Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Tomes Alpha Mod Development for CW

[MattCaspermeyer]

Well, it looks like with AP / CW there are a lot fewer counter resources available for creating new counters.

Once again I'm saddled with commenting out counters that aren't currently being used since there are not enough counter resources for all of them when starting a new game.

So it is looking like it is going to be more and more of a manual labor nightmare to implement the mod as intended and the more this leans towards some sort of automatic implementation.

Nonetheless, I'm going to see how this manual process goes.

So you'll find that when you get a tome, you're going to have to comment out any sp_... counters in the corresponding file to enable that bonus to work.

This is about all I can do right now until I figure out how to dynamically generate the tomes and their counter bonuses...

Matt

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[MattCaspermeyer]

Well, I've had a pretty good modding session the past several hours and so wanted to give you an update to how it has been going...

As far as where to place the modded files, this was driving me crazy in AP. I tried APDir\data\mods and APDir\sessions\addon\mods and it just was not working reliably. As it turns out, since I've used the editor, the game uses the following location: <DRIVE>:\Users\<USER NAME>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\1C Company\King's Bounty. Armored Princess\sessions\addon. Once I placed the files here, then it was working in AP fine. Note that for CW placing the files in APDir\sessions\orcs\mods works great.

I still have the problem in AP where I can't debug scripts so I use CW for now.

I've been working on the item and counter problems with respect to the tomes.

As far as the tomes are concerned, I think I have it fixed where you can click on a Tome and place it on your hero. So far I've just been adding tomes via the item cheat code to see if they work properly and if I can put them on my character. I've tried 29 out of the 180 tomes so far. Their pictures show up and their descriptions (for the most part) look okay.

I had a really hard time with the item params{} section and as it turns out it seems to only except about 9 or 10 params max per item. If you go over that, then the params won't work properly. I was using the params{} section for modifying the tome morale after a fight, but now will plan to implement that via an LUA script, instead.

The next area I'm going to work on is the mod section counters. I have too many and so need to reduce them. What I'm going to do here, is only use the Leadership Reduction counters that I use, others will be in the files, but commented out. This helps save counter resources since I'm not using them.

Next the spell counters I will consolidate into a single counter for the spell and rely on the LUA script to implement the various functionality. For example, I had counters for all the spell variables, including power, duration, chance of affliction, etc. This was simply too many counter resources for the game to handle and it was causing it to crash when I tried to start a new game (strangely I had more counters in TL, but I think there were a lot more resources available). I'm pretty sure that the counters have to exist when you start a game, otherwise they won't work. So by consolidating the spell bonuses into a single counter I save between 1/2 to 1/3 of the counter resources for the spells. I have not implemented this yet, but plan on doing so later.

With these changes, I'm hoping to have all the counters available when you start a game to manage the tome bonuses. If I still have problems, then I'm either going to have to get them to work in a different way or verify if I can use them after starting a new game. I'm pretty sure in TL I could use new counters, but things are different in AP/CW it seems like.

So anyway, if I can get this part of the mod implemented then I think I may still be able to implement the Tomes @level 1 and then you'll have to manually uncomment out the level 2-5 items so that you can upgrade them.

I also did a simple test to see if I could upgrade an item and the arena screen pops up okay, but the enemy hero doesn't work - there are just towers. In TL, suppressing the Staff of Destruction had both Towers and an enemy hero (the Staff of Destruction) in the arena together. In the item editor there is a place to specify an enemy hero, but it looks like this part no longer works in AP/CW or I'm doing something wrong.

I'm not going to worry about the Tome hero appearing in the upgrade / pacify fight, but it would be cool to fight against them when you're trying to upgrade them to the next level.

We'll see how it goes, but I'm making slow and steady progress...

Matt

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[Fatt_Shade]

Glad to see you`re progressing , but also sad for bumping in so many problems. Ideas for implementing tomes and then `developing` them during game into more powerful items are great, and sadly undoable as you said.
Weird thing about different game mechanics for spells/items ... in the Legend / Ap-Cw / WotN. All 3 are made on same basics but many thing in game itself are very different. It does not make any sense

Item having more then 10 params seems a bit much, but i guess it`s logical to add new param after every upgrade and keep old ones. It wasnt done that way for some items so far : Dragon toy in Cw (you gain 15% dmg for rage skill dmg but lose bonus for mana accelerator, and wall upgrade from separate items).
And having hero in tome upgrading/suppressing battles not necessary because towers already cast spells and more then one/turn. It`ll be like 1 more very strong tower with larger list of spells, and some passive bonus for troops in battle. Maybe you dont need to lose time on making this work.

Good luck in further work Matt

[MattCaspermeyer]

I've been making steady progress on the mod.

I found out why it was crashing in CW - there just aren't enough counter resources in CW for me to implement the Tome spell bonuses using counters.

So what I decided to do instead was implement the bonuses to the spells in the spells themselves (SPELLS.TXT).

I've gone ahead and implemented this and it seems to work fine. I added some LUA functions to handle doing bonuses to spells this way instead of the counter system.

Essentially what I do is list the items and their bonus in the spell's parameter list. Then I check if any items in the list are equipped and then sum up the total bonus. It's not as good as the counter system, but it is better in that it doesn't use any counter resources. It also seems like there are sufficient parameter resources available for the spell parameter section to include all the bonuses I intend to implement.

I may also expand this to unit abilities as well - we'll see...

I need to do a little play testing to ensure there are no show-stopping crashing issues, but I think if I can play a little bit and everything seems to be working, I can release an alpha update for CW.

I already have an update for AP that I released about a month ago if you want to check out Tome bonuses and stuff, but plan to release an update in about a week if there are no serious crashing issues.

I still have a lot of stuff to implement, but the idea is that you can start a new game and check things out as I keep doling out updates...

Matt

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