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

[Madrict]

Just wanted to stop by and say thanks for this patch.

I am doing a fresh play through with the GoG version of D1 + Hellfire, and this patch is awesome.

I love the bug fixes, yet it still keeps it pretty much vanilla Thank you!

[Viess]

Should this patch disable use of keyboards "enter" key in character/difficulty selection screen? Responsible is storm.dll, but if I choose different one then the game crash. Did someone encounter such issue? I have GoG version of the game.

[XylophoneParrot]

Hi,

The GOG-version of Diablo has me playing through Hellfire again for the first time since the 90s, and I'm really enjoying how much more of a polished experience this mod turns it into.

Thank you for making it

[avner]

Hello Belix, I wanted to thank you for the thousands of hours I have played your 1.02A5 patch. I recently applied the GOG patch and its incredibly smooth.

I know you don't accept donations but I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions

I have been looking for the armor of gloom for 4 years straight and by doing Lazeres and Warlord of Blood runs by the thousands and Im starting to give up.

My method is finding the demon plate and then clearing out the rest of the game where a mlvl monster could drop the Qlvl item - Armor of Gloom but its been 4 years and I still cant find it. I know I have to find a demon plate first and then the Armor of gloom could potentially drop.

I found 5 demon plate and 3 DemonSpike plates but 0 Armor of Glooms

Is there any way you could change the code to allow the Armor of Gloom to drop as often as say the demon plate? If not could you recommend the best method of attempting to find one?

I have been playing Diablo 1 for 24 years and your patches have made it enjoyable still after all this time

One more tiny thing, when loading a character I cant use the keyboard to load the actual save file, I have to click with my mouse. Do you have any idea what might be causing this? I switch between many characters and using just the keyboard is so much more comfortable. Thank you so much for your time

[aleeque]

I have been looking for the armor of gloom for 4 years straight and by doing Lazeres and Warlord of Blood runs by the thousands and Im starting to give up.

My method is finding the demon plate and then clearing out the rest of the game where a mlvl monster could drop the Qlvl item - Armor of Gloom but its been 4 years and I still cant find it. I know I have to find a demon plate first and then the Armor of gloom could potentially drop.

I found 5 demon plate and 3 DemonSpike plates but 0 Armor of Glooms

Have you tried my mini guide here?
https://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/thre...#pid215737

It covers all the useful super rare uniques in the game.

[avner]

I have been looking for the armor of gloom for 4 years straight and by doing Lazeres and Warlord of Blood runs by the thousands and Im starting to give up.

My method is finding the demon plate and then clearing out the rest of the game where a mlvl monster could drop the Qlvl item - Armor of Gloom but its been 4 years and I still cant find it. I know I have to find a demon plate first and then the Armor of gloom could potentially drop.

I found 5 demon plate and 3 DemonSpike plates but 0 Armor of Glooms

Have you tried my mini guide here?
https://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/thre...#pid215737

It covers all the useful super rare uniques in the game.

Thank you so much for this, I have done a few thousand runs so far and unfortunately nothing yet. Has anyone ever found the armor of gloom without finding two unique full plate mails in the same game?

This is the holy grail for me at this point I have been looking for it for so many years

[Phoenix7786]

With all these mods, tweaks, and patches, are Hellfire Multiplayer save files still located in the Windows folder itself?

EDIT: Yes Hellfire Muilti saves are now listed in your C:Windows folder as hrinfo_#.drv

[Belix]

Hello all. Sorry for being so quiet. I'm still keeping tabs on this when I can.

For those of you who don't know, the equivalent of both Diablo's and Hellfire's source code has basically floating around the web and being tinkered with by fans for some time now. They've already done all sorts of crazy stuff with it, including 16-player support (can you just imagine 16 people trying to get through halls of doorways leading to a dead-end in the Catacombs? Hah).

With this, people can do in mere weeks what took me several months. I suspect by the time I have free time to work further on Diablo or Hellfire, there will be much more popular and actively maintained projects.

As the next step for this project, I had intended to repackage everything into a new download to remove the base dependancy on Marsh's Mod, and introduce a custom launcher I began to program called Lazarus (naturally, since he's Diablo's little helper) that would have eliminated the need to manually edit a text file to enable/disable certain memory patches, and instead give you the convenience of checkboxes to enable or disable changes to the game quickly and easily. Lastly I intended to 'break' Diablo's item seed generation code entirely and just save actual items to the character files, finally allowing the properties of items to be modified from version to version without causing morphing in the player inventory.

The availability of the game's source code makes these plans redundant, however. If I found months of free time to commit to Diablo again, I'd build such features into the game engine itself, with presets for classic behavior, bug fixes only, or to include your selection of new features. Hopefully someone out there tinkering with the source code reads this and realizes there's a sweet spot between classic and full blown mods where players would like to be able to have more settings to control their game experience.

I'll be keeping an eye on the mods and patches coming out by source code, and, just as before, if I see Hellfire being neglected again, perhaps one day in the near future I'll recreate this mod bigger and better using source wizardry.

Until then I hope those of you still using it continue to have fun, and the rest soon find a source-based project that meets all your needs.

Long live Diablo!

If I missed any questions here that haven't already been answered, feel free to ask again. I still plan to check this thread ever so often until I see Hellfire getting some love from other dedicated fans.

With all these mods, tweaks, and patches, are Hellfire Multiplayer save files still located in the Windows folder itself?

I actually wrote a code that can be inserted into the .dat file that corrects that and saves them as non-hidden, non-system files in the same folder as the game executable with the filename format multi_#.hsv -- basically mirroring the behavior of the last official versions of vanilla Diablo.

I chose not to include that code with releases of the mod because it would essentially cause all existing (if any) multiplayer Hellfire characters to disappear since they would not automatically be moved to the game folder, and I didn't want to put the average PC gamer on an obstacle course to try to manually locate hidden system driver files in their Windows directory and move/rename them. The aforementioned Lazarus launcher I had planned would have provided the means to automatically transfer them to the game directly and rename them correctly, but I never got that far.

However, if you or anyone else is interested in it, you can give it a try -- just do this with the understanding that you need to fetch and rename those saves out of the Windows directory first or your MP characters won't be found. It also might confound you if this code were to be 'lost' some day when you reinstall the game on another PC and Hellfire starts trying to read from the Windows directory again. Just bear that in mind.

Code:

start HF1.01 "Read & Write MP Characters in Local Folder"
4B5AFD 6872696E666F5F25642E647276 6D756C74695F25642E68737600
4562AB 680401000057FF15C09048008BF0EB35 EB1E83FA040F848D59FEFFE9EC5AFEFF
end

The EXE offsets for these two lines are B44FD and 556AB, for anyone more interested in a permanent edit. The first line changes the file name format, hrinfo_#.drv, and the second changes the save location to the local folder from the Windows dir. If memory serves me correctly the change on the second line also bypasses the code that sets the System and Hidden flags Hellfire would set on the save files.

Good luck!

[Predator]

In one day as today, when new Diablo saga content has been announced, I just want to say thanks for mantain this mod active.

Now Blizzard has taken care of the Diablo II, making the remastered (and it's great because is an option to have the saga active). But for those who love the entire saga, including Diablo I (which is the heart and the origin, and a very, very good game despite the years), this mod is the way to having it working and updated for this days.

So, again, thank you very much for your work!

It's true that there are other multiple mods. Tchernobog is one of the best, and it really includes a lot of new content and improvements, but it is focused in the multiplayer game, and there is nothing with camping, quest and lore. For play the original experience and have a great dive into the story, I think that yor mod is the best!

I would only suggest to make an improvement of the resolution. The original game resolution is poor for current computers, and an improved one (as in other mods) would be great and make the game more atractive.

Something like that:
ORIGINAL:


GRAPHIC IMPROVEMENT:


I don't know how difficult could be to implement, but It would be the perfection of this mod.

Thanks.

[Deathrizes]

First off I would like to thank you greatly for all the work you have on this mod, Belix! I have been playing it for the past few years and found it to be my favorite way to play Diablo 1. All the other mods out there change way to many things or don’t do much at all. I enjoy the original game that I played so many years ago with some of the more modern touches and a bit less frustration. I’m hoping you find time to come back and do more work on this mod in the future thou I have been keeping an eye out for new posts and hoping for an update. If I could ask for one thing, it would be to have a setting where you don’t drop your gear upon death if possible. I have a character nearing level 50 and enjoy the ride, thank you so much!

[AJenbo]

The problems you experienced occur with vanilla Hellfire multiplayer (and exist in the original Diablo as well if you attempt to enable SP only quests in multiplayer); sadly the quest specific code responsible for generating items in the dungeons or from NPCs as rewards are not synchronized at all and cause problems.

Another issue with the SP quests is that the game doesn't properly track if a player is on a quest level or a normal level so you will see the other players appears on two levels at the same time. The worst affected quest level is The Unholy Altar, which is pretty critical

We have fixed the issue for town portals but need to extend the network messages to track this for the players.

Other than that it seems that mostly we just need to add NetSendCmdQuest() and NetSendCmdGItem() in a few key places.

There's also a bug with the Hive where the generation seed gets desync'd somewhere after creating the layout - many times in the Hive the players present will see identical level structure and paths, but the location of monsters, barrels, chests, and consequently every item they drop, is totally out of sync, which leads to a lot of monsters teleporting when activated on other player's screens, and nobody but the host can pick up items pre-placed on the floor or dropped by monsters/containers. Not really anything you can do but rehost and try again. It seems to happen less often if you visit one of the vanilla dungeons first before going to the Hive.

The good news is... if the host successfully picks up desynced quest/reward items, they can then drop the item and it will exist properly for other players who can see and pick them up. Excepting, of course, the ones that randomly vanish... I once had a very important item disappear in an Ironman game in vanilla Diablo, that was disappointing!

Hopefully some day we have an open source Diablo engine where all of the quests work properly in multiplayer. I spent some time working on them only to discover enabling them causes far more problems than I could fix.

Considering that we now do would you be interested in collaborating on solving this issue?

I have created a ticket in our issue tracker for dealing with this specific one:
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/issues/1112

---

It's true that there are other multiple mods. Tchernobog is one of the best, and it really includes a lot of new content and improvements, but it is focused in the multiplayer game, and there is nothing with camping, quest and lore. For play the original experience and have a great dive into the story, I think that yor mod is the best!

I would only suggest to make an improvement of the resolution. The original game resolution is poor for current computers, and an improved one (as in other mods) would be great and make the game more atractive.

I don't know how difficult could be to implement, but It would be the perfection of this mod.

I'm wondering if you could give some feedback regarding DevilutionX since this is pretty much the goal of our project.
1: Improve the engine
2: Fix bugs
3: Don't change the gameplay

In order for us to allow for the game to be resolution independent we had to change a lot of hardcoded values, so I'm not sure how feasible this would be for a hex based mod.

[AJenbo]

With this, people can do in mere weeks what took me several months. I suspect by the time I have free time to work further on Diablo or Hellfire, there will be much more popular and actively maintained projects.

I'm assuming you are referring to Devilution. Don't forget that it took us about 2 years of dedicated labor to recreate all of it

Hopefully someone out there tinkering with the source code reads this and realizes there's a sweet spot between classic and full blown mods where players would like to be able to have more settings to control their game experience.

That is exactly the goal of DevilutionX, we aren't even fixing the animation frame skipping bugs since it would change the balance of the game. Would much appreciate any feedback in regards to the project

I'll be keeping an eye on the mods and patches coming out by source code, and, just as before, if I see Hellfire being neglected again, perhaps one day in the near future I'll recreate this mod bigger and better using source wizardry.

If I missed any questions here that haven't already been answered, feel free to ask again. I still plan to check this thread ever so often until I see Hellfire getting some love from other dedicated fans.

Hellfire support is the main feature of DevilutionX 1.2.0 which I'm hoping to release in a week's time. If you have time to test the latest version I would greatly appreciate it!
https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/githu...nch=master
(select your system, then download the zip from the artifacts tab)

With all these mods, tweaks, and patches, are Hellfire Multiplayer save files still located in the Windows folder itself?

I actually wrote a code that can be inserted into the .dat file that corrects that and saves them as non-hidden, non-system files in the same folder as the game executable with the filename format multi_#.hsv -- basically mirroring the behavior of the last official versions of vanilla Diablo.

I was thinking that it might be an idea to create a tool that converts old Hellfire multiplayer saves. DevilutionX only supports reading Hellfires single-player saves as the multiplayer saves are encrypted using the hostname of the computer they were generated on, and there isn't really a good cross-platform way of handling this.
(Diablo 1.09 multiplayer saves are supported)

But since I don't have any original saves (or a Windows computer) I'm not really the right person to do so

[Predator]

It's true that there are other multiple mods. Tchernobog is one of the best, and it really includes a lot of new content and improvements, but it is focused in the multiplayer game, and there is nothing with camping, quest and lore. For play the original experience and have a great dive into the story, I think that yor mod is the best!

I would only suggest to make an improvement of the resolution. The original game resolution is poor for current computers, and an improved one (as in other mods) would be great and make the game more atractive.

I don't know how difficult could be to implement, but It would be the perfection of this mod.

I'm wondering if you could give some feedback regarding DevilutionX since this is pretty much the goal of our project.
1: Improve the engine
2: Fix bugs
3: Don't change the gameplay

In order for us to allow for the game to be resolution independent we had to change a lot of hardcoded values, so I'm not sure how feasible this would be for a hex based mod.

Hello, and thanks for your answer. So, if I understood well, DevilutionX is another mod, really? Would it be compatible with this patch (v1.02.A5 Hellfire)?

I really apreciate the improvements of this patch, which just make the game more modern and fixed, without changing too much the gameplay.

What are exactly the changes with DevilutionX mod?

Thank you.

[keksnase]

DevilutionX is not another mod. For the last few years some very dedicated people (AJenbo being one of them) completely reverse engineered the source code of diablo 1 + hellfire. This project was called Devilution and the result is an exact clone of the original game but as open source so it can be improved or changed very easily. DevilutionX is another project based on Devilution, which adds compatibility for many other operating systems like Mac OS, Android and other platforms like Nintendo Switch or 3DS. Additionally DevilutionX adds (mostly configurarable - as in you can turn them off if you don't like them) a whole bunch of QOL features (see this pull request for example: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/pull/895) and bug fixes. It's still a work in progress and new features and bug fixes are being added almost every day but it's stable and fully playable.

This being said this mod is absolutely not compatible with DevilutionX. But implementing all the features and bugfixes Belix (and Marsh) painstakingly searched for in the compiled original binary should be "relatively easy" to re-implement in the now available source code

[S3nsenmann]

Hi everyone, thanks for the hard work you put into the game.
I'm playing the gog version and I always get an Data File Error that he can't read the CD.
I can run the game with diablo.exe set in the ini file, but not with Hellfire.exe.
How to fix this?

[AJenbo]

Would it be compatible with this patch (v1.02.A5 Hellfire)?

It is able to use the MPQ files from this mod. But since we have the same goal, but with a different approach, we probably have many of the same features and would probably strive to implement the same fixes.

What are exactly the changes with DevilutionX mod?

Version 1.1.0 contains the following:

### Features
- Native 32/64 bit support for Windows XP - 10, macOS, Linux, Nintendo 3DS, Switch, PS Vita and a bunch of other systems.
- Scroll wheel support
- Upscaling, Integerscaling, Widescreen, Windowed (alt+enter), Unlocked render fps
- Gamepad support
- Escape all moview with ESC
- Skip logo and start up splash with -n
- Faster loading
- Adjustable game speed
- Multiplayer via TCP/IP (only host needs an open port)

### Original Diablo bugs
- Fixed a large number of rare stability issues from the original game
- Correctly take open panels into account when casting spells
- Fix sound some times being muted after Diablo dies
- Fix belt not working correctly when holding shift on *non-*us keyboard layouts
- Fix some monsters AC and to-hit values on Nightmare/Hell ending up as 0
- Fix player base block resetting to 0 after loading a save game
- Correctly render trees in front of the player
- Fully render sprites that are larger than the floor tiles
- Fix objects disappearing when walking on the opposite wall
- Duping via belt has been fixed
- Other players show on map
- Correctly detect if the mouse is clicking the world or UI
- Minor typography corrections
- Unbroken lines in automap
- Correctly align the inventory slots
- A slew of crash and stability fixes
- Make life easier for modders (mpq not required)

See here for a full list: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/releases

1.2.0 is almost ready, the list of fixes is probably just as long, I haven't written a chance log yet, but off my head, the major changes will be:

### Changes
- Hellfire support, Shareware support
- All fixes from Diablo 1.04 - 1.09 applied to Hellfire (Mana Shield and lots more, save games are not locked to the system and are not in the Windows folder)
- All fixes from Hellfire 1.01 applied to Diablo (Gharbad now drops the item when killed by a golem, etc)
- Stash
- Enemy health bar (optional)
- XP bar (optional)
- Auto pickup gold (optional)
- Save spell hotkeys
- XP not being shared in some cases
- Auto equip picked up items (optional?)
- Friendly fire can be disabled
- Adria not correctly evaluates if you have room for items when purchasing
- Fix Valor quest not working in some cases
- Portal appearing on the wrong level when in the level of a quest
- Lazarus getting stuck in his chamber
- Items disappearing if in cursor on level change
- Preserve cursor position when selling/buying
- Match scroll speed to narration length
- Walk sounds can be enabled/disabled
- High-quality transparency
- Can jog in Diablo
- Bard/Barbarian in Diablo
- Scavenger/grave digger no longer lose health when trying to heal
- A bunch of issues with lighting (tracking monsters, not updating, not changing, changing incorrectly)
- Load Diablo save games in hellfire (and vice versa) without losing items or game state
- A couple of surprises
- And lots of things I don't remember atm.

Also, things that we plan to do before release: https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX/milestone/4

[AJenbo]

It's still a work in progress

In a sense that is true for any project that hasn't been abandoned But fair enough this subject is on Hellfire and that won't be considered stable before 1.2.0 lands

implementing all the features and bugfixes Belix (and Marsh) painstakingly searched for in the compiled original binary should be "relatively easy" to re-implement in the now available source code

Since projects like this have a deep knowledge of what issues there are in the game as well as why they happen, we really would appreciate it if we could work together to solve as many known issues as possible. One simple thing that would help a lot would be to simply go over the feature lists and figure out what fixes/improvements we haven't implemented yet and then create to-do lists.

[S3nsenmann]

Nvm me, I was dumb, there is an extra folder called "hellfire" in the Diablo Folder, the files go in there and it works.

[Belix]

Thank you for the kind words, Predator (yet again) and Deathrizes. It really is great to know the months I spent dissecting Hellfire enabled people to enjoy it more over the years.

As for this project, its goal was to improve the original Hellfire experience and add a few extras without straying from the spirit or balance of the original game. But the method of editing executable code is painstakingly tedious and time-consuming. If I ever find significant time to work on Diablo again, Devilution will be far easier to work with, so I'd likely start over from scratch there.

That makes this project basically _obsolete_, so I intend no further updates. I don't feel sad about this at all, since the effort superseding should achieve the same goals and open up many years of better support for modern operating systems and all kinds of amazing mods.

I'll be reviewing my old notes about bugs and unimplemented features and offer whatever I can to the Devilution team. Yesterday I reached out to the Devilution team members (all of whom seem quite nice) that contacted me here on the Lounge, and hopefully - whether I myself can contribute anything or not - it will soon produce the most bug free and smooth Hellfire (and classic Diablo) experience available since release.

That said, while I did try to keep my additions within the spirit and balance of the original game, some of the changes I made here don't really belong in a technical recreation of the original gameplay, and others might be in a gray area. These things might end up in the hands of other modders exploring the many new possibilities of Devilution, and have much more free time left to tinker with Diablo than I do. But if I find someone interested in some of my ideas for adding improvements and features in their mod, I'll pass both some of what I did here and some of what I never implemented their way for consideration. As always, if someone is reading this, feel free to use or toss any ideas or changes I did here. Make it your own and make your own awesome version of Diablo.

I'm going to leave a note on the original post in this thread recommending that new and returning visitors should check out DevilutionX before trying to use this mod.

It's been fun everyone. I'll try to check in once in awhile until I forget I even have an account here, but there's probably not much left to say. For lack of any better ideas, I'll just leave an inspirational quote here.

"Find what drives you to awaken each dawn, and pursue it relentlessly. Only then will you find true happiness."

[Volker_Kaudah]

@belix in the patch notes it is written that diablo now always drops an item. is it intended that the item is always the butchers cleaver?

I think diablo as well as na krul should be used to give the option to find items otherwise not findable, like godly plate of the whale.