Wesband, MP dungeon-crawler (now for Wesnoth 1.9.14+ !)

[daniel.santos]

I just wanted to add an idea for modifying trolls if not lowering their experience. Perhaps adding the ability to use spiked clubs at some point that do piercing damage?

[Ken_Oh]

I'll take alternate troll weapons into consideration (probably a spiked glove or something), but I don't agree that Trolls need an easier time in the dungeon. If any race needs to have its exp upped, it's Trolls.

[Exasperation]

First let me say very nice mod! And now a few bugs & suggestions:

1. There are several inconsistencies between magical orders' advertised spell damage and actual.
2. (minor) Text for Magical Initiate and Silver Order changes from "5-1 fire" to "5-2 fire" when it becomes available.
3. (suggestion) Display the bonus per Mind level for each order's attacks.
4. (suggestion) Use {VARIABLE} instead of {VARIABLE_OP current_unit.variables.abilities.human_magic add x} when changing magic class to avoid confusion and/or mistakes.
5. (suggestion) Offer a "peasant" (or equiv) class template for human, elf and dwarf. This would have no starting abilities or equipment, but gold and talent points equal to the average value of the other class templates (i.e., 50 gold plus the average value of starting equipment for other classes and the average number of talent points it takes to make each class template).
6. (suggestion) Gender Inclusion!! I just got my gf started on Wesnoth, but she's not hooked yet! It's not nearly female-friendly enough. You can help! Allow a choice of genders for *every* class, even if the only thing that changes are the sounds. (Highly recommended book! Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market). This is something that Wesnoth needs to do a better job of in general, IMO.
7. (suggestion) Either lower the experience penalty for trolls or add more abilities. The regeneration is a tremendous boon, but I still believe they are over-penalized. I wouldn't recommend reducing penalties to deft, mind or non-impact weapons -- I think that part is perfect. But if not adding any other abilities or boons, I would say to lower the experience penalty to between 17% and 20%.
8. (suggestion) A character sheet where you can see all of your character's skills and equipped items. This should display their stats with the details of how they got there (each bonus & penalty).

Thanks again, very fun mod!

Thanks for your input. I'll definitely take a look at standardizing & correcting the magic upgrade descriptions. I think those values have gotten changed repeatedly during the course of development, and the descriptions don't always get updated at the same time.

For 5, I believe that was the original method for character creation, but players lobbied to get it changed to the current method.

6. This has been brought up a couple of times, and we sort of have a policy on it.

About female sprites, make them and I'll use them.

Wesband doesn't really have a sprite artist working on it (Ken_Oh and I do what we can, but I think we're both better at WML than sprite art).

This is the primary reason Wesband doesn't have female (or orcish, drake, etc.) adventurers, as well - we just don't have the sprites for them.

Putting together a set of adventurer sprites is a lot of work. So, if you want this done soon, feel free to put some female adventurer sprites together for us. I would be happy to give instructions on what sprites each variation needs, write up the WML necessary to get them into Wesband, and even fill in a few of the pieces myself if you put most of the set together but have problems with particular frames.
If nobody steps in to work on this, well... It's on the list of Things To Do, so we should get to it eventually - just don't expect it to be too soon.

7. Ken_Oh just addressed.

8. Interesting idea, but it might be harder than it sounds to implement. Also, a lot of the things that would go into something like this are still in flux right now, so if this went into the campaign right now it would probably either be broken more often than not or take a lot of time and effort to keep up to date (there was a lot of this sort of problem with shops/equipment change screens when the armor system got updated, as well as the magic attack stuff that's still (as you noted) partly broken).

[Ken_Oh]

Sorry, daniel.santos, I didn't see your previous post yet. And, sorry if I'm a little harsh on the Troll front. Really, Troll is the only race with which I don't feel like I have to take any henchmen down with me. It's only if I run into a ghost or something that I feel slightly in danger. This might change when more magic spells/items get in, as Trolls will most likely get the poop end of that stick.

Re: Females - Li'sar's sprites look like they would do for a great base

Elves are a little trickier. Marksman/Ranger lines look too armored, Druid looks too naked and the Sorceress' weapon is really awkward.

I've never seen a Dwarvish woman portrayed in Wesnoth. I know some D&D Dwarvish females have beards to the point that humans have trouble telling the sexes apart. Or maybe they could have no beards and otherwise be similar but have more ornate, Valkyrie-ish helmets.

8. Interesting idea, but it might be harder than it sounds to implement.

Indeed. I've thought of it, but as Exasperation said, it would probably quickly get broked. However, when it comes time to consider it, I think I remember someone saying that you can alter a single unit's description (i.e. when you press "d" over a unit). I think that would make for a nice place to put a character sheet.

EDIT: Oops, I forgot to mention that Exasperation came up with a way to make Storm not worthless. So, heh, Trolls will be better in the next release than they are now.

[daniel.santos]

Female Sprites
Unfortunately, my background is software engineering and not art. I've been able to do some this and that here and there, but I'm not too impressed with my work and it takes me a very long time, so I tend to shy away from it, let others do art work, modeling & animation and focus on coding & design. As for dwarves, I think it's legit to use the same sprites! At least initially. In Everquest, you could have a female dwarf either with or without a beard.

I've submitted a few patches for a few mods here and there, while claiming that I don't intend to learn WML very well, but I seem to keep going back on this. I guess the fact Wesnoth's extensibility is is quite fascinating to me. At the same time, I'm not too happy with some aspects of it (poor performance and huge saved-game files). Then again, I haven't learned Lua yet, which seems to be the most popular modern choice for game scripting.

Either way, as a software engineer, I would prefer to see all data kept in cute data tables and code duplication eliminated as much as possible via function calls. As I understand it, the way to do "functions" in WML is via events that you manually fire from your code. I don't know this well enough to sensibly critique anybody's WML except to bemoan, rather bumptiously, the virtues of encapsulation. Also, I haven't examined the Wesband code very closely yet. None the less, I hope that it's possible to cleanly encapsulate data and functionality in WML to avoid these types of problems, facilitating the growth of very large mods. Wesband is certainly fun as heck!! My primary languages are C and C++, but I haven't worked on Wesnoth's code (I have worked on Glest, an RTS).

Character Sheet
Back to the character sheet, I'm thinking that if the functionality for rendering the text for all abilities, stats, inventory, armor, weapons, resistances, etc. can be encapsulated into events that are re-used, then the character sheet is less likely to be broken when changes are made and, ideally, the entirety of the code base is more maintainable. Usually, this also includes the added benefit of a smaller code footprint.

Spells
I haven't read much of the first 29 pages of this thread, but I'm presuming that spells have been brought up many times. I rather like Brotherhood of Light's method for doing this, but maybe they can consume a "simple action". Perhaps spells occasionally sold in the magic shop and rare spells are only found in dungeons? My thought was that perhaps each spells would have a requirement for a min level of Mind, Casting Power, Casting Speed and/or magic school (you can choose which will be required for each spell). Again, it would be much better if all of the spell data can be encapsulated and generic events are used for processing all spells rather than separate code for each spell.

Thanks for reading & responding to my posts. I don't mean to be over-ambitious, but it's a very fun mod!!

[daniel.santos]

For 5, I believe that was the original method for character creation, but players lobbied to get it changed to the current method.

Oh, and I forgot to respond to this one sorry. All I'm saying is to re-add the option to build your own for each race (at least human, elf & dwarf) in addition to the existing templates.

[daniel.santos]

It appears that you can't upgrade thundersticks until you have reached the 2nd level of Tinker. Is that intentional? My guess here was that maybe this was intended as a "you need at least level 1 in tinkering to not degrade your weapon" and then additional levels if you actually want to upgrade them, but this isn't clear. Also, would you consider the "double attacks and half the damage" actually increase the total damage instead of just increasing the chance to hit (at all) during a battle? So perhaps double attacks and reduce damage to 60% or even 55%? This would be like adding 20 or 10% damage, respectively.

[Ken_Oh]

I've submitted a few patches for a few mods here and there, while claiming that I don't intend to learn WML very well, but I seem to keep going back on this. I guess the fact Wesnoth's extensibility is is quite fascinating to me. At the same time, I'm not too happy with some aspects of it (poor performance and huge saved-game files). Then again, I haven't learned Lua yet, which seems to be the most popular modern choice for game scripting.

Well, my background is in languages (non-computer), and I can say there isn't all that much to learn with WML. It's pretty straightforward. The only tricky parts are those random things you could only know by testing them (killing or moving a unit from a location during an attack will stop the attack but still fire the end attack event, there's no way to change a unit's ellipse, setting a unit's variation= variable will change its visualization, etc.). Exasperation is great with this and has already brought the code to a much better state than it was. Still, I don't think we would mind more help.

The fact that events can be used as functions is much younger than this RPG project. Believe me, I would have done many things differently if it was always that way. Then again, many things in this project don't resemble what they used to be, even simply from a design standpoint.

Exasperation has turned the magic system into something I think we all can love.

There are also a few more great additions lately, but things are transitional so we're not ready to release. I could shoot you a subversion if you really want to look at code.

T-sticks: Yeah, I haven't done the math on all that yet. When I do, I'll keep your idea in mind.

EDIT: Oh, and I like the extra clean-slate character template idea. The only issue is that you would totally be at the mercy of whatever items in are in the shop. On the flip side, you would be compensated in gold for all of the items you wouldn't get from the start, therefore you might be able to afford one item that costs more than 50 gold.

[Darkmage]

While playing i found what it seems to be a bug...

When capturing a soul and carrying it throught the path of shadow(claws and skirimsher) when upgrading speed(hasten) it says it's cost is 2 while it costs me 3(guess everybody so) also if a buy first some +1 damage the hasten option continues, and then if i click hasten it appears the soul has -1 talent points...

I haven't checked the banablade path yet, but i imagine the problem also stills there...

By the way, i guess the idea of requiring certain lvl of inteligence or order to use future spells is quite good... but also there could be some other ones much more common in store and less powerful for all/almost other characters or just with low intelligence requirements... eg:
(Common)Spell:shock, req:7mind (all), range:2hex, Effects:unit can't attack for one turn, the target unit can use any objet or move, if attacked the unit will react normally, unit looses ZoC, duration:1turn, target:1 enemy unit

(Normal/Strange)Spell:Fear, req:11mind (darkness order-magic initiate), range:3hex, Effects:target unit can't move, nor attack for the turn the spell takes place, if attacked the unit will attack to its 0,75%(equivalent to the wrong time of day), unit looses ZoC, duration:1turn, target:1 enemy unit

(Rare/Only found in dungeons)Spell:Terror, req: 18mind (darkness order), range:3hex, Effects:targeted unit will not move or attack and when attacked it's attack would be reduced to 50%(same effect than slow), unit looses ZoC, duration:1turn, target:1 enemy unit

And, yeah the peasant basic template is a great idea...

[Thrawn]

bump and question/idea:

I was wondering whether (at some point in the future) there would be items that increase your base stats (helm [body+3] for example)?

Also, general encouragement--just recently updated and started playing it again

[Ken_Oh]

Darkmage: I like the ideas. It's these kind of spells, the non-damaging kind, that I'm really looking for the magic system to be.

Thrawn: I've thought about it, and the idea gives me a headache from a coding standpoint. Though, it's certainly not off of the table. I'm honestly running out of possible enchantments, so this would probably be a good next step.

Btw, I'm very excited about what we're working on right now. Some fun stuff is in store for next release.

[Thrawn]

Btw, I'm very excited about what we're working on right now. Some fun stuff is in store for next release.

man, if that were an adom reference, I'd laugh--greater vault rooms in wesband would be as terrifying if not more than in AdoM. Prolly not the case though >_>

[Ken_Oh]

Hahaha, sorry. That was completely unintentional.

Though, I'd love to be able to put notes like that into chat. http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25300

[truffant]

Thanks to all the contributors of Wesband, it is one of my preferred modifications of Wesnoth!

As my suggestion: could you scale the level of the enemies to the power of the hero? After >60% Res in Blade/Impact/Piercing/Cold nothing can touch me and the game kind of tethers out. But i still like it enough to play on and on for countless levels

[Ken_Oh]

Yeah, getting that much resistance isn't going to be as easy in the next release. I did the math and it's like having 90% defense everywhere.

Thanks for the encouragement!