Phantasy 2018 Dev log: part II

[gsanders]

short patch B11 for v156:

  I don't know how much time I really have; I'm supposed to be studying.
  At the least it will add:
EDIT Sun 16 Sept '18:
  1) some more weak looters, foragers, and scouts to fight weaker parties
  Foragers are created again, these are factional troops of lowest tier and small groups found near villages and castles.  The higher faction numbers make slightly more patrols and scouts than their native human faction counterparts - that is, {Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Drow, Mages, Undead, and Blazing Hand}.

  2) enter towns and castles on first click, mostly (unless you are currently disguised when you left the last town/castle)
  This needs testing with epidemics.  Seems working fine.  This was a gift from Nameless Warrior at Warsword Conquest.  Be nice to him.

  3) enter towns and castles you aren't at war with when you should have been locked out at the gates but you just barely fail to meet criteria for a pass, based on your persuasion skill.  This is actually a patch b9 and greater thing, but b9 was fairly flawed.
  4) no longer lose your companions from the attempted fix at B10 and B10b

    5 ) slow movement, again.    DID add some checks that speed the party up in specific cases (fleeing from an enemy for example), to be the better of current movement rate or a fixed value.  The minimum movement rate is slightly higher for player's party than before.

    monk damage & some spells:  no time for this, which is a pity.
  6) quick adjust of orc lords gear to add  itp_civilian    item properties to armors worn so they don't seem naked in castles.
  7) W.R.E.C.K. still shows an error in TPE so don't use Tournaments.
  8 ) most quests should be working now, EXCEPT TOURNAMENTS.
  9) bandit lairs will now never swap player to become a bandit or spawn more players.  This was the reason the first quest series was closed but I don't have time to reopen it.  At least all the various bandit lairs should act correctly at this point.
---
  Status: LIVE at NexusMods and Moddb
  https://www.nexusmods.com/mbwarband/mods/6194?tab=files
  https://www.moddb.com/mods/phantasy-calradia

  Bugs to watch for:  there may still be issues with lords respawning after defeat.  If so, I'll adjust that sometime later this month.

 

[gsanders]

very quick and raw patch  "series v156 B12"

  close to final solve for lords disappearing after losing battles.  Only weakness I see is a one time fix for previous failed patches leaving lords missing could also mess with lords that joined you recently or were exiled for a good reason.  This does keep a corruption fix that was the goal of all the patches that started the |lords are missing" issue in the first place, without damaging companion relations or changing kingdom ladies into anything else.  This brings back missing lords and kings/queens in your campaign somewhere between 2 and 6 days in game after patching.

  Anyway, I'm out of time today but this looks to be the fix you were waiting for.  Open the game before patching, "save as" to another save slot, patch, and see if it works for you...

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/126N3pn9NifUZKeJ7G8zWpZtcFJhewZpS/view?usp=sharing

 

[gsanders]

v156 patch B12 cleaned up the chewed up missing lords in several open campaigns I had made that suffered from patches b9, b10 and b11, but I never did test against newly created characters (fresh savegames), nor kingdom starts where you begin the game as your own kingdom.  In both of those cases, the game gets chewed up by the same things that rescued a non-freshly started, in progress, non-kingdom game under patch B12.

  What I see in this report, and keeping in mind I only have about 2 real hours a week right now, compared to 50-55 hours a week during most of the last 14 months, I could either chase b156  trying to come up with something that behaved differently for new games than old games, or just assume that for new games you really shouldn't be in 156 in the first place and move you collectively to the version _I_ use.  After all, at this point, I'm modding for myself, and reflecting it so that if you feel like it, you can play the same version, and if not, its not like there arent a hundred other mods by people with more time.  This mod was never finished.  It still isn't.  But it does things differently.

  As I said on NexusMods:
"I'm thinking that since you're starting a new game anyway instead of recovering an old campaign, I might as well put up the in-progress v158 I used last.
That way I can skip the parts that were trying to fix the failed fixes v156b9 through b12 , since you wouldn't have had a chance to scramble your kingdoms up anyway if you were starting fresh.

  The thing about 158 is it has different loading in module.ini than 156 series, to support new faces on elf women and how spear animations are handled, plus the data model is completely redone so savegames can't be used that started on v156 (or earlier).  There are a few changes to troops to add rows that will later be filled in by custom troops, this spacing allows me to not have to break saves started now when adding two custom troop trees, something that can't be done right now with v155 custom troops.  There's working (mostly working) sea movement, with some early sea traders, that mostly are seen at the Nords and otherwise are seldom found, and there's a few sea pirates spawned but mostly aren't seen much.  At sea battles work correctly and loot can be pulled from them, unlike Warsword Conquest 2016.  Aristocracy is initialized correctly, meaning kingdom ladies can be married by asking parent/brother for permission, which was bugged before v156B8.  I've added some (4) extra lords to Drow so they have better early survivability.  They still won't survive unless you actively aid them, but if you join them they have a reasonable chance to survive.

  Again I have little time and there is much to do but I stopped playing 156 last June so if I were to do much it might as well start from the platform I most use.  I won't make my code OSP but if someone ever gets permission from Guspav to mod Guspav's 2017 code and I think they did a good job after a few months,  instead of just ripping off pieces to make their own necromancer fantasy or something that makes me puke, I'd consider sharing code.  Other than that,  its my scant schedule or nothing.  But at least 158 has a few improvements.

There's also more lists created for future tricks, as there are still places the performance could be accelerated (in the future) by smart use of lists, that I haven't had time to do.  Always consider this an unfinished mod, but instead of feeling sad so many normal things are turned off as wasters of my scant time (I'm looking at You, Tournaments and Tutorials), consider how many experimental things do work differently than every other mod.  I'll post a dump in a few hours."

EDIT: Sunday afternoon:
  I needed to edit troops more to set the custom troops more correctly, as some fields are difficult to change in a later patch.
  Also added 1 more lord to Undead,  1 to Blazing Hand, 2 to Orcs, and overall 7 to Drow since v156, which should allow a better evil to good balance.
I expect that the player's choice which "side" to help will tip the scales either way.

  Still experimenting with whether I can safely randomize female faces now.  Looks good, although a few ladies went bald.  Perhaps they wear wigs...
Kingdom ladies have randomized faces.

  Diplomacy recruiter menu no longer offers diplomacy recruiter at constable dialog.  Get a town and recruit from caravan at the town menu every 2 days.
Or start visiting villages yourself - I'm easy.  But you don't get a diplomacy style travelling recruiter.  The caravan recruiter is superior anyway.

Availability:  v158A0 FULL is approved at NexusMods
  https://www.nexusmods.com/mbwarband/mods/6194?tab=files

 

[gsanders]

quick patch v158 A1:

Does not claim to fix all problems known, but did these objectives:

1a) Quests - asking lords, or even the barkeep, for quests sometimes hung dialogs.  1a is traced to an error in party_templates check of bandit lairs, the line was not adjusted to look for Phantasy lair types instead of Native lair types, so the range check was wrong and certain factions would always hang repeatably.

  No text would display, so the user gets no feedback as to what happened.  Now when the code is about to check bandit lairs a message is displayed, which is harmless if everything worked and in the event a hang would have happened at least there's one last message displayed.  I expect the bandit_lair quest now works for all factions, but its also useful to leave the message in for a bit longer.

1b) Quests -  "Warning - this should never display" when asking a lord for a quest came uniquely from a check for offering Mercenary status which was denied for a variety of reasons up front (too small a party size, too low faction, too low renown, female gender wile faction has gender prejudice), or at the back end (you're a necromancer).  The front end checks are removed, so now only necromancer will fail mercenary quests, and maybe those inappropriately go through now, although that should be closed because mercenary contracts are one way to wipe faction penalties and I prefer not to allow Necromancers to do this.  Next time...

  3) Ship icon not updating for player and not seeing change of land so could not leave ship correctly.  This came from an optimization that forgot to leave an exception for player's "main_party", when skipping the next 460 parties as lairs, villages, castles, and towns that don't move.  Maybe someday I'll have a moving town (in the clouds etc).

  I still see other kinds of errors, but this is a fair start.  I'll be working next weekend both days, so next update is November.

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EZapzLUbjmVzaBLwPFBPGrrudlFSvpXf/view?usp=sharing
  note:
    unlike earlier updates this has just the changed files against v158_a0_FULL.  It can't be used to migrate a v150 or v156 series to 158.  It is very small.

 

[gsanders]

v158 A2 patch:
  simple patch just for v158 full that adds a small fix for stuck traders at the water's edge occurring from one line mistake in v158 a0 and a1.
  With this patch sea traders that should have spawned as ships but spawned as land traders in the water now have the land trader party skip towards town to hit the beaches, and a new message is generated when this happens.  Sea traders now function as intended, although they are fairly rarely seen.  There are messages (still active from a0 and a1) given when they spawn mainly to help me find them as at first I wasn't sure they were spawning.

  The sea trader behavior in v158 is different from previous years, specifically not the same as 2016 Warsword Conquest, but instead matching 2018 Warsword Conquest.  In my opinion, this is a less glitchy sea trader and the trades definitely go through, while before it was uncertain the towns got any benefit as the conditions to start trading may have never been met in 2016 version.  Sea traders still don't animate, they just park near town and trade, but now they really do trade.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jz8gQYvsPCXkCOc6dJ5B66iue3GgUfxX/view?usp=sharing