Question on the 'Horadrim' books

[Zenda]

Hello,

Does anyone know of a list or something with the story books (about the Horadrim and such) that can be found in the dungeons? In particular, I would like to know on which level each book appears. Or do they appear randomly? I found nothing on this in Jarulf's Guide.

[Caorn-Riastra]

HI,
If I remember correctly, the books you are refering to are found on the level before you enter a new area. For example; Level 4 the last level of the Church, and the first level before the Cats. This should make the levels the appear on, 4, 8, and 12 if I am correct. If I am wrong on this, someone with more knowledge should feel free to flame me heartlessly :D

[LemmingofGlory]

Caorn is correct. Books spawn only on dlvls 4 ,8, and 12.

There are three sets of books, one set of which randomly spawns in each game. That is, you'll either get Laz, Horadrim, or Narrator books in one game. You won't get a book by Laz on 4, a book by the Horadrim on 8, etc. Book color does not change; Laz's books are always blue, e.g. Book titles do not change dlvls; The Realms Beyond is always on 4, e.g. And book contents do not change; Realms Beyond always reads "All praises...", e.g.

Offsets before book name are the offsets for the book's name. Offsets before the text are the offsets for the text. Not really useful, I guess, since you can find the text on a quick search. But I scribbled it into my notes for some reason, so I may as well paste the whole thing.

Laz Books -- Blue; dlvl 4, 8, 12 respectively
b403c The Realms Beyond <-> c6100 "All praises to Diablo..."
b4028 Tale of the Three <-> c62c0 "Glory and approbation to Diablo..."
b4018 The Black King <-> c6468 "Hail and sacrifice to Diablo..."

Horadrim -- White; dlvl 4, 8, 12 respectively
b40c0 The Great Conflict <-> c5230 "Take heed... Great Conflict"
b40a4 The Wages of Sin are War <-> c5428 "Take heed... Sin War"
b4088 The Tale of the Horadrim <-> c5600 "Take heed... the Three"

Narrator -- Red; dlvl 4, 8, 12 respectively
b4078 The Dark Exile <-> c5a51 "So it came to be that there was a great revolution..."
b406c The Sin War <-> c5c48 "Many demons traveled to the moral realm..."
b4050 The Binding of the Three <-> c5dc0 "So it came to be that the Three Prime Evils were banished..."

[o: *LEMMING* :o]

[Yogi_Baar]

b406c The Sin War&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <-> c5c48 "Many demons traveled to the moral realm..."

... or merely an amusing typo?

[Zenda]

Hello all,

Thanks for the quick help :)

Especially Lemming's info will be of a great help to me. Never knew about those 'sets', btw. The reason I asked is that there is a way to have those books act as (obscured) shrine, and knowing their appearance will allow control over which shrine it will be.

[Sabra]

The reason I asked is that there is a way to have those books act as (obscured) shrine, and knowing their appearance will allow control over which shrine it will be.

Zenda, that's an interesting statement. Would you be willing to go into a little more detail? Do you mean that if you were to touch the book, you would receive a shrine effect? Presume this would be in HF:TD, of are you up to something new? ;)

[ArthurDent]

Dear Sabra,
a new version of TheDark, v5.0, is currently under development for a few months already.

The list os improvements/fixes/features is quite impressive to say the least.
For any of you that still "believe", the coming Winter will be very bloody and exciting

Regards,
ArthurDent

[Sabra]

Hi! Man I've missed you.

Well this is just great news and I can't wait. How exciting. Now if there were just a new version of Kali, but for this, I'll have to grit my teeth and get back on there. And when I do, I'll be looking for YOU. ;)

[Zenda]

Hello Sabra,

You assumed correctly. Touching the book will activate a normal shrine effect, complete with sound and speech. Then the bookstand disappears. In the current development version all such books produce the same shrine, and thanks to Lemming's info we can have more variation :)

[LemmingofGlory]

Do you guys have a cl2 maker/animator lying about?

[o: *LEMMING* :o]

[Zenda]

Hello Lemming,

No, we don't have a CL2 tool, unfortunately. It is done with coding. If the following changes are made in Hellfire, all such books (including those in Abys/Crypt) will act as Mysterious Shrine. This is because the objects have no RNG seed, and always come up with the first shrine in the list. Any variation has to be coded. The code that handles the shrines does the proper message, and advances the animation a frame. The latter makes the bookstand disappear.

file offset 00052F07

:00453B07 741C je 00453B25
changed into
:00453B07 7413 je 00453B1C

file offset 0004FB1A

:0045071A 8BD7 mov edx, edi
:0045071C 8BCE mov ecx, esi
:0045071E E84E310000 call 00453871
:00450723 EB46 jmp 0045076B
changed into
:0045071A EBE6 jmp 00450702
:0045071C 909090909090909090 9*nop

[LemmingofGlory]

No, we don't have a CL2 tool, unfortunately.

Nuts. I was hoping it'd be possible to make a golemn.cl2 and golemh.cl2. Oh well.

[o: *LEMMING* :o]

[Zenda]

Hello Lemming,

You want to create idle and stun animation for the Golem? That might be possible with the information from Foxbat below. Basically, you would copy one of the other Golem CL2 files to the new name, then adjust the pointers in the CL2-header to have the animation display one or a few frames. The result might be that Golem just freezes when idle, like the Nakrul animation does. Ofcourse, the modified CL2 files would have to be added in some MPQ.

The following info allowed us to have Diablo 'die in flames'.

By FoxBat:


Figured I might as well write this down before I forget all of it, plus Z&Z seemed interested.

Format of the .cel file

Fairly straightforward. The header consists of dword (4 byte) pointers. The first dword is the # of frames in the .cel. Then there is one dword for each frame, and this points to the location of the start of each frame. Then there is one dword which points to the end of the file + 1. (add 1 to the hex location of the last byte in the file) Then comes all your graphics data.

.cl2 format is a bit tricker. cl2's can be made of several groups of frames. The first dwords are pointers to the pointers for a group. (these pointers are omitted if the cl2 has only one group, such as missle animations) Then come the group frame pointers, and this is similar to a .cel in that you have the # of frames, the location of each frame, and then the end of the last frame + 1. Note that to read these group pointers you must add the value of the pointer that points to the the group pointers. So this means that when creating your own group pointers, you must subtract the pointer to the group pointers from the actual frame location.

For example, I have a .cl2 with two subgroups. Each group has two frames. The first two frames are located at 28 and 2A, and the second are at 2C and 2E. the end of the last animation is 2F. the pointers would be

08000000 10000000

then the first group pointers

02000000 20000000 2200000 24000000

then the second

02000000 1C000000 1E00000 20000000

Knowing this should let you C+P frames and lengthen or shorten animations as you wish. Just be aware that Diablo generally wants you to keep the same width for each frame when it reads these things, and in Diablo the width is determined somewhere in a data table in diablo.exe.

How to create a raw .cel frame from any 256 color .bmp:

Find the width of your bmp image, I will call this W for future refernece. (KP knows where it is in the file header, maybe he can reply with it's location) Remove the first 436h bytes, this is the BMP header. Then insert a W(in hex) at the start of the file. Then, every W bytes, insert another W. If you are jumping and inserting, jump with value W + 1 because you need to also jump past the byte you just inserted. After the last W you insert there should be W bytes which is the last line. Finally, add a header at the beginning in the usual .cel format.

Example: a single bmp 5 pixels wide and 4 pixels high would look like this when were done.

01000000 0C000000 24000000 050000000000 050F3E000000 05000ee500 05000e000000

A few notes:

The .cel graphics data starts from the bottom and goes towards the top as you near the end of the file. The first data byte indicates how many pixels of data will follow for that line and where the should be drawn in the final image (in a real .cel file, most of the transparant space is just skipped with these instructions and thus space is saved, while the method for converting BMPs above isnt smart enough to do that) ALso unlike some people say, theres more difference between .cl2 and .cel than the header file. These instructions for skipping space and line endings are completely different values in .cl2 and .cel, and I don't know how to convert them.

In the CL2 files, 7F is used to indicate a totally blank line. Why is this useful? By removing or C+Ping, you can alter the height placement of a graphic. For example, incinerator hit recovery animation has some strange floating. Knowing this information, they can be fixed.

One would probably need a utility to do any major amount of fiddling with frames and creating new .cels. I know some C++ but I've never worked with binary files n data, nor command line paramaters. KP was working on one but it's delayed for now, and he has enough to keep him busy anyway. So someone could go and make a util with this info if they were interested.

For you budding artists, .cel files cover item flips, dungeon objects, and inventory and user interface graphics. The level tilesets are also in this format but there is something tricky with this. Either that or the format is a bit different because most of those graphics come out in very odd width and height in cv5. (Likely just cv5's fault, since cv5 has to "guess" the actual width/height of .cel files)

[LemmingofGlory]

Neat.

[ArthurDent]

Do you guys have a cl2 maker/animator lying about?

[o: *LEMMING*:o]

Hello there,

- I know it's 4 years later but for what it's worth you can find what you asked for here:
http://www.thedark5.com/Guide/TDG21.zip

Regards,
ArthurDent

[Alamara]

Lol. Talk about a bump.