[Mod Release] Grail

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Darkquake
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[Mod Release] Grail

Post by Darkquake » Wed Jun 20, 2018 4:42 am

Hey all so I put my mod in for approval less than 12 hours ago and expected it to take a day or so but moddb was super fast! here is the link for those who are interested https://www.moddb.com/mods/darkquake

Readme:

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Grail v1.00 19-06-2018

Intro:
My take on what a content patch from blizzard would look like. This mod is intended to be played with plugY v11.02!
This Mod is ONLY for D2 LoD version 1.13c.
Already have a holy grail character? This mod is compatible with vanilla saves.

The Grail.rar contains everything listed including PlugY v11.02

Installation:
Backup your game and your saves.
Copy and replace everything from the "Normal Install" folder to your Diablo 2 directory.
Launch from the PlugY.exe

Main Features:
This Mod is split into a few main parts. What I've done personally called Grail, PlugY, multires and goblins.

Grail:
QoL, Act bosses now always drop there quest drop.
	This was changed for newer players to not have to worry about not knowing and experienced players to not have to bother with.
QoL, Content, New cube recipes for the end, end game. Recipes will be detailed elsewhere.
	This change makes uping runes past 10 simpler, adds uses to Zod and standard, as well as giving an extra step in true perfect end game.
Balance, Chance to gamble for rares and chance for a gambled item to be upped to current difficulty have been increased to ~30%
	Gambling in intended to be used as more of a leveling crutch and has seen a viability increase for the mid game. Note chance to uniques and sets are unchanged.
QoL, Balance, Gambling item pool has been increased.
	Most item types can now be gambled for including charms and jewels. Neutral items or class items that rolled skills have been disabled due to players going infinite(wands, scepters, etc).
QoL, Balance, All side area's in hell that are dead ends and do not have a quest and nilithaks temple are now alvl 85 and up.
	Opening up more options for late game farming. Area's include; The Cave(85/86), The Hole(85/86), The Crypt(85), The Stony Tomb(85/86), Halls of the Dead(85/85/86), Swampy Pit(85/85/86), All Temples(85), Nilithaks Temple(85/85/86), All A5 red portals(85)
QoL, Balance, Council members are more likely to drop from the "good" treasure class.
	This is to encourage alternatives to LK runs. The good treasure class consists of gems/runes/jewelry.
Balance, All mini boss's(Radament, Griswold, etc) have had there drop quality increased.
	Internally the game would roll 5 items then pick the lowest options. Now the game just rolls 5 items, there not going to be better than act bosses but it will be at least worth killing them while leveling.
QoL, Balance, Act bosses now drop keys instead of token ingredients.
	PlugY already has the option for respecing so the drop was obsolete. A key is about 1/20 kills depending on the boss. Not as good as farming there respective vanilla droppers but better than getting respec dust.
QoL, Increased the max number of /players to 127.
	This is for the completely insane of those who like punishment.
Balance, Items can now spawn with more sockets when appropriate.
	4os zombie heads, 6os shields as well as 4os boots and gloves and 2 os belts. Plus a few relevant runewords.
Content, NEW ITEMS, THIS IS A HOLY GRAIL MOD. 87 set items, 39 Runewords, 760 uniques.
	You can tell by my username how creative I am with naming. This only gets amplified naming almost 1000 items... If you have any suggestions please send them to me if I like them I'll change them :)

PlugY:
I'm sure everyone knows what PlugY does.

Multires:
Yes! multires for 1.13c!
Content, Gives an array of options for increased resolution.

Nizari's & Jetaman's Treasure Goblins:
Content, Adds treasure goblins to the game!

Know Issues:

Grail:
Extreme lag after killing an act boss.
	This is only really going to occur if you run D2 on a potato from the 90s that meats minimum requirements.
	Fix/Workaround, Wait. D2 is an old game mix that with more than double the unique items to chose from AND a bad pc and you get this.
Lag/Frame drops when hitting lots of strong monsters on high /players
	Again D2 is an old game there is a lot of much larger math problem than usual going on.
Unkillable monsters on high /players
	There is a VERY REAL chance that monsters on high players can just out regen the damage a player is putting out. Low the /players your crazy!

PlugY:

Game crash on launch err c0000005
	This can be caused by lots of things from my experience. Try all the standard stuff, restarting, reinstalling.
Game crash on switching acts
	This is caused by running the -ns command and PlugYs "run windowed" option together. Turn off ns or use the -w command line argument instead of PlugYs option.

Multires:
The first time you start a game with multires it will not render correctly
	Go in the video options-> resolution and pick a different resolution this will force the game to re-render.
On higher resolutions you can click out of shop vendor menus and move around.
	D2 was never intended to be run at a resolution so high that you could click outside of a vendor.
On higher resolutions you can see monsters on screen before they notice you.
	Again it was never meant to be this high a resolution, while it might be possible to fix this so it didn't feel like cheesing the AI, if you went back to a lower resolution you would constantly get ganked from off screen.
Some abilities actually don't have a range limit so with high resolution become crazy.
	Teleporting across a whole map in one shot is amazing and totally broken, lucky it's singleplayer.
PlugY has an error before stating game/Game will not open
	Multires requires PlugY to have the NBPlayersByDefault AND ActiveCheckMemory options set to 0
My game won't start in multires also I don't use PlugY
	Multires is loaded in PlugY as such you have to use plugY AND have "DllToLoad=D2MultiRes_113c.dll" setup.

Goblins:
A goblin ran away but I can still see it's curse/aura and can't move past where it ran away.
	This is down to how D2 engine handles despawning things. Walk a few screens away or port to town and back this will reset it.
Late hell goblins are way to hard to kill.
	Yes, yes they are. Act5 goblins in particular are extremely tough and for good reason.
Done a whole play through never seen a goblin are they working?
	Yes. They are rare and will not spawn in every location. Places like act boss floors, arreat summit and Uber floors will not spawn goblins.
	I encountered 3-5 on an average full difficulty clear of the game.
I had a look at the original plugin and it says there are other types of goblins but I've only seen the one?
	Yes the mod is amazing! however due to balancing reasons the other types of goblins have been disabled.

Credits:
HUGE thanks to everyone who made this possible and all the other mod makers who's mods have gone into this!
PlugY - Yohann
Multires original - Sluggy
Multires Modified 1.13c - JayTee, kidpaddle94, Necrolis and Sammy
Goblins - Nizari and Jetaman
Special thanks to Ogodei, Necrolis, devurandom, Doombreed, Hellfire, Szumigajowy, and everyone over at The Phrozen Keep for helping and putting up with my noob questions.
And of cause MrLlama for inspiring me to do my on holy grail eventually leading to this.

Contact: Comment here or swing me an email at duckquack.t@gmail.com I'm always looking for better item names if you've got suggestions ;)

Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-V2q5w3ZP_lpMm1jtZeEWtYxO9Sd-83aMDqPVoZxPZM/edit?usp=sharing
I kind of want to talk modder to modder? Seems a bit shallow calling myself a modder considering all I did was visit here to see how to do anything and then spend a few hundred hours in spreadsheets :roll:
I never wanted to do a total conversion mod or even anything even to this scale when I first set out. Don't get me wrong I've played through all of The Hell, ZY, Median, and a heap of other crazy awesome mods that change the game a huge degree. I love the total conversions but I also love vanilla. I really just wanted to make vanilla with extra items.

My reflection:
Originally I only wanted to add 100 or so unique items after finishing my own personal holy grail character.
After those 100 I realised how terribly bad I was at balancing... So I made another few hundred on the opposite end of the balance spectrum, completely broken OP.
I went through and added some sets, completely OP.
Runewords, completely OP.
Decided enough was enough time to balance, ran everything into the ground. MAN BALANCING IS HARD
Saw this awesome goblin plugin was available, thought to myself "well I've got to have that". Spent what must have been 50+ hours trying to balance it to suit vanilla.(totally worth it)
Had about a month of just testing. Doing full play throughs seeing if items were even good when they first dropped...
Buffing everything slightly. While buffing everything I notice that there are some item types that don't even have a unique version in the files. I guess I always knew this but never gave it any thought.
Made a unique for every single item type... OH GOD WHY :twisted:
Did a bunch of soft mod stuff(cube, overlays, treasure class all that good stuff) and balancing. Realise I wanted to make it run outside of PlugY since goblin mod will work in any version. Do what I told myself I wouldn't do and slightly touch hard modding to change the version text.
Even though I know next to nothing about hard modding people here are genius's so I have a look around see what else I could do. Players 127? Players 127. Why? Why not?
Finish balancing things to where I feel like most items are at least good in a vacuum, and there are even a handful that challenge things like Enigma and Infinity, BUT have the rarity to boot.
See that there is a 1.13c version of Multires!?!?!? Bye bye all that time trying to make the mod available to different versions and standalone from PlugY.
Upload it to moddb, oh god there is an approval system? Makes sense and everything should be fine but still worried for no reason...
Approved! 4 downloads!!!
Making post release plans in my head. D2SE support is what I'm aiming to do next. Time for yet more searching here to figure out how to do things ;)

TLDR I went up and down, in and out ALL OVER THE PLACE during my mod making. I would love to know everyone else experience with making their own mod. :)

I know I said it in my ReadMe but a HUGE thanks to everyone here for all the amazing info your willing to share and the amount of noob questions you can put up with. Thanks.
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Doub
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by Doub » Sun Jun 24, 2018 2:40 pm

I tried to run it with D2SE but had an error. (left u a message in moddb).

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devurandom
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by devurandom » Sat Jun 30, 2018 12:31 am

Your mod was featured on moddb. Nice!
:)
Assembly Reference | 1.13d Code Edits | UVLoD | BaseMod Plugin

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Darkquake
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by Darkquake » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:12 am

I know! So awesome!

Also I fixed that bug. But as per fixing things it breaks other things. Now it hangs everytime you exit the application. Some interaction between how d2se wants to close and multires1.13. Not allowed to edit d2se and don't know what to edit in the multires1.13 dll so I guess it'll have to stay for now, sorry. :-|
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artojas
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by artojas » Mon Oct 15, 2018 7:44 pm

Where can I find the list of new runewords?

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Darkquake
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by Darkquake » Tue Oct 16, 2018 6:02 am

artojas wrote:
Mon Oct 15, 2018 7:44 pm
Where can I find the list of new runewords?
There is a link to a google docs spreadsheet with all the uniques/sets/RW in the game at the bottom of the readme. RWs have there order included in the spreadsheet.
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bluechimera
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by bluechimera » Fri Jan 17, 2020 12:24 am

I know this is an old post, sorry for necro :P
If the author is still around, I wanted to ask... if they knew why I can equip Cleglaw's Claw (shield) ... but when i go to take it off, it crashes. :O haha
I can weapon swap fine, and remove other items... but the second i click on the shield... it crashes c000005

Another thing is an incredibly long loading time from character select (10 - 11 seconds) and normally it is instantaneous ... also when randomly paging through the plugy stash it lags a bit.
I have a high end gaming PC... and no other mod behaves this way.
*edit* forgot to mention, I am using the D2SE version :)
Thanks :)

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Darkquake
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by Darkquake » Fri Jan 17, 2020 1:55 pm

Hi, yeah there was a set unequip bug that was introduced in 1.11 if I recall correctly. There was a small patched I released just after that fixed it but I never got feedback if it had conflicts with existing bugged set items.

The loading time most likely comes from shared stash holding a lot of items. That's down to d2se and the plugy version it uses afaik.
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bluechimera
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by bluechimera » Fri Jan 17, 2020 2:12 pm

Thanks for the quick reply!
I am sorry I did not notice the fix on moddb :( I tested the d2common.dll fix and it works.. even on my existing bugged shield :) Thanks so much!

Regarding plugy, I am not sure it is due to items... this is a brand new character and I have other mods with 50+ pages of stuff lol :)
As far as the long loading time, it still exists, but I will play around with it and see if I can figure out what the slowdown is.

Thank you! :)

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Darkquake
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by Darkquake » Fri Jan 17, 2020 2:25 pm

No problem hope you enjoy :D

If you find out what the problem is with the slow down please let me know, hopefully I'll be able to fix that too.
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bluechimera
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by bluechimera » Fri Jan 17, 2020 4:15 pm

I narrowed it down to a plugy.ini setting... after i disabled it, the load time and lag was gone.
ActiveLogFile=1

change that to: ActiveLogFile=0
and it works fine :)

in my plugy.log it started on line 351 --- Start LoadSPCustomData ---
See image in link below:
ext/dmzx/imageupload/files/04facdeeb369 ... 17ba65.jpg

it seems that with it set to 1, it parses 1000 pages of personal stash, and 1000 pages of shared stash as well... that would explain the increased load time / lag :)
*EDIT* :idea:
After further testing, I realized that if you even VISIT a page (in my last test 1500) it will parse all the way to it each time, even if you do not put any items there, and on my PC it took about 1.2 seconds additional load time per 100 pages, I cannot imagine how much time this would be on slow machines. 8-O :D

Hope that helps! :cool:

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Darkquake
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Re: [Mod Release] Grail

Post by Darkquake » Fri Jan 17, 2020 4:52 pm

Wow good to know that's whats causing it, thank you :) For future releases I'll definitely ship it with that option off.
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