Using Monsters as Missiles and Advanced Missile Editing
Description: by Nefarius
Categories: Tutorials (1.09x)
What you will need:
Missiles.txt
Weapons.txt
Monstats.txt
Itemtypes.txt
Cubemain.txt
Sounds.txt (we will not edit it but we will need it!)
String.tbl
D2client.dll
Tools you will need:
A string editor of your choice.
XVI32 (or any other hex editor for this matter)
Cv5
A Spreadsheet able to save and read tab delimited *.txt files.
Some hex calculator of your choice.
First you should know how to work with Cv5, working with hex editors like XVI32
and generally how to extract files from the MPQ archives and how to use -direct
-txt.
If you do not know one of these you should first learn about these two things
before reading on.
In this tutorial you will learn how to use monsters as missiles just like I did
in my XyRAX mod with the “cow launcher” weapon.
You will also learn how to attach missiles to weapons and how to edit the
missile tables in and d2client.dll
To start with you should download the missile tables excel sheet by Lanthanide
from (http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~hoggarth/MissileTables97.xls) this file
contains the missile tables extracted from d2game.dll and d2client.dll and will
save you a lot of time.
Part 1: getting the monster animations.
Fire up Cv5 and load d2data.mpq.
Once you are inside d2data.mpq, browse into the DATA\GLOBAL\MONSTERS\CW\ folder
and select CWTRLITWLHTH.DCC this is the cows walk animation.
Click the lower SAVE button, select “Blizzard compressed image/animation” as
your file format and name the file COWMISSILE and save it. Now you will see a
panel, which asks how many directions you want your animation to have, select
“8 Directions X 10 Frames” (write this down somewhere as it will help you
later on).
Click OK and save the file. Move the file into the DATA\GLOBAL\MISSILE\ folder
of your mod making directory.
Now that this part is done we need to replace an existing missile with your
missile, to do this we must create an unused missile, how do we do that you ask?
By removing a specific missile from an enemy, Open up monstats.txt in your
spreadsheet and scroll down to the QuillRat row (row #65, populate ID 63) and go
over to the MissA2, this column contains the ID of the missile the QuillRat
shoots, change 7 to 8 to free up missile #7 in missiles.txt for our cow missile,
Save the file and put it into the correct location.
Now after we have an unused missile we can start working on missiles.txt.
Open up Missiles.txt and go down to the Spike1 row, this is Missile #7 (ID) and
the row number should be 9, for now leave everything alone and go over to
CelFile column, this column contains the file name of the Missile DCC
animations, change it from SpikeFiendMissle to COWMISSILE, next go over to the
AnimLen column and enter 10, this is the number of frames per direction of this
missile, as you remember out missile has 8 directions and 10 frames for each of
them. Go over to the ToHit column and change the entry from 1 to 0, this will
make this missile always hit and not be defined thru your attack rating. Now
change always explode to 1 so that this missile will always show its explosion
graphic even if it doesn’t hit anything. Now we reach a small choice of yours,
the trans column, this columns controls the amount of Alpha blending in the
missile, this means the darker a pixel is the more transparent it will be in the
game. If you want the cow to look like a real walking cow simply leave this as
0. Now go over to the MinDamage and MaxDamage columns and set the first to 100
and the second to 1000 (it doesn’t matter, use any damage value you want, but
this will be fine for a test), set the LevDam1 to 3 columns all to 0, Type
“cold” (without the quotes) into the Etype column and set Emin to 100 and
Emax to 1000, this will make the missile deal 100-1000 random cold damage and
100-1000 physical damage. Set Elen to 1000 as well, to give the missile a 40
second freeze duration. Change the hitclass column to 0, to make this missile
act as a elemental missile ratter then a physical missile, and last but not
least change NumDirections to 8 this controls the number of directions the
Missile DCC file has. (This is handled in missiles.txt since missiles do not
have *.COF or *.D2 files that do this job).
Save Missiles.txt.
Now we need to open itemtypes.txt to create the “Cow Launcher” base type
Add a new line to the end of the file and enter Cow Launcher as the name, next
enter “cowl” without the quotes into the type column (unless you used that
code already!). Change Equiv1 to “tpot” without the quotes. Its important
that we create a new type to avoid the game from drawing the throw angle used
for potions! Change both repair and body to 1 and set BowLoc1 to rarm and
BodyLoc2 to larm. Change the Throwable, Reload ReEquip and AutoStack columns to
1 set the Normal column to 1 so that this item will only spawn as normal (this
is very important) go over to the rarity column and set it to 0 so that the game
will exclude this type from the preset weapXX treasureclasses, go over to the
storepage column and enter weap.
Save the file.
Now we are getting close to ending the txt editing, how ever we will now open
weapons.txt
Add a new row to the end of the file and enter Cow Launcher as the name again,
change the type column to say cowl, change the code column to say COW, Change
alternategfx to axe and set rarity and spawnable to 1.
Set mindam to 0 and maxdam to 1. go Over to the Nodurability column and change
the entry to 1
Go over to the normcode column and change the entry to say COW, set wclass and
2handedwclass to 1hs, set component to 5 and set hit class to 1ht as well.
Set invwidth to 1 and invhieght to 1 as well, set stackable to 1 and change
minstack and maxstack to 100, now enter 100 in spawnstack as well. Enter flpjaw
in the flippyfile column and invjaw in the invfile column. Now go over to sound
and enter 29, set transtbl to 5, Now to the really important part, change
missiletype column to 7 this will make the game spawn our new missile when this
weapon is thrown. Set durwarning to 7 and qntwarning to 3, set bitfield to 0.
Set nightmareupgrade and hellupgrade both to xxx and change nameable to 0, and
last but not least set permstoreitem to 1. (you can adjust all settings except
for wclass, 2handedwclass, hit class and weapontype to whatever you want
thought!)
Save weapons.txt
Now we are getting even closer to the hex editing part, but first open up
string.tbl and enter COW as a new code, make it translate to Cow Launcher and
save string.tbl.
We have finally come to the point we will edit d2game.dll and d2client.dll at,
now this is easier then many people think so don’t worry first off.
We now need to open both missiles.txt and sounds.txt.
After these two files are open go down to row #344 in Missiles.txt (RegurgitatorCorpseExplode)
and write down the ID number somewhere its 342 for the matter of fact. Close
missiles.txt and exit.
Now switch over to sounds.txt and go down to row #1348 the id of this sound is
1346, next go to row #1353 and write down the ID which is 1351. now after we
have the Ids of both the explosion and the sounds we can close these files.
Now fire up XVI32 or the hex editor your using. Open up d2client.dll and use
your hex editors Go To Offset or Address option (In XVI32 its address > go
to) enter F36D4 and click the Ok button.
You will be brought the beginning of the following array of 5 dwords.
30E2B36F 00000000 00000000 00000000 FFFF0000
The first one controls the movement graphics and is currently set to the default
The second controls special impact graphics, we will not need it for this
example.
The next two dwords are important for us. The first one controls flight sound
and the second one controls the impact sound. Fire up your hex calculator and
convert 1346 to hex which is 542, now we must enter this in reverse byte order
which will be 42 05, change the hex string to look as the following
30E2B36F 00000000 42050000 00000000 FFFF0000
Now repeat this step with 1351 which will be 547 and hence 47 05, now change the
entry to look as the following.
30E2B36F 00000000 42050000 47050000 FFFF0000
After this is done we are left with the last dword which controls explosion
graphics, now we need to convert the explosion ID of 242 to hex which will be
F2, change the entry to look as this:
30E2B36F 00000000 42050000 47050000 F2000000
Save D2Client.dll.
Since we didn’t modify the way the missile acts in general we don’t need to
edit d2game.dll.
Now we need to test our new missile, for this open Cubemain.txt and add a new
row to the end of the file, name it cowtest and set enabled to 1 and version to
0, set numinputs to 1, set input 1 to say key, go to the output column and enter
COW and finally set term to 0.
Now just launch d2 and put a key In the cube and hit transmute it will turn into
a jawbone named Cow Launcher, now equip it and go out of town, throw it and
enjoy your Cow Launcher. MOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
While this is NOT a tutorial and isn't meant to be, I
post it here because it may be of interest to many people who want to have
hellfire runes in their mods.
Generally to start, this will require minor code editing as well (for the actual
mine effect) but nothing that will actually be complicated.
While the goal seams to sound very hard to reach, it isn't, I got the idea wile I
was at work today.
First you will need to create an unused missile, for this follow the standard
quillrat procedure (etc).
Now you need to create a weapon and link it to this missile, for this create
some kind of new throwing weapon (do NOT fill minmissdmg and maxmissdmg, else
your mine will be useless). For the missile use the ID of the 'unused'
missile, in this case it was a quillrat spike.
now you need to do the second most important thing. Give the missile some static
graphic (like the deathsentrymissile.dcc (unused)) this will be the animation
that shows wile the missile lays on the ground. Now the most important step. Set
Vel and MaxVel to 0. Range will be like 'time until explosion', remove
pierce and make sure alwaysexplode is set to 1.
Give it some damage, for this case we use cold damage.
Now open d2client.dll and give it the graphical collision function of freezing
arrow. Repeat this with d2game.dll just with the actual effects this time, give
it freezing arrow collision effects.
Now thats basically it. If a monster steps on your landmine it will explode and
freeze everything in a specific radius :-)
*for those who want to see how the missile data for the dlls should look:
d2client
| Code: |
| 30 E2 B3 6F 30 5A B3 6F 00 00 00
00 7E 09 00 00 1E 00 00 00 |
d2game
| Code: |
| 50 8D C5 6F 80 36 C5 6F 00 00 00 00 |
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[url=https://d2mods.info/forum/kb/viewarticle?a=208]Knowledge Base - Using Monsters as Missiles and Advanced Missile Editing[/url]