Invasion from the Unknown 2.1.13.1 [Wesnoth 1.14.x & 1.15.12+]

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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Do you ever use the Episode II menu entry to launch the campaign?

Poll ended at August 6th, 2020, 4:21 am

Yes
1
8%
No
11
92%
 
Total votes: 12

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Sadaharu
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Sadaharu »

I just finished playing IftU yesterday. Wow, nice work, especially with the way the drones keep popping out of the Shaxthal hive.

The playthrough is excellent (two thumbs up!) but the story is a bit telegraphed at times (one thumb up).
Spoiler:
But it's a nice touch having the old Necromancer Hekuba turn up again. :)

btw I know I found a typo somewhere and I have it in a .txt file somewhere but I've managed to make the notes on my hard drive be almsot as cluttered as my real (physical) desk. It was a minor thing in any case.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Sadaharu »

Oh! It's not the typo but I've found another thing: some of the female demon units are called ‘Elynia’.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Iris »

Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 12:24 amElyssa's name is revealed even before she's ever said it (she doesn't even say it to Anlindë when they fight).
It’s not revealed during her fight with Anlindë, I’m pretty sure. As for her name being revealed in scenario 22A before it’s even mentioned by herself... There are a surprising number of people in this game whose names are revealed by the UI before they come into play in the story. Back in the day, when I originally wrote the campaign (2007) I didn’t really perceive this as a problem because I didn’t think too much about it. I didn’t give much thought to the whole “speaking over millions of hexes away” mechanic either.

Even if I hid her true name until the end of Dark Hive, people on 1.14 who played the new version of UtBS will be able to tell who Elyssa is the moment they see her unmasked, since LordBob was specifically instructed to base her portrait on the one kitty drew for IftU. Personally, I’m not too bothered, since the real mystery is not that she ended up in this situation, but rather how this came to happen. The bit at the end of Dark Hive is primarily an internal reveal for the characters that also serves the purpose of giving the player a little more insight on Elynia and Elyssa’s characters since they both become important in AtS.
Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 12:24 amIt's also quite expectable and not much of a reveal that the Chaos Emperor is Elynia's former lover.
You should’ve played the older versions of IftU where the protagonists came across as incompetent buffoons due to their inability to tell that the Chaos Emperor was Argan despite him having a title that directly referenced his mastery over Darkness. :lol:

Jokes aside, my teenage self didn’t know how to write stories, honestly. I realized over the next two years after completing IftU and that resulted in a series of delays for AtS’ development while I figured out how to write a proper sequel built upon such an unsteady foundation. The entirety of IftU runs on clichés and always has. When the time came to rewrite it after completing AtS In 2013, I had to make a choice between writing something completely new that could render AtS obsolete, or embrace the flaws of my previous creation and try to polish the more remarkable aspects of it instead. You can more or less guess what my decision was in this regard. At least I’d like to think that there’s sufficient room for doubt that a few people may be surprised that Argan does turn out to be the Emperor. The only plot twist for those who played the original versions is that Elynia knows and is ready to do whatever it takes to release Argan from his curse, and conversely, Argan is ready to do whatever it takes to get Elynia back.
Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 12:24 amOh! It's not the typo but I've found another thing: some of the female demon units are called ‘Elynia’.
It’s an intentional easter egg.


Also, yes, I am working on porting IftU and AtS to 1.14 still. As is the norm for these campaigns (I’m a living bug magnet, aren’t I) Wesnoth 1.14.2 will actually deliver a few engine bug fixes that were originated by my porting efforts, actually.
Author of the unofficial UtBS sequels Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm.
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Sadaharu
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Sadaharu »

shadowm wrote: May 25th, 2018, 2:00 am
Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 12:24 amElyssa's name is revealed even before she's ever said it (she doesn't even say it to Anlindë when they fight).
It’s not revealed during her fight with Anlindë, I’m pretty sure. As for her name being revealed in scenario 22A before it’s even mentioned by herself... There are a surprising number of people in this game whose names are revealed by the UI before they come into play in the story. Back in the day, when I originally wrote the campaign (2007) I didn’t really perceive this as a problem because I didn’t think too much about it. I didn’t give much thought to the whole “speaking over millions of hexes away” mechanic either.

Even if I hid her true name until the end of Dark Hive, people on 1.14 who played the new version of UtBS will be able to tell who Elyssa is the moment they see her unmasked, since LordBob was specifically instructed to base her portrait on the one kitty drew for IftU. Personally, I’m not too bothered, since the real mystery is not that she ended up in this situation, but rather how this came to happen. The bit at the end of Dark Hive is primarily an internal reveal for the characters that also serves the purpose of giving the player a little more insight on Elynia and Elyssa’s characters since they both become important in AtS.
The moment they see her unmasked…? Well, the last time I played UtBS was on BfW1.10 so I wouldn't know. I remember the more caricaturesque depiction of her in TSoG.

And shhhh! Careful with the spoilers about AtS! I'm still trying to get into Wesmere, as I said in the other thread. btw the Forest Spirit/Wraith combo is lethal against Shaxthals and humans alike.
shadowm wrote:
Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 12:24 amIt's also quite expectable and not much of a reveal that the Chaos Emperor is Elynia's former lover.
You should’ve played the older versions of IftU where the protagonists came across as incompetent buffoons due to their inability to tell that the Chaos Emperor was Argan despite him having a title that directly referenced his mastery over Darkness. :lol:

Jokes aside, my teenage self didn’t know how to write stories, honestly. I realized over the next two years after completing IftU and that resulted in a series of delays for AtS’ development while I figured out how to write a proper sequel built upon such an unsteady foundation. The entirety of IftU runs on clichés and always has. When the time came to rewrite it after completing AtS In 2013, I had to make a choice between writing something completely new that could render AtS obsolete, or embrace the flaws of my previous creation and try to polish the more remarkable aspects of it instead. You can more or less guess what my decision was in this regard. At least I’d like to think that there’s sufficient room for doubt that a few people may be surprised that Argan does turn out to be the Emperor. The only plot twist for those who played the original versions is that Elynia knows and is ready to do whatever it takes to release Argan from his curse, and conversely, Argan is ready to do whatever it takes to get Elynia back.
That is a twist indeed. I wasn't sure whether Elynia knew until she confronted him.

And yes, from my own experience, writing something based on clichés is good (see Remy Mokhtar's Marry me! as an example) but then, yes, you have to stick to the clichés.
Writing free-form, with unexpected twists… is hard. I have the ideas for a good(ish) campaign for this game but the problem is getting the story to gives the several individual battles, puzzles and challenges coherence. It's clichéd enough to start with ‘village chief tells his eldest son and next chief a new problem is out there, find out what it is’ (logically he will have to solve it it and find clichéd allies e.g. an elvish archer and a human mage) but it's still surprisingly hard to write, even for me.
shadowm wrote:
Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 12:24 amOh! It's not the typo but I've found another thing: some of the female demon units are called ‘Elynia’.
It’s an intentional easter egg.
Oh! Well, I'll see what it portents.
shadowm wrote:Also, yes, I am working on porting IftU and AtS to 1.14 still. As is the norm for these campaigns (I’m a living bug magnet, aren’t I) Wesnoth 1.14.2 will actually deliver a few engine bug fixes that were originated by my porting efforts, actually.
I haven't installed 1.14 yet. I might just decide to play all the campaigns I downloaded in the past few months and hoarded like a deranged magpie before I actually do so. So I guess I have time to play this campaign. ;)
Last edited by Sadaharu on May 30th, 2018, 6:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Iris »

Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 2:17 am
shadowm wrote:
Sadaharu wrote: May 25th, 2018, 12:24 amOh! It's not the typo but I've found another thing: some of the female demon units are called ‘Elynia’.
It’s an intentional easter egg.
Oh! Well, I'll see what it portents.
Nothing at all. There are a lot of names in the name generator source for the demon race and hers is just one of several that are in there just for fun — as well as to introduce a little bit more variety into the output. “Irdya”, “Sela”, “Naia” and a few names that might be familiar to people who’ve stuck around for a long time are also in there.
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Sadaharu
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Sadaharu »

Heh! It looks as if a lot of the names come from an Elvish unit list. I'm just now fighting somebody called ‘Sella’.
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Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.9001.20180525.1 [Wesnoth 1.14]

Post by Iris »

NOTE: If you haven’t played Invasion from the Unknown on Wesnoth 1.12 before, you should probably stop reading here.

Version 2.0.9001.20180525.1 is out!

“Wait, WHAT?” I hear you say. You may be wondering why all of a sudden there’s a new release with such a long version number. Perhaps you’ve never heard of this campaign before and you have no idea what all the fuss is about. Or you may be asking yourself “lol arent these campaigns dead already why does she keep beating the dead horse”.

Whichever the case is, listen.

I know I haven’t done much with IftU or AtS for the past year or so. There are good reasons for that, most of which are beyond my control. In the background, however, and just like I said before, I’ve been working on a complete reorganization of the codebase in order to unify the common foundations for both campaigns and be able to deliver bugfixes to both of them more easily (it’s a pain to update the same 200-lines-long macro in two different campaigns for instance). This shared library is now called Naia, and although it will not be a proper add-on of its own on the add-ons server for reasons that probably nobody really wants to know (but if you do want to know feel free to ask), it is going to be shipped as an internal component that is built into both campaigns. My original intention was to release AtS 0.10.0 first as an experiment to see how things would work out from there, including support for Wesnoth 1.14. However, by the looks of it, it’s going to take me quite a while to tend to AtS, or finish my own IftU playthrough for that matter.

So, here’s the deal.

First of all, this version of the campaign is NOT compatible with Wesnoth 1.12. There’s simply no point in maintaining support for 1.12 and 1.14 at the same time anymore when 1.14 has already become the new stable series and 1.14.2 is at the doorstep. Second, there aren’t (supposed to be) any changes to the gameplay. It is supposed to work just like version 2.0.1 did on Wesnoth 1.12.x. I am still waiting on feedback on those AMLAs, by the way.

Third, this is not on the official 1.14 add-ons server. But you can download and install it by hand. You will need a tool that can unpack bzip2 tarballs if you don’t have one already (I can suggest 7-zip, WinZip or WinRAR for Windows) and unpack them into your add-ons dir (the “i” button in the bottom left of the title screen, choose “User data directory”, go into data/add-ons/ from there) so that you should be left with two add-on folders called Invasion_from_the_Unknown and IftU_Music — although the latter is still as optional as always, of course.
HOWEVER: You are absolutely required to report your results back here or on my personal Discord or on the bug tracker on GitHub, no matter what. This incidentally means that if you haven’t played the campaign at least once before, this experimental version is definitely not for you and you should either play version 2.0.1 on 1.12 or wait a little longer. If you go and play 2.0.9001.20180525.1 anyway, I cannot guarantee that you will not encounter any game-breaking bugs, or spoilers while trying to report one of them.

I should probably mention now that I’ve not made it to scenario 7 yet. So you’d really be doing me a big favour by playtesting this experimental release, and I’d be massively grateful if you did so. 💜 I’m crossing my fingers that nothing was broken in the process of refactoring code into Naia or porting it to 1.14 that I didn’t fix already, but you never know.

There’s no changelog this time around, but it really boils down to “ported to 1.14, also some changes from AtS that were never applied to IftU are in now”.

Have fun!



Also, as a fun fact for those who might be interested, the following fixes that will be published as part of Wesnoth 1.14.2 were actually prompted from my own discoveries while porting or playtesting IftU or AtS:

Code: Select all

[...]
   * Fixed a minor team coloring mistake in the north-facing Revenant standing
     animation.
[...]
   * [change_theme] no longer causes a Lua error when theme= is not specified
     instead of explicitly set to an empty string.
   * [change_theme] no longer requires running a separate action to update the
     UI afterwards (e.g. [redraw]) and the status panels are updated immediately.
     as well.
[...]
   * [message] no longer scrolls to units through fog or shroud so it matches
     1.12's behavior.
   * Fixed animation-wide text_color and blend_color keys being overwritten. This
     fixes level-in and level-out animations sometimes fading to black instead of
     white.
[...]
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Sadaharu
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Sadaharu »

Not compatible with BfW 1.12? I must probably be the very last person to play that version of IftU then.

Congrats on the new release. I'll keep playing the few episodes of AtS on 1.12 (I don't think you can get it updated THAT quickly) and if you keep producing episodes do it for 1.14 already because once this semester ends I'll keep 1.12 only as a legacy install for campaigns that haven't been updated/ported (the same as I am doing currently with 1.10, 'cos a lot of people have been saying they'd port directly to 1.14 and skip 1.12 this past year).
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Iris »

AtS (the unpublished development version, not 0.9.x) is technically already ported to 1.14 since most of the codebase is now shared with IftU. The primary reason I’m not publishing it yet is that I’d rather have IftU take the bullet for any game-breaking bugs. AtS is also a bit of a special case because it relies on a lot of undocumented quirks in the engine that aren’t used or aren’t as important for IftU, so in order to make sure it is working right I need to play through it myself.

I expect it’ll take me at least a couple of months to get there at my current play rate.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.1 [Wesnoth 1.12]

Post by Sadaharu »

Heh. By ‘THAT quickly’ I meant ‘before the long weekend is over’. ;)
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Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.9001.20180525.2 [Wesnoth 1.14]

Post by Iris »

Version 2.0.9001.20180525.2 is out!

Same instructions and same download links as before. See the original 2.0.9001.x announcement for more information.

Fixed an issue reported by nemaara where the armorerfoot movetype used by several Chaos units is missing, resulting in them having 0% defense and 0% resistance for everything. I should’ve known there was something suspicious about my luck in that scenario.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown [Wesnoth 1.12 + experimental 1.14 version]

Post by Konrad2 »

So, I've finished IftU now and reported every bugs I've found. I probably won't touch this again until the 1.14. AtS release. See you all then.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown [Wesnoth 1.12 + experimental 1.14 version]

Post by Sadaharu »

Another bug common to IftU and AtS: sometimes the Imp units have combinations of contradictory traits that nullify each other: slow/quick, intelligent/dim, strong/weak.
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Invasion from the Unknown 2.0.9001.20180531.1 [Wesnoth 1.14]

Post by Iris »

Version 2.0.9001.20180531.1 is out!

Same instructions and same download links as before. See the original 2.0.9001.x announcement for more information.

This snapshot fixes some issues with unit income in boss scenarios (including the last set of scenarios after The Heart), as well as with some of the major characters upon leveling up; as well as a major blocker issue making it impossible to progress past Face of the Enemy (S22A). There are other minor bugs fixed all over the place. Thanks to konrad2 and nemaara for their reports!
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown [Wesnoth 1.12 + experimental 1.14 version]

Post by Zhou »

I just found out about this and am already super hyped to dive into IftU again. I am so so glad you're updating this for 1.14.
Time to recklessly feed my gaming addiction for countless hours until I collapse from sleep deprivation.

Once I'm done with my playthrough and have awakened from my coma, I'll report back.
slightly confused
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