Hellfire Patch v1.02.A5: Classic HF with less bugs and more polish!

[Belix]

Too bad this will ruin one of my Fool's Crests that I shrined up to +1AC. Maybe some savegame editor may help. Does there one exist that you would recommend?

I never had much luck finding a reliable program to interface with Hellfire for purposes of backing up/restoring items, but in this case, if you can find an oil that increases armor class, you could cheese Gillian's stash by placing the +AC oil into the stash, then save/exit and make a backup copy of your current Hellfire_SP.Hst stash file in the directory. I forget if you have to restart the game or just return to the main menu after this, but you could repeatedly withdraw the Oil from the stash, then overwrite the current stash file with the backup, until you've raised the AC back to the desired amount. But, then you'd have to wait until you found such an oil, of course.

Well, would it be possible to remove the limit of items placeable in town or to revise Gillians' menu? (Or even either?)

In theory it might be possible to increase the maximum number of items allowed on the ground in each level (incl town), but sadly I suspect this limit is not due to a simple number somewhere in the code that needs to be changed to let more items drop, but rather a very specific amount of memory was allotted for items on the ground, and increasing the limit would cause a crash once the expected array size was exceeded. Consequently, changing that would probably be quite complex and time consuming. But if I find an abundance of time to work on Hellfire again, I might give it a shot.

As for Gillian's stash, PlugUlmo is the gentleman who created it. While included in Marsh's Hellfire mod and my own mod as a feature, neither of us had anything to do with its creation or design decisions. The stash mod exists outside of Hellfire's code in an external .DLL file, and is quite beyond my limited expertise.

It is an amazing piece of work, but I agree the functionality scales quite poorly when many items are added. Probably the simplest improvement PlugUlmo could have added is an ability to search by name and filter out item names that don't match, e.g. type in "Scroll of Heal" and see only Scroll of Healing in the list. It's a shame he doesn't seem to be around/active any more in the D1 community. I doubt there's much I could do with the stash even if I knew how, beyond writing my own new stash mod from scratch.

If there's one thing I learned quickly using the Gillian stash mod, which I suspect you are now learning, it's to be very selective about what I put in there. For instance, Adria sells an unlimited amount of TP scrolls (at least in MP), so for 1 slot in Gillian's stash, it makes far more sense to stash 5000+ gold (worth 25 scrolls of Town Portal) than actually stash 25 scrolls of town portal and take up far more room. Likewise with Health and Mana potions. Repair Oils are also a poor choice to stash imo, since if you're already in town you can just use Griswold, and if you want to take Repairs with you into a dungeon, a single Town Portal scroll is much more space-effective since that single slot taken allows you to go repair ALL of your equipment to 100%.

In multiplayer it's also very easy to get Pepin to generate more Rejuvenation potions by simply stepping into and out of the Hell entrance behind his house, but I don't think that trick works in SP.


The good news again though, is if the Devilution project stays on course, it will be wonderfully easy to add/improve these kinds of features. Like the fellow leading that project, I'd like to maintain a more 'classic' version of Hellfire, and have a separate one with silly stuff like mana-stealing bows.