Might and Magic 6, 7, 8 merge based on mm8 engine. [upd. 05.11.2023]

[Templayer]

DXTORY crashes the Merge...

I have the same issue with MM7 and MM6, so it might not be merge itself so much as a conflict with Grayface's patch.

I figured it might, so I prefaced the report on the Tracker that this might be a GrayFace thing. I will add your info to it as well.

[Figo]

Ok, so we do need a little more information about your issue (since crossing continents is supposed to dump you in a random location)
1) When this happens, where are you when you're casting Town Portal?
2) Are you arriving at a "normal" town portal destination (i.e. at the Big Fountain at Blackshire, or near the reflecting pool in Castle Harmondale), or in a random location on the map (such as anywhere in Tatalia or Murmurwoods)

It's not exactly like that. When you use TP spell, you get to see a map, e.g. Antagariach map. You can choose Harmondale or Erathia etc. Thing is, sometime I cannot choose anything, as something is chosen automatically in a blink of an eye and I am teleported to one of possible locations from my map. Same thing happens with Dimension Door, normally you get the map to teleport to Jadame, Enroth etc. Sometimes I just get teleported randomly to one of those 3 and in there I am indeed teleported to a random location on a map.

Have You tried casting TP without mouselook enabled (default caps lock)?

[fanasilver]

MMMerge trilogy is going on starting from Enroth, bolster setting will be MM6 (125%) / MM7 (150%) / MM8 (175%), also my first run in MM6, with a Thief/Knight/Cleric/Mage/Paladin team. So far I have arrived in the Mist and no glitches found.

So dear gentlemen and gentlewomen, I have checked about some previous discussions about cleric/mage cross-continental promotion. I wish to master both light/dark on my cleric and mage, and get GM light on cleric and GM dark on mage. Therefore my pre-designed approach is:

1. in MM6, finish all promotions: cleric -> high priest, mage -> master wizard
2. high priest and master wizard both learn master light and dark
3. team goes to MM7
[Path Dark First]
4. go dark path, master wizard -> dark archmage, and learn GM dark. High priest does nothing.
5. teleport to MM8
6. high priest -> priest of the sun, and learn GM light
[Path Light First]
4. go light path, high priest -> MM7 light priest, and learn GM light. Master Wizard does nothing.
5. teleport to MM8
6. master wizard -> lich, and learn GM dark
[Path joins]
7. finish the rest of MM7 and MM8 as normal

Is this approach doable?
I see other people mentioning that once you are converted from high priest (MM6) to MM7 / MM8 variant, you will lose the conflicting school, e.g. lich will lose light magic. Is this true?

[SpectralDragon]

Don´t worry, people, I˙m still here. I just stopped working on image assets and cluttering this thread with my own posts, so that notable bugs and glitches can be made clearer when they˙re posted in here, and to give Rodril (where are you ...?) enough time in making the next MMMerge version without swamping him in further work (there already is plenty of it when it comes to new stuff. Check Tracker´s Implementation Queue). Once time comes, I˙ll become more active and that time, sad as it might be, is not today.



Speaking of new line of work, if there would ever be any possibility to bring in a Blood Dragon, do you pals think my icon would work? Since it seems like it still has flesh and blood ... ^^; even though it´s actually inspired from Ashan˙s Spectral Dragons and Sims´s Vampire Ghosts.

[Templayer]

Don´t worry, people, I˙m still here. I just stopped working on image assets and cluttering this thread with my own posts, so that notable bugs and glitches can be made clearer when they˙re posted in here, and to give Rodril (where are you ...?) enough time in making the next MMMerge version without swamping him in further work (there already is plenty of it when it comes to new stuff. Check Tracker´s Implementation Queue). Once time comes, I˙ll become more active and that time, sad as it might be, is not today.



Speaking of new line of work, if there would ever be any possibility to bring in a Blood Dragon, do you pals think my icon would work? Since it seems like it still has flesh and blood ... ^^; even though it´s actually inspired from Ashan˙s Spectral Dragons and Sims´s Vampire Ghosts.

I actually thought that your current profile icon WAS the Blood Dragon, so yeah, works for me just fine.

[SpectralDragon]

I actually thought that your current profile icon WAS the Blood Dragon, so yeah, works for me just fine.

Shame that none of the "main cast" (Rodril, GrayFace, Jamesx) seems to be here anymore though. And yes, I mentioned Jamesx there because he's the one I trust when it comes to resizing large images and not making them looking trashy. ^^;

[Templayer]

I actually thought that your current profile icon WAS the Blood Dragon, so yeah, works for me just fine.

Shame that none of the "main cast" (Rodril, GrayFace, Jamesx) seems to be here anymore though. And yes, I mentioned Jamesx there because he's the one I trust when it comes to resizing large images and not making them looking trashy. ^^;

True. I wonder where's GrayFace. He spent so many years working on the M&M games that his disappearance is somewhat surprising.

Rodril has said that he has a lot of real life stuff to do.

And Jamesx does and goes, as he did several times.

*Starts the 3 month counter to create a Templayer fork of the Merge again*

[Macros the Black]

I was looking at those weapon lists and was wondering if you guys have thought about resizing some of the inventory sprites to make them more uniform for similar weapons. I think it could help make them feel more connected. For instance the Supreme Flail is slated to be a top tier mace but it's currently smaller than the other two flails.

Anyway, I still have yet to play this unfortunately, but it really looks amazing! Keep up the good work

[Macros the Black]

Just because of curiosity:

How can you distinguish a female and male dragon?

Hmm.. I generally imagine them as being able to switch genders - like fish. It makes sense as a useful trait in most fantasy worlds where they're depicted as going extinct. Anyway, in that case the more dominant/bigger dragon would usually become the female.

-> Rusts and Azures have the most chance in getting in as "neutral dragons", since what they only need are different voice alterations and some unique voices of their own, but like I've said before, I'll first let Rodril sort out the mess with voices and other paperdolls/characters before continuing. He's just one person after all. ^^;

Ah yes, I can already imagine it...
- Rust Dragon failing to disarm a trapped chest: "Oops! Ah, sorry, I'm a bit rusty."

[incinerated]

Hi everybody!

Is there any way to open Sandro house inside Necromancer's Guild when I've completed Eclipse quest before alliance quest? Maybe using Debug Console or something?

Thanks!

---
Spending a few hours trying random things at the console found a solution:
- when you are in the Necromancer guild open debug console and type Map.Vars[9]=0 and execute

After that Sandro house will be opened and you can complete alliance quest :-)

[raekuul]

Hm... assuming that that specific variable is only for if the throne room is locked or not, we could probably add that sort of thing to Castle Lambent on the completion of whichever quest it is that has you retrieving the Heart of the Wood, in addition to Necromancer's Guild if you're carrying the Nightshade Brazier. (obviously the former would be easier than the latter).

[Templayer]

[justl]

maybe we should wait a bit, until rodril catches up with all the errorcleaning.
we swamp the forum with new ideas/etc., which only will bloat the merge and probably make it more likely to have new errors.
justl, my2cents

[Templayer]

maybe we should wait a bit, until rodril catches up with all the errorcleaning.
we swamp the forum with new ideas/etc., which only will bloat the merge and probably make it more likely to have new errors.
justl, my2cents

We are not forcing anyone to implement them.
And at this point we should have an entire forum for the merge, where "bloating" would be a thread.
my2cents2

[Pol]

Pre-Christmas time, so much bustle.

[Templayer]

I have a bug report or something akin to it. My Merge crashes (HARD, no debug screen or anything) to desktop if I try recording it with DXTORY. Other software simply doesn't produce good enough results (like at least 30 FPS) or doesn't work either. Could there be something done to make it more compatible with it? I tried every possible option and codec I could think of with DXTORY.
How to record a 1440p resolution Merge at 30 (and more) FPS with zero quality loss? I have been trying to do that for months now, with no avail.

My specs are decent. FX 8350 CPU (4 GHz per core, one thread per core, 8 physical cores), GTX Titan X 12 GB GPU, 24 GB RAM, Operating system located on an SSD, and the drive the files are saved to is another SSD.

If my screen wasn't a DisplayPort 1.4 2K 165FPS one, I wouldn't have brought an HDMI capture card at this point, just for this game. Unfortunately it looks like decent DisplayPort capture cards do not exist, unless you are the army or somethin'.

Well, according to California, FX 8350 does not have 8 physical cores
Is OBS also not working properly for you? I was able to record 1080p 60fps "lossless" both with x264 and NVENC with no issue with similar PC. i7 4790K (4 cores, 8 threads), 32gb RAM, GTX 1070 (8gb) and all SSD. With x264 encoding I did notice CPU usage at around 50% but the quality settings were pretty maxed out and it didn't affect game or recording at all, just woke up the CPU cooler. With NVENC there was no performance issues whatsoever and something like 1440p should be just as doable.

Your one issue may be the SSD write speeds being lower than what true lossless 1440p 60fps content requires, which is something around 450MB/s. SATA 3 is also capped around 550MB/s, dunno if that's 550MB total transfer rate or if there's 550 for in and out separately, I assume it's total transfer rate so if you're reading and writing a lot on the SSD, it could also cap the SATA 3.
Just out of curiosity, why record lossless? Or did you just mean perceived lossless?

Here's the short clip I recorded with NVENC, the artifacts are from youtube encoding, the actual video files were clean.
https://youtu.be/WisOG3cu1kk

Wrong, it has 8 physical cores, but they are set into two modules per, which share some resources. No logical cores shennanigans.

It has 8 integer cores, which is why its considered an 8 core. it has 4 FPU shared between each module. 4 modules with 2 int cores and 1 FPU per module.

There is a single FPU per module but it has two independent 128-bit FMAC pipes to allow executing two instructions (one from each thread) in parallel. So arguably each module has two FPUs when running 128-bit instructions and one FPU when running AVX-256 instructions (or MMX instructions).

Also thanks for the answer, but 1440p and 1080p are surprisingly different to record. I can record 1080p just fine, even with Bandicam and MPEG1. 2560x1440p is quite a lot more pixels to record.

OBS bugs for me, hard. I had a setup that work with x264 and it worked for a time. Then suddenly I can see the game fine (Xcom 1 the firaxis remake), but the recorded video is choppy as heck (actually choppy, tried different players of course). So I switched to NVENC. Again it worked for a time, and then suddenly, without any chances, choppy videos (which shouldn't even be, given that NVENC is a completely standalone thing!). I am unable to use OBS to produce fluid videos for the Merge (tried everything, even a crapload of FFMPEG codecs with OBS, to no avail).

So far DXTORY is the only thing capable of recording 60 FPS 1440p gameplay for me, and it crashes the Merge...

Also as you have suggested, I meant perceived lossless. Even though DXTORY I am using Lagarith (a lossless encoder) to record 60 FPS 1440p, so in that case I do actually mean lossless, but I prefer perceived lossless.

Actually, I found out that a program called "Action!" works flawlessly in that regard.
I am now able to record 2k 100+FPS 60+ Mbps with it.
Just if anybody ever googles this up - After months of testing, I think I might have the cause - I have my GPU (GTX Titan X) in a PCIe 2 8x slot, while the recommended is PCIe 3 16x.
Most recording applications seem to get the frames from the GPU API (or whatever that is properly called). Both Dxtory and Action! are able to get the frames more directly by using workarounds (Dxtory states so directly while for Action! I suspect it due to the way it runs, running as a service, integrating into wdm, etc. No other recording software did that for me).
Looks like 2K is far too much data to travel through the slot (maybe even more than once at the same time, who knows, I don't), causing the things described. Or something along those lines of "there is a rather stupid bottleneck somewhere".
Kinda ridiculous.

Here's some MMMerge recorded (test) gameplay. Max FPS set as 120, effective FPS was around 45FPS, i.e. the same as if I was not recording at all (what you see in the video is how the game runs without recording, unless youtube internal converter screwed things up, I do not have experience with recording more than 60 FPS and since youtube doesn't support that yet, it has to change it, however I had enough testing for one day to check that out...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqHfPgvsHf8

[SpectralDragon]

Ok, pals, after WAAAAAAY too much time wasted on this thing (and others), I had finally completed the companion for the Black Dragon, an infamous Gold Dragon! Apologies for more stuff, Rodril and other coders, but well, that was asked to be made, so yeah, I made it. (shrug)

I´d say that this one, by now, is the closest I can get to actually making both images of new characters and having them be turned into ones that could be flawlessly implemented into the game, since I˙m managed to find a perfect background for a NPC icon as well and well, the rest is history. I only wonder what EXACTLY does it take to get new characters inside the mod like MMMerge if not the vanilla MM8 aside GrayFace´s MM8 patch and MMExtension, from what I˙ve saw (bloody lua scripting ...)

Anyways, you can get both source and partially game-completed (all are RGBs) images HERE: https://sta.sh/01tm1kswkdx3

Here´s your golden beauty for that alternative Dragon Egg quest you were mentioning doing.

[Templayer]

Ok, pals, after WAAAAAAY too much time wasted on this thing (and others), I had finally completed the companion for the Black Dragon, an infamous Gold Dragon! Apologies for more stuff, Rodril and other coders, but well, that was asked to be made, so yeah, I made it. (shrug)

I´d say that this one, by now, is the closest I can get to actually making both images of new characters and having them be turned into ones that could be flawlessly implemented into the game, since I˙m managed to find a perfect background for a NPC icon as well and well, the rest is history. I only wonder what EXACTLY does it take to get new characters inside the mod like MMMerge if not the vanilla MM8 aside GrayFace´s MM8 patch and MMExtension, from what I˙ve saw (bloody lua scripting ...)

Anyways, you can get both source and partially game-completed (all are RGBs) images HERE: https://sta.sh/01tm1kswkdx3

Beautiful!
Now if I use my voice to voice the black dragon (and apply an algorithm based on trying to simulate whatever filter was used on the current dragon voices, since those are edited by the game's devs in some manner or form), and I give you some directions (i.e. what should each sound clip be for), would you be willing to record just a few voice samples (like 5 voice clips) that I would modify ("dragonify"? ) for the Golden Dragon? It could be fun. And if the results are good (and you are probably going to say "nah, I am not good enough for that", but I have yet to hear your voice ), we could do the rest for the English version and then eventually other languages?

If you have low quality microphones, I should be able to remove noise. If there isn't too much of it. If it will be drowned in noise, then removing it will actually "malform" the voice, which won't matter that much, since we are going to apply an algorithm to it that partially reverberates the sound wave, which should mitigate the wave deformation.

What I am trying to say is .... that you are out of excuses!

[Templayer]

As for my progress on the Complex Name Generator, I made this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlxPJuzzq4Q

So basically the table structure is done, base table has been created with names from important M&M characters and Heroes characters, I can now load said table (currently hardcoded, but any table with the same structure will be loaded properly, even with new continents, races and genders) and I can filter the names based on any combination of Continent, Race or Gender. If I don't for example give the function a continent to filter, it takes all continents.

Also I would like to say that I hate javascripts and they are not something that I code in, 99,9% of time. Be warned.

What needs to be done: the actual generation of a name from a filtered template name (the process is described on the Suggestion Tracker - I can generate a sh*tton of similar sounding names from a single name by using the algorithm described, which I have coded once before in PHP), then the frontend GUI - buttons, selection boxes; and selecting a table / downloading those tables and using a custom one. Once that is done, we will have a Complex Name Generator for Might and Magic, for online and offline (downloadable) purposes. After that - porting to LUA (which might be a b*tch. Javascript has Javascript objects, Java has HashMaps, what equivalent does LUA have? I am afraid to google it... ) for in-game usage.

EDIT: Also Andrey was working on an expanded table with all the non-generated names for M&M 6-8 before he left us, GDSpectra might finish it up, I dunno. That would be the one I would love to use.

[SpectralDragon]

Beautiful!
Now if I use my voice to voice the black dragon (and apply an algorithm based on trying to simulate whatever filter was used on the current dragon voices, since those are edited by the game's devs in some manner or form), and I give you some directions (i.e. what should each sound clip be for), would you be willing to record just a few voice samples (like 5 voice clips) that I would modify ("dragonify"? ) for the Golden Dragon? It could be fun. And if the results are good (and you are probably going to say "nah, I am not good enough for that", but I have yet to hear your voice ), we could do the rest for the English version and then eventually other languages?

If you have low quality microphones, I should be able to remove noise. If there isn't too much of it. If it will be drowned in noise, then removing it will actually "malform" the voice, which won't matter that much, since we are going to apply an algorithm to it that partially reverberates the sound wave, which should mitigate the wave deformation.

What I am trying to say is .... that you are out of excuses!

That's what you think. My answer is still "no" and I have perfect valid reasons than just being trash at VA as well as having trash microphones.
1, I'm a she, thus my voice naturally doesn't suit dragons; 2, I'm currently in the active process of getting myself into a qualification school, which means there's a real possibility of having a job by the end of next year, thus even less time to be here; 3, I'm more keen in doing images anyways, not sound files; 4, there are still some characters that are missing that will be exclusive for you; 5, I don't have any idea how to speak the main localized languages here (Russian, French, Polish, Spanish), thus no possibility in doing localized voice files at all.

Sorry, but all you'll get from me are images. Nothing more, nothing less.