Development: Scarlet Sea [campaign]

[pyrophorus]

Hi team !

Here comes a playable version of scenario 3.
Most desired features have been incorporated, but not:

-- all lich abilities. Teleporting when surrounded and reviving nearby killed units is enough IMO. I think others ideas can be implemented in other units at will, but not in these. The main reason is we should keep some new ideas for later scenarios, and introduce not too many new things too fast.

-- all dialogues options. Maybe we can introduce them later, but it's a lot of work and don't improve really the scenario IMO.

I added some animations to add some fun and understanding of events:
-- There is a flashing gem to "explain" in some way the healing aura.
-- Defense towers are set to fire when killed, burn some turns and extinct.
Sprites used ther could be better fitted, of course.

When playing the scenario, maybe you'll find like me, that the fog is a bad idea: with so many units, it's really boring to wait until the AI ends all its moves out of sight. I think the fog could be disabled after some turns (maybe when the remaining necromancers come or at the first aura event).

Friendly,

Valia-sc3.zip

(267.99 KiB) Downloaded 198 times

[battlestar]

Great! Playing through it now.

Could you tell me if the added custom sprites are under the GPL licensing?

Sorry I forgot to get you this sprite:

grand-blue-crystal.png (4.41 KiB) Viewed 3849 times

Zerovirus made this for our blue crystal in this scenario.

He also did Lily's sprite:

Lily.png (2.75 KiB) Viewed 3849 times

Then his skeletal dragon, it's quite big but too awesome not to be used:

skeletal-dragon.png (18.29 KiB) Viewed 3847 times

Sorry for not being as well organized as I could, I've been a little busy lately .

[pyrophorus]

Great! Playing through it now.
Could you tell me if the added custom sprites are under the GPL licensing?

Don't worry, they all come from Wesnoth campaigns or forums. Anyway, I think most of them should be replaced sooner or later.
About the other sprites, no, you didn't send them, but it will not be difficult to update the placeholders except the skeletal dragon. Here is the new unit file:

Code: Select all

#textdomain wesnoth-units
[unit_type]
    id=SSC_SkeletalDragon
	[base_unit]
		id=Skeletal Dragon
	[/base_unit]
	image="units/monsters/skeletal-dragon.png"
[/unit_type]

Of course, the scenario should be edited for the unit id to match this one, etc...

About the blue crystal, I think it would be fine to have it animated, changing the orb color for instance. It will look more magic !

Friendly,

[daeVArt]

I'm sorry for my absence, I've got an Accident, and break my right hand, so I cant do create an artwork for a while, my doctor say that i need to rest my hand for more than 2 week. so sorry if I'm absence for more week...

[battlestar]

Ouch! How did that happen?

Take all the time you need, give your hand a good rest for sure. I wish you a complete and smooth recovery!

[battlestar]

Pyro, your coding is fantastic as always, especially considering the complexity of this scenario. I don’t think I could’ve done it as beautifully even if it took me weeks.

I haven’t tested out the necromancer combat special abilities yet (#13 in script). For the most part I think the way it is now is perfect, with some minor adjustments below.

Initially I was going to ask you to make these changes, but now that I think about it, I think I am able to do them instead. I’ve gotten more familiar with your codes during testing. I’ll ask for your help if I have trouble with any of them.

The only thing is, could you take a look at problem #6 and 11 below? If you don't think there's a problem with the rest of them, I'll go ahead and make the modifications.

1. Image overlay for tower is a little off. I will make all towers initially start out as units like the one in outpost (as side=2 units). Then I'll adjust the position of the sprites and maybe get rid of some of the castle tiles to make it look right. Then I will make sure that the tower sprite and its rubbles line up (they already seem to line up well).

2. At the beginning, maybe have an outpost unit (the unit involved in the dialogue at 22,31) come up from the forest south (ie 21,40) before the dialogue starts. So that it would look like that outpost unit came back from a scouting trip.

3. I will put Skarbod on 24,20, and lily on 25,20. Then add a few units for player 1 along the shore (on the grass tiles).

4. I will make the tower units resistant to poison.

5. The event that includes {SSC_DIAL-003-02}, I will split it into two events like so:

Code: Select all

	[event]
		name=new turn
		[filter_condition]
			[have_unit]
				side=3
				x,y=1-45,1-19
			[/have_unit]
		[/filter_condition]
		{SSC_DIAL-003-02}
		{LSB_FIREVENT enable_outer}
	[/event]
	[event]
		name=last breath
		[filter_condition]
			[have_unit]
				find_in=outpost_army
				count=0
			[/have_unit]
		[/filter_condition]
		# run the following dialogue: 
		# Soldier:Aaaah!!
		# Valia: Alas, look around, we're the last ones Skarbod. Everyone else died out here. What can we do against such reckless hate?
		# Skarbod: Come, the walls will hold them long.
		# Valia: But how long? They've breached all other defenses so quickly!
		# General: Lieutenant, send your platoon out and escort Valia and Skarbod 		# within the gates, they're important!
		# Lieutenant: Aye sir!
		# Lieutenant: Hang on kids, my troops are on their way.
		{LSB_FIREVENT enable_outer} # it seems to me that there’s no problem if this event’s fired twice?
	[/event]

6. I don’t know why, but it seems like {LSB_FIREVENT enable_inner} is fired while the undead army is still entirely outside the outer walls.

7. To give player a heads up for enemies coming from west side of city, I will add the following two lines of dialogue when the first wave arrives from the west direction?
Soldier: Look, look, to the west!
Soldier2: I see them, oh creator above, look! There're hordes of them!

8. For {SSC_DIAL-003-10}, I will change “What matters is that we make sure he can't revive it a second time.” To “What matters is that we make sure he can't revive it again.”

9. I will save names of the three necromancers in variables. They’ll reappear in a future scenario, and we’ll use the same names.

10: #10 in script, If the chained man was rescued and subsequently defeated in scn-2 part isn’t incorporated yet.

11. Not yet tested but the code looks like one skeletal dragon is raised every 4 turns instead of resurrection of the destroyed skeletal dragon after 4 turns?


Do you have anything to add?

[pyrophorus]

Pyro, your coding is fantastic as always, especially considering the complexity of this scenario. I don’t think I could’ve done it as beautifully even if it took me weeks.

Thanks for you appreciation.

I haven’t tested out the necromancer combat special abilities yet (#13 in script).

An easy way to do this: change the turn count of necromancers coming to 1 and 2 and create units nearby in debug mode. That said, I think the recruiting animation works great when a necromancer revives a killed unit neraby.

For the most part I think the way it is now is perfect, with some minor adjustments below.

Initially I was going to ask you to make these changes, but now that I think about it, I think I am able to do them instead. I’ve gotten more familiar with your codes during testing. I’ll ask for your help if I have trouble with any of them.

The only thing is, could you take a look at problem #6 and 11 below? If you don't think there's a problem with the rest of them, I'll go ahead and make the modifications.

OK...

1. Image overlay for tower is a little off. I will make all towers initially start out as units like the one in outpost (as side=2 units). Then I'll adjust the position of the sprites and maybe get rid of some of the castle tiles to make it look right. Then I will make sure that the tower sprite and its rubbles line up (they already seem to line up well).

I have coded this way, expecting we could have a tower sprite without mage and use it to show the not yet enabled towers. That's why you have two images for the tower (different names but same sprite). If you plan to create directly a unit, you don't need the second one anymore.
EDIT:
BTW, I think attack and defense standard anims are not OK for towers. Maybe a color change would be better than a move. I can try something if you want.

2. At the beginning, maybe have an outpost unit (the unit involved in the dialogue at 22,31) come up from the forest south (ie 21,40) before the dialogue starts. So that it would look like that outpost unit came back from a scouting trip.

3. I will put Skarbod on 24,20, and lily on 25,20. Then add a few units for player 1 along the shore (on the grass tiles).

4. I will make the tower units resistant to poison.

It should be since it is 'mechanical' but maybe I didn't spell the race attribute correctly.

5. The event that includes {SSC_DIAL-003-02}, I will split it into two events like so:
...

# it seems to me that there’s no problem if this event’s fired twice?

I suppose you mean 'fired from two different places' ? Not at all. That's why I use a fire_event instead of directly inserting the working code. You can even fire an event which exists not without error (handy in many situations).

6. I don’t know why, but it seems like {LSB_FIREVENT enable_inner} is fired while the undead army is still entirely outside the outer walls.

The event is triggered when enemy reaches x,y=20-39,1-13 (or all outer defenders die). You can stretch it a little. It should work.

11. Not yet tested but the code looks like one skeletal dragon is raised every 4 turns instead of resurrection of the destroyed skeletal dragon after 4 turns?

That's right. Since it has no name, I create a new unit each time. But it can easily be done otherwise, resurrecting exactly the same dragon. Let me know if you want to do that.

Do you have anything to add?

Except the fog thing, no, I don't see anything.

Friendly,

[battlestar]

Sounds good, I'll make the changes I listed, then I'll send it to you for the fog thing, dragon resurrection, and tower attack/defense.

For #6, I looked at the conditions including the coordinates, and I don't know why it felt like the event didn't quite do what the code said. The code looked fine. I'll test it in further detail.

Something I haven't been clear on, if you have an event with first_time_only=yes, and if it's invoked several times, it would only activate the first time, right? It does sound very handy.

[pyrophorus]

Sounds good, I'll make the changes I listed, then I'll send it to you for the fog thing, dragon resurrection, and tower attack/defense.

For #6, I looked at the conditions including the coordinates, and I don't know why it felt like the event didn't quite do what the code said. The code looked fine. I'll test it in further detail.

OK, i'll wait for it.

Something I haven't been clear on, if you have an event with first_time_only=yes, and if it's invoked several times, it would only activate the first time, right? It does sound very handy.

That's right and this is the default behavior. That's why I often put a fire_event in my abilities macros. This allows to trigger some action first time the ability is used (message, animation or anything) to explain or show how it works, and not repeat forever the same message. And if you don't want anything (for instance in next scenario), you don't define the target event. Really

Friendly,

[battlestar]

That's very handy!

[pyrophorus]

Hi all,
Here is an attempt to do some custom fog effects. Rather crude for now but I think it can be interesting.

The idea is to use large partially opaque halos, anchored on a map or a character. In this test you'll see only a black animated shadow on the south of the map on turn 10, but, with the same technique we could:
- create growing shadows creeping to encircle the city, regularly repelled back by the blue aura.
- create a black cloud when necromancers teleport (like the cuttlefish ink cloud).
- create a "shadow bomb" whose cloud slowly vanishes.
For those who played my campaign, it contains examples of units carrying a large black cloud with them (shadow casters).
I suggest we brain-storm a little on this.

Friendly,

Valia-test.zip

(185.69 KiB) Downloaded 192 times

[Ceres]

Hi there!
Sorry for not contributing much lately, I got stuck with the "stunned" status. The possibility of the effect prolonging when the affected unit is hit by an impact weapon made it way harder, and it is not done yet
Anyway, here're the first two fire/thunder/battle spells. I know that it's not much, but I guess I'll work on other spells first before I try to find a solution for a problem for some more weeks. I needed a new FOREACH macro to avoid skipping array elements when deleting, but I had no idea where exactly to put it (01-syntax.cfg?), so here it is.

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

# Syntactic shortcuts for running a FOREACH loop backwards, to avoid skipping when deleting an array element
#define SSC_FOREACH_BWD ARRAY VAR
{VARIABLE {VAR} ("$(${ARRAY}.length-1)")}
[while]
    [variable]
		name={VAR}
		greater_than_equal_to=0
    [/variable]
    [do]
#enddef

#define SSC_NEXT_BWD VAR
		{VARIABLE_OP {VAR} sub 1}
    [/do]
[/while]
{CLEAR_VARIABLE {VAR}}
#enddef

[battlestar]

@ Ceres: I'm stuck before I could test them...

the macro {SCC_SPELL_ENEMY_TARGET_CHOICE 2 spell_target_x spell_target_y} in {SCC_BOLT} from 02-spells_2_thunder.cfg and {SCC_FIREBALL} from 02-spells_1_fire.cfg are giving me errors that prevents the campaign from loading, but the same macro in {SCC_DISARM} gives no such error.

but the campaign loads if {SCC_SPELL_TARGETING_PETRIFICATION_START ({RADIUS})} and {SCC_SPELL_TARGETING_PETRIFICATION_END} are disabled in SCC_SPELL_ENEMY_TARGET_CHOICE macro located in 03_spell_menu.cfg.

It doesn't make any sense to me. Does this happen to you?

I'll update the utils/spells folder in SVN, where all of the relevant files should be included. Could someone take a look at this? Thanks!

[Ceres]

No, fireball and bolt work just fine for me. Maybe there's something missing in another macro which is called somewhere indirectly, but since the error messages can't handle excessive macro usage very well, I've got no idea.
I put a test scenario in front of the prologue so I can debug more easily, maybe I did something wrong with the initialisation or something.

Spoiler:

Code: Select all

[scenario]
    id="000-test"
    name= _ "Test"
    next_scenario="null"
    victory_when_enemies_defeated=no
    map_data="{~add-ons/Scarlet_Sea/maps/0_scn_test.map}"
    turns=60
    {AFTERNOON}
	{DEFAULT_MUSIC_PLAYLIST}
	
# -------------- Sides ------------
	[side]
		side=1
		controller=human
		id=Valia
		name="Valia"
		type=Valia
		canrecruit=yes
		controller=human
		recruit=""
		income=0
		#shroud=yes
		fog=yes
		gold=0
		team_name=heroes
		user_team_name=_"Valia and her friends"
	[/side]
	
	[side]
		side=2
		type=Orcish Warrior
		canrecruit=yes
		recruit=""
		income=0
		controller=ai
		gold=100
		team_name=ugly
		user_team_name=_"Undeads"
		[unit]
			type=Orcish Grunt
			x,y=5,6
			side=2
		[/unit]
		[unit]
			type=Dwarvish Guardsman
			x,y=5,5
			side=2
		[/unit]
			
	[/side]
	
	[event]
		name=prestart
		{LSB_CREATEHERO Skarbod "Skarbod" "Skarbod" placement=leader}
		{LSB_CREATEHERO Lily "Dwarvish Scout" "Lily" placement=leader}
		{LSB_CREATEHERO Glani "Footpad" "Glani" placement=leader}
		
		{SSC_MENUSPELLS 1} # uses menu slot 1
		{SSC_MENU_HELP 2}  # uses menu slot 2
		{SCC_SPELL_COLLECTION}
		
		[set_variable]
			name=G_help
			value= _"Use right click menu on heroes to cast their spells."
		[/set_variable]
		{VARIABLE string "Hello World"}
	[/event]
	[event]
		name=start
		{SSC_CHAR_INI Valia}
		{SSC_CHAR_INI Skarbod}
	[/event]
[/scenario]

[battlestar]

could you send me what you currently have for spell_menu.cfg and spell_targeting.cfg? Thanks,