Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

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LordMortiferus
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

Forgot to post some friday updates.
Well slowly but steadily the map fills with evil hordes of dragons, blood- and shadowmobs as well as custom stuff thrown in between. Bad news is that I have installed Starbound and spending most of my evening free time on building some huge base with a space elevator....
Expect more next week as I explore some new maped features.

I found my old notes on the background story from 2009 or so. The first part is in German summarizing the overall ideas I had, followed by some NPC names inspired by the fiction of Robert E. Howard (author of Conan, Solomon Kane, El Borak etc.), a bit of lore regarding shadow and bloodkin. Last, and this completely in english if you can read it, are the first chapters of a diary that gives background informations on the the map.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by 1[WoWz] »

LordMortiferus wrote:snip
Keighn is that you? Haha just kidding. Putting some tough mobs in there sounds good man. Can't wait to finally play this map!
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by Chedich »

Are you sure that's handwriting and not sort of code? Because I can't read more than a word or two of it :D

And thanks for reminding me to check out Starbound now that they've stopped with the periodic character wipes.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

Chedich wrote:And thanks for reminding me to check out Starbound now that they've stopped with the periodic character wipes.
There will probably be a planet wipe, which would suck cause building takes sooo freaking long - but then again I read you can backup your planet somehow. Characters and ships are save for the future regardless of upcoming updates afaik.
1[WoWz] wrote:Keighn is that you?
=p
Wish I could find my notes for Ultima 5.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by eggmceye »

we could start instagram accounts and just post photos of our notes
(I'm actually going to do it)
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by eggmceye »

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putting stupid filters on my notes
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by eggmceye »

sorry last one
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by 1[WoWz] »

Wow Egg and Lord M. Your notes look like art while mine look like a 2nd grader's first short story. There is no way I'd scan anything I physically wrote down LAUGHING OUT LOUD LIKE A MORON
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

haha
come on 1 post what ever you got!
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

Fell in a deep motivation hole when it came to fill the rest of the map with mobs - but Egg's custome heads were a revelation for me to try something else. Not using those for now as they are not ingame yet but I tried somemore split avatar combinations and it turned out that minos and several human avatars fit nicely together.
Also I tried to use a bear head with human feet and those kinda look good enough for me to have some gummibears / teddy ruxbins running around in one of the dungeons (with their claw animation they remind me of Wolverine).

Anyways, While I have various mobs now ranging from typical dragon/shadow/blood over scaled hydra/balron/werewolf to custom made Orcs/Trolls/Dwarfs/Shadow-/Bloodkin aswell as some split avatars. I am a bit worried about making them interesting to fight though.
What I have at the moment is the following idea (fully scripted already) to add for variation in battles:
#Mobs from the group of Orcs/Trolls/Dwarfs/Minos/Bear/Shadow-/Bloodkin have some base stats according to difficulty.
#At random a mob is further grouped into Fighter/Rogue/Priest/Mage/Monk with respective visible weapon.
- Fighter have higher HP/DEF but are slow
- Rogues are fast with low HP/DEF
- Monks inbetween Fighter and Rogues
- Priest high HP/DEF as well as typical Priest spells
- Mages low HP/DEF but high INT/MR as well as typical Mage spells
# Shield in off hand grants extra defense and HP (maybe grants MR as well)
# Weapon in off hand grants extra AS and DMG
# runes/orbs in off hand grant INT and MR if I am not mistaken
# Depending on the weapon there is a chance for the mob to execute a special attack (running a script by Rusty at the moment)

If you guys have any ideas to spice things up, please let me know.

Some interesting aspect I noticed, though not surprisingly if you think about it, is that custom stats make boss fights easier because the scaled stats of the boss are overwritten by the custom stats as those are applied in the aftermath. Hence, I made myself the following function to scale bosses with custom stats if "m.boss == true" - couldn't find the default function for this, hence I guess it is pre Lua scripting. Note: largeBossSetup(m) is a lua function by Egg to scale 2x2 mob bosses.

Code: Select all

function tols_boss_setup(m)

		m:set_hp_max(m:get_hp_max() * 2)
		m:set_thaco(m:get_thaco() + 2)
		m:set_base_ac(m:get_ac() + 2)
		m:set_dmg_dice(m:get_dmg_dice() + 1)
		m.xp_kill = m.xp_kill * 2
		m:set_intel(m:get_intel() * 1.25)
		m:set_magic_resistance(m:get_magic_resistance() * 1.5)
		if m.large == true then
			largeBossSetup(m)
		end

end
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

hmm one idea for more interesting mob battles goes like this:
You battle a mob to its death, but instead of resting in peace the mob transforms into something else with new stats and attack abilities. I have one such scenario scripted for one mob already which was influenced by Blood Plasma Pack if I remember correctly (not gonna say more to keep the surprise for you).
Anyway I am open for ideas - maybe similar to what I said above or maybe you guys have some really cool new ideas to test (keep it simple though).
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by 1[WoWz] »

LordMortiferus wrote:hmm one idea for more interesting mob battles goes like this:
You battle a mob to its death, but instead of resting in peace the mob transforms into something else with new stats and attack abilities. I have one such scenario scripted for one mob already which was influenced by Blood Plasma Pack if I remember correctly (not gonna say more to keep the surprise for you).
Anyway I am open for ideas - maybe similar to what I said above or maybe you guys have some really cool new ideas to test (keep it simple though).
Sounds like you have some pretty in depth ideas. I actually would like to see enemies change their equipment (i.e. stats) based on what they're up against (if this is even possible); this can occur before they die or after.

Examples, a mage casts a spell on a monster, the monster gets more MR either by equipping something or transforming. If a monster can't do damage melee, they switch to magic or the other way around. If they're hit with physical damage, they get more defense.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

1[WoWz] wrote:Examples, a mage casts a spell on a monster, the monster gets more MR either by equipping something or transforming. If a monster can't do damage melee, they switch to magic or the other way around. If they're hit with physical damage, they get more defense.
I could write a script for archers to change to melee attacks depending on the distance (done) to the player or an AoE spell that transforms certain monsters around a wizard NPC (drakes into dragons). Could be an issue on the performance though, but the idea is cool.
Last edited by LordMortiferus on Sun Jun 15, 2014 2:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

Hierarchy of monster stats (what and when are monster stats defined and/or overwritten)

1) Default Maped spawner stats
2) Boss stat boost (including 2x2 and split bosses)
3) Stat overwrite by custom LUA scripted functions
4) Heroic/Epic scaling
5) Summons (not affected by point 2, 3 or 4)

This is for my personal reference as I try to figure out how summons could scale within heroic/epic instances. Probably will check for map_level to see if we are in an instance (works until maplevel cap starts to exceed 300) and than compare max_hp of the caster with the theoretical values an epic or heroic caster would have to determine the type of instance. Well something like that.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

I wrote two deathfunctions to spice up the gameplay.

First and less curious is that initial killing a certain mob will transfer it to something else (nothing special I know but maybe good for a surprise).

The second script is a AoE spell. Killing a certain mob will change adjacent mobs of the same class into something else or make them stronger. This will have two effects. First, the battle itself will change as the new mobs will have different attributes and abilities, making it either easier or more difficult to kill them. This has a direct effect on how players will approach a group of mobs in the first place as the player has to decide on the tactics and which mob to attack first (in theory at least).

Note: I also took care of XP. Means If you have injured a mob and it then gets transformed into something else with new stats etc. the hp it has lost in its first stage will be converted to XP and will be added to its second stage form. At the moment the formula is

Code: Select all

extra_xp = hp_lost * 1.1
with 1.1 the mean factor for calculating xp from hp - maybe I should chance it to 0.5 or so to have a bit of a penalty for an uncoordinated attack from a group of players on a group of mobs but still granting a bit of extra xp.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

Weekly Friday update:

Did good progress again this week and from what I see there are the following things left:
- fill underwater stage with mobs (fish and split avatars probably)
- fill snow plateau with mobs (ice dragons and scaled imps)
- add instance entrances
- add random draconian
- add Cheds boss
- review scripts
- stay away from new ideas and do get lured into buying Xenonauts on gog as this will slack down progress again.
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

pre friday update

from the list above:
- fill underwater stage with mobs (fish and split avatars probably) done
- fill snow plateau with mobs (ice dragons and scaled imps) nearly done
- add instance entrances done
- add random draconian - started but not finished yet
- add Cheds boss
- review scripts - I dread that day (nearly 2k lines of code)
- stay away from new ideas and do get lured into buying Xenonauts on gog as this will slack down progress again. Bought the rebooted X-Com game on steam instead. Well it seems to be nice but sure it is not the good old UFO game. I have to check out the new open source port of UFO/X-Com soon. Would be cool if they merge enemy unknown with terror from the deep someday...
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Re: Town of Lost Souls - Map DevLog

Post by LordMortiferus »

One of those updates I would like to avoid.
Somehow I managed to corrupt maplvl 262. I can load that level and add spawner/items/maptiles as well as save the lvl. What I cannot do anymore are resizing the map, using "l"oadmap or features to change to another maplevel as well as "q"uitting maped while lvl 262 is loaded. The log file of maped does not register anything weird though.

I got two guesses as to what might be the problem here.
1) I set an undertile under a maptile that was not meant for undertiles (I remember that caused some issues)
2) I cropped the map. While that should not be a problem per se I can imagine that something went wrong during that process.
Note: itm and fea files are not the reason for the problem

Anyway, I will scan over the whole map for undertiles and if that doesn't solve the problem I will have to copy&paste the whole map to a clean file - Only problem with that I have to set a lot of undertiles manually afterwards. Edit: copy&paste would work, as I have just tested, but I am still inclined to find the reason for the problem in the original file.

This is a bit of a bummer as I wanted to finish spawner placement.
On the bright side, I have added two unique instance entrances as references to two shorts stories I mentioned elsewhere a couple of weeks ago. Part of one entrance is the never before seen use of a 2x2 maptile hack (which is not the cause of my troubles).
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