Horn of the Abyss

Ask Kuririn, he walks his own paths :wink:

I am trying to create a mod that replaces creature defs from those from hota. Either replacing creatures is not supported am doing something wrong (more probable :slight_smile: ). For starters I try to replace Orc and Orc Chieftain. By trial and error i tried to use:

core:stroghold

or

core:creatures

but none of them work, I get:

	 Error: Unknown entry found: orc
At <root>
	 Error: Unknown entry found: orcChieftain
At <root>
	 Error: Required entry faction is missing

Full JSON file:

{
	"core:stronghold" :
	{
		"orc" :
		{
			"graphics" :
			{
				"animation" : "battle/CORC.DEF",
				"map" : "map/AVWORC0.DEF"
			},
			"sound" :
			{
				"killed": "OORCKILL.wav",
				"wince": "OORCWNCE.wav"
			}
		},
		"orcChieftain" :
		{
			"graphics" :
			{
				"animation" : "battle/CORCCH.DEF",
				"map" : "map/AVWORCX0.DEF"
			},
			"sound" :
			{
				"killed": "ORCCKILL.wav",
				"wince": "ORCCWNCE.wav"
			}
		}
	}
}

Could you give a hint what am I doing wrong?

{
    "hota:pirate" : 
    {
        // entries that you want to replace in object "pirate" from mod "hota"
        // Note that hota is submod so you need to write "hota.cove:pirate" (if I haven't missed anything)
    }
}
    "core:orc" :
    {
        // entries that you want to replace from H3 object "orc"
    }
}

Add file with such code in “creatures” section of your mod and it should work.

Excellent, thanks :slight_smile:

Ok, I managed to successfully make a mod implementing all changes and graphic fixes to creatures from HotA. Unless I am wrong, VCMI does not support shooting area attacks at any hex (Magog, Lich) ? I could not find any info on that, so I assumed that it does not, therefore obviously it is not implemented :stuck_out_tongue:

I do not know if it will be helpfull, but I think it can be added as a submod to hota. I managed o quickly test it and fix most obvious errors, but it would be nice if someone looked at it as well. I’m attaching it below :slight_smile:

BTW, does VCMI use graphics from map symbolizing creature attack when hero gets close right before the battle (AVWATTAK.DEF)?

HotA creature changes.zip (3.29 MB)

Good job!

However, I don’t see how making Faerie Dragon stronger than Rust Dragon could help balance :stuck_out_tongue:

However, I don't see how making Faerie Dragon stronger than Rust Dragon could help balance :P

Well, HotA team should probably be asked about it :smiley:

marif, OK, will take a look on it in a few days. I wanted to create such mod but never got to actually doing this. Thanks, will include it in HotA soon :slight_smile:

Not yet.

I’ll try to look into Town screen corrections, but probably not this weekend. Kuririn’s mod has a few bugs and crashes VCMI altogether as far as I checked…

Ok, I did it :slight_smile: I made all HotA Town Screen corrections into a mod (attached below) and (hopefully) polished and tested it. New creature backgrounds are implemented as a part of the mod as well. I aligned some of the buildings as some of their areas are different. Sample screens for Conflux (most altered town), Inferno and Tower are below as well.

Everything should work fine but… well, it doesn’t :frowning:

While modding I encountered some problems. I am not sure if I am doing something wrong or mods are conflicting with one another (I don’t think they are, but…) or maybe it is the problem of modding functionality itself… The problems are:

If I have both the mods for Town corrections and HotA creature changes (the previous one I made) enabled, it seems that at least some of the changes in creatures do not work. Lets take Firebird/Phoenix for example. At first The Town corrections mod did not alter anything but horde growth for The Vault of Ashes. Rest of the creature modifications from HotA are in the other mod. When Conflux was fully expanded I noticed that Phoenix growth is 7 (2 Basic + 2 Castle + 2 grail + 1 Vault of Ashes) instead of 4 with the mod (1 Basic + 1 Castle + 1 grail + 1 Vault of Ashes). The changes to the price from Creature changes mod did not work as well (gold increased from 2000 to 3000).

When I disable Town corrections mod, HotA creature changes kick in and lower the basic growth and increase the price as it should. I thought that maybe one mod overwrites the other. But that is not consistent with another fact. The changes to Firebird from hota give him fire resistance of 50% instead of full immunity. I did add this ability, but it seems that not the Firerbird has both of them (screen), so nothing is overwritten. Is this a bug? I do not see how to disable full fire immunity via a mod and add lower. :confused:

Anyway… at this point I just added “growth” to Town corrections as well so at least this works but I have no clue what is wrong :frowning:

It would be good I thing if one of you guys takes a look at that…








You cna disable ability with the following formula:

"abilityName" : null

That’s just why every ability is named :wink:

Thanks Warmonger :slight_smile:

I would appreciate if you or Ivan added the line under Firebird abilities section (I don’t think that reuploading the whole mod just for this is a good idead since it is not published yet :stuck_out_tongue: ):

"immuneToFire" : null

On the other hand, I reuploaded the whole Town corrections mod mod below again (I fixed one or two small issues - I think that is easier than to instruct what to fix). I hope everything is fine now…

There is something else wrong i noticed. When I try to change:

"guildWindow": "conflux/town/TPMAGEEL.bmp",

the graphics are misaligned by 1-2 pixels to the right. I edited it and moved 1 pixel to the left (much better), but there are still light borders visible. I also forgot to mention before - I noticed that something is wrong with building borders as well. The extracted ones from ‘HotA.lod’ for new buildings are misaligned by 1-2 pixels to the right like above. I edited them so that they look ok in VCMI. A bug connected with the one above?? Anyway, the mod below has edited both mage guild window and building borders.
HotA Town Corrections.zip (5.42 MB)

I downloaded the newest version of HotA mod from the launcher and noticed some bugs, so I fixed some little things.
Changes:
Switched images of Astra and Casmetra. This isn’t really a bug, but merely a mistake in “lore”.
How did this mistake come to happen? Was the entire HotA mod remade from scratch?

Changed Astra’s specialty image from frost bolt to cure, which is her specialty.
I extracted that image from the original HotA def, and it usually puts out .bmp files, so I just set the extension to .png when extracting, though I noticed that the size may change if you just open in paint, save and close.

After building the first upgrade for the pirate dwelling, the 2nd upgrade doesn’t have its picture shown in town hall screen, which also gives out this error while hovering over any building image:

GetImage error: Request for frame not present in CAnimation! File name: HOTA/TOWNHALL Group: 0 Frame: 46

I didn’t know how to really fix this other than using a .json file with the same name as the .def used for graphics, and that was actually used in the old cove mod version, just redirecting the frame 46 to the proper frame in the def file. This is the text:

{ "frame" : 46, "file" : "hota/townhall.def:21"}

What is making me wonder here is does the building id actually represent the number of the frame in the archive(def) and does it always have to be like that if that’s true?

What’s the difference between hero specialty “tooltip” and “description”? On the wiki, it says that tooltip is visible on clicking and that it supports using {} for making yellow text, and “\n” for line breaks. I also saw “\r” in mods, what’s that one supposed to mean? It says that the description is actually visible when hovering over specialty icon, so where would that text appear? In the bottom of the screen? Instead of that, only description is visible when clicking and tooltips don’t work at all. Is this a known bug?

I don’t know does the Sea Dogs’ ability works the same as death stare, will it be possible to add a new ability with new graphics? Or just graphics, if the ability is the same?

I wanted to ask why are there no images for creature abilities, like for example this picture
http://forum.vcmi.eu/files/bonuses_985.png

HotA creature changes and town corrections have not yet been uploaded in the repository?
I’m checking if there’s anything else that may be wrong, but I probably won’t find anything new. I will probably post the link to the entire HotA mod with changes soon then, even though I only changed the cove submod, so could i maybe upload just that?
EDIT:
Here’s the cove submod: dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88897131/Cove.zip

It’s right. Building ID corresponds to frame in town hall icons.

It’s something with your installation. These icons are shipped in “vcmi” mod. If you build VCMI from sources, these pictures are not included into sources, as i remember.

Some of those icons come with VCMI itself but majority are from WoG. So if you don’t have WoG enabled you won’t have icons.

In the current version of the Cove town submod Corsairs cannot be upgraded to Sea Dogs. In addition the graphics for Gunpowder Warehouse is black.

@tkamin, I mentioned that in my post and fixed that, it’s just that it’s not uploaded yet, I hope it will.

Sorry for delay, will do an update today.

UPD:
marif, I have nothing against your mod but I not sure if it is a good idea to include it in HotA because it mostly consists from edited H3 graphics (unlike rest of HotA).

So I’d rather keep it separate, at least for now.

On tooltip & description: don’t know. Both of these texts are present in H3 text but I’m not sure where each of them is used. If you can recheck H3/VCMI behaviour and report any mismatches then I can fix them.

On \r\n: H3 uses “\r\n” to indicate end-of-line (Windows-style end-of-line) , VCMI uses only “\n” (unix-style end-of-line). Both can be used by VCMI so “\r\n” is not a bug or anything like that.

Which one? The castles mod or the creature corrections? AFAIK to some degree both have reused graphics. I thought, that while HotA mod will be gradually updated, all of its changes will be imported, so that ultimately it will be like a complete expansion rewritten specifically for VCMI.

But, ok, whatever :slight_smile: Not being offended or anything, but if not, then what? A second separate HotA mod including only graphic fixes? This does not sound like an elegant solution (at least for me) and I think that there will be a demand for this anyway :slight_smile:

Cheers!

But there was only one mod attached to your post? UPD: nevermind, found it on previous page.

What I’m OK with in main mod:

  • completely redone creatures like pikeman/orcs;
  • any mechanics/stats changes & balancing.

Not sure. Perhaps separately installable submod? Of course to do that I would have to finish missing bits in Launcher.

In any event - I’d like to have this second part separate from main mod. How this would be visible in Launcher UI - not sure. Possible options:

  1. Submod that must be installed separately.
  2. Submod that will be installed automatically but by default - disabled.
  3. Separate mod with some indication in main mod? Don’t like this one much.

I think any of these options should be viable by next release but for now I’d rather leave HotA mod as it.

(will upload HotA update in a minute)