Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Tomes Alpha Mod Development for CW

[MattCaspermeyer]

Bill Gilbert's painting only gives out level 1 tomes, but all tomes are maxcount=0 already as well as having the rare and moral propbits.

I thought maybe the moral propbit, since it creates a counter, might have been causing it to crash since counters are a limited resource as well, but when I removed it, it had no effect.

I may have an idea how to "level up" the tomes by using a parameter and so instead of fighting them to upgrade, I could have it where you fight a certain number of battles and then their level would increase, using the item's parameters.

If I did it this way, though, I'd have to manage the bonuses for levels 2-5 internally via LUA script. This would work okay for the fight bonuses, I guess, since I could mod them at the beginning of round 1, but not for the mod bonuses since they are counters. It may be possible to execute scripts on equip and on remove when you are wearing the item versus when it is in your backpack to increment / decrement the mod counters. I'm not sure...

Anyway, thanks for the ideas, I'll keep thinking about this aspect of the mod. I may implement just the level 1 versions and work on how to upgrade them later - we'll see...

Matt

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[Fatt_Shade]

For upgrading items on counter, i guess you mean like Ring of mind (+3 intellect permanent after 30 battles). This is interesting idea, and doable, but only for 1 lvlup i think. Because you lvlup item from 1st to 2nd lvl, and then what ? How does counter resets, and start counting next 15-20 battles for that `new`2nd lvl item ?
And problem with this is, later in game when you get 1st lvl from Bill`s portrait and want to upgrade it but have no more enemy stacks to fight.
Simple fight item to upgrade it was great, higher lvl of item, tougher battle and it was great. But as you said it, it created problems with number of items in game

Sry for not being of much help here Good luck.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

And problem with this is, later in game when you get 1st lvl from Bill`s portrait and want to upgrade it but have no more enemy stacks to fight.

*Exactly*

So that would be compromise.

I have two new ideas:

1. Include all tomes, level 1-5, but tomes level 2-5 are commented out. When you get a tome, then you uncomment out levels 2-5 so you can upgrade it. Once you get all the tomes, then you'll probably have to comment out the level 1 tomes you didn't get since you'll need more head room to level up all your tomes (if you don't level them all up you can probably leave the level 1 tomes alone).
2. Generate the tome choices on game start. Generate the tomes.txt files needed from this list. You then have to save the game, exit, restart game, reload, and continue.

Option 1 is easy to implement, but requires a lot of manual work from people who play the mod. Nobody would probably want to do that manually, but it would be a way to experience the mod as I intended it.

Option 2 is much harder to implement, but would allow minimal user intervention to get it working for them. I'm not sure how to do any of option 2, but I think LUA has file I/O capabilities, although I'm not sure how to handle UAC.

Anyway, those are a couple of ideas that I just thought up...

Matt

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[Fatt_Shade]

I vote for option 1, if you manage to make it functional. I`m sure players would help, because here wearn`t for split second action but for decision in leading armies. And for quality mod are ready to involve.
Hope you make it working version soon

[MattCaspermeyer]

Option #1 is readily doable, so I think I'll go with that for now during the second alpha phase and see what everyone thinks as they play it...

[MattCaspermeyer]

Well, it looks like with AP / CW there are a lot fewer counter resources available for creating new counters.

Once again I'm saddled with commenting out counters that aren't currently being used since there are not enough counter resources for all of them when starting a new game.

So it is looking like it is going to be more and more of a manual labor nightmare to implement the mod as intended and the more this leans towards some sort of automatic implementation.

Nonetheless, I'm going to see how this manual process goes.

So you'll find that when you get a tome, you're going to have to comment out any sp_... counters in the corresponding file to enable that bonus to work.

This is about all I can do right now until I figure out how to dynamically generate the tomes and their counter bonuses...

Matt

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[MattCaspermeyer]

Well, I've had a pretty good modding session the past several hours and so wanted to give you an update to how it has been going...

As far as where to place the modded files, this was driving me crazy in AP. I tried APDir\data\mods and APDir\sessions\addon\mods and it just was not working reliably. As it turns out, since I've used the editor, the game uses the following location: <DRIVE>:\Users\<USER NAME>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\1C Company\King's Bounty. Armored Princess\sessions\addon. Once I placed the files here, then it was working in AP fine. Note that for CW placing the files in APDir\sessions\orcs\mods works great.

I still have the problem in AP where I can't debug scripts so I use CW for now.

I've been working on the item and counter problems with respect to the tomes.

As far as the tomes are concerned, I think I have it fixed where you can click on a Tome and place it on your hero. So far I've just been adding tomes via the item cheat code to see if they work properly and if I can put them on my character. I've tried 29 out of the 180 tomes so far. Their pictures show up and their descriptions (for the most part) look okay.

I had a really hard time with the item params{} section and as it turns out it seems to only except about 9 or 10 params max per item. If you go over that, then the params won't work properly. I was using the params{} section for modifying the tome morale after a fight, but now will plan to implement that via an LUA script, instead.

The next area I'm going to work on is the mod section counters. I have too many and so need to reduce them. What I'm going to do here, is only use the Leadership Reduction counters that I use, others will be in the files, but commented out. This helps save counter resources since I'm not using them.

Next the spell counters I will consolidate into a single counter for the spell and rely on the LUA script to implement the various functionality. For example, I had counters for all the spell variables, including power, duration, chance of affliction, etc. This was simply too many counter resources for the game to handle and it was causing it to crash when I tried to start a new game (strangely I had more counters in TL, but I think there were a lot more resources available). I'm pretty sure that the counters have to exist when you start a game, otherwise they won't work. So by consolidating the spell bonuses into a single counter I save between 1/2 to 1/3 of the counter resources for the spells. I have not implemented this yet, but plan on doing so later.

With these changes, I'm hoping to have all the counters available when you start a game to manage the tome bonuses. If I still have problems, then I'm either going to have to get them to work in a different way or verify if I can use them after starting a new game. I'm pretty sure in TL I could use new counters, but things are different in AP/CW it seems like.

So anyway, if I can get this part of the mod implemented then I think I may still be able to implement the Tomes @level 1 and then you'll have to manually uncomment out the level 2-5 items so that you can upgrade them.

I also did a simple test to see if I could upgrade an item and the arena screen pops up okay, but the enemy hero doesn't work - there are just towers. In TL, suppressing the Staff of Destruction had both Towers and an enemy hero (the Staff of Destruction) in the arena together. In the item editor there is a place to specify an enemy hero, but it looks like this part no longer works in AP/CW or I'm doing something wrong.

I'm not going to worry about the Tome hero appearing in the upgrade / pacify fight, but it would be cool to fight against them when you're trying to upgrade them to the next level.

We'll see how it goes, but I'm making slow and steady progress...

Matt

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