Mandatory mod update thread 2018

[Dale]

What is still active? Where we at mid 2018? What can I be excited about in the future?

[drcode]

Mostly bug-fixing mode for now. Some users are working on mods, as you can read in this forum.

[Knight Captain]

Conquests will return. I have a ton of code to test and whitespace-clean to get it up to release-level quality. And a fair bit of new art.

[Mark77]

KC, you referring to "The Conquests of Chaos" mod in which the Banes take over the towns? Can hardly wait to see what you've been working on...

[Dale]

Any deeper details you care to share, KC? Still beyond excited for this.

[Drew]

My crown of the liche king mod is coming along well. I completed the initial mod and sent it to my brother, who is still working on getting through it. I picked it back up a while ago and am in the process of making some wholesale changes to it. The biggest changes have involved the re-introduction of the Altar Rooms of Truth, Courage, & Love from Ultima 4, the addition of a volcanic cave to the Isle of the Avatar, and changes to the source of the clues which lead you to the crown. That has been a lot of work, but I do plan to release it down the road.

[Dominus]

Drew, that sounds interesting!

[Dale]

Awesome, Drew. Really looking forward to checking that out when you are done! Care to share the basic concept, or prefer we just wait to play it ourselves?

[Knight Captain]

My mod is every bit as massive as you might expect it to be. I'm still slowly hacking away on it.

Just tonight, I changed the burner shape setting and code to allow you to turn off both red and blue burners, and relight them to the correct color. I'll write a separate post about that.

ACHTUNG! SPOILERS!!!

Early changes:
The arrival process is more dramatic. The ship doesn't just appear on land now. (I may edit the map to improve this further.)
The three landing strips are no longer needed. New code checks for teleport storm items and removes them so you can't keep them by dropping them.
The party is better equipped to start, addressing a common nitpick. Dupre's Armour will match his shield. One item from the Labyrinth of Worlds will be included as well.
These new items will also need to be located post-storm, so replaying the first half will be different too.
Shamino will be further away from the spell battle to accommodate larger resolutions.
The fishnet stockings plot will be added back in.
Inquiry code for Harnna, Jendon, and Bucia has been moved into new functions for easier editing.
A bug in Flicken's code has been caught and fixed.
Johnson will join the party in the Goblin Village, and has a unique Pikeman skin.
Caladin's paladin shape now uses Monitor's colors.

Latter changes:
Batlin's death scene is longer, with the Banes getting all the gear from the Companions, equipping specific items, and attack the Avatar and any other companions. (The roof may cave in, if I can code it.)
Some of the Avatar's gear will be stolen. Including the Jawbone.
An old favorite song will play while the Avatar is dead. (I hope to show cutscenes of the Banes as this happens.)
A specific NPC will wake the Avatar. One that is woefully underused.
New monsters will appear, including Lizardmen, a black dragon, gold golems, and others.
The Seminarium will be attacked, with the boys inside, blockaded in their room.
Fawn will be defiled.

General (uncoded so far):
Cantra will be curable and join the party. Andrio may as well.
The three towns will be taken over as the original plot called for. The story will be longer and more involved, and the massive die-off will not happen.
Shamino will pervert magic in Moonshade, and have both Rangers and Automatons on his side. The resistance may go into the Catacombs and try to repair the water pumps to escape to Claw.
Iolo will make Fawn a fortress, with the still-sane inhabitants hold up inside the Great Captains' manors. Lizardmen guard the main gate, so the Avatar's only approach will be via the defiled throne room. Even getting out of that will be a challenge. The plot involving Delphynia and Ruggs will get twisted. Almost Hookish.
Dupre will change all Monitorians into their clan animals, with one turned into a Gwani for his purposes. New bear colors are done.
Each Bane will have to be defeated twice. Dupre will organize the Goblins, Iolo the Lizardmen in the swamp, and Shamino in his "rightful place" as the King of White Dragon. This will give time to talk to each Bane in the Black Sword.
Final puzzles and shines will remain unchanged. I was never a big fan of them to begin with.

[Gotcha!]

"Some of the Avatar's gear will be stolen. Including the Jawbone."

Question: How will this work without annoying people? Will players be required to walk all the way back to Fawn/Monitor to get the jawbone back somehow?
I can see why you did this, since the Avatar being able to teleport right to Fawn/Monitor/Moonshade after Batlin's death, and basically see the damage the three banes have done within literally one minute... It's silly. They wouldn't have had the time to do the things what they did. The Avatar should have been able to stop at least one of them.
Forcing people to walk all the way back though... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

It all sounds very interesting though. Nice work!

[Knight Captain]

That is some valuable feedback.

One of the overall goals is to make the mod feel like it "belongs" with the rest of the game. Serpent Isle is a linear game, generally, so that is something I want to reflect in new material.

ACHTUNG! SPOILERS!!!

The Banes will have different paths back, and cause trouble along the way. The Banes aren't completely unaware of what their hosts have experienced, so they will know what is valuable. There are at least 26 unique items the Party should have by Spinebreaker, and code is written to check for them and assign them to Banes.

Batlin's goons will be brought back to life. The first sign of this will be their corpses are missing. Dupre takes Brunt, Shamino takes Palos (his daemon), Iolo takes Deadeye.

The Avatar's spellbook is also missing.

Some ideas:
All those Automatons just inside Skullcrusher are reanimated, this time with glowing red eyes. The Avatar has to defeat them to escape.
A White Dragon in the snow... someplace.
Vasculio gets brought back to undeath, to confront the Avatar a second time. He'll have better help.
The Gwani are attacked, and one stops the Avatar on the way back to plead for help. This gives the Avatar the option to confront Hazard now, or risk further slaughter. Are all sentient lives worth the same?
A Bane may swordstrike a Gwani on the way south. Could be a cutscene, or finding a mutilated corpse with scores of cuts but fully furred still.
The cave south will probably remain the same, Goblins and such. (This is an area that proves your point, it's not a particularly interesting place.)
Northern Forest should have more wolves attacking the Avatar. This may lead to trying to find the Forest Master, since he should have control over their aggression.
Imagine if the first person the Avatar sees is Yelinda. What a welcome to the chaos of the Banes! Does the Avatar seek to help her by undoing the spell? Or take on the larger problems?
Then an ambush by Lizardmen in the swamp, their first appearance. And just as that seems done, a Black Dragon attacks. This one is powered by a Jawbone.
Kalen, somehow appearing alive, is captain of the gatehouse at Fawn. Thus the Avatar cannot enter the city immediately.
Ruggs has escaped to Sleeping Bull, and is drinking like he is Olon.
Ensorcio is missing, and as is typical he left a tab behind. Not that he could not pay it, but that he chose not to do so.
Monitor's portcullis is open. The animals must be fed to keep them from attacking, preferably beef/meat frames. They may still brawl with each other, but can't unlock the List Field.
Since Mad Iolo drove Yelinda out, Leon took over Fawn.

Hopefully that better explains why the Avatar will have to walk back.

[Gotcha!]

So the walk back will be a whole new experience. That's nice.
I would carefully choose to not go for rage-inducing options though.

- Losing the jawbone would already be an annoyance, but taking away the Avatar's spellbook and gawdknowswhatelse, personally I'd be incredibly annoyed about it. It's never fun to have your items stolen, in any game.
- Resurrecting Vasculio feels kind of cheap. Apart from me not liking characters killed by the protagonist not staying dead (in any game), the first encounter is already very hard, unless you have the Magebane. Even then, it often manages to kill a party member in a second.
Having to kill it on your own while he has more help...
- Resurrecting Kalen: When this all will be happening, Kalen will have been dead for a long time. If the game would allow corpses to rot, there wouldn't be a lot left. I'd rather see a lizard instead, or Jorvin (under the influence of mind control or something).

But it's your party of course, so feel free to ignore my two cents. I love the rest so far though. Nice going.

[Knight Captain]

One of the challenges I have is getting artwork. While I do can sprites and shapes, doing faces is a whole other level.

And Kalen does have some Mad Iolo lines:
https://tcrf.net/Ultima_VII_Part_Two:_S ... Text#Kalen

I could potentially assign them to another character. There has to be room for new NPCs in all of this, I'd just need to write one as lecherous to use those lines.

You may be right on the Jawbone bit. I may move that up in the timeline. That would still give the oh-sh_t! feeling without it actually lasting long enough to be disheartening. Same with the spellbook.

Just while writing this, I thought, "Why didn't I make an Automaton-colored golem?" So we may see that as well. I should probably write a tutorial on how I palette swap to create new shapes.

[Gotcha!]

Interesting that Kalen has lines. It makes me wonder if Kalen's regular death wasn't planned by the developers but just added in there at that time to save development time.

I wish I was a half-decent artist so I could help out and create a half decomposed-looking Kalen portrait.

[Drew]

Dale, the basic concept is that my mod ties up some loose ends from the original game:

The crown of the liche king was an artifact mentioned in a book on skara brae. However, it never actually existed in the game. Now it does. The crown in a very powerful item that starts out as cursed. In order to find the crown and get the curse lifted you have to play through some of the most difficult areas of the game.

Garok al-mat, a mage you meet in one of the dungeons, tells you to come visit him at his home in the mountains. However, no such place ever existed. Now it does. Garok will now give you a more specific location for where it is when you meet him.

There is a scroll in Iolo's house which describes how Gwenno met a pirate who knows the way to Serpent Isle. However, no such pirate ever existed. Now he does; and he will have some valuable information for you.

Brother Wayne, a monk lost in one of the dungeons, can now be given directions to return to Empath Abbey.

There is now a key to the vault in the jewelry store in Britain.

I added eggs which spawn blood moss and mandrake root to the game. That means that you can now gather all of the reagents on your own if you know where to find them.

You can now sail the pirate ships which are docked on the Isle of the Avatar, if you can find the deeds that is...

One of the Avatar's companions from a prior game is now available as a party member after a certain event occurs.

My mod also adds some high end equipment and reintroduces places that appeared in other Ultima games into BG. These include: the Catacombs of Moonglow (U-6), the Altar Rooms of Truth Courage and Love (U-4), the lighthouse on Buccaneers Den (U-9), the waterfall on the River Maelstrom (U-5), and the passage which connects Buccaneers Den with the mainlaind (U-5 or U-6. I can't remember which.). There is also a new volcanic cave in the game.

There is no set starting point for any of this. In order to find all of the new places / items you will have to play through the game from scratch. I even re-wrote some npc conversations to add clues to point you in the right direction. How does that sound?

[Dale]

KC:
This sounds so damn good. SI is my favourite of the series, and I can't wait to play it beefed up! This ALL sounds amazing. Having to play through a large chunk without the jawbone or the spellbook sounds brutal in a GOOD way to me. As long as you are introducing new story and challenges along the way, which it sounds like you are. Whichever direction you go, I am beyond thrilled.
I just wish we had one of the developers to share a bit more info on Claw. I think you were going to re-implement that too? Which I am already sure will be great.. just would be cool with more to start from that the little that had already been learned.
REALLY so excited for this.

Drew: This ALSO sounds amazing. I remember you posting about this now, I think. I am remembering that book and I spent a lot of time wandering around that swamp with the liche and dagger trying to find a crown or something.
Huge game-sprawling mods for Black Gate are trickier to pull off, because I am sure everyone here knows their way around that game like the back of their hand (it is so difficult not to run immediately and grab the carpet and then the black sword).. but I am excited to try and play through it as blind as possible. You combining this with the keyring mod or anything? Having the keyring makes the game so much less painful.
Kudos, either way.
I had always felt that for such an amazing and open/non linear game, BG had a painful lack of unique equipment. I had started work on a mod that introduced a new sword with a mini quest to pull off, but I kept hitting dead-ends and not knowing how to progress. I LOVE that you plan in introducing some new equipment. Especially if they have properties requiring some use-code. My lack of imagination and skill basically meant the sword I had made just had the paralyze/stun properly checked off hahah.

Really excited to be able to actually play all this! Thank you all for all your amazing time and efforts!

[r_h_o_n_a]

I'm just recently coming back to SI and Exult after a few years and damn, that mod sounds absolutely amazing, KC. Super keen to see how it develops!

A few thoughts, if you don't mind some unsolicited suggestions.

I tend to agree with Gotcha re Vasculio. Especially given Boydon and his unresurrectability (is that a word? it is now). Vasculio's plenty hard even the first time around - I think resurrecting him a second time might make it both excessive and a little cheap (not to mention that if you use the Magebane on him the first time, that should steal *all* his magic, including whatever magic he has that would allow him to return again as undead).

On the other hand, LOVE the idea regarding the Banes stealing the Jawbone and assorted other stuff. It always struck me as weird that you could just gate back to the towns and they're insta-rubble; making you walk all the way back solves that plotline - and you're so right re Yelinda, that'd be a super disturbing introduction to the Banes' devastation! One caveat, thinking about the logistics from a first-play-through perspective: I don't think it's possible to have the Avatar's spellbook be taken by a Bane without some serious reorganisation. The Dispel Field spell that the Avatar get from Selina is crucial to finding the Banes in the first place (it's needed to get the Gwani Horn, which allows the freeing of Gwenno, who then describes how to find, defeat, and cage the Banes), but if you don't have your spellbook to Transcribe the scroll into and use it from, the Dispel Field spell will be lost forever. There's a similar problem with the Create Soul Prism spell, which Torrissio only gives you on a single scroll but you need to use three times to make the prisms for the Banes, meaning it needs to be able to be put into the spellbook.

I'm also super keen for the inclusion of Cantra and perhaps Andrio as party members. The one thing that disappointed a bit about Serpent Isle when I first played it was a relative dearth of options for building a party, especially during the Banes sequence; filling up the party with automata isn't quite as much fun character-wise (Stefano wouldn't stick around after the Death Knight, and Wilfred from Sleeping Bull was way too much of a d-bag for me to want him on my party). Your plans for the Monitor reimplementation also sound super promising!

Re Fawn, I admit having Leon take over and Ruggs fleeing to Sleeping Bull seems a little strange. It destroys the deep irony of the hideous outcast Ruggs being the only person left alive in the great city of Beauty, which I know was a time-saving measure on the part of the Origin programmers but actually works quite well as a tragic element. I can't help thinking of potential alternative scenarios incorporating parts of the unused Fawn usecode into the original. Instead of having Leon take over Fawn, there's part of me that'd like to see a handful of people (ones who aren't imprisoned or killed outright - maybe Delin, Alyssand, Jendon, and Zulith?) flee Fawn entirely and seek refuge in the Fellowship camp. Adding even further to the plot irony, it'd be great to see Zulith or Kylista in particular having to beg for sanctuary in the camp of the Fellowship outcasts they'd previously shunned. If you did that, you could keep Leon alive - perhaps with whatever plans you originally had for him - and develop some interesting additional points in the Fellowship camp. I always felt the camp was quite underused anyway; it's entirely possible to finish the original game never having visited it. (Love your plans regarding the Lizardmen, though, and having Kalen as Mad Iolo's henchman is a nice touch that harks back beautifully to the original usecode.)

Purely a logistical suggestion, I wonder if it'd be possible to code a way to allow the Avatar to mine small amounts of Stoneheart during the Mountains of Freedom sequence (especially since there are shovels and picks lying around in Freedom anyway)? You never get more than a handful in the entire game otherwise. For the extended Banes sequence, or if you'll be including a second run at Vasculio, it might be handy for the Avatar (once the spellbook has been recovered) to have a few more magical attack options as well as weaponry, and the upper-circle attacking spells all call for bloodspawn.

Not really on topic, but it also always irritated me a bit that the Lydia-Selina sibling relationship wasn't dealt with in greater detail in the original. (Hell, when the Avatar talks to people in various cities, they can't even keep it straight whether it's Selina or Selene or Celennia, or in the unused usecode, even Selenia.) Given that Selina's own sister tried to poison the Avatar, it's bizarre to think Selina, being in league with Batlin, wasn't in some way involved. Such rich side-plot possibilities there too, especially if Selina would have to be resurrected for some reason (which we already know is accidentally possible in the original)...

Anyway, overall this is a mod I'd be thrilled to see. Let us know if you need testers!

[Dale]

What is the latest with Glimmerscape? I am finally thinking of starting it, but if there are any updates on the horizon, I will wait.
Any estimate on rough play-through time on that one?

[Donfrow]

No updates pending in the near future for Glimmerscape.

The updates I do to it these days are bug fixes and dead-end quest completions that people come across (I forgot to finish some due to the sporadic nature in which I created it, not sure if any more of these exist though).

There's an outstanding bug that has to do if you die on the starting island that was reported to me but I haven't gotten around to fixing it unfortunately. I think other than that I had corrected all of the ones I could (and know about...) in the currently available release.

Not sure on the play through time though. There's a lot of areas that aren't related to the main story line so unless you wander around you don't come across them.

[Dale]

Alright.. I'm going to give it a try, then!

[Donfrow]

Hopefully you don't encounter a whole new set of bugs but I'm sure you will come across something. I think all the game breaking things are resolved though.

[Dale]

Mostly just typos and text errors other than the issue mentioned in the other thread. I'll keep an eye out for anything useful.

[Dale]

With only Sentri in my party, I rested and told it was time to continue the journey or whatever by the Smith the Horse portrait hahah. This happened again when I interacted with an occupied bed.

Nice T2 reference. And Star Trek.

A couple portraits I didn't recognize include the cyclops (though I may be blanking) and Miles Bennet Dyson. And the king... hahah. Did you make these?

Talking to a fancy pirate named Dimitry south of that first city does not work. His portrait does not come up and his dialog options are there, but you cannot see the text.