Strange Legacy - 1.16 RPG World (Markets Upgrade)

[Heindal]

Oh my, i believed the game would really react on the broken save, too bad. However that is what I made cheater path for.

I will add some of your ideas for higher difficulty. But I think that the pacifist, or the deactivation of spells is way harder, or dissallowance of trading is harder than just not to allow scrolls. Scrolls are nice, but have been extremly weakened in the last updates. Plus it's hard to disallow the use of stores. Most stores are manual pieces of code, to avoid macros. Macros are good for automatization, but have horrible effects on the overall performance and initial loading time.

Crafting tools, i think i can fix this easily. Believed it would work, but its proably just an misspelled variable.
You don't have to heal mercs, as you can use almost any consumable (such as healing scrolls) on mercs.
Will fix these points on the weekend ^^. Thank you for your comments.

[Mu]

I have a big problem to advance in the main story.

I need to go to the Stonecutter, and I need the snow upgrade to get there, and the snow upgrade is in Elves Rise. But since some event about a conflict beetween humans and elves, an Elvish Avenger unit has placed himself in Elves Rise, making imposible to enter.

I have played a lot of hours, but the Avenger does not go. I don't mind playing more, but I would like to know if it will go eventually, or if I can do something to solve the conflict (I can't speak with the King's Marshall nor the Council in Harbour, I don't know if I need more fame).

If there is an ingame solution I will try it, but if I know that there isn't, I will edit the savefile to move the freaking Avenger.

Thank you.

[Heindal]

This one of the most frequently questions I've had.

There is a war going on! Cities are blocked, but I need to access them!:

One solution is to wait until the war is over, but that can take its time. The end is also triggered by a random event. More confortable and faster way is to get rid of the unit that blocks your access. This can be done by teleporting the unit away, or killing the unit with a spell or ability. Teleportaway spell and scrolls are a nice way to get rid of these units and they should be available in every magic store.


If you are stuck again, you might want to check the official Strange Legacy FAQ.

http://www.heindal.de/strangelegacy/faq.html


Cheers

Heindal

[Mu]

Thanks.

I'll try to wait a little more, since your solutions feel like editing the savefile (I understand that because of the war the markets are closed). If the war do not end soon, I will make one of the tricks.

Thanks for the FAQ also.

[Mu]

The war ended at last! Too bad it is winter and I can't reach Elves Rise Ok, I'll just wait, I only tell this because I think it's funny.

I forgot to praise you as you deserve. Is really impressing the RPG you built using the wesnoth engine. And the variety of options you can choose to develop into (the long human-elf war made develop almost all of them).

EDITED: I just realized I can just teleport there.

[Heindal]

Also note that I like to work with secrets.

Spoiler:

f.e.

There are several embassies of the elves, dwarves and sand people in Capital city.
There is a skill teacher in the north of capital city, as well as a central guard, which just can be reached by teleportation.
There are several persons and happenings marked with "Examine" which give you a passive stat boost.
You can talk to caravans and can get good deals to get seldom items.
Almost any city offers some special missions.

[Wussel]

There is an issue with the apprentice robe. No picture and no need to undress it for better stuff. Resulting in free bonus.
There is an issue with the goods you take on as job. They never get deleted in your bill of loading. They get reduced from the capacity calculation, but it looks awkward. You can ditch them with the ditch everything manually.

What makes the campaign slow?

Could you elaborate on the code you are using for blit/overlay? I found the lua part. In the unit file the things seem to be put into comments. Where is the shop part where the stuff is bought? Where is the equip part? Could you apply your blit/overlay thingy to portraits as well?

[Heindal]

Thanks for your reply wussel.

I will see if i can fix the apprentice issue and the job issue. They will be fixed with the next version 1.11.

The addon is slow, as I was believing the macro would work like functions. They don't!
These are placeholders, which are replaced by real code when the game starts.

That resulted in the issue that the addon didn't start and caused a bow crash on some computers. I don't know many free rpgs with a complexity of Strange Legacy. I added a lot of secrets stuff, a casual player will never discover. The problem with this creative spirit is, that I used an existing concept of using a lot of macros. This also takes a lot of manual work.

The only way to solve this is to use lua functions.
Oh its not that easy, as I have to adress wesnoth objects and variables. I just don't know how.

Also this approach would need to use arrays of variables. Unfortunately the real use of arrays are not explained in the wiki.
I lack the motivation to change that.

I can address arrays, objects and create function easily in Javascript. Its not really hard, in fact its really easy.
It's not in WML. The wiki just scratches this part, so you have to try out and find out yourself.

Concerning your question of the blit/overlay. I've tested a lot. You can ignore the comments in the unit, it was just an approach.
The overlay/blit approach works fine for units. But as soon as they are moving the overlays will disappear.

As you might know, overlays can be used to place an image over an character. This can be used for icons, status effects or a manabar for example.
They unfortunately disappear when a unit moves or attackes. So this is an dead end, like unit manipulation.

As I'm not the lua expert, so dugi was so kind as to develop a solution in lua. He has written a great concept for world of wesnoth. I'm quite sure you can find the discussion somewhere hidden in the wml workshop. If you want to use the concept, I'd be glad to explain the pieces of code you need.

I'm not quite sure if blit can be used for portraits. It would be cool, but I don't like the ammount of work (and most importantly testing) it would require.
I mean in html5 its so easy just to move to annother level and put an item over annother. Its not so easy in wml.


Shops are mostly written directly in the scenario. So they just have to be loaded when the scenario itself is loaded, also this reduces the number of macros. It doesn't make sense to code macros for stores that are just used once. Some prefined shops can be found in buyandselloptions (magic store) as well as in townsandplaces cfg.

The equip part can be found in the helpmenu.


Kind regards

Heindal

[Wussel]

Yep, the help.cfg

I found it after the line numbers got 5 digits.

Blit works on portraits. Blit works with the baseframe. It is good for shifting animations. If you have a second baseframe for the animation you would have to blit everything on this picture too. I do believe it should be easy for you as you have all the pieces in place already.

To be specific on the most annoying slow part. End turn waiting time in encounters, dungeon and such is a pain. Maybe there is a way to keep the macros involved more limited for that turn button?

I would suggest to keep the city maps more dense. The walking between stores can be quit long.

One totally easy thingy: The ruffian displayed (story wise) when entering cities is the 205 pixel version. If you add transparent/ into the path you get the 400 pixel version.

[Heindal]

New Version for Halloween: Legacy of the Scarecrow

Versionnumber: 1.11
Available for Wesnoth: 12.4


slight performance upgrades:
- initial loading time slightly reduced
- loading time in game and after end turn slightly reduced
- reduced unnecessary macros, improved macros in randomevents

repaired crafting issues
- crafting torches and other tools will work now
- problems with piecesofspice have been solved

fixed Apprentice Cloak icon

randomdungeon:
- fixed issues and added improvements of the other infinite dungeons
- 5 more places of interest to allow even more random dungeons

new tutorials:
- added tutorials for missions and achievements
- added labels to guide new players

achievements:
- removed achievements from the infinite moving as this caused a lot of performance problems
- therefore you can now claim achievements in the house scenario near the sea

randomevents:
- 5 new global events, so far nothing really disturbing - tell me if you see issues has hardly been tested :/
- improved use of macros reduced loading time
- new event that will give the player random consumables
- reduced number of randomlootevents (replaced by randomconsumables)
- overworked descriptions (some of them were really old and had some grammar and spelling mistakes :/)
- slightly increased chance for global events in other parts of the world

gold balancing:
- increased resting prices in the tavern
- charisma multiplies the bounty award
- singing has a more random income
- more options in the casino
- increased the gold taken by random events
- prices of flasks and jewelery massively increased

new missions:
- added random kidnap and hero rescue missions (available in the center of capital city after 50 missions done)
- added mission 'legacy of the scarecrow' (available in the center of capital city after 100 missions done)

new difficulty:
- this will increase your starting level to 20, giving you negative income of 40 and ask you to take a challenge

new challenge:
- Anti-Consumablist can neither enter the consumables menu, use items or use ship items.
(anti-scrollist would have been to weak imho, and would be harder to realize )

most important:
- no pumpkins and no ghosts have been added to this version, even so its Halloween.
- but there is a spooky scarecrow mission


@wussel: thanks for your reply, I've already fixed some of the issues in this version. One problem will stay. In infinite and random dungeons there will be two factions fighting each other. Maybe I will rethink this concept, but I like it somehow. But the more enemies are in the dungeons the longer the fights will take, especially in higher levels. I've already set the ai to guardian so the number of fights will be at least reduced, plus giving you the chance to avoid nasty enemies.

[Wussel]

Awesome!
In my experience the AI is having a performance issue if faced with crazy odds. Ignore bad combat helps and there is an attack dept setting. Meaning checking if a later unit will be able to kill. That should be reduced too. I was sitting with my player on a village (drainserker), AI took ages for each suicide run. I did summon some angels just to give them some targets.

If you can learn a skill at a trainer until 70 it actually gives you 71 and so on.

I was thinking about a wall following the fence form and using the woodenbridge macro. Wood be easy to make and would be much more nice than the abuse of the cave walls. Could be stone wall or palisade or such.

There is an issue with a dual armor equip. Maybe related to a requirement being achieved by ring/amulet and than removing of that ring/amulet. I managed a second trollskin armor too.

I have still this maxstorage issue. I have now 95/89 available for usage. The last 5 came when ditching some rubbish (crafting items??), I was not aware of having. Please check the 10th 1/1 advancement (achievement?) too.

Could you get me a link to that lua part in the forum? Did not find it. Can you see all your achievements somewhere? Would be a nice list!

Any chance for re-doing some city maps?

Oh, that helmet of clairvoyance? Is it working? What is it doing? (Gives spell, got it!)

[Heindal]

I will keep working on the project. One of the most current issues seems to be the helpmenu and there is still a lot of redundancy concerning the buyable buildings.
The helpmenu, spellcasting or the encounter itself is causing some lag. I will need to work on these performance issues first.

Oh my, the armor issue again. I believed to have solved that aeons ago :/.

Can you tell me what do mean by redoing the city maps? I personally like them, smaller cities are somehow unpersonally and don't fit into a rpg.
I even wanted to add more side quests to travel to several inner cities and talk to several person and make small deliveries.

A list of achievement can be found in the achievements.cfg.

[lightlord]

Hi,

I played this and world is nice but gameplay leaves lot to be desired. It becomes quickly too easy even on harder difficulty, no consumables is bit harder. Simplest way is start as bard. If you selected no trade you need to go to capital/woodcutter trade guild and reject missions until its to capital/trade guild to build some cash to get fame, buy luck potion for 100 fame, then buy lucky boots. Otherwise you could just get mission to harbor city. Go to casino and keep enter pressed until you earn 100000 gold. Then enter city, buy captains hat, train singing and buy 50 teleport scrolls. Get desert upgrade and go to desert keep for +luck ring and amulet. Then singintg in tavern and buying charisma and luck potions from earned money will be most profitable bussiness. Next second is diamond mining but due to loading screen, followed by teleport, mining, teleport back, another loading screen, selling diamonds for around 1200000 gold takes me minute and half and i could earn more in tavern.

So types of trading are pointless, so why bother with that. Buildings and mining resources are joke, you need work for hour in building to pay itself and you earn much less than even 2000 per second when you click slowly in casino.

Crafting has similar problem as money isn't problem its faster to just buy things than spend more time by getting resources and crafting them for same result.

As combat its too easy, again due to cheap money, even if I didn't make John superhero I could finish almost any map before enemy moves, just teleport to boss, attack him with six assassins and if he isnt dead then teleport him and repeat until he is.

[Heindal]

Hi lightlord,

yeah I agree, there is still a balancing issue, but it depends how you play and there are around several ways of making income, solving problems in several unique ways and even different fighting styles. Its meant to be played several times choosing different ways to achieve your goal. The casino changes in the last update weren't so good after all it seems. Will need to delete this option than. Also flasks might just increase the player up to a maximum statlevel of 10. I will also increase the effects of levelups to make fightings better.

Most people start with getting as powerful as possible, not starting the story missions. That's a problem, but there is hardly a way to change that without taking away the player's fun/freedom. The only way would be to force players to do missions and I don't want to do this.

Edit: I think I will solve this easily, by just allowing to use one item per turn, instead of an attack. Its something I had in mind long time ago and I think its time to do this now.

Thanks for your feedback

[Wussel]

About the cities?
Elf city
Dwarf city
swamp city
Drake city
are kind of boring. To much ground to cover and not enough variation.

Harbor city is good
Desert capital and main capital too

About donation (in temple): It gets sacked after the player has 1000 fame. Maybe not the best way to do this.
About the book: It often gives experience, however numbers from 1 to 29 xp are really disappointing. Maybe multiply by 10 or 20?

About the story arc: Rebuilding the bridge to the north. I had to rebuilt the northern city. Than it got stuck. Do i have to rebuilt something else??

What is absolute_unit_overlay doing? What is the difference to a regular overlay?? Can there be a absolute_portrait_overlay?