Content queries & Suggestions

[maw]

Personally, the menus do it for me much better than the 3d environments.  Frankly the average Darklands city feels bigger, to me, than (say) the Imperial City in Oblivion did.  More full of life.  So I don't anticipate changing this anytime soon.  If you want to prove me wrong, though, I'd be happy to see an example.

Character creation likewise, although I am working on including a "default self" for each of the NPCs, so you can non-customize their stats.  I may, per your suggestion, include a small random element in this.

wouldn't have expected it on my opionion. just a preference i bring up. if anyone else feels the same, they'll mention it. otherwise, keep on keeping on.

I'm glad you like the map, although really it's received only a tiny amount of work so far.  Probably the next update to the map will be a huge one, honestly, one which expands things out to the right scale and puts all the cities on it.  Don't expect that one anytime soon, though.  But while I'd cheerfully accept a prettier interim map if someone decided they wanted one enough to do it themselves, since it's only an interim item it's not high on my list.  Incidentally, once we do add roads, they're gonna be real roads, you'll get a bonus to Pathfinder if you're on one and your encounters will be (a) more people and less animals, and (b) generally more benign, I've got that code already sketched out.

pm Quanta at m&b site. she did good work on my map. maybe...?

The Anya thing is still odd.  I can age her as far as I like on my machine (up to your age +11, which is the most the mod will let you), no problems.  Did you talk to the innkeeper at all, or have any subsequent conversations with her after the one to improve her stats?

just jummped right from talking to Anya to heading out hunting.

And, lastly, you got menu pics to work?  Tested and everything!  Stop the presses, that's huge, thank you!  I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with the brf/dds/skinning process that I'll need to fiddle with that for a bit, but that's seriously awesome news.

its in. maw

[Mad_Hamish]

I know this might sound like a stupid question but are the greyed out options just waiting for the player to develop or are they not in this version? If they are available then how do we open at least one (this could give us a clue to how to open the rest)?

Love the mod by the way. Am I right in thinking that there are more reliable and less reliable potions and that is why they have the inventors name on them. This thinking is because I blew myself up with a breath of death after using one with a different creators name successfully.

[Hellequin]

Hamish - it depends on which menu, why a menu item may be greyed out.  For instance, in the city, all the options are currently shown (but mostly greyed out), including (a) the ones which lead to city locations we haven't included yet, (b) the ones which you might need certain conditions on your character to select, and (c) the ones which should only appear when you're on a particular quest or a particular plotline has been triggered.  In particular all the "investigate his politics", "talk to the guild about their leader" etc. stuff is all keyed to a city-in-rebellion plotline which I, for one, never even saw when playing the original game.

In the brewing menu, currently potions you don't have the ingredients to brew are greyed out.  I plan to change this in the next release, though, so that you can get at the info about what ingredients you need, even if then the options to actually brew a dose are greyed out until you have what it takes.

Other menus' greyed out options are similar to one of the two reasons above. Sorry I can't be more specific, I've used (disable_menu_option) about eight zillion times in this mod.

As for the potions, there are more and less powerful ones, varying by inventor.  For each potion the intermediate grade is 40% better than the lowest grade, and the top grade is 80% better than the lowest grade.  I should really include that datum somewhere you can get at it, but you can use the prices to tell (comparatively) which is which.  The fact that a breath of death blew up in your face is much more likely to be (a) your aim point was closer to you the second time, and breath of death has a huge (and progressively spreading) area of effect, and/or (b) there's a random scatter on potion throws, and that scatter gets quite large at low Throwing proficiency.  What can I say, they're not exactly aerodynamic.

[jeansberg]

Jeansberg - yes, mp3 files play as SFX.  Once Armagan gives us a (stop_sound_effects) operation as he's explicitly promised to do, then we'll really be cooking with gas and our players will get to see the full effects of your hard work.

I hope that will enable us to have triggered music/ambience according to encounters and such. I'm really excited about the opportunities.

Would it be possible to disable the use of traditional music completely and have events trigger certain music via sounds.txt? When you enter a battle, one of the battle songs play; when you enter the world map, one of the travel songs play, etc. That way we could easily stop the currently playing music to make room for some devilish chants when you encounter the wild hunt and such. That is, if I understand this correctly.

Speaking about music, maybe I should upload a song pack with a music.txt for people to use if they want to...

Edit:
I uploaded all the sounds in the sounds folder as .ogg files to your repository. They're about a tenth the size now.
All you have to do is put them in the sounds folder for the next release and rename the references in sounds.txt from .wav. to .ogg.

[Hellequin]

Jeansberg - yeah, that's the thought.  I'm not sure if we can use the module system to disable the traditional music entirely, but I'm sure we can work around that (get players to turn it off if necessary).  The greater control will be a godsend, and enable us (you!) to do really powerful stuff with it.

[jeansberg]

If we leave the module's music.txt empty, there won't be any music, right?

[Fisheye]

right. I've done that and it works. Technically you have to put a 0 in the file, but yeah.

[jeansberg]

I kinda screwed up with the .ogg encoding. The encoder decided to make the files stereo again 

I re-uploaded them as mono.rar.

[stoned_dude]

hiya, i've made a small weapon project, containing a lot of landsknecht weaponry
AS far as i've gathered, darklands is supposed to take place at the same time, so if you'd like, i can send the weapons over
(PM me with email on M&B furom)

[jeansberg]

How about some screenshots?

[stoned_dude]

sure

[jeansberg]

Wow! Those polearms are going to look great for city guards and such.

Those swords look a lot more appropriate than the native ones too!

[Hellequin]

Those are indeed lovely.  PM is definitely on its way.

Is the blade of the katzbalger meant to shade that dark, or is that just the way the light is set up in that render?  Either way I like it, and if you don't mind I'll send the link to my friend who runs a Riddle of Steel game and occasionally does Poser renders from it - one of the PCs in that game bears two katzbalgers, and the landsknects keep challenging him to reclaim them, and dying.  It has sort of become his hobby.

As I think I commented earlier, armies per se are mostly not a part of Darklands, so troops like the landsknecht and doppelhanders didn't actually appear there at all.  [Even several military bits which appear in the source, concerning cities under siege and a Soldier's Row in some cities and suchlike, don't actually appear in the playable Darklands.]  So in theory, while I'm in phase I of things (replicate, don't add), they won't appear in the game.  But in practice, I do plan to integrate that material, and there's a bandit-soldiers encounter which would do wonderfully to be converted to renegade landsknechts.  Which I think I shall do.

I also have a thought on including "sign up with the army" stuff once I've got the original material all incorporated, which the above inspired.  I'll be letting that stew for a bit, but it's thematically appropriate (as a temporary tour of duty, if you start weighing in on the politics and actually developing allegiances).

Oh, and while I'm here...

Update: Version 0.1d is on way very soon.  The content I referred to in my last update is all in, now, but as it happens I managed to make big inroads on further potion/saint functionality, which I hadn't meant to include -- so, given that that's now ~80% written, I'm holding off on 0.1d until I get that stuff added too.  Up to another half-dozen potion types.  Projected release, maybe Saturday, give-or-take a day.  One part of what's been added has also been requested by Winter, for eventual inclusion in Craftmod, but you're gonna see it here first... then we'll fork it to Craftmod once it's proven out as stable.

And one of our sequencers, Blankshield, has got a handle on the format and process, at which point we'll be able to start adding new random encounters at much-increased speed.  We've got a working list of a dozen or so which he's set up to tackle.

Lastly, I had an insight which may give us a workable Wild Hunt far sooner than expected.  That's still a 0.1e or even -f release item, but it's much closer than I'd previously anticipated.

[jeansberg]

If anyone wants another preview of the soundtrack, I just uploaded my version of Tristan's Lament to my Schattenländer music page (You may have to click 'hi-fi stream').

You haven't updated the thread in a while, Hellequin. Anything new?

[Wood]

That's nice music, what program did you use to compose it?