Development: Scarlet Sea [campaign]

[battlestar]

This thread is for the purpose of communication between developers of this campaign: Boldek, Ceres, pyrophorus, The_Other and me. Though anyone is welcome to comment on anything related to this campaign (such as drafts of dialogues and scenarios that may be uploaded in the future).

Details have been recently distributed to teammates through private messages, so sorry to the rest of the readers that more information won't be provided here unless one of the teammates requests it.

Thanks!

[pyrophorus]

Team communication:

@battlestar: OK with me for the comment things and improvements you made in the scenario. I'll make the alternate branch soon: it's clear to me now when and how to trigger it (and wasn't before ).
BTW, you add a lot of unit sprites we need not yet and not the dark magics !
You added an 01-animations.cfg file which is fine. The "01-" isn't really needed here. The reason of 01-syntax.cfg is ensuring files are loaded in correct order (alphabetical), to avoid dependencies problems. And we must be cautious to avoid circular dependencies here.

@Ceres,TheOne: I would like your feedback about the programming rules I suggested. They are only my personnal habits, so we can change. But I suggest we agree ASAP on some rules, before the real work begins, to avoid refactoring later.

@all: I think I must change the campaign title to Crimson Sea, isn't it ? I will too split the "units" folder as I suspect we will have many.

[battlestar]

The campaign folder is fine named "Valia", IMO. Campaign title probably should be changed to Crimson Sea.
Actually, I've had thoughts about changing the title:

Spoiler:

It bothered me a little since someone told me Crimson Sea was also the title of a fighting game or something. I looked into alternative names that contain the word Crimson, but a lot of good ones are already taken. Here are some of my choices and thoughts on them:
-Keep Crimson Sea: I came up with it myself so it's probably a fitting title. I thought of a sea of blood, and a "sea" of red demons in a "sea" of lava and dancing flame.
-Crimson Clover: Clover as in the little girl protagonist.
-Crimson Cloud: Sounds silly.
-Crimson Storm: Storm as in a torrent of events, ones that the protagonists are powerlessly dragged along.
-Crimson Cyclone: Same as above, sounds better though.
-Crimson Cycle: One of my favored ones, gives a feeling that the story, despite being long, is but one link in a cycle in history. As it is often remarked that "History repeats itself." Furthermore, this title can also drive the story and its description of the past and future.
-Crimson Chronicle: One of my better liked ones, since the story spans over a long period of time and involves a large number of events, many of which are linked to distant past.
-Crimson Darkness: The entire story theme is pretty dark. Perhaps better fitting as the prologue's title, though.
-Three word titles?
-Other name ideas?

By circular dependencies you mean how file A depends on a macro from file B, yet file B also needs a macro from file A?

[Jabie]

Scarlet Sea - Alliteration.

[battlestar]

I like it!

Update: Ceres is taking up spells and skills



To Ceres:

As for the skills/spells/menu, let me know what I could do to help you understand better.

Yes, spells include:

- damage dealers: 1) instant vs prolonged, 2) single target vs area

- supporters: 1) temp stat changers, 2) adds abilities temporarily

- curses: 1) temp stat changers, 2) special negative effects (freeze/stun/sleep/fear)

- summons: 1) summons you control, 2) summons you don't control (ie. phantasmal aid: the phantoms do their thing without player control) 3) unit morphing

- special effects such as shockwave which pushes enemy back, and teleportation spells, enemy controlling spells,

- gold affecting spells 1) directly produce gold, 2) channels gold from enemy, 3) affect villages

- global effectors that can change the playing rules of the entire map: an example is "arcane disruption": whenever a mage casts an offensive spell, 25% chance that it backfires which damages the victim with 25% of the attacker's firepower

- probably other special types I missed from the spell list

Spells are divided into 2 weak spells that require no runes, 4 medium spells that require 1 rune, 3 strong spells that require about 3 runes, and 2 ultra spells that require approximately 5 runes (sometimes varies with spell power)

Weak spells are meant to be able to cast every turn, medium ones every 2-3 turns, strong spells every 1-2 times a battle, and ultra spells once every few battles. This is controlled by casting chances and rune cost. However, the casting chances system may need modification to adhere to this objective better.

In terms of calculating spell casting success rate, first a variable (bs_spell_roll) with random value is generated between 1 and a value assigned to each spell (rand=1..${SPELL_NAME}_cast_rate), and if the random value exceeds 10 (the cut off for success), then the spell is a success.

Spoiler:

- For example, spell Fireball has a value of 20, and first variable is randomized between 1-20, and if the result <=10, the spell is successful. It fails if result >10. So the casting success is 50%.

- Weak spells have value of 20, medium spells have value of 40, strong spells have value of 60 and uber spells have 80.

Spoiler:

- In the first example, "cut off for success" was 10, but this is modified by each character's {CHAR_NAME}_casting_level (which should be converted to become stored within unit status). Each casting level increases the "cut off for success" by 5.

-Each level a character has in the spell also increases the "cut off" by 1

- Example: Fireball casted by someone with casting level of 1 and 5 levels in fireball spell -->(bs_spell_roll) is randomized between 1 and 20 (fireball's value for being a weak spell), then compared to 20 (base of 10 plus 5 for one levels in casting then plus 5 for 5 levels in fireball spell), so the success for casting that spell is 100%

Please give me some more time about skills, about what you said, pips are only for Valia, other things such as "focus", "rage", "mana" are used for different characters. They are used for casting instead of buying the skill.

Some housekeeping todo list for me:

Spoiler:

-Clarify spells list: rank them, add detailed descriptions
-Clarify skills list
-Proof-read/polish scn3 script
-design scn6 script
-Campaign hero sprites
-P's campaign hero sprites (10-1)
-Do the one sprite for demon faction
-Demon Faction unit descriptions
-Check in about AMLA system
-Other campaign sprites
-fireplace sprite

[Ceres]

Okay, this will busy me for a while then.

By the way, right now I've apparently got two campaign folders for this, with completely different files and names. Is the campaign worked on from two sides, or am I supposed to merge those to one folder, or is there a standardized campaign folder?

@pyrophyrus: I'm fine with your coding style, from what I've read in the scenario file. It'd be nice to have the standardization guidelines in a written form or something, though.

[battlestar]

Please use the "Valia" campaign folder for everything from now on. It is the one containing pyrophorus' scenario 1. That will be the official campaign folder.

[The_Other]

It'd be nice to have the standardization guidelines in a written form or something, though.

Seconded.
Also, I'd like to make clear at this point that my WML skills are fairly limited. I can't do the complicated stuff, but I'm happy to take on the simple but time-consuming things so that better coders can focus on the difficult bits.

[battlestar]

For The_Other:

Got a new formula for the AMLA:
round up to nearest integer: (previous lvl's required exp to level)+50x(40-level)x0.02
It's surprisingly close to the previous formula.

-------------------------------------------

These are my suggestions/ideas for AMLA...

Initialize the heroes with something like this:

Code: Select all

		[modify_unit]
			[filter]
				id=Valia
			[/filter]
			[variables]
				number_of_aval_upg=15
			[/variables]
			[status]
				health_1=yes
				health_2=no
				health_3=no
				health_4=no
				health_5=no
				
				learning_1=yes
				learning_2=no
				# ...
			[/status]
		[/modify_unit]

Each randomization would only pick from status that has value of "yes".

For example, if "health_1" was picked by random, a corresponding

Code: Select all

[advancement]
	id=health_1
	always_display=true
	# etc etc
[/advancement]

would be added to the hero.

Once an advancement is chosen, for example if the player chose health_1, then in the status it becomes: health_1=no and health_2=yes

and so on.

For Ceres

Could you check if the description format here is Ok with you? If it is, I'll do the rest of the spell descriptions as such. If the actual spell effects were changed during coding, we should probably make changes to this file as well, in order to keep track of things.

complete spelling.zip

(3.49 KiB) Downloaded 244 times

[Ceres]

Could you check if the description format here is Ok with you?

Yep, perfect. The "Ah I'm on fire" - is that meant to be said by burning units?

[battlestar]

Yeah, eventually, we could add more embellishments like the caster says some catch phrases during casting, and affected units sometimes say something. Kind of like what happens when people click a unit too many times in starcraft. These would probably be presented with floating text to minimize interference with game play.

[pyrophorus]

Hi everybody !

Team communication:

Here comes a new version. The folder is complete except maps and pics. The image contains nothing except the *new folder organization*, mainly subfolders creation.

The campaign title is set to Scarlet Sea. The folder is named accordingly. I think it could be named Valia, but this could be disturbing because all campaign folders are named after campaign title.

Some macros have been added (syntactic shortcuts mainly).
Scenario 1: the second alternative have been immplemented and the scenario is now complete (AFAICS).
My apologizes to battlestar: there was no missing pictures, but the animation was way to fast and couldn't be seen. I multiplied all delays by ten, and it works fine now.
More comments in scenario file.

Scarlet_Sea.zip

(23.4 KiB) Downloaded 220 times

Rules.txt

(6.18 KiB) Downloaded 246 times

[The_Other]

Um, how do I open .ds_store files?

Windows does not recognise this file type

Is this a mac-only format? Or do I just need to download something to make it work?

[battlestar]

When I unzipped them, I got rid of the .ds_store files and folders. They seemed redundant. Don't know what's causing these extra files to pop up.

[The_Other]

All I have is .ds_store files
I will try opening with some different programs, and see if that works better...