02-05-2015, 11:15 AM
Hello everyone,
Just wanted to offer a little peek at what's going on, and touch with Slyrk again on a few things that were brought up.
A few features/fixes coming in the next version:
Improved Oils and Oil descriptions: Currently, many oils are junk items. They have gotten some attention and will now offer bonuses that makes them worth picking up and using instead of tossing away. The in-game text when you hold your mouse over Oils will be improved to indicate whether the Oil's effect is Temporary (lasting only for the current game session), and what the exact effect is; several of them currently do not give hard numbers.
Suffix "of the Bear" / "Knocks Target Back": I have always found this behavior undesirable. It tends to stun monsters, which is great, but pushing them away is often more annoying than helpful, especially when playing cooperatively with others. The behavior of this effect will be changed from Knockback to Stun; this makes Windforce and The Grizzly much more desirable, and Bear items worth consideration for low level characters. Monster knockback against players will not be affected.
Fire Arrow Traps: I finally found the formulas for Fire Arrow Trap damage, and some examination of its behavior confirms what Jarulf's Guide says: the Fire damage can hit up to 9 seperate times, in addition to the initial damage from the physical arrow. A fire arrow trap on the first floor of the Catacombs could deal 6-21 physical damage with 6-21 fire damage, which isn't unreasonable until that bug kicks in. That fire damage could be anywhere from 6-21 to 54-189. Even a healthy Barbarian could die in one shot there. The traps also appear bugged to do even MORE damage in the Hive and Crypt, because it doesn't treat their dungeon levels like the Caves and Hell, respectively (up to 225-531 fire damage on Normal difficulty seems fair, right?). I will be writing a new formula to keep the traps dangerous enough to kill you if you're low on health, but not one-shot a level 25 character at full condition.
Single player games are scripted to try not to drop the same unique more than once, right? But flaws in the way unique items are generated normally prevent the Armor of Gloom from being dropped at all. Items that share the same qlvl and same base item (Demon Plate and Armor of Gloom here) create a situation where one obscures the other, since the game always picks the first unique it can find for an item type.
I don't think much is known about how exactly the code works that makes single player work around this issue, but I'm going to take an educated guess: I believe the Armor of Gloom you found was originally generated as a Demon Plate, then the game checked to see if you had already found one. Since you had, rather than recreate an item, it looked up properties for the next matching unique, and applied them to the Demon Plate before it appeared, making it an Armor of Gloom.
So what would that mean? The game itself actually morphs the items INTO a unique that isn't what the item originally was. So when you create a new game and your Armor of Gloom changes into a Demon Plate, it isn't morphing, but being restored.
Perhaps I'm totally wrong about that, but it would make sense of why your Armor of Gloom apparently has the internal ID of a Demon Plate. It can't be a coincidence that it morphs into what SHOULD have dropped if not for single player's special rule.
But that means that you never actually found (or ever could, in the original game) a real Armor of Gloom. They're all essentially counterfeit goods.
These kinds of surprises happen when you have a mod, based on a mod, based on a mod based on a poorly supported expansion pack based on an older version of Diablo... tangled web here.
But all of those efforts, from Hellfire to Marsh's mod, aimed to improve the core game, and I will continue to carry on that work until I stop playing Hellfire some day. It has eaten up countless hours of my free time already. Today I made one tiny code change that took me 3 hours of trial and crashes to get right. I would not do this for any other game - Diablo has and will always be one of my favorite games ever. The vanilla game is in great shape, but Hellfire has been almost completely abandoned over the years. As far as I know, there were no significant Hellfire projects outside of two user patch type mods (Hellfire: Fixed and Marsh's Mod) and two gameplay mods (The Dark and The Hell).
And at some point in the future, when this project is no longer dependant on Marsh's mod, and has finally become a complete, self-contained package that you can drop right into a fresh Hellfire v1.00 install (or v1.01 patched), it will deserve its own name instead of simply v1.02.A#.
Just wanted to offer a little peek at what's going on, and touch with Slyrk again on a few things that were brought up.
A few features/fixes coming in the next version:
Improved Oils and Oil descriptions: Currently, many oils are junk items. They have gotten some attention and will now offer bonuses that makes them worth picking up and using instead of tossing away. The in-game text when you hold your mouse over Oils will be improved to indicate whether the Oil's effect is Temporary (lasting only for the current game session), and what the exact effect is; several of them currently do not give hard numbers.
Suffix "of the Bear" / "Knocks Target Back": I have always found this behavior undesirable. It tends to stun monsters, which is great, but pushing them away is often more annoying than helpful, especially when playing cooperatively with others. The behavior of this effect will be changed from Knockback to Stun; this makes Windforce and The Grizzly much more desirable, and Bear items worth consideration for low level characters. Monster knockback against players will not be affected.
Fire Arrow Traps: I finally found the formulas for Fire Arrow Trap damage, and some examination of its behavior confirms what Jarulf's Guide says: the Fire damage can hit up to 9 seperate times, in addition to the initial damage from the physical arrow. A fire arrow trap on the first floor of the Catacombs could deal 6-21 physical damage with 6-21 fire damage, which isn't unreasonable until that bug kicks in. That fire damage could be anywhere from 6-21 to 54-189. Even a healthy Barbarian could die in one shot there. The traps also appear bugged to do even MORE damage in the Hive and Crypt, because it doesn't treat their dungeon levels like the Caves and Hell, respectively (up to 225-531 fire damage on Normal difficulty seems fair, right?). I will be writing a new formula to keep the traps dangerous enough to kill you if you're low on health, but not one-shot a level 25 character at full condition.
Slyrk Wrote:[*]Spells cast in quick succession (before the previously cast spell is completely executed) will result in several cast animations, but only the last spell is executed.Despite spending some time playing, I have been unable to reproduce this issue. If you can reproduce it consistently, please pay special attention to anything significant going on before this problem manifests itself. Using a Cauldron? Fountain? Leveling up? Encountering a certain enemy? Drinking an Elixir? Reading a book? Anything could be an important clue linking back to a change myself, Marsh or Lemming made and give me an idea where to look. I want to fix this but as of yet, I don't know where to begin.
Slyrk Wrote:[*]No Healing animation when used in town.I gave this a little thought and it occured to me why you don't see spellcasting animations in town: No proper animations exist. At first it seems that the spellcasting animations used in the dungeons would be perfectly suitable, but the posture of the characters is totally different in town. Take the Warrior in Heavy Armor, for example - he holds his weapon at one side and his helmet is off of his head, held at the other side. If we switched suddenly to his casting animation, his helmet would instantly pop up onto his head, and his axe would snap up into his combat readiness stance. It would look similarly awkward with the other characters snapping back and forth from their dungeon standing pose to their town standing pose. Ah well.
Slyrk Wrote:[*]Finally, my Armor of Gloom that I found in plain Hellfire still morphs to a Demon Plate Armor upon creation of a new game.I've been thinking about this, going over Jarulf's Guide, studying how qlvls work. I think I have a theory for this morphing behavior.
Single player games are scripted to try not to drop the same unique more than once, right? But flaws in the way unique items are generated normally prevent the Armor of Gloom from being dropped at all. Items that share the same qlvl and same base item (Demon Plate and Armor of Gloom here) create a situation where one obscures the other, since the game always picks the first unique it can find for an item type.
I don't think much is known about how exactly the code works that makes single player work around this issue, but I'm going to take an educated guess: I believe the Armor of Gloom you found was originally generated as a Demon Plate, then the game checked to see if you had already found one. Since you had, rather than recreate an item, it looked up properties for the next matching unique, and applied them to the Demon Plate before it appeared, making it an Armor of Gloom.
So what would that mean? The game itself actually morphs the items INTO a unique that isn't what the item originally was. So when you create a new game and your Armor of Gloom changes into a Demon Plate, it isn't morphing, but being restored.
Perhaps I'm totally wrong about that, but it would make sense of why your Armor of Gloom apparently has the internal ID of a Demon Plate. It can't be a coincidence that it morphs into what SHOULD have dropped if not for single player's special rule.
But that means that you never actually found (or ever could, in the original game) a real Armor of Gloom. They're all essentially counterfeit goods.
Slyrk Wrote:[*]Sometimes, the game crashes on Crypt level 4.Just repeating this information here for anyone who missed it - this issue has been fixed (there is a temporary fix my post or two prior to this if you don't want to wait for A5). Turns out Lemming created this issue all the way back in Hellfire: Fixed by giving Fleshdoom (a new Reaper boss on Level 4) the AI of Leoric, which made him capable of randomly trying to raise skeletons inappropriately in the Crypt. Marsh later exposed this issue in his mod based off HF: Fixed by modify Leoric's AI to allow him to raise skeletons in Multiplayer, which brought Fleshdoom's crash to MP games as well.
These kinds of surprises happen when you have a mod, based on a mod, based on a mod based on a poorly supported expansion pack based on an older version of Diablo... tangled web here.
But all of those efforts, from Hellfire to Marsh's mod, aimed to improve the core game, and I will continue to carry on that work until I stop playing Hellfire some day. It has eaten up countless hours of my free time already. Today I made one tiny code change that took me 3 hours of trial and crashes to get right. I would not do this for any other game - Diablo has and will always be one of my favorite games ever. The vanilla game is in great shape, but Hellfire has been almost completely abandoned over the years. As far as I know, there were no significant Hellfire projects outside of two user patch type mods (Hellfire: Fixed and Marsh's Mod) and two gameplay mods (The Dark and The Hell).
And at some point in the future, when this project is no longer dependant on Marsh's mod, and has finally become a complete, self-contained package that you can drop right into a fresh Hellfire v1.00 install (or v1.01 patched), it will deserve its own name instead of simply v1.02.A#.