, with the rare outsider post as well, mostly because I can't remember things well and the forum is an excellent place for my log book -- or at least, its handy to ME as a log book, and if anyone wants to follow along that's fine too. I suspect it wasn't meant to be used this way, so I'll have to find a solution that everyone likes. I actually can't function without something like this that I can control to log what got changed, what is open, what needs doing, and what next week's goals look like. I've tried to just keep editing the same post endlessly and then change posts in my log when the topic or theme changes.
Having my own "Phosphor" forum would help track new versions -- I make a new version every two weeks, on average, with the first 6 months coming 1 week apart. I think 2-3 weeks makes for a more exciting change set. Pretty much each version is not savegame compatible so 2-3 weeks is one playthrough for a deep game...
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WHAT GOT MERGED:
Well even Rigale became something more than when I got it last January. Until then, Rigale was focused on crafting, gathering, roleplaying layers that other mods ignored. It was a labor of love by one guy in France and he put YEARS into it. It had some bugs, one that still shows up from time to time but has a work-around that is fairly simple (if you're stuck in town and can't leave just go to tavern, ESC to save game and exit, load the game, and whatever was in "queue" for killing time (this is a needed condition to get stuck in town) now finishes.
In February I merged Diplomacy 4.3 to Rigale, which needed TWO MONTHS to finish. I had just come off of 2 months in Perisno -- .71->.73 were mine with nearly no other coders helping. I was in fact sick, and tired, and didn't appreciate having to carry Perisno by myself, when there were not less than "16 developers" listed. But I dare say I enjoyed most of my minutes there, and was pretty much thinking I needed to have a project I could do MY way, not according to a committee that seldom coded but wanted "equal say". I also didn't take criticism well. It was after all my first 3 months after a 25-30 year absence from coding. After Rigale had Diplomacy, I wanted to make Rigale a good starting platform for other modders, and leave the source to assist them. So I put modmerger framework, battle mini-map, prisoner dialog by Mordachai, and a demonstration of using the framework shown to reboot a Mount & Blade mod plugged into Warband, which some may have felt was impossible. So I put the earliest open source magic I could find, Mirathei's "Curtain of Fire" into code and released it side by side with Rigale, as a 2-in-1. that was end of March/April. Then I merged Perisno, which is NOT open source, and thus I cannot publish Phosphor's source, as I was still the most active actual programmer for Perisno this year (but Perisno is many years old, and had many Programmers).
Phosphor has everything I wanted to add to Perisno, or at least all that I wrote between April and now, plus all of Rigale, all of Diplomacy, formations, pieces of Silverstag, my own system for encumbrance, and my own scheme to use items sorted by categories to infer properties on items without having to make explicit item properties that Warband will reject. This "implicit" meta-information was something I felt no one else used. It's old school thinking.
Phosphor has all of Perisno's races, including the very pretty skin for human females that I adapted for Perisno, plus Elven Path's drow, plus undead and skeletons, and one version of Phosphor has all of Perisno 0.8 except the start sequence. The version you downloaded also has Kaos kit's accelerated start, where you can have a kingdom from first day to not have to grind man-days to get to middle game, plus a huge amount of debugger tools such as a troop inspection to inspect every troop adapted from Silverstag.
Rigale was extended to add from the original 28 recipes to 108 recipes; recipes now have the concept of subcombines -- to make a chain mail tunic, you take Iron, make a "chain links" and this needs a wood as fuel, do this 4 times, now you need to get hides and make a leatherwork, or buy one, and have 2 of those, then make the leatherworks into a leather jacket, and now combine all those to become one chain tunic. Your skill and a little randomness can put positive or negative item modifiers on the result. These are all new. Prices in Perisno were adjusted to prevent someone from getting easy money by becoming a guild master plus having very high (near 20s) skill so they make "lordly" things easily and relatively often, which sell too high.
But Rigale was changed not just that -- both Perisno and Rigale have not less than 400 changes each. I feel like the result is something not really just "this plus that", like a grand cut & paste, but with original coding. And original bugs...
The project isn't "finished". It's actually just now ready for the next stage of things - magic done my way, and religion -- which is itself a form of magic, with the two intertwined. This needed each layer to work so that the next layers start from a clean base.
So let's be clear: Rigale, which was started by Cromcrom, went idle after Cromcrom rage quit and actually lost his family over in part an obsession with his coding here. He came back as Cernonos to almost finish v11 Rigale when I was starting express an interest in the source code, but managed to get himself banned by posts off topic in another forum. At the time he was agitated about "Muslim" terror in France but generally depressed and hurting, and on a board hosted in Turkey, it really isn't useful to have any perceived bias against any group, especially the host country. His last act was to get me on as moderator and he did in fact assign me "rights to use" Rigale as I wished. I wish to keep it intact for him, as OSP in the manner he gave it to me, and free to use all but Phosphor in other mods. Phosphor, because pieces came from and contain Perisno, would need a deep cleaning before code could be open, for any reason, and since I do it all myself theres no reason to open it. If I had to scrub that much of it, I would either start again with Rigale 12.1 or Silverstag 26.4 and build it up again from there. As it stands, Phosphor is WAY more than Perisno. Notice how it takes months to change Perisno? This is because when .76 happened, it was 100% code taken from Phosphor, as a gift. Nobody plays Phosphor. Perisno has 40K or so players. Well, not NOBODY. There were 20 or so people that play. By now it may be 100. But for a very long time, Phosphor was "bleeding edge", and likely to stumble often. You had to kind of know what NOT to do to not crash.
By now it should be hard to hang. If you can run Perisno -- you can run Phosphor. Same specs. BUT use Warband 1.161-1.168, only. Encumbrance checking uses calls that aren't in 1.53-1.158 Warband engine.
So there you have it.
- GS
P.S. you asked about the manual. Expect that to need 2 days to get a MS Word document version to acceptable draft. I don't have software to export to .PDF
but I can pound out a Word document in quick order.