Nameless Warrior said:
I have turned off the icon changing trigger when the space button is pressed and early reports are that the map lag has been reduced when fast travelling. I will look into further adjustments later.
Hope phantasy is going well gsanders
You would be surprised to know I spent the day thinking of a presentation driven character generator from Floris extended modified for specific needs of Phantasy 2018 and how it would be adapted to WC 2016. I casually calculate WC 2016 had around 600 distinct variations on final character after considering the 8 possible answers at cb1, cb2, cb3 for 18 factions and with male and female adjusts. Now that you have 2? 3? more factions and 1 less faction this still makes for a complex character generator, with what 850 or so outcomes? I think I only need to worry about 250 or fewer outcomes. Even so, it became easier to make the generator than write documentation. Your case will be more of the same, but with even more text to display. How about I just make one and if you like it I can port just what were dumping as 6000 lines in game_menus as a presentation players can run then when they are happy confirm to keep their character and the lists etc driving it can be cleaned and recycled for general re-purpose later.
I haven't really looked at WC 2018 since November (if the drive is even still there) but I wanted the diplomacy etc to be very clean before offering it to you, and as you mentioned you didnt want to see lords recycling or hopping factions. I did manage to clean up (recently!) the notice spam from diplomacy events, and I think I have map travel very clean at the moment, although between v150 P3 and P4 a simple change of animations greatly lowered map, and P4b cleaned that so that map is full speed again. I did finally get dual stab spears working with the skins and casting animations I had (mainly by removing many casting animations). I certainly found and solved a class of AoE issues when either the caster or target is mounted. I'll send you some of those so you can not waste as much time on reinventing the wheel, but as I understand it you're pretty much past those anyway. I every so often see certain problems still pop up, else I would have sent a care package earlier.
I expect the new generation v160 Phantasy about a month from today, more or less for my 57th birthday, by which time I think most of the things that would have made my base untenable for WC 2018 will be solved. As it was my flub up for sea battles, I'll also look at that, if only for a "how do I navigate port to port around this curved island" perspective. VC solved it and there are new opcodes for that, but their fix involves adding invisible ports sticking out into water so ships never actually touch land. At least that removes one layer of my list based checking. I regret using lists so freely in 2016, but lists in 2018 are subtly different, and I think perhaps 1/3 to 8 times faster during worst case corner conditions. I've changed the way lists insert and delete for the general case of not adding/deleting at the end of a list (stack mode). I think you can see the map travel difference. Your map travel has roughly 20% more parties but especially bandit creation and kingdom parties can be split across 3 waves like I did for Phantasy 2018 to end up with a spread spectrum use of bandwidth instead of one big peak that causes a pulse of lag. You already had timings moved around in 2016 but I've got some more tricks since then. I'm willing to share the best of those practices, I just didn't want to donate
garbage so its been held back.
I'm mostly outside spell making and instead looking at core systems again, which I think is what I do/did best. I did speed up Guspav's spells but I can't say that's been my best input. I kind of have to rip up the Rigale layer a bit for next generation, which you (or Guspav) never asked for in the first place, to solve some persistent issues (have to click twice to enter town, sometimes get stuck in menus -- and only with Rigale active). I think some of my dynamic resists, ability to define a global blessing or curse, and decoupling of agent stats/skills/resists/ encumbrances from troop stored values allows battlefield buffs and debuffs with no risk of perverting permanent values stored for the troop by plug pulling after a buff etc. I'll say your art, scenery, and modeling teams are hyperactive and I think your magic effects will be therefore much prettier. You're a good, clever, careful coder while I've been sort of an obsessive yet flaky coder. I'd say I became much stronger in the last 9 months than I was at any time you had me in 2016.
I'm sorry you've seen nothing from me this year.
I'll PM you, "Soon".
- GS