Started playing Darklands again...

[Hellequin]

I concur with all of the content-related stuff above (pool of common NPCs - I really like the hash function idea BTW - and leaving the images be).

The assumption that I know how to use CVS & Subversion is amusing, though.  I'm not a programmer.  I'm a physicist.  Which means learning weird-ass code types as they come up (I can actually do useful things with Fortran, for instance), and almost always working alone on the code.  However, it's a damn good idea - so I'll look into it.  (And I'm a freaking fast learner.)  I do have a site I can host it on, with lots of clear space at the moment, and in fact it wouldn't surprise me if Dreamhost had something of the sort set up for a one-click install; they're cool about that sort of thing.

I'd like to let this thread meander a touch more before I start up an official thread, partly to keep its first bits fairly tidy (which will help bring further help onboard).  Two things I'd like to get down... one, the mod needs a name.  A good name is pretty critical.  I've been leaning toward "Darkenlands" but a German or pseudo-German translation of Darklands (or some phrase close to Darklands) might be cool too.  Checking babelfish, "shadow lands" translates to Schattenländer, which is really sweet.  Any comments or other ideas?

Next post will sum up my notes on Leipzig, from starting up DL again last night, and go into number two, which is the question of where to put the menu-to-scene boundaries.

 

[ronin47]

I'd like to let this thread meander a touch more before I start up an official thread, partly to keep its first bits fairly tidy (which will help bring further help onboard).  Two things I'd like to get down... one, the mod needs a name.  A good name is pretty critical.  I've been leaning toward "Darkenlands" but a German or pseudo-German translation of Darklands (or some phrase close to Darklands) might be cool too.  Checking babelfish, "shadow lands" translates to Schattenländer, which is really sweet.  Any comments or other ideas?

A Quasi-Correct Translation would be "Finsteres Land" (singular) or "(Die) finsteren Lande" (plural)

Hell Guys, THERE IS ACTUALLY SOMEONE WORKING AT A DL-MOD!!!!
I could not believe it!

 

[fisheye]

Hell Guys, THERE IS ACTUALLY SOMEONE WORKING AT A DL-MOD!!!!
I could not believe it!

WHAT?? WHO? WHO IS WORKING ON A DARKLANDS MOD??



Ahem. Just kidding.

All those titles sound good. Maybe with the tagline "Adventures in Mythic Europe" so people know what the heck to expect. Also try to make clear that it's not a German-language mod.

For the versioning thing, best is to get CVS or SVN working. Bryce, help??

Another option, if we can't get a CVS server:

Each of the scripters has a web host, right? We will just post the most current source on our respective sites when we've made a change to it. So say I code a new scene. Before I post it on my website, I'll download the latest version from Hellequin's site and do a merge. Then when I upload mine, it will the most current version and I can make a post on the thread to reflect the fact.

I cannot stress enough how necessary this is. Without such a system you can only have one coder. I can't tell you how many weekends have slipped by where I've had an hour or two to work on Extra NPCs mod, but I'm simply unable to do so since I don't have the most recent source that Hardcode has.

 

[ronin47]

And BTW: The Title I planned for my (Hypothetical) Mod was "Into the Darklands"
Think that sounds not so bad for your Project.
(If would code more and wouldn´t play .0803/4 or post on this Board, I could have already an playable 0.2 Vers of mine....

 

[Hellequin]

I'm big on single-word titles.  The tagline point, especially with regards to identifying the language of the mod, is a good one.  On the other hand, Mythic Europe is totally Ars Magica to me, not Darklands; it's just the specific phrase that does it, they used it like six hundred times in the rulebook for that game.  I hereby propose a mod title of Schattenländer - Into the Darklands.  Nays have until tonight to register cogent complaints, at which point it becomes a working title and a project, and I'll open an official thread.  (The umlaut, by the way, is optional IMO.  Only on high-visibility things like splash screens and thread titles will I generally bother.)

An old but still usable version of Subversion (1.1.4) is directly available on my hosting provider (Dreamhost), and I have generated a repository for the project.  Getting some weird issues with the initial repository and its refusal to put a particular directory under version control, but I think I've gotten those resolved; I think it may be a TortoiseSVN issue, I'm not sure.  Those interested in really contributing to the project, PM me and I will send you the URL and set you up a username and password.  I'm not sweating SSL or anything here, it's not like it's high-security, I just want to keep versioning under control.  The workaround Fisheye is describing won't be necessary.

If and when you do PM me, please let me know (a) what you are interested in working on in Schattenlander, (b) how much time you realistically expect to be able to put in on this project (say in hours per week), (c) the extent of the modding you've done so far and which bits you were responsible for on those projects, and (d) what you've got done on related projects (such as Bryce's or Ronin's code chunks, or Pope's meshes) that you'd like to contribute.  Please be as detailed as you like on any of these; more information is better.

Once I start the official thread we'll lay out tasks and start distributing them.

 

[Seengs]

I really like the name, actually.

 

[bryce777]

Well, I will put my source up on cvs once it is in .800 format.  It is a good starting point.  I already have the raubritter castles (orksih forts) working, though I want to elaborate more on them and have the option to 'ask politely to come in' work.  I also have modded arrays into M&B mod system, and do a lot of extra static checking for errors.

I generate out a bunch of hamlets and I generate out 500 npcs and have them randomly travel around the hamlets.  We would want to change that up for this mod, of course, but the basic idea works pretty well.  I pmed you the demo version so you can play with that if you like.  I'll pm it to fisheye as well. 

 

[Hellequin]

Back to the next post I had intended to make before lunch:

City anatomy.  This is going to be a big element of the mod, and it's something on which I want some consensus.  The big question is this: at what point do we "incarnate" the textual descriptions of Darklands into M&B scenes in 3D?

I'll use Leipzig as my example to illustrate.  A quick sketch of it, leaving off several lowest-end destinations and the entire political sphere (it has both a town hall and a fortress, access to neither of which is available when you start), looks like this:

Now, I can see several ways to implement this; they have their advantages and their disadvantages, and we need to figure out where our ideal balance stands.

Option one - pure Darklands
Primary decision points (main/side streets) are menus.  Secondary decision points (church area, kaufhaus, crafts district) and tertiary ones (martial crafts, other crafts) are menus.  Destinations (Fuggers, church, armourer, physician) are implemented as dialogue directly off the menu.  (Can this be done?  Can't think of any instances in normal M&B where we go straight from menu to dialogue.)
Advantage: Zero scene crafting for cities.
Disadvantages: May be impossible. No use of 3D visuals outside of combat; poor visual appeal.

Option two - Darklands outdoors, M&B interiors
Primary, secondary, and tertiary decision points are menus.  Destinations are M&B interior scenes showing the shops, houses, and so forth, with the merchants and innkeepers visibly present.
Advantage: No large-scale scene crafting.  City continues to feel larger than you can see.
Disadvantage: No large-scale visuals as eye candy.

Option three - Darklands branching, M&B subcities
Primary decision points are menus only.  Secondary and/or tertiary decision points - areas like the Kaufhaus market and the Crafts district - are M&B outdoor scenes (are, in fact, smallish M&B cities), with doors opening on M&B shops/scenes for the destinations.  Once you've found a shop once, it's availble off the menu for its subcity, like in M&B.
Advantage: Mix of exterior and interior eye candy.  Familiar to M&B players.
Disadvantage: City begins to feel small, like M&B cities do.  Not quite as bad as Native, but not good.  A fair amount of scene-crafting required.  "Shrinking" factor may be able to be offset by using subcities which feel very strongly different from one another, and good city-skyline skyboxes.

Option four - The big explorable
Expands on option three by just going whole hog.  Every Darklands menu is replaced with an M&B scene.  You need to do lots of exploring just to map out the city for yourself; the first time you visit, even the "side streets" nexus isn't automatically available on the menu.
Advantage: Exploring is fun!  Lots of eye candy.
Disadvantage: Tons of scene crafting.

Option five - subcities separated on map
This is an interesting possibility I wanted to throw out into the mix.  It would be possible to make our cities actually "large" on the world map, by having the subcities incarnated as distinct icons on the world map.  Thus, instead of one "Leipzig" icon on the map, there would be a cluster of them... a "Leipzig - Kaufhaus Market", a "Leipzig - Church District", and so forth.  Imagine them as a central icon which is big and flattish, generic citylike, with towers and church spires rising out of it.  Surround them with a thin "river" painted brown, with "Leipzig - North Gate" and so forth in the only available gaps, and you could have a pretty damn original and cool implementation of the M&B engine.
Advantage: Cool points.  Cities can't help feeling large - you have to leave the Market and travel on the map to get to the Church District.  In-city random encounters use same engine as wilderness random encounters (they just check prox to the city center).  Larger and smaller cities are visibly thus, on the map, being made up of more subcities.
Disadvantage: Lots of making new map icons, on top of all of the coding required for option three.  Does not progress all that naturally from the previously listed options.


Note that with the exception of option five, these options basically supersede one another gracefully.  If we have a fully developed option two, and then we get a model for the Kaufhaus done, we can do option three with regards to that scene only.  If we've got option three nailed down and choose to start working on the interstices to make option four, we can.  Whether we should, or not, is another question.  I'm curious - which of these did each of you envision, when talking about this project?

(Crossposted - bryce, yeah, I've glanced at the code you sent me but not in detail.  I'm dubious about the overhead of this approach, and am kind of inclined to go with a purer random-encounter model - every hour you have a random chance of a random encounter from a list, which if necessary spawns a party nearby, invisible or visible as appropriate to the encounter.  But I'll look over it again.)

 

[bryce777]

I would go for option 2.

personally I just hate wandering around cities.  Also, the big issue is that menus can give the city a HUGE feeling, whereas when you wal across a whole city in 20 seconds that is supposed to be the capital city it just looks idiotic. 

It is also tedious and time consuming to make large scenes, and fighting in a really large scene will be impossible.  On the other hand it would be easy to make an alley scene for fights with bandits or guards.

the issue with #1 is that the transition from dialog to menu and back does not seem to be easy to make (I have tried).  You could probably do everything through menus instead like darklands, and jump to trade menu or recruit (heroes) menu and back with some work, however.

But, I think #2 is both the easiest and the most appealing.

 

[nijis]

Interesting to read this discussion. One approach I was going to try with the Sicily mod would be to have the entire city wall structure (or half of it, for particularly large cities) plus outlying buildings modelled on the scene, to give the player a sense of the scale of the place when viewed from the outside. As a reference point, even the largest of medieval European cities were maybe a mile across and most a lot less, while I calculated the length of the longest scenes to be about a quarter-mile (although my estimation might be off).

However, at first you'd only bother to model small, enclosed sub-sections (like a market street, say) that would be connected via passages. Each subsection has its own entry point, accessible from the menu. This allows you to expand from branching to the big explorable over time, if you're so inclined, but doesn't force you to do much work to have a decent-looking playable starting point. This also allows the player to move from one subcity to another via the menu, if you don't like exploring. I just thought I'd throw that out there, as it's good to see designers devoting a lot of thought to making realistic-feeling larger cities.

 

[Seengs]

I'd cast my vote for #1.  As an avid reader, I can let my imagination do the describing for me far better than an actual 3d represention, as long as written descriptions are well done for a 100% menu driven city experience.  Is a totally menu driven town system possible in M&B?  Gameplay can be enhanced IMHO doing it this way, even though "eye candy" will suffer.  BUT, it's in the battles where I personally like the good visuals, not spending crucial minutes tromping around walls/buildings in the towns.  Even before this discussion started I craved a totally menu driven town option, because I hate the running around town stuff of games nowadays.  A BIG reason I love DL's to this day.  It's better to feel like your involved in good gameplay than to sacrifice content for visuals.  Even in Oblivion, I couldn't get away from the feeling I was in a MMORPG, even though it's a beautiful game.  Just a personal preference.  If it's not even possible in M&B, just ignore this whole little speech!

 

[sheek]

Wow this mod is really taking off! Looking forward to it.

I'd cast my vote for #1.  As an avid reader, I can let my imagination do the describing for me far better than an actual 3d represention, as long as written descriptions are well done for a 100% menu driven city experience.  Is a totally menu driven town system possible in M&B?

Sure why not?

I greatly encourage you to go 100% text. Do not even have a 3D interface of shops, it's pointless - wastes a lot of dev time, many most players don't care and some (like me) find it irritating. Go directly to trade screens. Taverns and throne rooms may have a use for 3D scenes, but only if there is more than one person to talk to.

In other words Option #1 with rare exceptions using #2.

By the way are you looking for new mission/quest types or are you sticking strictly to DL on that? I have been working on implementing generic missions, not for any mod in particular and I would enjoy contributing in that way.

 

[fisheye]

I vote #1.5.

#1 sounds easier but it's actually much harder for shops and inns. As Bryce said there's no way to trigger a conversation from a game menu, and it's even more impossible to jump straight to a trade screen. If you try to go 100% text we'll have to use some crazy hacks and it will take more time to develop and debug them than to create the scenes themselves. For the inns you want your NPCs to be standing in the scene so you can talk to them and leave them there (or not).

In terms of additional work to enable scenes for merchants, there's none. M&B has what, 12 cities and hence 12 different merchant shop and tavern interiors. That's all you need. EDIT: Hm, it looks like we'll need an Alchemist's shop. So we'll need to make a simple interior shop scene and throw a bunch of beakers and retorts into it. Hopefully not too hard.

As for connections, use the menu system. When I go into a city for the 15th time, I'm not interested in exploring a wonderful world of 3D passages - I'm there to buy supplies, get quests, then head out again for more action. The faster we can get a player to the functionality they want, the better.

Now the tricky thing is, what to do with churches and town halls and offices where the scenes are not already available. For this I vote #1, only game menus. It will be much faster to implement and has the advantages already mentioned. If you want scenes for this, then you'd need several different church scenes, several different town halls, etc.... a lot of effort. Not to mention I really don't fancy having to model 5 different cathedrals and universities. We can do this later if we get more scene modellers who like to do this kind of stuff.

So in summary, Option #1 EXCEPT for shops and taverns which use option #2.

 

[bryce777]

Actually, fisheye is probably right about this.  Also, the interactions for town hall and church are not very complicated.

 

[Hellequin]

Not to mention that 1.5 evolves into 2+ gracefully, as I mentioned.

Man, I want menu meshes enabled!  Y'see, I found all the images.  Pretty little gifs.  They'll do so very much for this mod, the moment we can enable menu meshes... that game had such good art.  Never mind for its time; the simplicity and limited palette is definitely part of their medieval charm.  Anyone interested can find them (all, or most) here.  (The parent site has a random load script which shows one each time you browse the page - nice.)

With those in mind, I'm all over 1.5 with possible intention to degrade not upward to 2, but downward to 1.  Worth considering.

============== Pause, check, read, think, check again ===============

Holy crap.

I just looked at the actual game data, and all of the menus are there.  In text form.

In one file.

I'd been about to ask people to go through and play through the game, writing down their random encounters as they go.  But I took a second to look, and the file msgfiles (no extension) in the Darklands game directory appears to contain every. bloody. word. of the game's menus.  If you don't have the game at present, the file is here.

It's one megabyte.  Of pure text.

Okay.  I'm now looking for a way to partition up the contents of this monster into usable chunks and do triage and transformation.  Optimally, I think what we want is to use the special characters Microprose built in, and find ways to text-replace or macro-replace that into M&B mod system delimiters.  The Schattenlander project is now looking for volunteers to work on (a) triaging the menus to extract the random encounters, etc, and classifying them all, and (b) programmatically turning them into menus for our purposes.

We could do this in one huge swoop.

Sorry, I'm stunned.  More later.  Wow.

 

[Merentha]

*adds Hellequin to his hero list*  I am looking forward to this with great interest ser, and wish you the best of luck.

 

[fisheye]

Okay.  I'm now looking for a way to partition up the contents of this monster into usable chunks and do triage and transformation.  Optimally, I think what we want is to use the special characters Microprose built in, and find ways to text-replace or macro-replace that into M&B mod system delimiters.  The Schattenlander project is now looking for volunteers to work on (a) triaging the menus to extract the random encounters, etc, and classifying them all, and (b) programmatically turning them into menus for our purposes.

Well, I'd rather do this by hand. Game menus are the easiest part of mod scripting. It's the interface with encounters and scenes you need to worry about, and no automagic parser is going to help you with that. Being able to cut and paste from that file would be of immense help already, automating it is somewhat less essential.

 

[fisheye]

Thoughts on Alchemy

Potions are problematic. We have the following issues:

1. The natural way to implement them is as thrown weapons. Unfortunately this only allows them to cause direct damage. There is no way to trigger an effect upon impact or even find out who was hit. This makes almost all potions infeasible except those which cause a local effect around the player or do direct damage on the target that was hit. For example, you cannot cause stone-tar to create a pool of mud 10' radius around the place where the potion landed.

2. You can only carry 4 potions at a time. This is if you're running around completely unarmed! Clearly infeasible. EDIT: Hmm. You can get around this by having a generic "combat potion" and hitting I to select the actual potion selected from your inventory, so you can access all the potions in your inventory. So not a big problem once people figure out how to use the interface.


Sorcery is much easier, because there is no physical object that is being thrown. You can have a single very small mesh that represents magical power and is implemented as a thrown item (very high velocity so it basically goes in a straight line). More magic power on the character = more ammo on the thrown item. Hitting the Inventory key in combat cycles the spell you wish to cast. You can implement spells that are Area-of-effect in a fixed area in front of you (10' radius centered on player, 15' cone, or 5' radius ball 10' ahead, line straight ahead), and these spells can affect the behavior and skills of your allies and opponents. Unlike potions, there is no disconnect between physically lobbed items and the arcane effect.

With these limitations I'm somewhat inclined to replace combat alchemy with sorcery. Potions remain, but only ones that you can chug before or after a battle such as Essence of Grace, Quickmove, Truesight, Trueflight, Greatpower, Deadly Blade, Eater Water, Transformation, Strongedge, Hardarmor. When fighting, instead of lobbing bottles of glass at your enemies and getting indigestion chugging down potions in 0.1 seconds, you get to cast spells.

Spells are formulae which need to be learned, and they also use up reagents (automatically extracted from your main inventory, it's assumed that you are carrying them on your person during combat and they weigh nothing). Basically identical to potions except you don't brew them beforehand and you don't carry them physically during combat. Think of a spell as an insta-brew potion that's chucked immediately

Opinions and suggested workarounds are keenly sought!

 

[bryce777]

My thought is that potions should only be used between combats not during, though menus.  You use a thunderburst and enemies lose halth before battle.  Use noxious aroma and they lose weapons skill, etc.

That is how I am doing sorcery for LoM so far. 

The potions were really best used for adventuring, really.  They were SO expensive I never wasted them on combat except to do healing during combat. 

 

[Pnakotus]

Expensive?  Potion manufacturing was the easiest way to make money.  Aside from the monotonous walking around to get ingredients, Alchemy was the road to infinite money.  So you can't really feel bad for throwing a few dozen pounds worth of potions to kill a dragon.