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.
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.
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!
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.
(01-14-2021, 07:55 PM)Phoenix7786 Wrote: 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
endGood luck!