The Four Champions

[kallewirsch]

In the scenario about the ancient sword
if I choose to kill the undead ,the scenario will always end with my defeat.Doesnt matter if kill the 4 undead and the bat or not.Did I miss s.th.? furtermore the mudcrawler dont attack the wolf and the bat doesnt recrut .

[Arawn]

In the scenario about the ancient sword
if I choose to kill the undead ,the scenario will always end with my defeat.Doesnt matter if kill the 4 undead and the bat or not.Did I miss s.th.? furtermore the mudcrawler dont attack the wolf and the bat doesnt recrut .

Huh; that definitely should not happen (although killing the undead is non-canon, I suppose). I'll look into it.

[Sneezy]

Hi Arawn-- regarding kallewirsch's recent post, I can confirm a couple of those points. The mudcrawler didn't attack my wolf, either. I chose to use the undead, and the scenario finished okay in that case.

EDIT: All of the errors below should now be fixed, except for how quickly you get to level 7 of the castle. Thank you for the feedback. And do let me know if you feel more castle levels would be a good idea. I just didn't want to overwhelm the player. ... The castle moving to level 7 is intentional because I decided having seven levels of it would bore most gamers. Let me know if you disagree - there were more quests planned, some to add backstory. As for the other errors, I'll get to fixing them. I just uploaded a new version but didn't catch any of the removeitem errors. Sigh... I need more practice with grep.

So I updated to tFC 0.1.1, and tried castle level 2 again.

Spoiler:

Opened the mage room, and the druid walked right in next to him. Ended the turn. Mage never moved, and never said anything. Seems like the "sighted" business isn't working as you intended.

Since you said that the jump to the final castle level was what you expected, I moved on and tried it.

Spoiler:

I was surprised by the units that the scenario started with: the usual units, plus General Whats-his-name, and Katherine, and a dragoon. The drake was no longer part of the party. He left without saying a word, not even good-bye. I've worked to get around the bug and "rescue" the mage, and the mage's sister announced that she was going to help us, and I haven't seen her at all. That was a surprise, and something of a let-down. Not much point in rescuing the mage.

The Gen. makes sense, I suppose, although we've never seen him before. He's been mentioned, but never showed up to say, good work, I'm assembling my troops and will join you shortly (or something like that). He just shows up. We haven't seen Katherine for a *long time*, so it's odd she'd be here. Likewise, the dragoon hasn't been around for a long time, and it's odd to find him on the final level of the castle. Both are still lev-2, and we haven't had any chance to toughen them up; also, they haven't contributed much in the last 5-6 scenarios, so it's a surprise that they'd be here for the big finale.

The final confrontation was fairly simple, and not much of a problem. The map isn't terribly interesting; just a big ol' room. We stepped over near a wall to guard our flank, and dealt with the problem when it arrived. Then closed in on the big boss and took care of him.

I'd re-think the whole castle thing, and the ending. It seems like the quests aren't crucial to being able to defeat the final bad guy, and I missed an item or two the first time through, and the resulting dialogue confused me. I think the dialogue assumes that you know what items to search for and bring back each time. In your testing, I suspect you do the right thing each time. Someone new to the story might miss something. And if a player misses an item, some strange behavior happens. In a couple cases, I got error messages.

I wonder if I missed something, or missed some opportunity to recall some of the earlier troops. Once I got to the town, it seemed like everything was out of my control. I just need to walk along and pick things up and smack somebody every now and then. Gold was irrelevant. I enjoyed the earlier parts of the campaign, but the final portion didn't hold together (for me) as well as the earlier parts did.

Thanks for your work on this. I hope you devise a plan to beef up the end of the story.
Regards,
--sneezy

[Arawn]

Hi Arawn-- regarding kallewirsch's recent post, I can confirm a couple of those points. The mudcrawler didn't attack my wolf, either. I chose to use the undead, and the scenario finished okay in that case.

AH - I just looked at the code! Half the problems people have described here are because the sides are initialized with "ifdef EASY" meaning that if you play on MED or HARD, these things just don't happen. Fixed. Quite frankly, I have no idea why I even had that.

The mage-rescue quest is now fixed. This was an almost-as-dumb mistake on my part: I forgot to give the ON_SIGHT event an id. To make it up to you guys, I fixed it so that the "overjoyed sister" now whas a portrait. Orell is next.

The rest of the concerns you mention are tricker and won't be fixed in the usual time I have been giving this. I'll have to think about it. The fix for keeping units is quite easy. I'll just add castles so you can recruit. This can be done fairly easily. The rest... is far less obvious.

As for the general - he was mentioned in other, not-included quests, but it's true that he should also be mentioned every now and then as you return to town. This will also be implemented but will require actual dialogue. Probably by the end of the week. Oh, and in case anyone is wondering why the sister joins you instead of the mage: Brian is meant to be you go-to mage. Also, I just really liked Dela from DID.

The castle quests aren't meant to be crucial. It's meant to be somewhat of an RPG, very reminiscent of Diablo I. I suppose it is a problem if the quests aren't enjoyable but you're absolutely right that they have little to do with the story.

[whip]

Hi, I just downloaded Four Champions and I found a strange problem. Basically, after loading th campaign, I wasn't able to read any text in the first scenario. By launching wesnoth in debug mode and watching errors throwed, I started reading things like these:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20120614 07:47:44 error config: Skipping over a utf8 BOM


20120614 07:47:45 error config: Error: invalid string: �Door
20120614 07:47:45 error config: Error: invalid string: �staff (+1 damage to staff, full heal)
20120614 07:47:45 error config: Error: invalid string: �fireball (+1 damage to staff missile, full heal)
20120614 07:47:45 error config: Error: invalid string: �As Chris learns, his talents grow, and he can call upon the power of the animals.
[...]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This happened *before* the first scenario was fully loaded.
Right after the scenario loading, that's what i observed:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
20120614 07:51:49 error config: Error: invalid string: �Move Zack and Brian into the forest
20120614 07:51:49 error config: Error: invalid string: �Death of Zack
20120614 07:51:49 error config: Error: invalid string: �Death of Brian
20120614 07:51:49 error config: Error: invalid string: �Turns run out
20120614 07:51:49 error config: Error: invalid string: <big>Victory:</big>
<span foreground="#00ff00">&#8226; �Move Zack and Brian into the forest</span>
<big>Defeat:</big>
<span foreground="#ff0000">&#8226; �Death of Zack</span>
<span foreground="#ff0000">&#8226; �Death of Brian</span>
<span foreground="#ff0000">&#8226; �Turns run out</span>
Early finish bonus.
40% of finishing gold carried over to the next scenario.

20120614 07:51:49 error config: Error: invalid string: �Inspire:
This unit can inspire own L0, L1, L2, or L3 units that are next to it, making them fight better. Adjacent own units of L3 will do more 25% more damage; L2 units will do 50% more, L1 will do 75% more, and L0 units will do 100% more.
20120614 07:51:49 error config: Error: invalid string: �inspire
[...]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So i tried and watch in .cfg files and I found that every error was throwed out when an occurrence of '= _ ' was found.
Then I simply tried to /= _ /=/ (find every .cfg file and substituted '= _ ' with '=' by using sed -i) and now everything seems to work correctly.
I have no knowledge of WML, but it just worked.

For the record, I'm playing wesnoth 1.10.2 (ubuntu packages 1:1.10.2-1ppa1~oneiric1) on Ubuntu 11.10 and the system language is italian.

HTH.

[Dugi]

Hello,
I have tried to replicate the error whip had, on a similar OS (Ubuntu 12.04), and I had absolutely no problems, neither with absent texts nor with stuff appearing as errors. It was obviously related to translations, as the ''= _ ' means that the value is translatable, but I had no issues with this, even if I used a different language. Maybe removing the definition of the textdomain in the _main.cfg file should help (it is useless there anyway as you have no tranlations... yet).
Also, can you please set silent=yes to the object the fencer is given at the start? It looks pretty crappy without it.
I haven't played further, I don't have enough time, sorry. I just wanted to help this guy and... I earned you one download.

And just for the author:

Spoiler:

You seem to be using items with the PICKUPPABLE_ITEM macro. I used to do the same, but many people bashed me that this allows an unlimited stacking of effects, resulting in massively overpowered units. I had to redo it completely.
I plan to release a resourcepack, that should make it much easier to use extra items (with an inventory system and so on).

[Arawn]

Wait, this could be a huge issue. Are you guys saying that despite working on one OS, a Wesnoth campaign may crash on another? So far I have been developing solely on Ubuntu 12.04 and just assumed this would run on Windows and Mac. That's not the case?

As for the way I format items, creating overpowered units is left up to the player. The items are intended on being spread out among units. However, if someone does want to give them all to one unit and create something overpowered, I don't see why I should stop them.

EDIT: Alright, another major version is out. The issue of unit recruitment in the castle has been fixed thanks to the terrific macros of Descent Into Darkness. The next major concern is dialogue explaining where Ecthelion is and why Arawn disappears. Coming very soon, but I'd like to jot it down and plan it a bit instead of just throwing it out there.

[quincy]

I played through most of your campaign, and I like it a lot. I have found some bugs, though. For example, when Brian is a healer mage, the animations for the fireball doesn't match whether the attack does damage. So sometimes when it does the animation for fireball hitting, no damage is done. Sometimes damage is dealt when the miss animation is played.

I beat the level where the goal is to find a sword, but Zack never seemed to get a weapon. I am on the second castle level and Zack is still unarmed. I chose to keep the undead, if that matters.

When I am in town, the battle princess and everyone else in town appear to be hostile. They have no blue orb, and I even managed to kill the battle princess, to see what would happen. That doesn't affect much, but their zones of control are annoying. Also, at the start of the campaign I think the Red Mage has no blue orb, but that affects nothing.

A small typo I noticed is that, in the description for the ability Inspire, it says "more 25% more".

Also, the Draug in castle level two says upon death something like "As the necromancer died, he grasped for something only he could see, and began to say something that might have been his name" which was the death message for the necromancer who recruited ghosts.

And, lastly, I think you should put a turn limit when you go back to town from the castle. This would be to prevent a player from recruiting hundreds of drakes from the gold they get from the villages in town, which would make the castle easy to beat.

I have Wesnoth version 1.10.3.
Overall, this is a great campaign!

[Arawn]

I have found some bugs, though.
...
When I am in town, the battle princess and everyone else in town appear to be hostile. They have no blue orb, and I even managed to kill the battle princess, to see what would happen. That doesn't affect much, but their zones of control are annoying. Also, at the start of the campaign I think the Red Mage has no blue orb, but that affects nothing.

Holy... well, I don't think cursing is encouraged here. HOW is the princess hostile? Ok, can you tell me where this happened? Back to town, but after which castle level? The rest of the bugs you mention sound like things I could fix as early as tomorrow.
EDIT: Hmm... hold on, can you download the newest version and check the Isere thing again? I think I fixed that just yesterday actually...
EDIT AGAIN: Ok, I just talked to my mentor and it turns out I did fix that two days ago. Good stuff. That just leaves the dragon sprite.

In the meantime: I have hit a bit of a wall, you guys. I'm trying to make a quest where you find a dragon egg and then have a pet dragon. I found an existing egg sprite alright, and made a dragon hatchling unit using another sprite (adorable if I do say so myself; that was today's project), but I just can't find a yound dragon sprite of any sort. So basically, if I made the units as is, the evolution would go "egg" "baby dragon the size of your fist" "HUGE FIRE-BREATHING MONSTER". Anyone know of a sprite that can fix that gap a bit?

[jawick]

Enjoyed the campaign.. overall a great job.. good story.. liked the recruiting options.. Nice job with that bit of creativity. I liked having the choices for who to take with me at the end of the early scenarios and also enjoyed only being able to recruit certain units in certain areas.. more realistic than the usual way recruiting goes. It would be cool if other developers would follow suit with that sometimes.. I'd like to see campaigns where that was worked in occasionally (i.e. - sometimes you could recruit anybody, sometimes options would be limited).

I'm generally addicted to focusing on leveling up my characters, so being able to level up lots of them worked well for me... though for some reason I had the idea that this was going to be a shorter campaign than it turned out to be. I kept thinking that I wasn't going to be able to get them all maxed out and I left a few units out of the mix that I would have leveled up had I known. Knowing how many scenarios there were upfront would have helped, but I understand that you are still developing the campaign, so maybe thats not something you are ready to list up front yet.

Brian was a cool character.. though maybe that staff he had was a little over the top for the early scenarios.. oh well, it was fun anyway.

I kept thinking Chris was gonna level up to be a more interesting character than he was. When he became a lycanthrope I thought he might wind up turning into a werewolf or something (maybe like a nighttime transformation) especially since his description said that he would learn more about his abilities as he grew, but then he just turned into a druid with a lot of hitpoints and nothing else very interesting about him. Maybe the wolf that became loyal to the group in the ancient blade scenario had something to do with his ability to communicate with animals, but if so, it was not exactly clear in the story that that is what happened. Chris would have been a little cooler if he actually talked to the wolf and let him know that they would help him and/or talked him into joining them. Maybe Chris could have said.. 'Oh, no.. that wolf is getting attacked by the mud globs' and the wolf could have said, 'Aoooeergh' or whatever wolves say. Then Chris could have been like 'He wants us to help him.. Let's go!!'. The Sylvie could have said something smart like 'Uh.. what.. did you just understand that thing.. all I heard was 'Aooergh'.. and Chris could have said, 'Never mind.. come on, they're hurting him!'
Okay, maybe thats just me being a little silly, but it could be cool, too.

Bummed that I was never able to get any cool swords for zack during the campaign... Even though the dialog mentioned that he lost his sword, he still had his saber throughout the ancient blade scenario and nothing changed with that when he found it in the end. Nice dialog at the end of that scenario btw.. 'Undead quick.. re-kille them' and 'we fought for.. I don't remember' - haha... nice.
Was the blacksmith in town supposed to make me a sword.. my memory is a little fuzzy with what happened there.. he made me a necklace.. maybe that was it.. anyway I never got a sword out of him.
And in another back to town scenario Gustave said I could use the sword that I found in the castle, ghost had killed the creature that was using it, and zack told Gustave about it, but then I never actually got the sword. Poop

The first castle scenario was cool but then the rest of them got a little old for me... too easy, too many, and I though the layouts were a little *yawn* boring. If they were more interesting I would have been alright w playing that many I suppose.

And I agree with the other guy who suggested that the back to town scenarios should have had some sort of turn limit so we didn't just wind up with as much gold as we were willing to take... but I took advantage of that anyway.

Is it over? Is the battle with the vampire guy the end of it? I was hoping to travel on to the citadel and get Ecthelion exonerated.. though maybe Ecthelion wouldn't have wanted that anyway after killing his old friend..
maybe the group could go to the citadel and overthrow whoever exiled him in the first place (was he exiled or just shunned.. don't remember)..
or maybe Ecthelion could have stayed in exile and the group could have taken word of the victory to the citadel.. then Ecthelion could have been exonerated from afar..
and maybe they could reach the citadel to find it under attack. Then they could rescue the city.. anyway, if its not all over I'm hoping that you decide to throw in a huge battle at the end of the campaign so that I can actually use all of these characters that I've acquired and maxed out along the way. For me, there weren't enough people to fight in the castle scenarios to use the army that I've amassed here.

Again, overall, great job. This was one of the more interesting campaigns I've played, and I'd be glad to play it again when the bugs get worked out.. and especially if the story goes on. Cheers!

[quincy]

In the meantime: I have hit a bit of a wall, you guys. I'm trying to make a quest where you find a dragon egg and then have a pet dragon. I found an existing egg sprite alright, and made a dragon hatchling unit using another sprite (adorable if I do say so myself; that was today's project), but I just can't find a yound dragon sprite of any sort. So basically, if I made the units as is, the evolution would go "egg" "baby dragon the size of your fist" "HUGE FIRE-BREATHING MONSTER". Anyone know of a sprite that can fix that gap a bit?

Perhaps you could edit a drake glider or another armorless drake?

[Arawn]

@jawick: whoa, wonderful feedback! Thank you so much! Alright, let me try to address most of what you said.
I believe the latest version of the campaign lists how many scenarios there are.

The overpowered staff: right... he's the thing. I don't know how to make an item that levels with the unit. So you're absolutely right, that staff is Lvl 3 power available at Lvl 1. Any ideas here, guys? I'll try to research it myself, but if anyone knows of some example code that does something similar, I'd be glad. Basically, when Brian finds the item, it should start leveling with him like a standard attack.

In a version I uploaded just now (2.0 - is that a valid number?), Chris does turn into a werewolf! But only at Lvl 3. Gotta keep things interesting. I'll look into the ancient blade scenario again. It was debugged thanks to someone who actually understands the wesnoth language (you know who you are), and it sounds like you were playing an old version of the campaign, so it should already be fixed, but I'll check. Zack should get a ridiculously awesome sword that I may need to nerf later at the end of the scenario, regardless of which path he takes.

The castle scenarios: I'll look into that. I'm glad someone else thinks they need to be harder. Can I ask what difficulty you were on / what you would recommend. I've attempted to make them interesting (the garden, the side-quests), but if it's not working, I'm open to ideas.

Back to town: did I fix that? I don't think I fixed that. I'll fix that.

Spoiler:

As for Ecthelion: There is no way you could have known this since it isn't mentioned anywhere (I'll try to include it in the Back To Town scenarios), but one of the aspects of Ecthelion's character is that after he witnessed Jusarne's downfall, he dedicates his life to atoning for it. As such, he does what he does because he thinks it's right (and in a black/white scenario like this, he's right), not because someone will thank him. As such, Ecthelion does not care about being exonerated. In fact, given his character, he probably never even bothered asking while he was in Zamora. For those of you wondering, that's not supposed to make him Four Champions' Jesus or Dumbledore. This is a character dear to me, and I've packed a lot of inspiration into him from various sources. I will admit that one source was Batman.

[Adamant14]

I got an error message 'unknown scenario 17_Inside_The_Castle_Lvl6'


The ID of scenario 16 is wrong I guess ...

[Arawn]

Alright, that's fixed as are most things at this point. A new version has been uploaded (again). Things are simpler now that I decided to just delete two of the castle levels, though I doubt anyone will notice because they weren't supposed to be linked in the first place. At any rate, the castle now has only 5 levels, including the ground-level with the snowy-forest (so basically, four levels worth of "Inside the Castle").

I updated the Ancient Blade scenario to reflect one of your ideas about the encounter with Ghost, the wolf.

Also, a horrible bug came to my attention where I once again wrote 'fog = no'. Sigh... ok, to my knowledge, back in 1.8.4, having 'fog = no' with spaces actually resulted in fog being set to true. I'll have to hunt through the code and make sure everything is good with that.

Past that, the only thing left is to give all the side-quests a test, which will be extremely tedious, but there are clearly problems as some of you have pointed out.

[jawick]

Oh good about Chris... yeah, I think making him a weirwolf (but not until level three) is the right way to go. I'm sure I'll get around to redownloading this one again to see the changes... I was on medium difficulty by the way. I'll be interested to see what you worked in with ghost, too.
As far as the castle goes... hmm.. well I liked the first one for sure (the outside and up the steps one). There was just more to it than the other ones. There were enemies coming at me from different directions (ie - some from within the castle and some from without), so that there was fighting on multiple fronts and there were some pretty serious fellas hiding in the shadows and guarding the holy water. That was a nice surprise.
So for one thing, I would just like to see some more of that. I'd like to be fighting in multiple rooms at once, or at least have some random enemies hiding in the shadows or corners. The side quests were fine but it would be nice if there were some enemy units guarding the captive Mage and the artifacts in the garden, and if they were harder then you might be able to leave some holy water around though I would have some enemy units guarding those as well. One thing that I loved was having to fight the enemies w nightshade (that's where you can't see em in the dark unless you're next to them right?) attributes. That did make it interesting because one of my units got stuck in a doorway while I was trying to move him into the next room. I'd welcome some more of that, too.
Again, nice job overall, and thanks for the interest in my post. Nice talkin w you.
Good talkin w ya