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

[Belix]

Apologies for the long silence. I moved across country on 2 weeks short notice at the end of last year.

By the way, people playing this great mod might not know that qlvl's of many uniques have been changed and this is not documented ANYWHERE.

Oops! These changes are part of Marsh's Mod. When I originally released this one, I linked directly to his thread where all of his changes (including qlvl changes) were detailed. Later when I wrote more detailed documentation as the changes/features applied here increased, I forgot to include details on the qlvl adjustments.

I did not realize Marsh had altered the qlvls of items that were already dropping. Thanks for pointing this out. If I had implemented this myself, I would have attempted to preserve the original drop locations of items by only changing the qlvls of items that would never drop.

Thanks for posting such detailed information about the changes. I should include this along with the changes he made to qlvls in the next version of the documentation. Unfortunately, as with some other changes I would like to make to items, changing these would cause existing items to morph since items are basically only stored in character files as seeds (except in Single Player saves that are resumed) where the item is re-generated on entering a new session.

I've considered re-writing the item code to prevent morphing entirely, so that items can be modified in future versions without this issue, but that's a big project I won't have time for any time soon.

I initiated playing this last year when I started craving my favorite game and it has been a great experience.

Awesome!

In the "1.21 fixed" version, i could se the HP of the mobs. Has this feature been removed, or?

Hello! I don't think that was ever implemented here. I could consider adding it in a future version, but personally I feel that's almost the same as adding on screen monster hit point bars somewhere, which I've always felt detracted from the immersion of games (since players often spend more time watching the health bars than the actual game). Hence why it never occurred to me.

A couple of times my friend and i experiences problems, where there was a drop, but we could not pick up the item. After a couple of seconds the item desapars. This also happend once with the bomb from the farmer in town. I could se the bomb on the ground, but i could not pick it up. After 5-6 seconds it vanished.

This is normal (buggy) behavior for Hellfire related areas and Hellfire's quest related item drops. Diablo's networking code does not properly synchronize quest items that are forcefully dropped by NPCs and monsters, which is why my attempt to enable the single player quests in multiplayer failed miserably (as almost all of these rely on forcing specific items to drop either as part of the quest or a reward).

Also, for some reason I haven't isolated yet, sometimes the Hive will not synchronize correctly, and while the level layout and monster types will look identical, the position of monsters, containers, and items dropped will all diverge, causing the same issue there. Sometimes creating a new game and both entering a vanilla dungeon like the Catacombs first before entering the Hive seems to help. I really wish I could find and fix that bug! I don't remember it ever happening in the Crypt, so that dungeon might be unaffected.

I experienced once, that after i died, and pressed restart in town, i had al of my gear on. All the other times i died, i dropped all my gear where i died. I dont know why this happened?

There should be only two cases where you don't drop your gear when you die, and both are default game behaviors from the original game:

a) If damage from another player is responsible for your death rather than the environment or monsters,

b) If you're on Diablo's floor. This case is to prevent a case where Diablo could be slain while you're trying to get your gear back, which in the original game would have froze and exited the game and left your gear behind on the floor, potentially lost forever.

Every then and when (maybe twice or three times per game - only SP so far) it happens that a monster drops an item twice (original and duplicate). The first item can be picked up as usual, the second one seems to be unpickable at first, but can be picked up after a while (some seconds) too. Even Na-Krul happened once to drop his stuff twice - each of the four items.

Hi again Kunibert! How odd. Not sure why this would happen in single player. But I'd certainly like to fix that! Can you note which character class(es) you're using when this occurs, and what was it you used to kill the offending monster with (melee, ranged, spells)? Could be relevant.

The reason for my posting however is that i have some questions about shrines.

Fun questions!

[*]Could you, Belix, please explain which digits do what?

Using the Glowing Shrine as an example:

49023B 18 03

As you seem to have guessed, the first value in this set is a memory address. The second value is the original value at the address, in this case one hexadecimal value of 18 (24 in decimal). This value is for the Glowing Shrine's maximum allowed dungeon level. The second value is the desired replacement value, which changes the lowest floor the Glowing Shrine can appear on from 24 (18h) to 3 (03h).

The Loader.exe used by PlugUlmo, and many Diablo memory editing programs, parse changes through simple text files this way; you specify an address, the original bytes, and the new bytes. If the original bytes don't match with what is found, the change will not be applied.

[*]What are the addresses/codes for other Shrines?

This is a tricky question to answer because the values for Shrines are not grouped by Shrine, but rather by the type of value. For instance, all the maximum dungeon level values are grouped together.

Here are all the data ranges and associated shrines... hopefully enough information you can figure out any changes you wish to make:

Shrine minimum Dlvls

Code:

004901F8 01010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101

Shrine maximum Dlvls

Code:

00490220 18181818181818181818181818181818181818181818181818181818181818181818

Shrine appearance (00 = any mode, 01 = SP only, 02 = MP only)

Code:

00490248 00000000000000000000000000000000000002000000000000020000000000000000

The order of each shrine in those sequences, per byte, is as follows:

Mysterious, Hidden, Gloomy, Weird, Magical, Stone, Religious, Enchanted, Thaumaturgic, Fascinating, Cryptic, Magical, Eldritch, Eerie, Divine, Holy, Sacred, Spiritual, Spooky, Abandoned, Creepy, Quiet, Secluded, Ornate, Glimmering, Tainted, Oily, Glowing, Mendicant's, Sparkling, Town, Shimmering, Solar, Murphy's

So to change properties of the Mysterious shrine, you'd modify the first number in any of those 3 ranges as desired. Good luck!

[*]When does the game create the maps/shrines? When starting a new game or when entering a new level?

I'm fairly certain the game generates all levels when a new session is started.

[*]"Tainted Shrine & Murphy's Shrine - No longer appear" - So if one of these would appear, does the game create a different shrine instead or does is just leave the place for the shrine empty?

I think the game logic first establishes one or more locations on the level as shrine rooms, and then randomly selects from available shrines. So where a disabled shrine would have appeared, you should get another shrine rather than miss out on one altogether.

[*]If someone starts a new game where all shrines may appear (or better yet, stands in front of let's say a Murphy's), then saves the game, activates "No Tainted & Murphy's" code in cowqueston.dat and reloads the game state, what would happen to these the shrines?

Those shrines should remain unchanged. I believe saved games contain a copy of the level structure and contents that were already generated at session start, so a single player save would still contain whatever shrines were initially generated.


I'll try to keep better tabs on this thread now. I'm currently booked with RL projects and won't have time to mess with Hellfire for awhile. Thanks everyone and have fun! =)