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

[Predator]

This patch is a great job, congratulations and thanks for it. I'm using this to play and works very nice.

I'd suggest just one thing: how about get a mana recharge from Adria? Similar to the heal recharge of Pepin (the town healer). I know is not a original implemention of the game, but, like the stash of Gillian, it would be a very helpful option in game.

Greetings and thanks.

[Slyrk]

Wow, thank you so much for this! especially for maintaining it so well for what seems to be three years since Marsh's first upload. Lots of awesome changes! and the one's I don't agree with I can disable (abbreviated greetings by Adria and Griswold just feel so strange to me ) very nice!!

Out of curiosity, are the qlvls and base items of the unique items changed in the same way they are in Hellfire: Fixed? or simply the qlvls spread out more evenly? I'm asking because I didn't see any coils or bands, but on the other hand Lazarus dropped a Shirotachi, whereas in plain Hellfire he would have dropped Grandfather instead. Also, I felt like there was a significant increase in magic and unique item drops. Is that true or was I just lucky?

If you are still looking for things to improve/change, here are some ideas. Don't know how difficult these are to fix/implement. The first two bugs seem to be a result of this mod.

Additional bugs to fix:

• 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. I know this is just a matter of changing one's casting habit, as there is no use in clicking faster than your character can cast. But still, it's tough to remember when you flee in panic from approaching Bloodknights and try to cast Fireballs in quick succession, only realizing after 4 casts that no Fireball has appeared yet. Also, my beloved telenova strategy through Steel Lords is difficult (often fatal) without doublecasting Anyway, I have been able to isolate when the problem appears, which might help identifying the source of it: Interestingly enough, the problem does not appear when first entering dlvl 13, but only after reaching dlvl 14 for the first time (might be true for other dlvl changes). The problem ceases to exist after defeating Diablo
  
• Double clicks necessary to choose load game or new game in the main menu. This means I cannot make these selections with the enter key, which is particularly annyoing since the mouse does not appear after leaving an earlier game. This means I have to exit Hellfire and restart loader.exe to create a new game.
  
• Possibly you are aware of this already: when loader.exe is run as administrator, the game does not see singleplayer characters that were created before installing the mod. I guess it's no problem really, since the characters are found correctly if loader.exe is run without administrator's rights, and administrator's rights are only necessary for multiplayer games.
  
• Mana Shield bug: This has been around for as long as Diablo 1. When a hit would cause the character to die without the Mana Shield on, hit recovery is skipped and additional hits occuring in the same 0.05 second interval are completely ignored. Thus a Sorcerer with 1 Life and no shield except a Mana Shield never enters hit or block recovery, which means that no spell is ever interrupted. Although convenient for Telenova/Teleimmolation Sorcerers that hunt Mysterious shrines to reduce Vitality to 0, this is clearly a bug. Probably the major bug still around that affects gameplay.
  
• No Healing animation when used in town. Always bothered me for some reason not sure if it's easy to do.
  
• No mana cost for disabling your Golem with an additional cast of the Golem spell. Not sure this is a bug, but I feel like it shouldn't cost 60 mana to disable your Golem, especally when you can kill it with a Fireball for 10 Mana. Disabling it with the spell would be 'cleaner' in a way.
  
• Finally, my Armor of Gloom that I found in plain Hellfire still morphs to a Demon Plate Armor upon creation of a new game. But maybe this is changed for Armors of Gloom found with the mod.
  

Additional features:

• More hotkeys. Don't know if this is easily implemented, but if F2-F12 could all be used that would enhance the gaming experience so much!!
  
• Mana Shield / Reflect stays on when changing dungeon levels. Maybe even when returning to town. An additional cast would disable it (at no cost) similarly as it works (should work) for Golems. Maybe one could even allow casting of Mana Shields and Reflect in town.
  
• Second weapon slot. Maybe this is in violation of the true Hellfire feel, but personally I think it would be great to have a second weapon slot. Many character classes have this one monster type where they need to switch, and a second weapon slot would make this so much smoother and free up more room in the inventory. Probably quite difficult to implement, but if it can be done, this would be awesome!
  
• In singleplayer, unique items that the player has equipped at game creation won't drop again. I think it would be awesome if that were to include items in the inventory and in Gillian's Stash. Would make them more unique, and hunting for a specific unique item would be faster (especially if we don't know the precise qlvls the items were changed to).
  
• I would love it if the Flash of monster mages would do more damage, similar to player's Flashes with this mod. Also, I think it would be awesome if there was a small probability that mages do a Teleflash from time to time (maybe this could depend on the intelligence factor, f.ex. 2*IntF%, so that Counselors won't do it). Unfortunately I wasn't able to find Brother Jerec on dlvl 15 despite getting magistrates to see how he does it.
  
• I may be alone in this, but I always felt like it's a bug that the difficulty only affects the qlvl of base items and not the qlvl for affixes of magical items. I thought it can't be a coincidence that the best affixes have qlvl 60, which is precisely the level of Bloodknights, Advocates and Soulburners in Hell/Hell. I mean, where does Wirt get his supply if these items can't be found in the dungeons I guess one would have to revert Diablo's level to 30/45/60 and do the same for Na-Krul to prevent creating level 60 affixes with certainty (Na-Krul has lvl 105 in Hell) and possibly set a minimum level for affixes similarly as when Wirt sells them. If you are ever attempting this, one could also rethink the qlvl of current affixes and unique items, make Hell/Hell more worth playing. If you are interested in this, I have lots of ideas for how qlvls could be changed
  
• Is it possible to have Diablo drop several magical items similar to Na-Krul to make it worth killing him? Or at least a random magical item rather than the undead crown in singleplayer?
  
• Finally, same as Predator suggested, A mana recharge from Adria would be a nice-to-have.
  

In reply to some of the other posts in this thread:

• @Malek, more rings are found in church because the qlvls of the three different types of rings were all set to 1 in HF:F (they used to be 5, 10 and 15 in plain Diablo/HF). This is something I would change back if I had the knowledge to do so :wink: because I don't see a problem if certain items are not findable in Normal difficulty.
  
• @maplestoryfall, you can still walk diagonally (w.r.t. grid: N-S, W-E) through straight (w.r.t. grid: NE-SW, NW-SE) Firewalls without receiving any damage at all, regardless of how many adjacent straight Firewalls there are. Interestingly enough, it is impossible to walk through two adjacent diagonal Firewalls without receiving damage.
  

Again, thanks a lot to you, Marsh and Lemming for making Hellfire more fun to play!!!

[Slyrk]

Haha, okay I found Brother Jerec. He's a cabalist, not a magistrate. So much fun Upon further testing I found some more bugs, minor and major:

• Sometimes, the game crashes on Crypt level 4. Surprisingly often when I'm around one of the new super unique monsters. Happened like three times, but I couldn't consistently recreate the bug so I'm not sure what causes it.
  
• Gillian seems to select her gossip randomly from Pepin's or Griswold's gossip. Quite funny when you speak to the barmaid unsuspecting and you hear Griswold's booming voice.
  
• Gillian's stash is not accessible when she gives you the quest Grave Matters. Instead, she gives her spiel about the graveyard over and over again. Not sure this counts as a bug as Ogden does the same thing at the beginning of the game, but he has no services to offer so I never really cared. Maybe she could give her speech only once same as the other NPCs with services?
  

Also, I noted that the bug about spell queuing mentioned in my previous post does not always start upon entering dlvl 14, but sometimes only when entering dlvl 15 or Lazarus' Lair etc.

Finally, I realized that I would really enjoy if Search would somehow highlight unique items. Say, by creating a golden glow around the item instead of a blue one. Don't know if highlighting it on the map as well would count already as a maphack

Thanks again for all of it!!

[Belix]

Thank you both, gentlemen, and you're welcome. Apologies for the delayed response.

Warning: Long post ahead! ######################

I'd suggest just one thing: how about get a mana recharge from Adria?

I don't see why this couldn't be added as an option. I will put it on the list for the next version. It might take awhile, but anyone still playing Diablo after this long is probably patient enough for my slow updates. Haha.

Out of curiosity, are the qlvls and base items of the unique items changed in the same way they are in Hellfire: Fixed? or simply the qlvls spread out more evenly?

Probably the former. In most cases where Marsh implemented something from Hellfire: Fixed, its often (mostly) identical. I can't tell you for sure without examining both versions more closely.

Also, I felt like there was a significant increase in magic and unique item drops. Is that true or was I just lucky?

Perhaps a bit of both. Since there are more unique enemies (some that existed but were broken and never spawned, and other new ones, such as in the Hive and Crypt), you're almost guaranteed to find more magic items on a given play through. With unique qlvls fixed, more uniques can be successfully generated that previously would of been impossible.

As far as I'm aware, however, the actual formula that controls how frequently magic or unique items occur has not been altered in any way. It is difficult to be certain though; when I run into a problem or something that seems different from Diablo v1.09, I have to determine if its Hellfire's fault, Lemming's fault (Hellfire: Fixed), Marsh's fault, or my own fault. Four possibilities, since Marsh borrowed some changes directly from Lemming's work. Lots of fun!

[*]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.

Agreed, that is definitely an issue with this mod. I accidentally caused it once before and fixed it, apparently something I did down in Hell (probably related to making the Warlord Quest random instead of constant in MP games) reintroduced it. I'll put this at the top of my list to look into and aim for a minor release containing a fix for it.

when loader.exe is run as administrator, the game does not see singleplayer characters that were created before installing the mod

This seems likely an issue with Windows Security behavior rather than PlugUlmo's loader or anything the mod might cause. If a game (such as Diablo) is installed in directories Windows is sensitive about, like Program Files, it can be denied access to write files to its own directory. This results in Windows writing and reading the save files out to some weird temporary location, for example:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Diablo

If this is happening to you, when you run the game with Administrative permission, it is able to properly see its own directory and will load/save characters there. The example directory structure above may vary depending on where you installed Hellfire, but if you feel comfortable exploring folders, you should investigate this to see if you can find Hellfire saves located in such a temporary place. They will be the ones your game sees when it isn't run as an admin, and can be moved to the game directory and renamed appropriately so you see all your characters.

You may also consider moving/reinstalling Diablo and Hellfire into another location as well, I put all of my games in C:\Games on modern Windows so I know that Program Files isn't denying them permissions - some of them will crash if blocked this way, or fail to save progress at all.

I can't think of any other explanation for that issue at this time, so hopefully that's what you're dealing with.

[*]Mana Shield bug

That's still an issue here? I thought Marsh fixed that. I'll add it to the list and check into it.

[*]No Healing animation when used in town.

Interesting. I've been used to that for so many years it never even occurred to me. This game behavior might be related to how the game uses special character animations in town (standing, walking), but I can take a look some time. It might be beyond my ability to work with though.

[*]No mana cost for disabling your Golem with an additional cast of the Golem spell.

Good suggestion, this is in line with some other spell-related issues I need to address where things are cast/cost mana when they shouldn't, such as redundant Mana Shields.

[*]Finally, my Armor of Gloom that I found in plain Hellfire still morphs to a Demon Plate Armor upon creation of a new game.

This is a symptom of changes Marsh made to the item table in his mod. Diablo only saves items in saved game files; when you start a new game, only a lookup code to find/recreate that item is saved in your character.

Thus, a lot of changes that could be made to items risk altering the contents of the item table (something I've managed to very carefully avoid so far as not to invalidate any items from Marsh's mod). Marsh made many such changes by changing which affixes can appear on items, like Staves, so the lookup code for your Armor of Gloom now points to a different item since the item table changed.

That was a mouthful, but I think you get the idea. This problem is why I have not addressed some item problems yet, like fixing the Sharp prefix bug (considered cursed when it is beneficial). It would potentially morph all existing items for people using Marsh's mod. I want to fix it but people's equipment turning into random stuff is too high a cost.

Unfortunately, there isn't anything I can do about morphs between vanilla HF and Marsh's mod short of disabling most all of Marsh's item changes. The only thing I could do is if I had both an SP character file containing an Armor of Gloom found *in* Marsh's mod, and your SP character file with the morphed one. I could use the first file to get the item's new location in the table, then update your morphed item to point at that location correctly so it returns to being an Armor of Gloom.

That addresses bugs/issues, lets look at feature suggestions you made now.

[*]More hotkeys. Don't know if this is easily implemented, but if F2-F12 could all be used that would enhance the gaming experience so much!!

Agreed, 4 never feels like enough. I haven't explored this yet but I will try to look at it.

[*]Mana Shield / Reflect stays on when changing dungeon levels. Maybe even when returning to town.

I'm uncertain if this is possible. When you cast either of these spells, a 'spell effect' is created and maintained on the current floor until the spell wears off, much like each flame that makes up a Fire Wall. The list of active spells is wiped whenever you changed floors. It might be possible to make Reflect behave this way, since it saves a value with the strength of the Reflect spell - I could prevent the game from wiping that value, then test it on the new floor, but Mana Shield may not have such luck. In later versions of Diablo, they changed how Mana Shield is handled in memory, associating a true/false flag with each player object, rather than making it part of the spell list. This allowed you see if players had Mana Shield on or not properly at all times, even if you entered a floor after that had cast it. I'm not sure if Hellfire can be easily updated to behave the same way without the source code, but if it could, then MS could probably be preserved between floors easily.

[*]Second weapon slot. Maybe this is in violation of the true Hellfire feel, but personally I think it would be great to have a second weapon slot.

This is possible, very recently the Hellfire mod "The Hell" achieved this. I suspect the implementation may be very complicated though. Possibly above my head. Although I'm practiced at whipping open my inventory to switch gear with my Warriors and Rogues, I would much rather have an extra slot, if for no other reason than not having to worry about accidentally selling my other weapon.

[*]In singleplayer, unique items that the player has equipped at game creation won't drop again.

If possible, which I'm quite unsure of, it would sadly be very complex to implement. To us there may be just 1 of a unique, but the game actually generates many copies of unique items in the item table. Editing compiled code to compare for the same item id would be difficult enough, but I wouldn't even know where to begin to make it test against the many identical copies of the item that exist at different ids. If that doesn't make sense, to give you a rough idea, assume that there are actually 30 different Cranium Bashers, even though they all have identical stats. This is so if you find more than one, the new one probably isn't reported as a dupe (and consequently destroyed). There are hundreds of different values for potions and gold, but once in awhile the random numbers match up and a pile or potion vanishes as a dupe.

Sorry, that was probably more than you care to know. Its way too much work without the source code. Editing the compiled code makes even simple changes very difficult sometimes, something like this would be crazy. From the perspective of a collector and/or someone just hoping to find an item that's useful instead of redundant, I totally understand where the suggestion came from.

[*]I would love it if the Flash of monster mages would do more damage, similar to player's Flashes with this mod. Also, I think it would be awesome if there was a small probability that mages do a Teleflash from time to time... Unfortunately I wasn't able to find Brother Jerec on dlvl 15 despite getting magistrates to see how he does it.

Their Flash spells do seem rather weak, but if I made any changes to these guys the first would be to remove their immunity once they finish becoming invisible. This should give them enough time to slip away from an attacker, but still be slain quickly once pinned in corners. After you slay a few thousand of these guys in corners as a Warrior cleaving the air repeatedly waiting for them to phase back in and take the hit, their time-wasting temporary damage immunity gets really old.

Jerec is set to use some other AI, I forget which, but it causes him to move (teleport in his case) to melee range and begin attacking repeatedly. It behaves as a melee attack, I don't think he ever invokes Flash.

The idea of having really bad luck and getting Teleflashed by 3-4 of them simultaneously is funny, especially if their Flash damage was increased, but again this sounds like a case of too much difficulty code wise for too little reward. (Once again, if there's any Blizzard people reading this... Diablo is an amazing game and I'm not the only person that would love to do awesome things with its source code, which you should totally release! Look at us poor souls slaving away over x86 Assembly Language just to make little tweaks to it still!)

[*]I may be alone in this, but I always felt like it's a bug that the difficulty only affects the qlvl of base items and not the qlvl for affixes of magical items.

Yup. I have thought about this quite a bit myself. It really does look like this was part of the intended design that was overlooked, but it seems to have been accepted by the community as a feature of the game and not a failing. In particular, Ironman games would have benefited immensely from better affix drops on high difficulties (I reached Hell difficulty once as a Warrior with a Rogue teammate, and that didn't last long because some of our gear broke battling Nightmare Diablo, and there is no way to replace good items in early Hell difficulty since none drop). Its probably possible to fix this, but all debate about whether it was supposed to be this way or not, most players would probably consider it a very controversial change.

This seems like another case where I need different branches/options for the player to choose from to customize their game experience. Altering the monster levels of bosses would be problematic though, since monster levels are used in combat calculations as well.

[*]Is it possible to have Diablo drop several magical items similar to Na-Krul to make it worth killing him? Or at least a random magical item rather than the undead crown in singleplayer?

This is planned in the next update. Marsh made this change for the very reason of making Diablo worth killing, except, his focus was on multiplayer. By making Diablo drop a specific unique item in SP, existing multiplayer code forces him to always drop in multiplayer like he is a Unique monster (so guaranteed magic item, book, or better). But this consequently made him not worth killing at all in single player. I want undo Marsh's forced drop and try to set it up so he is treated as a Unique at all times, always dropping 1 'good' item in both SP and MP. There are some bugs with Na-Krul's forced drops in multiplayer, so I don't think I'd make him do that. Its been awhile but I believe I found the change Marsh made that altered his drop behavior, so I'm already halfway there.


###################### End of long post!

Thanks for your notes and suggestions, I hope I can deliver at least some of them soon. Particularly a fix for that spell issue.

Edit: 1 typo fixed.

[Belix]

Woops. I missed an item in your first post, and missed your second entirely. I knew your second post was there but by the time I finished the first one I had forgotten about it.

[*]Double clicks necessary to choose load game or new game in the main menu. This means I cannot make these selections with the enter key

I think this is actually a bug caused by the file that adds UDP support to Hellfire. It also prevents the use of the Enter key for selecting a difficulty to host an MP game with. I have no idea why this file interferes with the Enter key in some menus, but the mouse doesn't disappear for me. What operating system are you using, and are you using the new DirectDraw wrapper that supports Windowed mode etc.? I'm not sure I ever posted about that here but I found it very useful for running Hellfire on newer systems.

If you're not playing multiplayer, or using a better solution like IPXWrapper, you can probably safely delete the new Storm.dll file (260kb~) and restore the original one (134kb~). Due to upload limits, I can't put the original here, so you'd need to grab it from a Hellfire install. Pretty sure Storm.dll was NOT modified by the Hellfire v1.01 patch, so the one in a fresh 1.00 directory should suffice. If my memory about when the Enter key issue started is correct, this should fix it. I'd be curious to hear how it goes.

[*]Sometimes, the game crashes on Crypt level 4. Surprisingly often when I'm around one of the new super unique monsters. Happened like three times, but I couldn't consistently recreate the bug so I'm not sure what causes it.

I'll make a note of it. I've had a few crashes as well, particularly in the Catacombs and Crypt. But I think I had this problem with other versions of Hellfire, too. So far though I think I've only crashed when attempting to leave the floor.

[*]Gillian seems to select her gossip randomly from Pepin's or Griswold's gossip. Quite funny when you speak to the barmaid unsuspecting and you hear Griswold's booming voice.

This is a bug (or feature) of Ulmo's Gillian Stash. I've been meaning to look into this to see if it can be fixed, but given the complexity of the stash feature, it may have been necessary to make it work. I won't know until I can mess around with it. I always hear her speak with Cain's voice though.

[*]Gillian's stash is not accessible when she gives you the quest Grave Matters.

This is annoying, but only happens when you're holding the Cathedral Map. If I recall correctly, the repeating dialogue is a bug with Hellfire itself, and her new stash functionality makes it worth fixing.

Finally, I realized that I would really enjoy if Search would somehow highlight unique items. Say, by creating a golden glow around the item instead of a blue one.

That's a really neat idea. Not just for Search, but it would be nice if mousing over any item at all yielded a highlight color matching the text color; white highlight for normal items, blue for magical, gold for uniques. And then you see the same colors with Search active. I will have to look into that.

[Predator]

Thank you both, gentlemen, and you're welcome. Apologies for the delayed response.

Warning: Long post ahead! ######################

I'd suggest just one thing: how about get a mana recharge from Adria?

I don't see why this couldn't be added as an option. I will put it on the list for the next version. It might take awhile, but anyone still playing Diablo after this long is probably patient enough for my slow updates. Haha.

Thanks for your consideration and don't worry about the delay in the answer, you're doing a great and altruist job.

So, I will be very happy if you finally put this feature; of course, I'll be all patient that is needed xDD.

Greetings.

[Slyrk]

Thanks for your reply! I have no clue when it comes to assembly language, so I don't know how difficult some of my suggestions are to implement. I mean they are just suggestions, so if they feel like too much work for too little reward, don't bother with it. And if it works, great

This seems likely an issue with Windows Security behavior rather than PlugUlmo's loader or anything the mod might cause.

Yea, this makes sense. I'll check into it and see if I can find my save files in some temporary folder. Thanks!

This is a symptom of changes Marsh made to the item table in his mod.

In fact, the Armor of Gloom morphed into a Demon Plate already in Hellfire 1.01, without Marsh's mod. I thought it had to do with the way unique items of the same qlvl are stored. I guess I was pointing it out mostly for completeness' sake, as a bug in Hellfire. With Gillian's Stash I can keep it from morphing anyway.

This is possible, very recently the Hellfire mod "The Hell" achieved this.

Cool, I will have to check this out!

Editing compiled code to compare for the same item id would be difficult enough, but I wouldn't even know where to begin to make it test against the many identical copies of the item that exist at different ids.

Yea, I understand. I just remembered from Jarulf's guide [p.42] that this was something Blizzard had intended for singleplayer, but messed up in its implementation. That's why I suggested it, oblivious of how difficult it is to correct in assembly language. The fix might not be super relevant anymore anyway, since the qlvls are spread out more evenly since HF: fixed and all uniques are more findable.

And the post wouldn't be complete without a bug When leaving a level with stone-cursed monsters, some of them will remain stone-cursed forever. Especially practical for Sorcerers dealing with the Warlord of Blood.

[Belix]

I have no clue when it comes to assembly language, so I don't know how difficult some of my suggestions are to implement.

I'm still learning it myself. When I first started I never would of imagined being able to implement Diablo bow speed behavior into Hellfire, so who knows what I might be able to do later if I stick with it. Even so some things will be way too much work, given the limitations editing code this way.

In fact, the Armor of Gloom morphed into a Demon Plate already in Hellfire 1.01, without Marsh's mod.

Can you elaborate on this some more? I had read about a bug with some uniques morphing in single player some time ago, but I've never witnessed it. I might be interested in getting a copy of a character with that item equipped so I can study it and see if I can't figure out what's going on. From my understanding of how the internal item table works, though, the problem sounds like a generation issue resulting in the wrong ID, so I suspect even if that bug was fixed, items dropped before the bug fix would still morph since their ID is incorrect.

When leaving a level with stone-cursed monsters, some of them will remain stone-cursed forever.

I'm surprised the game even retains the Stone Curse state on monsters, considering how much other information it discards when you leave a floor and come back.

This is an interesting bug to explore. It could offer some insight into the issue with Gargoyles and Stalkers being active when you return to a floor. Might lead to two bug fixes!

Since the casting issue in Hell is serious, I will aim to finish and release A5 quickly, and leave some of the more time consuming work that remains unfinished for A6.

EDIT: Trimmed some unnecessarily long quotes.

[Belix]

Anyone recognize the name Malignus? Chances are if you've ventured very deep into the Crypt, you might know him as the unique Arch Lich that closes in to melee you. Malignus is quite dangerous. In fact, closer inspection revealed that he may be far worse than Na'Krul himself.

Malignus originated in HF:Fixed, the first Hellfire improvement mod that introduced unique foes to Hellfire (it previously had none in its own new dungeons besides the Hork Demon, Defiler, and Na'Krul). While Marsh changed the names of the Hellfire bosses to be a bit less silly (no more 'Flappity the Floppy'), as far as I know their stats were retained. So, since Malignus was first introduced, this boss has had 1200 hit points and a damage range of 100-100.

This strikes me as rather unreasonable, when you consider that Na-Krul himself only has 666 Hit Points on normal when not weakened by using the books in the correct order, and a damage range of only 40-50. Even Sir Gorash (the deepest unique monster in Diablo) only has 1050 Hit Points and 20-60 damage. In fact, Malignus does so much damage that he's only a few points short of hitting as hard on Normal as a Blood Knight does on Hell difficulty (106-106).

I will be reviewing all of the unique monsters that HF: Fixed brought us, and adjusting any that seem too far apart in strength from their original Diablo counterparts of similar levels.


UPDATE:

By request...

I'd suggest just one thing: how about get a mana recharge from Adria?

Finally, same as Predator suggested, A mana recharge from Adria would be a nice-to-have.

This has been implemented for the next version. It will be on by default, but can be commented out like all the other changes.

I haven't had time to test it extensively yet, so I can't guarantee it won't cause other problems, but if either if you wish to try this in the current version without having to wait, copy and paste the following code into the end of cowquestON.dat:

Code:

start HF1.01 "Adria restores Mana"
46DB65 68EC864B E9A65F02
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
end

[hybridmoments]

Just a quick question Belix, was the ending cinematic removed? Because I am using this patch and when I kill Diablo, he freezes in the middle of his death animation and the ending does not trigger.

[keksnase]

.....
• Ending Cinematic: Disabled by default so you can finish clearing the level, go play in the Crypt etc. rather than get ejected from game
...

To quote from the starting post

You can disable this feature (enable the cinematic) by editing cowqueston.dat with a text editor.
Remove the starting # from line 18 to 22

Edit: if you didn't know this: instead of reading the whole post you could have searched the startpost by pressing CTRL+F in your browser and search for "cinematic"

[hybridmoments]

So much for properly reading all of the information.....

Anyway thanks, next time I'll re-read everything.

[Belix]

Good news, I may have fixed the crash on the last floor of the Crypt. If my suspicions are correct, this problem was not caused by my own work and originated in either HF: Fixed or Marsh's mod. See below for code you can use to fix this issue for now until I release it in the next update.

I will be releasing A5 in the near future (probably this month) as a small update aimed primarily at addressing some outstanding issues. There are more major features on the way for a future version. I wanted to release them with A5, but want to offer you fixes for serious current problems as soon as possible rather than wait to finish some luxuries.


Here is the code that will hopefully prevent random crashes on the last floor of the Crypt. Please let me know if you still experience crashes in the Crypt while using this. Find the file cowquestON.dat in your Hellfire folder containing my patch-mod, and copy and paste the following code into an empty space at the bottom of the file:

Code:

start HF1.02 "Potential Crash Fix for Crypt"
4B0E50 0A 02
end

EDIT: Omitted some basic instructions. Fixed now.

[Belix]

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.

[*]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.

[*]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.

[*]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.

[*]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#.

[Hammerskjold]

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 want to say kudos for your work, Belix. Out of the Diablo franchise, for me HF (modded thoughtfully) is so far the only one that I seem to keep returning to.

[Thenryb]

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 want to say kudos for your work, Belix. Out of the Diablo franchise, for me HF (modded thoughtfully) is so far the only one that I seem to keep returning to.

I second that. I have to add that I also hope Belix will be willing and able to eliminate the ability of Leo to resurrect on MP.

[Belix]

Thanks! I'm genuinely pleased to have encouragement from two of you who are credited with involvement in the original Hellfire: Fixed project, which I think dates back as far as 2002.

Leo's ability to resurrect in MP was just removed a couple days ago, his AI has been restored to its default behavior while I was fixing the crashes caused by Fleshdoom using Leo's AI, so there will be no more skeletons raised in MP games as of the next version.

[Thenryb]

My involvement was pretty much limited to some help play-testing and generally cheering Lemming on. Ah, the "unbearable Lemmingness of Lemming" (to quote a famous poster who uses the name of a legendary diplomat).

[Hammerskjold]

My involvement was pretty much limited to some help play-testing and generally cheering Lemming on.

I think that was the same for me.

Ah, the "unbearable Lemmingness of Lemming"

Sir, I do believe you win a cookie for that recollection.

[Malic]

Hello I'm new here, only because of Diablo 1/Hellfire and Diablo 2. I recently bought Hellfire, are you folks still working on updates?