Basic Gripes: 1.6A

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Innomen
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Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by Innomen » Wed Dec 03, 2008 8:16 am

Basic gripes 1.6A.

I was asked to present what I hate if anything about this mod, and while I am quick to add that if it sucked I wouldn't be playing it for hours a day. it does have a few problems. Many new to 1.6A

This is not a bug list, it's a policy gripe list.

1. Uniques are far too common, I would much rather have them be as rare as before but have a shop in say act 5 sell one random unique or set based on the 0 through characters lvl, say minus 10. Like charsi sells jewels. A ring and ammy shop and a jewel and gem shop would rock as well. Its silly, if you can sell something you can buy something, that's how the market works.

2. Sets are missing and that sucks. I love sets.

3. "Adds ato paladin skill levels" atrribs on uniques (and sets) should work.

4. The affinity system rocks but with uniques being so common its gets no play from the inventory side. My char is 21 and is already almost completely outfitted with uniques, which don't have sockets rendering normal items and sockets and gems nearly worthless.

5. There are too many classes of affinity, if you really want players to even consider generalizing, they need to be smaller and more vague, like the schools of magic in D&D for example, especially if you're going to keep the new inventory system. As it stands now the vast majority of items are worthless. And I'm selling uniques, and not even bothering to pick up rares. I would go so far as to suggest limiting ach skill to two affinities.

6. The game exceptions for me at random which is fine, comes with the territory, but I would like either a way to force a save without quitting or a more rapid saving interval, I'm tired of coming back from the exception and finding all the progress I made in the last ten minutes lost.

7. (I know the impossibility of this I'm just including it as a known issue) incompatibility with newer versions.

8. The skills need to be presented by order of level requirement or class or something in the shops. ( I get the pages thing, but I mean within each page.)

9. I'd like the ability to add sockets to something for a price. Like say a reagent. "Nullium shard, adds sockets for X Q) (random number max based on char level or something)

10. the hirable merc lvl needs to be based on char level, or the experience scale for mercs needs to be removed. I hate ebing stuck with an act 2 merc just because I can only get an arrow merc at lvl 3 and their experience system is scaled such that I cant power level one. (which would actually be kinda fun if the scaling were removed)

11. The mercs need affinities, and maybe even a grantable skill or two. I know what you told me but even with full gear, with no affinities and no control over their skills, they suck. They are meat shields aura and m�l�e and little else.

12. The speed reduction of the armor needs to be toned down or compensated for in some additional way. Like say so many points of strength equal a reduction in the move penalty. Like armor proficiency in D&D.

Seriously once again I'm in no rush. I'm still having a damn fine time. And I am NOT downing your work. This mod is in my opinion better than diablo ever thought about being.
Last edited by Innomen on Wed Dec 03, 2008 8:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

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GnomenKlayture
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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by GnomenKlayture » Wed Dec 03, 2008 8:32 am

On that Number 8... What he said!

Actually a good list and I agree whole-heartily with it's a Great Game!

I've noticed the exceptions seem to occur on the host's end most often... from my experience.

I'm like you, I wish I could go to that menu from ESC, do a quick save and return to game, not EXIT! Please! I'm having too much fun!

Still if I can't do that, I agree, care to fiddle with that save interval? Is it something we could add to the to the short cut, a command line switch or something?

Where do the logs dump from this game when it exceptions? A memory address conflict of some sort looks like, but I can't find any 'bug check' info ... is there a startup switch I could add that make it dump to a log file of some sort? :)

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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by Quatl » Thu Dec 04, 2008 2:08 am

Innomen";p="406981" wrote:Basic gripes 1.6A.

I was asked to present what I hate if anything about this mod, and while I am quick to add that if it sucked I wouldn't be playing it for hours a day. it does have a few problems. Many new to 1.6A

This is not a bug list, it's a policy gripe list.
I did ask :), and I appreciate it.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote: 1. Uniques are far too common, I would much rather have them be as rare as before but have a shop in say act 5 sell one random unique or set based on the 0 through characters lvl, say minus 10. Like charsi sells jewels. A ring and ammy shop and a jewel and gem shop would rock as well. Its silly, if you can sell something you can buy something, that's how the market works.
Yep, they are too common and too useless. The drop rate is a side effect of something else, and should be changed. The suckiness issue is more involved, but I agree they should suck less.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote: 2. Sets are missing and that sucks. I love sets.
Yeah they were removed since taking skill bonuses off of them made them by an large crap. Making them useful is a large project.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote: 3. "Adds ato paladin skill levels" atrribs on uniques (and sets) should work.
These bonuses can't work properly without code editing, and I'm not cool enough to do that. I had planed to replace them with affinity bonuses for equipment eventually.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:4. The affinity system rocks but with uniques being so common its gets no play from the inventory side. My char is 21 and is already almost completely outfitted with uniques, which don't have sockets rendering normal items and sockets and gems nearly worthless.
yep, I agree.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:5. There are too many classes of affinity, if you really want players to even consider generalizing, they need to be smaller and more vague, like the schools of magic in D&D for example, especially if you're going to keep the new inventory system. As it stands now the vast majority of items are worthless. And I'm selling uniques, and not even bothering to pick up rares. I would go so far as to suggest limiting ach skill to two affinities.
I agree the balance of affinities is off. My intention was to add a lot of new skills, ensuring that each affinity had the same number of skills associated.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:6. The game exceptions for me at random which is fine, comes with the territory, but I would like either a way to force a save without quitting or a more rapid saving interval, I'm tired of coming back from the exception and finding all the progress I made in the last ten minutes lost.
Random crashing is not fine! :)
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:7. (I know the impossibility of this I'm just including it as a known issue) incompatibility with newer versions.
Not so much "impossible" as "I'm not cool enough". I don't have the skills to re do all the code editing involved to make loth work with later versions.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:8. The skills need to be presented by order of level requirement or class or something in the shops. ( I get the pages thing, but I mean within each page.)
Yeah the arrangement is not great.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:9. I'd like the ability to add sockets to something for a price. Like say a reagent. "Nullium shard, adds sockets for X Q) (random number max based on char level or something)
I could never get this to work properly (I'm not sure why as other folks have, it must be something I altered somewhere.) It would be nice to be able to add and remove sockets.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:10. the hirable merc lvl needs to be based on char level, or the experience scale for mercs needs to be removed. I hate ebing stuck with an act 2 merc just because I can only get an arrow merc at lvl 3 and their experience system is scaled such that I cant power level one. (which would actually be kinda fun if the scaling were removed)
This is another hard coded thing. The xp gain rate for mercs is far greater in LotH than vanilla though.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:11. The mercs need affinities, and maybe even a grantable skill or two. I know what you told me but even with full gear, with no affinities and no control over their skills, they suck. They are meat shields aura and m�l�e and little else.
Adding affinities to mercs would be awesome. This is another thing I'm not cool enough to accomplish as it requires code editing. Properly equipped the bow mercs are the most powerful minions by far. (unfortunately the crafting is largely busted in 1.6 so I'm lieing ;) )
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:12. The speed reduction of the armor needs to be toned down or compensated for in some additional way. Like say so many points of strength equal a reduction in the move penalty. Like armor proficiency in D&D.
It does need tweeking, the speed reduction was intended to balance against the large amounts of damage reduction that can be achieved with heavy armor if crafting isn't broken.
Innomen";p="406981" wrote:Seriously once again I'm in no rush. I'm still having a damn fine time. And I am NOT downing your work. This mod is in my opinion better than diablo ever thought about being.
I know you're not bashing :)

It will be a while for improvements unfortunately. I have no time to work on the mod, and haven't for a while now. I may release the source code early next year if my situation doesn't improve. I've been debating that option for a while now, telling myself that I wanted to return to LotH someday and finish what I started. I'm not sure what's happening yet.
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Innomen
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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by Innomen » Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:00 am

Yeah they were removed since taking skill bonuses off of them made them by an large crap. Making them useful is a large project.
Well, I'd throw them back in anyway, even if they suck, For the GI Joe effect if nothing else. (his litle plastic guns may not fire but they still rock. :) )
Not so much "impossible" as "I'm not cool enough". I don't have the skills to re do all the code editing involved to make loth work with later versions.
Bravo Sierra, you are cool enough, but as far as I'm concerned you've done your time. I only made this list in the hope that some of them were 30 second easy fixes (like putting sets back in, is that more than 10 minutes work?), and I would consider even those a big favor. I am not pretentious enough to demand that you bust your hinny for hours just to make my play time a bit funner, just because you can. Sure people should help when they can but they deserve lives too heheh.
(unfortunately the crafting is largely busted in 1.6 so I'm lieing)
Do you have a short list of what does work? Or what is broken? Whichever.
It will be a while for improvements unfortunately. I have no time to work on the mod, and haven't for a while now. I may release the source code early next year if my situation doesn't improve. I've been debating that option for a while now, telling myself that I wanted to return to LotH someday and finish what I started. I'm not sure what's happening yet.
Dude, take your sweet time. Like I said I'm having a fine time, I could play the game with a naked character given how awesome the affinities system is.

While I am normally a rabid open source fan boy in this case I'd rather wait for your improvements and only see it go public if you're Certain you're done with it. I think you are doing an excellent job, and I'm damned picky. I think if you opened it the Gaming-as-employment-uphill-barefoot-in-the-snow-both-ways crowd would descend, Nerf the hell out of everything, and suddenly I'd have to play for 5 years to gain a level.

I'd suggest farming it out but being compartmental with it, like only sharing bits of code so you can retain policy control. Gnomenklayture for example has said that he'd be willing to proof read for text errors, is there some way to exploit desires like that without compromising your code too much?

Anyway thanks for the prompt response.

Your mod has turned diablo 2 into the best rpg (and shooter from my perspective) of all time.

How about you go mod the hell out of hellgate so that game can start rocking as hard as diablo now does. :)

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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by Innomen » Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:03 am

P.S. Have you ever thought about putting something in there that costs experience? Like maybe a super special shop that doesn't want gold? Just a thought.

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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by GnomenKlayture » Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:09 am

Deleted, duplicated entry...
Last edited by GnomenKlayture on Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Innomen
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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by Innomen » Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:10 am

Also, just an idea,

How hard would it be to revert the 1.6a item and crafting system to equal 1.5e until you get it sorted out?

Is this something I could do myself even? (hey, you never know.)

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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by GnomenKlayture » Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:14 am

Sure, I've mentioned I might be willing to farm out my OCD tendencies about spelling and consistency.
So...
Yeah, I'd be willing to do some grunt work to help keep it 'alive'.

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Re: Basic Gripes: 1.6A

Post by Quatl » Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:22 pm

Sorry for taking so long to respond to these, December has been hectic.
Innomen";p="407027" wrote: Also, just an idea,

How hard would it be to revert the 1.6a item and crafting system to equal 1.5e until you get it sorted out?

Is this something I could do myself even? (hey, you never know.)
Maybe, you could try taking the cubemain.bin file from the most recent 1.5 version and see if it works. The game should crash fairly quickly if it doesn't.

[EDIT:] I thought about this idea some more and I think that reguardless of crashing, it will break the tome... I'll try to find a way to get a repaired version of this file out.[:EDIT]
GnomenKlayture";p="407028" wrote: Sure, I've mentioned I might be willing to farm out my OCD tendencies about spelling and consistency.
So...
Yeah, I'd be willing to do some grunt work to help keep it 'alive'.
Sure, you already have access to all the strings, D2 doesn't encrypt them. Most of the changes are in patch.tbl, though there may be a few in some of the other tables.

In the tools section here you can find a few table editors that you can use to edit the strings. It's not very difficult, but there are a few weird things about the way strings are stored. (mainly color codes, and the reverse order of multi-line strings.) There is a lot of information around here about that though.

If you do fix some things, send the file(s) to the email address in the readme.

My spelling is really bad :)
Last edited by Quatl on Wed Dec 31, 2008 1:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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