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Tovias said:
It is in the Magic Patch description. Magic will be simply blocked out during sieges, and rightfully so. I played the Phantasy Calradia mod and it was a disaster. One well-placed spell could obliterate 40 troops clumped up on the ladder. I could only imagine what would happen at for example Dark Elves' Black Fortress where at the starting position attackers are all stacked up.
Ramazon said:
Plus as a defender all you would need to do is spam the spells which hex ranged accuracy and the enemy attacking archers will do next to nothing.
Seeing that you are active on the forums lately Polloio (and we've just been joined by Nameless Warrior there, hi!) I would like to ask another question that was bugging me, and I believe some other people.
- are you planning to give elven races their trademark ears? Can it even be done with the human model in this engine? How about adding some wig items with long hair and maybe a helmet or two, with the ears visible, to work around it? That would be pretty much what you did with all non-human races to get their features working.
- If the above is not an option for any reason, do you plan to at least fix the current elf hair options? At least for females every second hairstyle has heavy clipping going on.
- I was also wondering about villages having generic scenes and NPCs but it seems you are already on it. Thanks!
- are you planning to give elven races their trademark ears? Can it even be done with the human model in this engine? How about adding some wig items with long hair and maybe a helmet or two, with the ears visible, to work around it? That would be pretty much what you did with all non-human races to get their features working.
- If the above is not an option for any reason, do you plan to at least fix the current elf hair options? At least for females every second hairstyle has heavy clipping going on.
- I was also wondering about villages having generic scenes and NPCs but it seems you are already on it. Thanks!
Hi Ramazon. I would love the elves to have proper ears. I think that there is a reason for it, maybe something to do with clipping with helmets, I cannot remember but there I remember del mentioning something back when he did the skins. If it is a clipping issue then we could do the fake heads like you say (which we do for chaos dwarves to get the teeth) but the trouble then would be the player as an elf. Redoing the elves is something for a later update and I am sure we will troubleshoot it then.
I would love to add more hair for females (clipping is clear), males (too much gekokujo hair) and elves but our modellers have much to do that is cannot be prioritised at the moment. Hopefully at some point.
We don't have much scope for new scenes at the moment apart from fixing issues with current ones (many thanks to marshal_157).
I would love to add more hair for females (clipping is clear), males (too much gekokujo hair) and elves but our modellers have much to do that is cannot be prioritised at the moment. Hopefully at some point.
We don't have much scope for new scenes at the moment apart from fixing issues with current ones (many thanks to marshal_157).
Restriction to cut down magic in sieges is artificial IMHO.
Its natural it excells at sieges. I did sieges in Phantasy Caldaria it wasn't OP - it was very powerful. Mages die from one arrow hit, and higher level troops had resistances for magic.
The problems you mention its coz there walls make people cluster but don't give protection at the same time.
It is because beacuse there is no collision check in spell scripts.
There is a solution here that is good and diminishes the problem (and in general makes things more realisitc)
Explosion code that takes into account obstacles and already hit units
a) Take three orthogonal vectors that pointed from explosion to two forward directions and one backward and name them (L, R, B) Its important to take left-forward, right-forward and back-up.
b) See if those points are visible form center of sphere. ( *position_has_line_of_sight_to_positiion*),
Multiply vectors by the the visibility weight, VI, Vectors should have been normalized previously.
Visibility weight should be 1/3 if point is visible form center or less than 1/3 (1/9 lets say) if not.
c) When you apply damage (my guess is you're using granade code) - and must calculate relative position of agent to the center of explosion.
Normalize this and name following way P = (AgentPOS - Explosion_POS) / length(P)
Your damage is (TOTAL_DAMAGE is whatever you had before)
TOTAL_DAMAGE_PHYSICAL = TOTAL_DAMAGE * (
max(0, VL * dot (L, P)) +
max(0, VR * dot ( R, P)) +
max(0, VB*dot(B, P))
)
You now have damage that accounts existence of surfaces in vinicity of the spell its approximatly accurate but it 100 better than not taking cover into account at all.
If you want more accuracy you sample with more vectors.
I may edit this post to replace formulas with actual code.
1. Note that you have change one script, the damage calculation - NOT every spell if gsanders was involved I'm sure he made the damage calculation "grande" code separated.
2. This is very performant - you make visibility check three times per explosion, not per enemy!
What is the second issue with spells in sieges - the fact that is strategically good choice?
If you don't want spamming apply miscast chances for bad outcome should raise (i.e 5% for damage each time u cast a spell)
Its natural it excells at sieges. I did sieges in Phantasy Caldaria it wasn't OP - it was very powerful. Mages die from one arrow hit, and higher level troops had resistances for magic.
The problems you mention its coz there walls make people cluster but don't give protection at the same time.
It is because beacuse there is no collision check in spell scripts.
There is a solution here that is good and diminishes the problem (and in general makes things more realisitc)
Explosion code that takes into account obstacles and already hit units
a) Take three orthogonal vectors that pointed from explosion to two forward directions and one backward and name them (L, R, B) Its important to take left-forward, right-forward and back-up.
b) See if those points are visible form center of sphere. ( *position_has_line_of_sight_to_positiion*),
Multiply vectors by the the visibility weight, VI, Vectors should have been normalized previously.
Visibility weight should be 1/3 if point is visible form center or less than 1/3 (1/9 lets say) if not.
c) When you apply damage (my guess is you're using granade code) - and must calculate relative position of agent to the center of explosion.
Normalize this and name following way P = (AgentPOS - Explosion_POS) / length(P)
Your damage is (TOTAL_DAMAGE is whatever you had before)
TOTAL_DAMAGE_PHYSICAL = TOTAL_DAMAGE * (
max(0, VL * dot (L, P)) +
max(0, VR * dot ( R, P)) +
max(0, VB*dot(B, P))
)
You now have damage that accounts existence of surfaces in vinicity of the spell its approximatly accurate but it 100 better than not taking cover into account at all.
If you want more accuracy you sample with more vectors.
I may edit this post to replace formulas with actual code.
1. Note that you have change one script, the damage calculation - NOT every spell if gsanders was involved I'm sure he made the damage calculation "grande" code separated.
2. This is very performant - you make visibility check three times per explosion, not per enemy!
What is the second issue with spells in sieges - the fact that is strategically good choice?
If you don't want spamming apply miscast chances for bad outcome should raise (i.e 5% for damage each time u cast a spell)
polloio
Knight
Arsakes said:
That is a nice thing....but this is not Phantasy Calradia, this is Warsword Conquest.
We follow the rules of the lore and the tabletop game, and in Warhammer spellcasting is an hazard game, where the winds of magic rise and fall in intensity constantly, and this is what regulates magic.
We already have miscasts, but some things are OP and that's it. Those are made to be OP, but because they are we can't let the whole balance go through the window. Also, players are even stronger with magic, and them quite never go down with an arrow alone......especially in sieges, where a player could hide behind the wall and simply magic-missile snipe the enemies.
Magic is made to be powerful. Ok. Sometimes it's even made to be a bit broken. That's why we need to put barriers and make it viable, not UBER STRONK OMG PEW PEW MLG LOL.
In Warhammer, wizards die/get possessed/become mad and slaughter their army/explode pretty often. That doesn't mean we are forced to include it (and as a matter of fact we didn't). In Warhammer, you lose life when casting magic, because it draws energy from your soul. We haven't added it too.
The loss of magic in sieges seems like the least bad thing we could do
To wrap it up: we follow both lore/original rules, we are not forced though to follow them all, but we yet have to "pre-nerf" potential gamebreakers, be them on the players' or AI's side.
EpyonComet
Recruit
I don't have strong feelings either way, but if that is something you are interested in doing, maybe you could put a cap on the max received damage of those units, whether a flat amount or a percentage. I would think that that would circumvent the tournament issue.polloio said:Wyzilla said:
We are making lore characters as close to their original counterparts (we've already shown you Arbaal, Sigvald and Heinrich Kemmler.....but we have some more in store and many more to do through the nex updates), which means that throught he next releases you're going to see some well known and strong faces roaming around
Their stats though are a rough translation of their tabletop attributes in Warband means, so we're not giving them random amount of anything, we're just following the rules.
Also, you got to remember that lords do appear in tournaments too, where you fight with wooden weapons....and some of them would never be beaten if we also gave them super HP pools.
Arsakes said:
Well _I'm_ interested, if no one else is, especially if you have source.
Not sure if you were implying good or bad, but for better or worse, the magic in Warsword Conquest is totally without my involvement, to prevent a conflict of interest. I should try my hand at merging some Diplomacy sometime, but right now, 101% of the coding is Nameless Warrior and no one else, not even me.
I've considered the problem of spells needing to ray trace to determine blast protection but for now it was most important to have a base line of stability and performance issues clear before tinkering further. I'm willing to dig in deeply. Anyway the norm is to have different spells use different scripts, so one spell can use one style explosion and another a different mechanic, to determine the ideal. I was deeply interested in dynamic resists for example, which I think are working well, but here everything is governed not by by what _I_ think makes sense but only by what Games Workshop made cents from. So they remain two very different mods, regardless of how diplomacy might or might not work etc. I'll say the graphics are better here, by far, there are better scenes, and Nameless Warrior makes fewer mistakes. I have to make up by burning more time, but I have fewer restraints on what I am allowed to do at Phantasy 2018.
For example, I can (and have) declared that NOTHING from 2014 Phantasy Calradia is so canon I am not free to do it differently. I suppose it helps that Guspav withdrew 9but without a clear abdication) from the effective project, so I'm at a loss if 2018 is technically a "submod" or the legitimate evolved successor. I'd be happy labelling it a spin off but with Guspav's sort-of approval. He doesnt write me much. Last letter was September!
If you wish to mail me code, I'm all for it. If not, Nameless Warrior is the one, the only one, doing magic here. If I touch anything for 2018 Warsword Conquest it will be layers Guspav didn't hand to me,, so as to keep isolated the code to avoid who made and where its owned issues. In any case, Magic is SO different here, both the strengths and weaknesses of my evolved approach don't apply. I expect there will be much better graphics here, it will be harder for some to install, and otherwise when Nameless Warrior feels like showing more magic, we'll all see it together. From time to time I wish I had his graphics people to ask questions about shaders at night etc but all in all I'm satisfied with progress in my parallel universe. I do have some things I can share here, that are well debugged over there, but it isn't like the mod NEEDS them. It's pretty strong already from Nameless Warrior's coding, and he has much that's amazing in the pipeline in a working or mostly working state already. My 2018 is no longer closed, but open beta, so what it has or doesnt have is well covered, mainly at NexusMods not Moddb, as Moddb wont let me put up patches every 2 days. I had 4 patches in 8 days, which is normal for me. So its difficult to compare one mod with another. Moddb pretty much wants one super huge patch to rule them all, 2 times a year or so, not one every few hours focused on a super test community (of about 6700 in 8 days, although honestly probably 2/3rds dropped out silently when they didn't look hard for the patch and saw it needed patching.) What a difference in communities from one host and another. Still, aren't many of them here also? This has a MUCH better map, more faction diversity, more interesting interplay. There's much to be satisfied with Warsword Conquest, post 2016. But right now, whatever works is thanks to Nameless Warrior, in the coded layer.
Just a little. Mages in Warhammer lore use winds of magic, so kind of a shared mana pool. You will have just a few total spells cast in normal battle anyway. You should always invest into combat skills if you want to perform in battle. You could say that high INT,CHA and low STR and AGI character is useless, but that is your choice to keep it that way, or to start improving that.
So long story short, magic is not supposed to be like it is in the other mods, where casters spam them endlessly, so it won't be that much of a problem for sieges.
So long story short, magic is not supposed to be like it is in the other mods, where casters spam them endlessly, so it won't be that much of a problem for sieges.
I think you guys have given more than enough reasons why you do not want magic in sieges...hell, just saying you dont want it is enough since you guys are making the mod, tossing in keeping the mod in line with the lore is going above and beyond. Everything else is just wasting your time.
I look forward to the next update.
I look forward to the next update.
Totulhu said:
both of these are correct answers. I had bandits fixed for spawning in Warsword Rigale, which came out about a month after Warsword Calradia (2016) and was intended to be a demonstration and test of code. I also addressed some but not all sources of lag with an overall 30% speedup. I think the difference was quite visible. I've since improved the technologies used and shared them with Nameless Warrior; whether he has time to integrate some/many depends on how busy each of us is. I was PLANNING to come over here and help a bit, as a minor dev, but got my hands full elsewhere at the moment.
I did solve the forwever peace yesterday, so its fair to say that ASPECTS of the games many many layers are still worked on, even at other mods. Its not just Nurgle vs Chaos vs Skavens. Its core systems layers that are quite similar for every mod, in the same way a doctor can compare body organs from one person and the next. Of course, one might be a hobo who dies in the gutter drinking rot gut and the next a million dollar actress in perfect health, but you know, parts is parts...
For example I see no stutter or lag whatsoever in Phantasy 2018. I do have parties capped at about 1100; Warsword Conquest had around 1450. There is no water travel, which probably wasted 20% of the system bandwidth flipping icons and detecting shore. The scheme used in Phantasy 2018 was to split bandit creation across 3 non-intersecting timers at 7.something, 9.something, and 17.something cycles so they never really overlap and most background tasks were protected for every register call made so that background and foreground threads running concurrently would not cross communicate the reg contents, which is a flaw for diplomacy based code. This allowed both threads to run in Warband without needing "force single threading mode" enabled in Warband advanced options. Certainly the bandits can spawn more often and all of the parties, with correct "hunt bandit camp" quests given by each lord/king/queen and for that matter at the local tavern, which actually pulls up the same quest.
Right now I have a completely different magic system than Nameless Warrior, and they intentionally were made in isolation, so that Guspav's layer of things could be kept local to his mod. It turned out to be a blessing for me not to have worked on Nameless' magic system, as it allowed the two systems to stay completely different in every aspect. I think the depth this team here went (and they have MANY artists, a dedicated scener, a dedicated coder, and even an Ombudsman) - well, it should be something when its shown. I sure hope they show a twitch play or something like this someday. But its an oddity I don't have time to dive into other than limited technical advice, pretty much none of which Nameless needs. He's truly my peer; I wouldn't claim either of us is better, although he is more details oriented and I'm more "it can evolve its ok if it needs a few revs" kind of guy. So he's super fussy about whats shown, unlike me (from all my daily updates its obvious my project wasn't "finished").
I think the decisions were already taken to remove icon flip and other bandwidth hogs, and the proof that the lag can be completely eliminated while still having a high party count is already tested. Warsword Conquest had > 45 towns and 18 factions+, while Phantasy 2018 is 29 towns and 13 factions, and fewer lords. So there are differences; Warsword Conquest had considerably more lords, ladies (perhaps they go), and the number of kingdom parties per town/castle was higher. I spawn fewer per settlement and slower spawns now, with perhaps too many bandit parties still spawning. I see most of my traders getting eaten by bandits still. But I'm confident Nameless Warrior will balance all that out. It was never anything I participated in -- he's do factions, armies, items, party types, and I was more systems layers that are common to every mod. So the mod you see is not anything I touched. I see the part that is more the bowels (in good and bad senses) and not anywhere near the skin layers. I used different hairs than were used in Warsword Conquest 2016, which I think Nameless Warrior wanted to change anyway as the ones last time had gaps in coverage and mesh issues. Warsword Conquest always had superior models and vastly superior performance for technical considerations like LODs and shader use for each armor or item. Its a pity GW is involved but noone would even know "what the mod is about" without it, so I suppose you take the good with the bad and live with it.
Just my take on what I see/have seen. I certainly did trim 30%, but I did much better this year. MUCH better. Nameless already knows where I thought the speed and bandwidth waste was, and I shared some working examples of how I sidestepped problems that were without solution last year. its not the same thing as writing a mod; but at least the problems each mod has exist for many. I don;t think my help really moved the mod greatly, but at least it didnt hold it back either.
- GS
