Elemental Mod for MM7 -- v4.0 open beta

[Tomsod]

Status report: I'm 95% sure to release something by New Year, but it'll most likely be an open beta kind of thing. Just as well, it'll probably have more bugs than I can squash alone!

For now, I just finished adding the Black Market to Steadwick sewers, where you can buy and sell stolen items:

House animation is from the (unimplemented) Nighon bank. I don't like the glowing eyes, but otherwise it's close enough.

The plan is to also have it replace the Judge's "I lost it" feature, but this would require tracking quest items more thoroughly, otherwise the market ends up crammed with every trinket currently in your castle's chest. If I do implement that, it will organically fix the book of Divine Intervention exploit (which can be duplicated and sold in vanilla), since you'd have to pay money to get it back from the market, eliminating any potential profit. Hopefully I'll get around to this.

[Lone_Wolf]

I've looked at the changelog and read many interesting ideas.

I don't like easy games and doubled monster hp in vanilla to reduce the number of oneshot kills.

Will 4 be harder / have a higher difficulty option then 3.x ?

[Tomsod]

Yeah, everyone asks me to make Hard difficulty harder! I'll try, there's already some stuff done for 4.0, e.g. last month I added a bunch of new monster spells that only appear on higher difficulties. But it seems that the more tricky features, like better AI, will have to wait for later releases because I'm nearly out of time.

[Lone_Wolf]

Understood, I'm watching the github repo.

I can at the very least spare some time to check if rangers are treated differently then other classes in 4.x .
Would a VCS/release package for archlinux following arch wine package guidelines be useful for you ?

[Tomsod]

I've rewritten the monster-chooses-target function from scratch, so even if there's a bug in vanilla that causes everything to have a preference for rangers or something, my mod shouldn't inherit it.

While I do happen to use arch btw, my MM7 is just locally installed in ~/.wine -- actually there are like ten copies of the install for various mods and versions of the game and other testing purposes. You can put your thing on AUR, maybe someone is interested, I dunno.

[Kaltenberg]

This black market is a much-needed idea, it fills a gap!

[Lone_Wolf]

I often feel the limit of 2 hirelings is too restrictive and noticed you have been working on hirelings.

Any chance to increase the limit to 3 or 4 ?

An alternative might be to introduce new hirelings that replace lower ones of similar profession .

example :
I often have instructor + teacher that give 25% bonus to xp.

Make instructor & teacher conflict so you can only hire one of them.
Add a new hireling, Master Teacher that gives 25% bonus but conflicts with instructor & teacher.

This still gives the option to get 25% bonus xp, but only takes up one hireling slot .

[Tomsod]

I originally intended to add an option to hire a skill-boosting hireling for just one character, at the same cost but only taking half a hireling slot. In the end I scrapped this idea, as I don't have enough time left to properly implement this, and, more importantly, the vanilla hireling system heavily favors homogeneous parties, which is fair to them as MM7 class skill caps mean such parties (even four sorcerers, but especially four knights or monks) are crippled in some other way(s), so this is even balancing! Yes, in the default KTCS party any given skill hireling will be wasted on at least one of your characters, but in exchange you get a very versatile skill set.

[Lone_Wolf]

I should have chosen a better example as it's not the skill boosters I would put in the extra slots but utility hirelings .

I don't like waiting days for stables/ships until they head to my next chosen destination, so I walk across borders a lot.

By hiring a pathfinder the travel time is reduced to 1 or 2 days per crossing, but food supply goes down fast and most inns only sell a low amount of food.

Adding a Chef (creates 2 food a day upto 14) would solve this and also make camping outside easier then running back to an inn when you need to rest.
Unfortunately that means both hireling slots are filled.


You know a lot more about the internals of the MM games then I do : is categorizing hirelings and limiting slots to certain categories technically possible ?

[Tomsod]

You might be the first person I met who considers vanilla chefs useful! Unfortunately, they're already completely revamped as of v3.0, improving stats on rest instead of adding food. Personally, I've never had problems with food, in most regions taverns sell over 10 food at once which is enough for a while. And in a pinch, there are apples.

As part of that discarded idea I've considered having "weak" hirelings such as travel time boosters also occupy half a slot, but I think a better solution is to make each profession at least somewhat competitive. For instance, in the next version travel hirelings will boost walking speed and tell you which dungeons have refilled.

As for technical feasibility, most code calls an unified "is this profession hired" function, so if it's rewritten, only the hire/fire code itself needs to be modified to tweak hireling slots however necessary. However, having a special slot for travel NPCs is questionable, as a lot of players (not me, though) consider them all completely useless.

[Lone_Wolf]

I checked and indeed only 3 taverns sell less then 12 food : Harmondale , Emerald, Evenmorn .

I usually realised after crossing a border (especially during trading triangles) I didn't have enough food left .


Looking at commits post 3.1 I see several things I'd like to try out. Please let me know when you need testers.

[Tomsod]

Well, hopefully at the end of the month I'll invite everyone here to test a horribly buggy 4.0 beta! Unless I find time to do a playthrough myself before the deadline (unlikely), then it'd be ordinarily buggy.

[raekuul]

In my experience, food and travel NPCs are convenient but because of the limited hireling space aren't worth picking up over healing or spellcasting or skill buff NPCs. I would enjoy travel NPCs not counting against the hireling cap - MM7 and onwards don't permit Diagonal crossings like MM6 does so going from AvLee to Deyja or Ravenshore to Murmurwoods (or Blackshire to Sweet Water in MMMerge) overland is always two crossings.

[Tomsod]

FWIW with a (promoted) Knight in party you're allowed to buy a horse which pretty much acts like a slotless travel and/or hauling hireling (some horses have other bonuses, too). But yeah, my current plan is to make it so any NPC type is worth the slot in at least some situations. Running faster in dungeons oughta be worth something; if not, well I could think of something else to add.

[Lone_Wolf]

2 questions

Town Portal is severely nerfed, as it now only teleports to the last visited
town on Master, and only at GM you can choose. Also, the success chance is
lowered to 5% * skill both at M and GM, but with no monsters nearby it's 100%.

If party is on a map with a TP fountain, will party Master TP bring you to that fountain or to the previous one ?
example : party goes from harmondale to tularean forest and casts master TP . Will party arrive in H or at centre of pierpont ?

Lloyd Beacon is also nerfed, as a character can only recall one beacon per day
per 3 points of skill. Setting new beacons is not restricted, though.

Since LB is a GM spell, does this mean that char can recall 4 times per day after getting LB ?
If yes, maybe int( (skill -12)/3) +1 would be more realistic ?

[Tomsod]

If party is on a map with a TP fountain, will party Master TP bring you to that fountain or to the previous one ?
example : party goes from harmondale to tularean forest and casts master TP . Will party arrive in H or at centre of pierpont ?

Visiting not just Tularean, but any dungeon in the region (e.g. recalling a beacon to castle Navan) sets the "current fountain" to the Tularean one, yes. Similarly, after visiting Bracada you get teleported to Celeste, assuming its fountain is activated (i.e. Celeste was ever visited before).

Since LB is a GM spell, does this mean that char can recall 4 times per day after getting LB ?
If yes, maybe int( (skill -12)/3) +1 would be more realistic ?

Indeed, it starts at four uses. I had no intention to make the spell super hard to use, just to have some reasonable limits that would make increasing the skill rewarding.

Spoiler

P.S. a (half-baked) release in a few days, in case you were wondering!

[Lone_Wolf]

The TP change will need some adjusting, especially for the human elf war travels and visiting/getting back from nighon .

Does it also affect the gatemaster NPC or do they still cast TP at GM level ?

My current playthrough with vanilla (2*monster HP - 4* monster xp) KTCS party is now early on light path and my lvl 48 party is stronger then opponents for now making things kinda boring.

Looking forward to a new challenge.

[Tomsod]

The gate master hirelings cast at GM, yes. Overall I wanted to encourage players to use stables and boats more often, although I'm only now noticing that there are no direct routes between Erathia and Tularean! Makes sense, they're at war.

[Tomsod]

Well then, the fourth release is out! It's not actually close to finished by my own standards (nor playtested), sorry for that, but I promised to have something by New Year, and I think there are even some exotic calendar systems that say I made it? So, expect bugs, upcoming patches, a new indoor map made by Kaltenberg, more bugs, a lot of changes to shops and stuff, new quest, and also bugs. Did I mention it wasn't playtested at all? Please write me (such as here) when you find something doesn't work properly.

See the changelog for all the stuff I did. Fair warning: I haven't managed to add an important Monk-related feature, but I will soon, so if you want to have a Monk, maybe wait for the next hotfix. Also, the difficulty stuff is a bit sporadic, misses some features as well, and really needs playtesting.

You can download the English and Russian (Buka) archives from GitHub. Installation is as before: unpack the archive into a (preferably fresh) MM7 install, overwriting everything. Latest version of MM7Patch is also required, with all the optional tasks (those that it tells you to uncheck for mods; my mod not only doesn't mind, but expects them!) MMExtension is not required, but it and the mod may be installed over one another with (hopefully) no problems. (At least for MMExt v2.2 or v2.3.)

Again, my hope is that y'all will help me identify the bugs and stupid features and stuff, so please communicate! And on that topic, could someone reddit this? I don't have an account there, but apparently r/MightAndMagic is mostly unaware of my mod (or perhaps this forum in general?) At least one person at some point wrote that 'a mod for MM7 that returned MM6 elemental resistances would be cool' or something like that.

EDIT: updated the links for v4.0.1.

[Lone_Wolf]

Downloaded, installed and looking around on emerald now.
Can throwing knives be recharged or are they gone when out of charges ?


I like to peek in files like monsters.txt & items.txt directly , but am unsure where the ingame used version is located.

The data folder contains 4 events files, events.lod, elemental.events.lod, 00 patch.events.lod and 01 tunnels.events.lod .
In what order are they applied ?