MM7Rev4modR1 Redone

[DaveHer]

Be aware that monsters summoning other monsters is a special feature of the original MM7Rev4mod by Big daddy Jim.

BigDaddyJim's mod never had monsters summoning other monsters aside from Archmages (summoning Light Elementals) and Necromancers (summoning ghosts). Those two monster archetypes had that ability in the vanilla MM7 game as well.

Every other monster that is able to summon in the current mod was only exclusive to Maestro's Mod.

Thanks for the info. I thought it was BigDaddyJim's.
David

[DaveHer]

This mod can also be downloaded at https://www.moddb.com/mods/mm7rev4modr1-redone
David

[plenum]

David, did you manage to disable the summoning trait from problematic creatures?

[DaveHer]

David, did you manage to disable the summoning trait from problematic creatures?

The problem is not monsters summoning other monsters. The main problem is too many monster in some of the maps. I have fixed that problem for Alvee and Barrow Downs. I am work on Land of the Giants. Too many monster creates a memory problem because of the HD graphics. Alvee, Barrow Downs, and Land of the Giants are the maps I found that crash to the desk top. The maps start out with a lot of monsters. Then you have monsters adding more monster. That's too many monsters.
David

[plenum]

there's no way to regulate how much memory is allocated for creatures graphics? I wonder if guys doing m6-m8 merge (and tackling the codebase) may have ideas how to extend that memory...

[DaveHer]

there's no way to regulate how much memory is allocated for creatures graphics? I wonder if guys doing m6-m8 merge (and tackling the codebase) may have ideas how to extend that memory...

When I said HD Graphics, I meant all graphics, graphics for building, sprites, plants, trees, and so on.These texture require a lot of memory. The original game did not have HD graphics, therefore there was no crashes. I also used a patch call 4gb_patch. This program forces 32bit programs to use 4 mega bits of memory instead of 2 mega bits. It did not work. I believe I have fixed Land Of The Giants. I need to do more testing. Grayface already knows about the problem.
David

[DaveHer]

@ all that have downloaded the game. The patch has been uploaded to both of the sites and is available now. Check the main post.

[lightbringer23]

Awesome! That fix was what I was waiting for. Downloading now, then firing 'er up.

Thinking ... Are there any decent artifact staves in Rev4 (Redone)?

I love the potential of the monk, but I remember there being a dearth of staves. Not a problem in the MM678 Merge (Staves of the Swamp and Elements from MM8 were quite nice), but what about here?

[Anubis]

no. ethric's staff was removed from the game. wizard staff w/ enchantment is the best you can do.

[lightbringer23]

Hmm .. I wonder if I did something wrong. I followed the instructions precisely, as far as I can tell. Everything seemed to install correctly.

What I'm finding is that the armor is displaced several pixels to the right of the paper dolls. I have seen this with the Plain Clothes you start with as well as the really powerful leather armor on the coast of Emerald Island. I haven't tested with chain or plate. Weapons all seem to place correctly.

What's perhaps worse, though, is that, for the dwarves, the armor appears as the unique "harness" style of equipment that Maestro used for his Drake race. Doesn't fit the dwarf at all. I recall he replaced the dwarf race with his Drake race in his mod. It's as though the icons for his mod remained here in this one.

Did anyone else experience the above?

Edit: I tried extracting items.txt and altering the Equip X and Equip Y variables for Plain Clothes, but nothing happened. I verified the capability to change by setting the AC of Plain Clothes to 56. The X and Y entries must just not do what I thought they would, or there is an override somehow. I thought I remembered us messing with this over on the Merge thread.

[DaveHer]

Hmm .. I wonder if I did something wrong. I followed the instructions precisely, as far as I can tell. Everything seemed to install correctly.

What I'm finding is that the armor is displaced several pixels to the right of the paper dolls. I have seen this with the Plain Clothes you start with as well as the really powerful leather armor on the coast of Emerald Island. I haven't tested with chain or plate. Weapons all seem to place correctly.

What's perhaps worse, though, is that, for the dwarves, the armor appears as the unique "harness" style of equipment that Maestro used for his Drake race. Doesn't fit the dwarf at all. I recall he replaced the dwarf race with his Drake race in his mod. It's as though the icons for his mod remained here in this one.

Did anyone else experience the above?

Edit: I tried extracting items.txt and altering the Equip X and Equip Y variables for Plain Clothes, but nothing happened. I verified the capability to change by setting the AC of Plain Clothes to 56. The X and Y entries must just not do what I thought they would, or there is an override somehow. I thought I remembered us messing with this over on the Merge thread.

I did not see any clothing or armor displaced. Anubis has played the game all the way though and I ask me if he saw any armor or clothing displaced. I am waiting for a response.
The armor for dwarfs, I think I know what that is. I never like the image of the playable characters, so I change them and in doing so mess up the dwarf armor. To correct that I am going to have to bring dwarf armor from the original game. That may take some time.
When you edit the items.txt did you put it back into the Events.lod file using MMAchive?
David

[lightbringer23]

Well, I don't really play dwarves either. I mainly mentioned them to help troubleshooting, in case it helped point to a root cause. Don't worry about the dwarf/drake armor on my behalf

If nobody else experienced it, I may just try a reinstall. Very odd.

I placed the items.txt file in the Datafiles folder. It's worked before, and I can currently see it working via changing an armor value. Perhaps the X/Y variables work differently? I'll try re-injecting it into the Events.lod file. I remember in the Merge, there was a ComplexItemPictures.txt file that we used to change positioning. That may be an MM8 thing, though, as I don't see any such thing here.

Edit: Looks like using the Datafiles folder as a sort of override is a feature of Greyface's patch. Re-injecting didn't work, in any case.

Your mod looks absolutely amazing, btw. It's like a whole new game.

[lightbringer23]

I tested it with plate and chain. Same offset. Going to try adding the paper doll icons from a fresh download of Maestro's mod to see what that does.
Edit: No change. I'm eager to hear what Anubis says. I used a fresh download of the 3 files from Nexus Mods, on top of a fresh Gog install. I tried removing the UI features, to see if it was a screen positioning thing, problem persists.

[DaveHer]

Well, I don't really play dwarves either. I mainly mentioned them to help troubleshooting, in case it helped point to a root cause. Don't worry about the dwarf/drake armor on my behalf

If nobody else experienced it, I may just try a reinstall. Very odd.

I placed the items.txt file in the Datafiles folder. It's worked before, and I can currently see it working via changing an armor value. Perhaps the X/Y variables work differently? I'll try re-injecting it into the Events.lod file. I remember in the Merge, there was a ComplexItemPictures.txt file that we used to change positioning. That may be an MM8 thing, though, as I don't see any such thing here.

Edit: Looks like using the Datafiles folder as a sort of override is a feature of Greyface's patch. Re-injecting didn't work, in any case.

Your mod looks absolutely amazing, btw. It's like a whole new game.

When you mentioned ComplexItemPictures.txt I remembered that the procedure for repositioning armor, hats and so on is completely different because there is no ComplexItemPictures.txt. I had to use a bitmap editor to change the back ground of these images. You add or subtract background to the top,bottom, or the sides. Depending on which direction you want to move the image.
David

[lightbringer23]

I gave that a try. I'm becoming more adept with Paint, so if it's a simple resize and fill or something, I could just do that to the hand full of armors I'll actually be using in game.

Yeah, so when I open up the bmp in Paint3d, then do anything at all to it, then save and re-inject, the blue background all the icons have suddenly shows up in game :-/

Let's say the sudden appearance of said background is fixed. The images need to move to the left, but they are flush against the left edge of the icon/canvas. There's nowhere left to move them. It's like the whole file needs to be moved to the left, not just the image within the file.

I tried resizing the canvas/background, then filling it in with the blue background, and then not filling it in, and the result was the same. Big blue box in the middle of the paper doll, with maybe a little more blue on one edge or another.

Edit: Everyone else seems to use Gimp. I wonder if Paint isn't sophisticated enough to recognize the blue background as a transparency mask and just saves it as a blue color. I'll grab Gimp and see if that makes a difference.

[Anubis]

Due to my color-blindness, it was super-hard for me to see the items on the ground when I started the game, especially weapons (e.g. the Duelist Blade of Acid on Emerald Isle). I eventually ended up going into Icons.LOD and replacing all the modified items with the vanilla images.

That said, I honestly don't remember much about Maestro's graphics -- just that the armor for the dwarf wasn't showing properly or something. Sorry

[DaveHer]

I gave that a try. I'm becoming more adept with Paint, so if it's a simple resize and fill or something, I could just do that to the hand full of armors I'll actually be using in game.

Yeah, so when I open up the bmp in Paint3d, then do anything at all to it, then save and re-inject, the blue background all the icons have suddenly shows up in game :-/

Let's say the sudden appearance of said background is fixed. The images need to move to the left, but they are flush against the left edge of the icon/canvas. There's nowhere left to move them. It's like the whole file needs to be moved to the left, not just the image within the file.

I tried resizing the canvas/background, then filling it in with the blue background, and then not filling it in, and the result was the same. Big blue box in the middle of the paper doll, with maybe a little more blue on one edge or another.

Edit: Everyone else seems to use Gimp. I wonder if Paint isn't sophisticated enough to recognize the blue background as a transparency mask and just saves it as a blue color. I'll grab Gimp and see if that makes a difference.

If you want to move the image to the left, you need to add columns of pixels (blue) on the right side and you need to be careful with palettes. I use corel draw. It will not change the palette when you bring an image into it.
David

[lightbringer23]

Hmm... Okay, so I've been playing with Gimp. There's definitely an inverse ratio between the power of software and its user/beginner-friendliness. Got it to save in a format that MMArchive would actually open (Gimp is too smart for poor 20 year old MM7 )

I tried increasing the side of the canvas. X is currently 81 pixels. I made it 91. I filled it in with the same blue sampled from the existing image. I didn't notice much of a change. On the plus side, I did manage to preserve the transparency. I'll try a more drastic move. Maybe 30 or 50 pixels instead of 10, just to see if it works.

[lightbringer23]

Yeah, no dice. Changing the canvas size (adding those columns of pixels) didn't change anything -- at least not with Gimp. Maybe you have better luck with Corel Draw?

I'm beginning wonder if it might be a flat out mismatch between Maestro's female armors and your new paper dolls. His paper dolls and yours might have different bodily dimensions.

Along that line of thought, I filled out the proportions of the basic clothes armor. It needs more work, and I need to figure out why I'm getting that horrible blue outline, but this might be the way to go. Your paper dolls are rather <ahem> well rounded in places

Here's what I've been seeing:
https://imgur.com/J6XvjRU

Here's what I did as a proof of concept (still needs more work, and removal of blue border)
https://imgur.com/P33s7Dq

[cthscr]

If you want to move the image to the left, you need to add columns of pixels (blue) on the right side

Don't you need to remove the exact amount from the left side?