Any Fan websites?

[Vaarn]

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone has a site available that lists all the recipies and runewords? Perhaps someone has their personal "master list" they'd care to share?

I've gone through the forums and collected all the info there but found much is inaccurate and/or incomplete.

I've got to say that this has to be one of the most enjoyable mods I've yet played and this is because it gives the player something to do instead of just hack and slash. However, making a player work TOO hard for the rewards can become tedious and discouraging. Hell on Earth 2 had the right balance but sadly was abandoned before completion

Anyway, if anyone can supply a url or a master list, I'd very much appreciate it

[jbouley]

My cousin is threatening to release all my recipes and runewords...fortunately, he doesn't have the time for all that typing right now.


Seriously, though, I'm sure some kind of "master list" will crop up in the near future. I'm not aware of one, but there are people who play my mod (or once did) and have full copies of the cubemain.txt and runes.txt files, which would give you access to most of the relevant info (though it helps to have misc.txt, armor.txt and weapons.txt, too for the itemcodes).

After I release 2.21, which I hope to do within the next couple weeks or so...I will probably release ALL of my .txt files, including the cubemain.txt and runes.txt files that I haven't shared with very many people. That will give you all the info you need. Even if you don't know anything about modding, the files in question are easy enough to figure out in terms of the ingredients and amounts needed for recipes and runewords. Take 20 or 30 minutes with the Beginner's Guide to Modding and a get copy of d2excel (available at the Keep if you don't have MS Excel), and you'll be off the the races...if you can wait a couple weeks or so.

Why am I about to become so generous? Because, at the point I release 2.21, SiC will probably come to an end as I upgrade to D2 patch 1.10 and start getting the next mod put together (at which point I'll become cagey about all my info again. )

[Vaarn]

Thanks for the heads up and I'm looking forward to the next upgrade. But please try to remember that making us work too hard for scraps of info can be counterproductive *s*

[jbouley]

Hard to please everyone. For a long while, people complained that too many recipe clue scrolls were dropping, so I diminished the drop rate on them.

Ergo, clues come slower...Ah, well...

The runeword issue was a more difficult one...I mean, Blizzard provided NO clues at all, so I figured I was already doing a favor by providing them as "riddles" from Anya. But there is no easy way to provide clues for 200-something runewords.

[Vaarn]

Ok, I must be doing something wrong. I placed your mpq file in a seperate test folder and was able to open it and see the txt files you mentioned. However opening the text files shows only the normal original info, not your enhancements and additions. I see no new recipies nor do I see the rune word formula you added although I know they work.

Example: I have "RAIN" installed on a mech bow and yet the file shows RAIN as runeword 117 has no info to the right.... completely blank to the end

Any Idea what I'm doing wrong?

[jbouley]

Ah, you misunderstood. I have made most of my .txt files available to modders to learn from my work...but as a separate download (or e-mailed to them).

The .txt files in the MPQ are the original, unmodded ones...I only packed my .bins in there, precisely for the purpose of hiding recipes and runewords (which are two files I don't usually give out except in rare circumstances).

In any case, don't bother. I started work last night on a recipe spoiler document and should have it done within a matter of days. A runeword spoiler document should follow soon after that.

Basides, I realized that even with the cubemain.txt file, some of the descriptions I gave for recipes are inaccurate due to copy-pasting a billion things...so it might be a bit confusing to people not used to those files. Hence, why I'm making an official guide as a Word document. Stay tuned...I'll let you know when it's ready.

[Vaarn]

I suspected your info was in the bin files but was unable to open them with the D2Excel prg supplied with the beginner's kit. What prg do you use to open them ? (I found nothing in the approprioate threads)

[jbouley]

You don't open .bin files. You modify the .txt files and then run D2 with a shortcut that uses the -direct -txt command, and THAT produces a wad of .bin files.

No one's ever made a fully completed utility that opens .bin files.

But again, don't sweat it. I'll have the recipe spoiler list done by this weekend...maybe even sometime on Friday.

[Myhrginoc]

When Isilweo developed D2Excel, he must have thought about reading and writing bins directly, since he left buttons and menu options for them. But it turns out generating bins is not simply a matter of looking up values in a table. Reading bins is even more bizarre.

[Vaarn]

I worded that last post wrong.......bin files (binary files) can be opened with any hex editor but the problem is in interpreting the values as only the low ascii is readable as is. I was hoping someone had gone to the trouble of developing something to interpret the balance

But, as suggested, I'll wait for the spoiler list... unless my curiousity gets the best of me and I delve into this binary issue (for someone that built his own eprom burner and used to recode and burn kernal roms for way back in the old C-64, I'm sure I could figure it out if there was proper incentive) *s*

[jbouley]

I'm almost done with the recipe spoiler document, which is pretty detailed.

Hopefully, it will also be mistake-free, though that might be too much to hope for.

It won't take me very long to do the runeword spoiler document after that, mainly because I won't be including any details about what the runewords do, really. That would take me hours upon hours upon hours of work, and I just don't have the time. The document will list the names of the runewords, the runes needed, the order of those runes and the items the words work on...but probably little else besides that. Sorry if that disappoints anyone, but it's really a huge task to go through and look at the powers of each runeword and type them out, given that there's 200+ runewords. If anyone wants to modify the document I make later on to add the powers, more power to ya...

[Myhrginoc]

I worded that last post wrong.......bin files (binary files) can be opened with any hex editor but the problem is in interpreting the values as only the low ascii is readable as is. I was hoping someone had gone to the trouble of developing something to interpret the balance

Those ASCII dumps in a hex editor are almost useless for reading bin files directly; they only have validity where the data type is a string or string code. To understand a bin file, you need the following information:

record length
field offset
is it a "virtual field" (added in code after the txt file is loaded and compiled)?
field data type
string length if data type is 1
is the field a linking field (between tables, or with 1.10 also a function call)?