Seven Lances Released!

[FoxBat]

There is an ancient and powerful race, the Eternals, who waged the War of the Seven Lances. In the aftermath of this war, Hell sought to claim a relatively defenseless world. The mortals of Sanctuary must now struggle against the might of the Three with artifacts from this ancient war...

Introducing a comprehensive, balanced, and challenging modification for Lord of Destruction.

Features:

-Almost all magical and rare affixes, sets, uniques, runewords, and crafting recipies replaced with new themes and more balanced stats.
-All base items tweaked for better balance
-Drop system overhauled: find small but frequent upgrades from normal monsters, instead of occasional rediculously powerful items from boss runs.
-Nearly all skills rebalanced, with new abilites for the weaker skills
-Smarter, faster, stronger, and more varied monsters
-Half a year in the making, and beta tested in multiplayer by over 80 players for a month.

Find more details at http://www.planetdiablo.com/theforge/

[Trip]

Mod sounds cool, but i have a problem downloading it, it stopped at around 160 kb.

[Matryx]

hmm the site doesnt display nething jus a blank page for me

[FoxBat]

Fileplanet seems to be behaving now but I've put up an alternate download just in case.

Matryx: you sure it's not just loading incredibly slow? Does http://www.planetdiablo.com/theforge/se ... neral.html work any better?

[Matryx]

ok i downloaded and installed it but it didnt work. this is a new installation and im having trouble with this since i dunno about thos vbs files...wat exactly do they do?

it says this when i try to load it up with the shortcut

"One or more reuired DLLs is either not present or has a corrupted name in the Diablo II installation directory. Run RecoverFromCrash.VBS and try again.

[FoxBat]

My guess is that you don't have Diablo II installed properly... those VBS are from Myhrginoc and they switch the DLLs back and forth as well as the save directory.

Think I will put up MPQ form for manual switching as a failsafe...

[Har'lea'quinn]

K...now that I know what the scripts are for I'll run them. Norton politely warned me that the script was possibly harmful .

Curiously, the text files have a prefix of std - is this required of your text files the way you set the mod up?

[FoxBat]

The std files are for use with D2Accelerator. That's part of why the mod is -direct -txt. The other part is so that patches can just add a few text files rather than forcing people to redownload the entire patch_d2.mpq and dlls.

[Haywood247]

I think you should include an option to install regularly, copying/pasting the DLLs/patches. Some people might not want to use the accelerator (*cough* me *cough*). Also, IMO, you should also include an option to use direct txt or just re-download the patchd2.mpq.

I'm gonna test it out in a few, i'll let ya know what i think

[Matryx]

hmm this new method i cant seem to make the mod work. i got bg and es installed in subfolders with their own shortcuts but i cant get this to work. can u jus release this mod with the dlls or the mpq or jus the data bc i cant get this to work

[Myhrginoc]

K...now that I know what the scripts are for I'll run them. Norton politely warned me that the script was possibly harmful .

Norton is suspiscious of VBS files in general. Ones attached to web pages can do things you don't expect. These scripts end up on your machine, so you can read their code before trying them out. And unless FoxBat edited them (again), they don't call D2Accelerator.

[FoxBat]

I've uploaded MPQ/DLL only versions now.

The scripts don't make any D2Accelerator calls. It's just that D2Accelerator is set up to conveniently add to -direct -txt mods. So it will modify stdmonstats and spit out a monstats that removes all shadows from monsters for example. Then when the game is run, it uses -direct -txt and the shadows are removed but it otherwise uses the modded monster stats.

[Haywood247]

Sweet, thanks a lot, i'm gonna try and play it now

[Brother Laz]

Ahhh... so half of that filesize is the D2Accelerator?

Gee, thanks. For the third time in a row already one of my three diskettes gave out on my way to home. But when I do get there, I can boost my framerate from 25 fps to ...25 fps!

Seriously: if all those files are in the installation archive, a choice between D2Accelerator y/n before downloading would be nice.

[FoxBat]

Eh those three text files compress down pretty small. It's the five DLLs and the MPQ that take all the space.

[Watcher]

OK, I downloaded the MPQ/DLL version, and now have a mighty level 11 Druid!
I've encountered some weirdness with my minions: Sometimes, they seem to decide that they don't want to live anymore, and start losing life. It's happened with both Dire Wolf, the first Vine, and Oak Sage. This life drain goes on even if there are no monsters in the area, and even in town. Outside of town they can even kill themselves. I'm rather sure it's not poison, because there's no visible effect on any of the minions, and while talking to Akara does heal them completely, the life drain is still there. The only way to stop it is to resummon the minion. What's up with this?

Watcher

[FoxBat]

Right now this is a "feature", as stated in the readme. Minions have negative life regen. This is an attempt to combat the scaling of minion HPs in higher-player games (possibly by use of players x) At the end of the beta, the largest balance complaint was that minions of all sorts were too good, in making the otherwise challenging monsters into boringly easy. While I can reduce their HPs to make them weaker tanks in single player, I don't have enough control to keep their HPs reasonable in multiplayer/players X and high enough in single player.

I would much rather simply remove the HP increase in multiplayer than use this negative regen, but I've had trouble identifying the code section, and haven't been able to get anyone to give me the slightest help on it. I have not given up entirely but I'm almost at the point of hoping 1.10 will fix it.

For now you can think of it as a "summoning timer." I have heard from some people that dire wolves instantly kill themselves upon eating corpses with this change (the sound of which I don't like), but have been unable to reproduce this myself.

Also I'll consider making the spirits lower HP, more likely to run away, and remove the negitive regen, since they are more like walking auras than minions.

[rtcm]

Well, this mod is amazing, kudos to u foxbat, and your crew. Its been the only mod till now which has been able to pull me from de ME mod by V&K.

Now, to what takes me to post here:

im having some serious trouble with this mod, first i dowloaded the initial version with the install us thing. then when you posted the 1.01 version i downloaded the MPQ only. i uninstalled the mod with install us saving the saves, and then, with a clean install of D2X, I just replaced these files in my D2 folder:

Patch_D2.mpq dated 28-08-2002 20:08
d2client.dll ----- 25-08-2002 21:59
d2extra.dll ----- 31-07-2002 14:31
d2game.dll ----- 31-07-2002 12:24
d2common.dll ----- 10-05-2002 20:42
d2lang.dll ----- 29-11-2001 23:28

the dlls i saved them from the install us 100 version. Im using patch 1.09D and i now enter to the game by the default D2 shortcut, so i think this installation is ok?

now im having several game crashes that send me to the desktop. i only play multiplayer in LAN with my cousin. this is the log of todays games:

(snip by FoxBat: some modders find the entire log useful, but that's mostly greek to me! I don't mind scanning through it in an email or PM but I would like to keep this huge log from cluttering the thread, so I'll reduce it to the Assertation error which I can use)

Assertion Failure
Location : D2Common\ITEMS\ItemMods.cpp, line #1110
Expression : Invalid param for plus to skill item ability sk09

[FoxBat]

The method youre using won't work for the DLLs. However, if your using a 1.01 MPQ you shouldn't be seeing those crashes (the game should not crash without DLLs, just be some gameplay bugs) I haven't seen that crash since 1.01.

Anyway I'd recommend removing what you and your friend have installed and trying the v 1.02 exe [url=http:/www.planetdiablo.com/theforge/sevenlances/download.html]here.[/url]

[Brother Laz]

(still have 1.01, but in case it hasn't been fixed yet: )

30,000 damage per second!! Yep, I'd say that's overpowered, right?

Level 30 charged strike... does around 250-300 damage per bolt, and emits 32 bolts. A bit insane, don't you think? I don't have the math here, but I did calculate that with perfect +skills eq (around +18 to charged strike, if one wants to keep a HC in their inv), one can get 350 dmg per bolt, and emit 40 bolts, adding up to 12K damage per hit! Now get some IAS and throw all stat points into dex, and you're set for life. Working on it right now... already doing over a thousand damage in one hit at level 13! (and if you hit with the javelin, most of the bolts are applied to the same target, particularly if it is large. Can you say 'instagib'?)

A similar reasoning can be used for raven, btw, adding up to a potential 5K passive damage per second.

OTOH... why does chain lightning still suck? (cast anim + low damage)

Overall, a great mod! I'd always wanted to play another mod with new affixes, and here it is! Good job, FoxBat! Just fix this firewallx2 problem and I'd be perfectly happy.

Not sure if you fixed this, but you put in nrg instead of enr in some affixes.

[FoxBat]

I don't reason much though, I test. Every skill has been tested in hell diff act 5 at slvl 28. The calculations do turn out pretty insane like you have stated, but for whatever reason they don't do nearly that much damage. Charged strike may be a little overpowered, but it's nothing like the power 30,000 damage to a single target would give you. And raven is right on the bare cusp of usefulness, almost variant material in hell, despite whatever you calculate there.

Chain lightning is still affected by attack speed, but it does more damage (though lightning mastery was reduced at the same time) You can find increased attack speed stuff on staves and orbs though, plus all staves were sped up, so you can get your cast speed up to a good rate with the right equipment.

A few of the charm affixes had nrg instead of enr Spiderdrake did most of the item design and he usually writes nrg so I guess I forgot to convert it. Whenever the next critical oversight occurs I'll slide that into the next patch.

Firewallx2 What's that?

[Alkalund]

Firewallx2 What's that?

I believe he is referring to the overpoweredness (is that a word ? ) of the Charged Bolt here

[rtcm]

@Foxbat: man, im sorry but the problem i told you about already is still there (in version 1.02). i'll try to explain it a little better this time:

I've downloaded the 1.00 exec (the istall us version) right when this mod came out cause i was eager to try it out (and im still addicted ). when you put up the 1.01 to avoid another large dowload i downloaded just the mpq. i grabbed the dlls from the seven lances (SL) folder which are the five i already posted above (you can check the dates of the files), and i saved them in another folder. then i unistalled SL in add/remove programs. at this point im absolutely sure that my D2 installation is as clean as if i had just installed it. i replaced the original patch_d2.mpq with the SL 1.01 one and replaced the regular D2 dll with the ones i saved from the 1.00 install. when this new 1.02 came out i also downloaded it (just mpq again) and replaced the 1.01 in my D2 folder. im running D2X ver. 1.09D and, with this install method, i enter the game (and thus the mod) with the regular D2 shortcut.

Now i'll try to detail the bug as best as i can:
it only (until now) occurs when someone is killing one of the minions of that unique boss which is always right after the 2nd waypoint of act5 (normal difficulty, dont know about others). Also it seems to not happen the 1st time you kill these monsters with a given character, so when if you are trying to reproduce this kill them once, save and exit, reenter the game with this character, go through the waypoint and try to kill them again.

This is the error, coppied from the .txt log:
12:23:46.350 -------- FILE: D2Common\DATATBLS\Sequence.cpp LINE: 2863 --------

Assertion Failure
Location : D2Common\DATATBLS\Sequence.cpp, line #2863
Expression : nIndex != 0

[Myhrginoc]

Looks like a monster is dropping a +skill item that might be bugged. If it is only happening in one spot, it may be you haven't gotten further and that monster group is the first that is high enough mlvl to drop the buggy item. If that is the case, you would see it more often later on.

But, from reading your post with all of that file swapping, I think I understand you are running Seven Lances in the default install directory as if it were a Blizzard install, rather than in its own subdirectory and using the VBS launcher. If so, you may well be running with an improper mixture of mod and Blizzard files. Errors from such combinations will be thoroughly misleading. Neither version knows how to deal with unacceptable deviations caused by code or data from another version.

You should be running the mod in its own subdirectory and use the scripts. If you crash in Seven Lances and can't run D2 because of missing DLLs, run the RecoverFromCrash script and it will reset the Blizzard DLLs. The scripts handle separation of Blizzard saves from mod saves so you don't get a file mix. And the Seven Lances DLLs won't interfere with a normal Blizzard game or vice versa.

[FoxBat]

I couldn't reproduce the bug you're mentioning. Besides, if it is a skill bug as Myhrginoc suggests, it shouldn't be happening so frequently, there aren't THAT many skill items in the mod.

I say again, restore all your D2 originals, and try the full install of 1.02. Maybe one of the dlls you have from earlier is corrupt or you don't have the proper d2client or something. And if you are playing on LAN, what your friend is using is just as important as what you're using.