Legend of the Invincibles

[Wussel]

lol, I love it. The black shadow is of course a dark aura. The red pixel and the outline stray pixel make it look really bad-ass. I must say Dugis pixel pushing becomes quit impressive, if he cares.

Dugi are you aware that you can use 0.5 in the gausian blur in gimp? It helped me a lot with making blur shadows for sprites. applied around 6 times, copied on top of each other for 3 layers, enhance the transparency again to something 50 plus minus. It looks like you do the rest, but the blur on this small scale can be less than 1. Copying and toning down again really does a lot on blur.

Here a the cloaks :

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[Dugi]

I know there is gaussian blur in GIMP, but I haven't come to the idea to use it to create shadow. Next time, I'll use it.

I have used your dark and black cloaks, but not the red one - mine has flames coming out of it, yours is just red. Thanks for the work!

[Wussel]

Next topic is a bit a challenge. Aura and halos. I like the white balls flying in circles. They can be recolored to allmost everything. I tried teal for the charge aura.

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There are 3 types of animations 1,2,3,2 for pulsation and 1,2,3 for circling. I would make the animation a bit slower maybe 300 msec and maybe stick with circling as it should work for pulsing too.

About merging auras: You can still use blit if the png are all put to the same size. So wml does not have to find out the picture size.
However there is a far easier option too. Just combine them using variables for the picture name: show -1 from charge, -2 from cantor and -3 from berserk or whatever.

I would redo the illuminating aura in 3 levels as you have 3 different strength of it. Toning it down would help tremendously since all kind of fellows have the light. Maybe just making a thin ring very transparent, or 2 or 3 for stronger versions.

[Dugi]

The charge halo was just leadership flare that I pasted more times and animated as rotation. I am not very convinced that colouring it teal would make it a better idea.

Regarding the merging of auras. I know that there is ~BLIT, but the problem is that each halo has a different number of frames. Writing an algorithm that would deal with it is not hard, but writing it in WML isn't so easy and if the numbers don't have small common multipliers, the resulting code might be extremely long. If each either a single frame or a certain number of frames common for all animated halos, it should be far easier. If you're willing to spend the effort, you can edit all these halos to make sure that all animated halos have the same number of frames. Better adjust the number of frames to the hard-to-edit animated halos, such as Lilith's axes halo (and leave the unanimated ones, this can be dealt with easily).

[Wussel]

charge had a pulsing teal color hex in my version. really ugly for me. Than there are the triangle ones. I mad a few tests with poison aura and came up with this as simple replacement. I reduced the transparency to 50% on top of what it had before. It is clearly visible so for me this is enough.

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As I said I would go for a 1,2,3 animation with 300 msec each. If you have similar things like triangles in 3 color version would not work with blit alone. But maybe it is possible to come up with some different things.

Is there a list of all different area affects somewhere?

light 1, light 2 light 3
leadership,royalty, inspire
poison, charge, backstab
heal 1, heal 2
convict or so, like all the make enemies bad things, darkens?

I am sure i am missing a lot.

And as I said: The leadership fly-balls are awesome. Coloring them makes it good for other things too.

[Dugi]

Changing intensity of light does not even need more than one picture, the rest can be done with the ~O modifier.

I have noticed that there are halos that have five or eight frames. The ones with five frames cannot be obtained by playable units, but the unit that uses a halo with 8 frames will be on your side for some time (and capable to equip items). How about normalising these halos to 4 frames (it divides 8) or 8 (not much extra work for the ones that pulsating opacity).

There is no list of abilities that create such a halo, but the code that adds halo according to abilities is in utils/stats.cfg and all automatically added halos are coded there.

[Wussel]

did not find those once yet. Will have a look. I was thinking in making bigger rings of different size for everything. I disagree on the light thingy. I would like to know which unit has the better illumination. Since I have a lot of it and the white things stack extremely badly.

[Dugi]

Illumination isn't supposed to be animated, if we choose to animate it, a part of it can keep the a constant intensity to show the intensity of the illumination effect. But that one can stay unanimated. Opacity can be changed with ImagePathFunctionWML, so it's possible to re-use one picture for three intensities.

To find where the code references the halos, just use Ctrl+F to find an occurrence of one of the image names.

[Wussel]

I made a quick test with rings at 50 % and some blur. Idea is that the rings can be in different pngs and can have different colors. The size is 225px square because of illumination file size. File size is silly because uneven. Maybe 218px square would be good.

illuminates-aura-test.png (12.51 KiB) Viewed 2992 times

[Ashes]

Hello everyone,
I have started to play LotI a second time, and I noticed something annoying, but which may be on purpose: just before the end of a scenario, one may want to recall a few units that will not be useful for the next scenario, just to remove some equipment that will have a better use on some other units. This is an advantage when playing LotI a second time, when you remember what will happen next.
Would it be possible to be able to pay some gold to remove one item from a unit from the recall list, without needing to recall it? We could do it at the start of a scenario rather than at the end of the previous one.

[Dugi]

@Wussel
The one-two-three rings idea might separate the degrees of illumination quite well. Good idea.

@Ashes
Endless item swapping is fruitless and boring and reduces the amount of fun brought by playing the game. My approach is to limit the possibilities to swap items. That's why it's taking items from inventory to units is limited to the first two turns and units on keeps.
In fact, you don't need to recall units just to take items from them, you could just take items from them when they were last recalled.

[Whiskeyjack]

I recommend this tactic: Just strip any unit you are not sure you need in the next/a few scenario(s) of all items.

I don´t want to know how many times I returned my whole army´s items just to redistribute them properly. Probably every 2 or 3 games in part I

[Ashes]

Endless item swapping is fruitless and boring and reduces the amount of fun brought by playing the game. My approach is to limit the possibilities to swap items. That's why it's taking items from inventory to units is limited to the first two turns and units on keeps.
In fact, you don't need to recall units just to take items from them, you could just take items from them when they were last recalled.

I agree that limiting item swapping is nice. It makes the items be a part of the personality of each unit. For example, I usually have one guy with Boots of Evanescence to take possession of as many villages as possible: being my gold-digger is who he is.

But for example when I started "The Army of Darkness" (sc2/06) I wanted to use all my Woodland Cloaks. How could I guess that the units with Woodland Cloaks should have put them back to the inventory the last time I used them?

I recommend this tactic: Just strip any unit you are not sure you need in the next/a few scenario(s) of all items.

I don´t want to know how many times I returned my whole army´s items just to redistribute them properly. Probably every 2 or 3 games in part I

That's a possibility, but I don't like it.
I like my units having their personality linked to their items, and therefore I don't like stripping them from their items (even if I know that it is a valid tactic, there is even an option to strip a unit from all its items in one click).

[Ashes]

An issue with scenarios3/01 Thirst for Adventures.
When playing straightfully by first killing all will o wisps then all bandits then meeting the town and then killing the lich, everything goes fine.

But if I take some time killing the will-o-wisps using only the low-level units to make them gain xp, some will-o-wisps go north and kill the lich. Then we get a surrealist sequence of messages because the town is still in the dark and we don't see Argan and our other friends.
I looked at the .cfg file and I guess the the [ai][avoid] is not working well.

Other problem: if we go north after quickly killing the will-o-wisps, and kill the lich without having seen the town, we still get this surrealist sequence of messages. This could probably be avoided if the lich is eastern from the town.

[Kymille]

Is there a way to see all the attacks and abilities of a unit? On the right hand side menu, if there are too many abilities or attacks, then even mousing over to get a pop-up window doesn't reveal everything. If I choose "unit information" it just gives the generic information which doesn't include all the special abilities from ALMAs, special weapons, books, etc. This also means I don't even know what some abilities are if I've added them to a unit with a lot of abilities, because the description doesn't appear.

In normal Wesnoth, this situation doesn't arise so I've never had to know another method.