Further Respawning & a Feature Request

I think the giant might be too late in the game. Rainbow rock could work, as it's achievable earlier than the giant. Other possibilities would be in the stomach of one of the giant frogs (they ate whoever took it originally) or the bandit leader in the moathouse.

 

*laff* the Skeletal Priest Giant with two giant skeletons!..

 

Oh yes they do!

 

Just keep in mind, o ye of excess enthusiasm, that the quest for Black Jay's ring was intended to be handled (and handle-able) by beginning characters. It is the lead-in to useful information from Jay, as well as a second quest which requires no combat. (Not that one goblin really counts as combat IMHO, these are both in my notes as "before you leave Hommlet and start getting into fights".)

So, shall we simply chalk that up to maybe he's one of Ted's renters off on walkabout, and just let it go? :kiss:

That said, I'm fond of the idea of respawning the Meadows with the skeletal priest. This time he and any friends should be standing around buffed instead of jumping out of the ground, though, I always won that combat more easily than it should have been by just concentrating on him the first turn--that meant he never had time to get past "cast Desecrate" in his strategy.tab. Maybe he could use some of these kewl new summons?...

Darmagon, when am I going to be able to cast Horrid Wilting!

--Blair
Yes, one more day without a quote. Where is my :rant: video card?!

 

Well, I was thinking about how the Behemoth King Frog in Imrydis Run has treasure inside and figured it wouldn't be too tough to do the same with one of the moathouse frogs.

Well, I don't mind it requiring combat since the reward is a magical item. Plus, you can get the sheep quest without the ring if you have the proper social skills (I think it's Diplomacy).

I'd be cool with the group of goblins idea except for the whole lack of a place to put them thing.

Actually, Livonya was pretty much convinced the Desecrate spell didn't actually do anything, so she pre-buffed the Skeletal Priest and it's guards in the protos. They're tougher than normal whether the spell actually goes off or not.

 

The Moathouse frogs are handlable very early in the game, and so wouldn't be much of a shift for that quest. The first time I played the game, they were my first combat experience. Personly I quite like the frog idea.

Cuchulainn.

 

Well for adding a new map is out cause of dll hacks so can you add say a cave entrance to an existing map say the woods with the spiders? like expand the map a little to add a cliff and a cave in the side with a goblin or two outside as lookouts.

Macer

On a side note why is dll hacks so much harder then the modding you are doing right now? and why would it be easier to do it once you have the source code from Atari? i am modding illiterate

 

That's not doable because (AFAIK) the maps are all giant 2D image files. New maps are creatable, but it's impossible to actual alter the existing ones beyond placing the little blue door icons and the like on them.

Because dll hacking requires actually changing the game code. All the other modding we've been doing involves just working with existing items and possibly "tricking" them into doing something different than originally designed. It's the difference between changing your oil and completely re-working your car for higher performance. One minor screw-up could hose the entire thing.

Changing monster stats, for example, involves simply going into the protos.tab which is basically just a giant spreadsheet, and changing the appropriate numbers. This is made even easier by tools like Phalzyr's Protos Editor and Agetian's World Builder which actually label what each column is for. Change a number, and as long as you understand how the engine treats that number, it changes the monster appropriately.

Hacking the .dll requires you to be able to read and understand programming code and figure out how the one bit of code you want to change relates to all the other code that makes up the game. If you misinterpret or make a mistake, the game either won't run at all, it will crash at random moments or it just plain won't work the way you want it to.

Getting the source code from Atari would give the modders a model to work from. Right now they have to try to look at the code and try to reverse-engineer what it does and why it does it. With the source code, they'll be able to tell what everything does and why and then all they have to do is figure out what changes need to be made to fix it.

Of course, this is just my understanding, and I'm pretty clueless when it comes to programming, so someone who actually knows what they're talking about will most-likely come along and call me an idiot.

 

No that is a pretty good summary of the situation Kal.

Think of the program as a pocket calculator, the functions we understand and can do on paper are fairly easy to do say a + b = 4. It could be 2 + 2 = 4 for example. So if we wanted to change something that we understand its not so hard to make a change such as 3 + 1 = 4, as long as the end result is the same we can plug in almost any number into the formula without a error.

Complex calculations are more difficult to calculate but you can do it as long as you know basically what calculations are being done you can do it, think of these calculations as the dll.

The compiled source becomes the dll. The steps it follows to do the calculations and all the variables are stored here. We know where to change some of the variables such as the protos.tab and the files that comprise the meshes (through the trial and error of many modders)

To make some changes we would need to be able to change the steps being followed, others change the variables being plugged into these equations. This is extremely difficult to do without the source to use as a template.

Dissassembling the code only gives you the output of the calculations for the most part, not the actual steps that are being followed to calculate that output. You can derive the original formula from this but it is a long and painstaking process.

The source code would open things up a bit as stated above reverse engineering only gives you an approximation of what the engine is doing and you can't really see many things even then.

Exactly how some things are calculated remains a mystery, the world builder and all the progress we have made so far is proof that it can be done.

 

Moathouse frog works for me.

My first thought was the giant lizard, but I was trying to figure out how raiders that killed Mrs. Jay got eaten in the moathouse that was freshly sacked by the forces of good. All that happened during the same weeks of the original battle, and the changing hands thing seemed best. Could be that a straggling raider from the fall of the temple sought shelter at the moathouse, and got eaten by a frog along the way. Sounds just as good to me.

 

Well that pretty much answers my Coding question, Even though i took a small bit of C++, and i mean Small, i am still completely clueless on it. I can't even get a script to work with a scripting wizard in NWN, but anyway that sums up why i never looked into programing anymore.

So if i understand this you can change existing maps to substitute a new one? and then add a new zone? If this is the case if you wished to add a little more flavor into the ring quest without just adding it to another Monster and deleting the goblin, why not work up a map for it and the cave?

Well hell this could add various possibilities to what you can do with some of the other quests to make mini quests dungeons if you wished. The again i am looking at doing all this from a Non-Modder so it comes easier to the mind then it dose to the reality of it all.

Macer