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

[Great_Mage_Atari]

Well I have made a green Slime, as stated in the "What we need" article. It's up for grabs if needed for this project.
I also included coding for it. I would appreciate it if people would ask me before downloading if not affiliated with this project in general. It is named "Poison Slime", but the name can be changed as needed, and so can the attacks:

[Exasperation]

Sorry about my extended absence - I've been pretty busy IRL. I did just publish a minor update that should fix the issue with bless weapon as well as including Shinobody's female PC art.

In response to some of the other questions that have been asked:
-There isn't a 1.9 version available yet.
-There isn't any way to increase mana regen yet, but there are plans for a skill to allow you to recharge faster at the expense of an action (the current plan is use minor action -> regain mana equal to casting power).
-It does seem odd that you can heal opponents, that may be removed at some point.
-It's normal for NPCs to cross-class sometimes, however I believe that should only occur after they've reached their normal maximum level (so the white mage picking a different school of magic is probably a bug).
-I don't believe replays of Wesband games work properly (I might be wrong), so a save from just before a bug occurs is the better bet.

[Sapient]

Porting it to 1.9 is pretty easy. Mainly you just have to re-implement all the core macros that got removed. I've got a local copy of deprecated-utils.cfg that's allowing me to play it.

[Exasperation]

Hmmm... no serious troubles with the 1.8 -> 1.9 WML syntax changes? As I said earlier, I'm planning to start porting around when the first release candidate for 1.10 comes out, and it looks like that might be pretty soon; it'd be nice to know about any unfortunate surprises you ran into.

[Shinobody]

Ow, at last! So I'll now get to make these drake-PC-spritey-thignies...
And dwarf-girl, too.
One thing: it seems like name of thread was reverted back to "Wesband 0.6.1" - why?

[Exasperation]

Yeah, sorry about how long it took to get those in game. But they got there eventually!
I look forward to the next batch of sprites you send our way. Drakes might be a bit trickier/more involved than the others, because of the game-mechanic plans we have for them. I can give you a quick summary if you'd like.

And the title reverting is because I can't edit the first post to change the title of the whole thread. So while I can change the subject of my individual posts, it will keep defaulting back to the thread title, which was last updated for 0.6.1.

[Shinobody]

Ah, I get it now.
As for drake sprites, yes, I have some questions: (from purely graphical point of view-)

• Will they be able to fly? That is the most important question. (More sprites to do.)
• Will drakes use claws for melee, or just punch like the others? Or both?
• Do they need firebreathing anim? Or some more ambiguous breathing frame, which would fit acid, ice and whatever?
• Could the warblades of Fighter, Flameheart and Flare be used for daggers, swords and axes, respectively? Or is it too race-based/exotic and I should just frank them wingless races equipment?
• And last one (related to above one) : since drakes use no magic, let alone staffs, should I just frank them some human staff?

First three are important. Last two, not so much. (if you don't answer, I'll just assume I'm on my own here.)

[Great_Mage_Atari]

I was told that a Slime was needed for Wesband, as was stated in the to-do list before. Is there still an opening for making a Slime for Wesband? I would be willing to make one fit to your standards if at all possible.

[Exasperation]

@Shinobody:

Drakes will be able to fly and breathe fire depending on how heavy their armor is (as stated in the clasher description), so there will need to be separate sets of sprites for heavily and lightly armored drakes; the heavily armored drakes won't need flying/firebreathing animations while the lightly armored ones will (I don't think it's necessary to do a separate set of sprites for true-flight drakes like the glider; they can share with the other non-heavy drakes).
Neither set will need spellcasting animations as that will be replaced by firebreathing.

Like the saurians, they will probably have both punch & claw attacks; also like the saurians you can probably get away with one set of animations for both unarmed attacks.
There will be warblades in the game, but it would be ok if you used them for axe/sword/dagger animations; for simplicity's sake all the other races will probably end up just using axe/sword/dagger animations for the warblades anyway, and there are already plenty of instances of weapons being displayed as racial weapons on sprites (think of the dwarf using a runic hammer for the magestaff animation or the troll's giant hammer for the mace animation).
I would say using a human staff for the staff animation is fine; I doubt staves will be a common choice of weapon for drakes anyway (no spells to boost means they're effectively just weaker maces, and drakes will additionally have penalties to non-racial weapons).

Let me know if this raises any more questions or if you think of something else you need to know.

@Atari:

If you provide a high enough quality slime, we will happily use it (our requirements are not quite as high as mainline for art, but the closer to mainline quality and style the better; we also accept reasonably good frankensteined units); however, adding enemy types is a fairly complicated process and there are higher priorities at the moment, so new enemies will probably take a fair amount of time to make it in even if there is good art available.

[zaimoni]

Hitting two errors with "four dwarves and four white mages"

Code: Select all

UnitConstruction.lua:391: arithmetic on a string value error

* Happens on level creation only
* in local function move_cost_modifer which is called only to bootstrap the local variable "values".

I didn't see anything outlandish in the incoming parameter values. If I were to look at this further, I'd be seeing why get_p was returning a string value instead of a numeric value.

Code: Select all

UnitConstruction.lua:478: attempt to perform arithmetic on field 'illuminates' (a nil value)

This happens on promoting a white mage to a mage of light. I suspect this is preventing the illuminates ability from actually happening. Diff for untested formal fix:

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

--- UnitConstruction.lua.ref    2011-11-04 10:53:25 -0500
+++ UnitConstruction.lua        2011-11-04 10:53:45 -0500
@@ -475,7 +475,7 @@
                for i = 1, #ability_array do
                        local ability_id = get_p(ability_array[i], "id") or "non
e"
                        if ability_id == "illumination" then
-                               values.defense = values.defense * values.illuminates
+                               values.defense = values.defense * modifiers.illuminates
                        end
                end
        end

edit: Third error

Code: Select all

UnitConstruction.lua:391: arithmetic on a string value error

* happens on level creation
* looks like get_p(equipment.melee_2, "evade_adjust") returned nil

[Colouredbox]

I've got a question, are you "supposed" to use the 1-1 attacks to farm XP or are you supposed to just bang everything you see?

[Exasperation]

@zaimoni: fixed the first two, you were spot on with your analysis of & fix for the second issue. For the third one, did you paste the wrong error message? The one you posted is just pointing at the same place as the first error, and doesn't match what you said after the error message.
edit - nevermind about the line no., a quick search showed there was only one line that could possibly be occurring at, and a simple "or 0" fixes the problem.

@Colouredbox: well, hopefully when we get around to balance adjustments, we'll be able to balance the risk vs. reward of farming xp with weak attacks; until then, just play whichever way you feel is more fun.

[zaimoni]

Yes, third paste was of wrong error message. Actual was:

Code: Select all

UnitConstruction.lua:788: attempt to perform arithmetic on a nil value

[Brian_A]

I've got a question, are you "supposed" to use the 1-1 attacks to farm XP or are you supposed to just bang everything you see?

You play whatever style you enjoy - be it farming or fast-killing.

[Xudo]

Farming style gives a lot more profit than fast killing. Thats why it should be adjusted.
There is two way of farming xp in Wesband:
1) Keeping enemy alive.
Ways of adjustment:

• You can set levels of all units to 0 (it's not good solution, but it is easy to implement.)
  You can force player to spend xp:
  • xp-draining attacks of enemy (or even of player)
    using xp as energy to cast spell
  You can reduce amount of healing done to units. (remove regeneration from game or alter it)

2) levelling enemy and killing him.
This case of farming sometimes very challenging. Some enemies too weak to survive levelling, some too hard to kill while levelled.

After all you can force player to deal as much damage as possible. Use "spawn-points" instead of placing enemies. When player comes enough close to it, spawn point will start to produce enemies until player dies, or spawn point get destroyed. But this will produce enormous amount of loot. You can remove loot from spawns (and give it to spawn-point), make it cheap to sold or reduce droprate. But it's another topic to talk.