Dungeon Siege Adepts 2 for Broken World

I currently have Logic 1e and resources 1d installed and things seem to be working fine so far. All the side quests are working. Deru, Taar and I are off to Kill the Hak'u beast, find the Wolf and leave the Island. We should reach Vix and move on sometime tomorrow. Then hunt the beasts in Windstone Fortress. We where there before but I decided to start a new game to verify the problems with Vix where just in my mind [saved game] Part of the time today I spent untanking and then reading the new logic file to see what had changed and what had not. Can not help myself have to poke and prod and look.
Made one or two small edits just for myself. I like the new test map that has the new weapons and armor. Had to tie my hands to prevent myself from picking up some cool items without finding them in game. Once I reach Windstone again I will start making a few screen shots. Iryan the edits you did to some of my weapons are really not that bad. Thanks for leaving the range enhancements on the bows alone.

Yes the animations are badly out of sync, not sure what I can do to fix them. The girls' animations are even more restricted than the boy's as the boys can use farmboy's animation. The girls can't sweep with brooms, hammer nails, etc and can't even sleep in a hammock without falling out (you'll see that in the dryad hospital - I couldn't get them to stay in the hammocks even if I moved them in the editor and placed them standing on them).

Any ideas on the animations and what could be done about them would be appreciated.

Spells are different and that's why those 3 uber haku are there- to beat on and test them. Still nothing beats testing them out in the field and I've already found and fix a few problems with some of the spells.

I made it almost to the front door of Windstone Fortress before the real world got in the way. Did not see any obvious problems. Taar remembered to bring her camera so here are a few screen shots.

I had forgotten that to much Vix can make your nose run.

Finished testing up to Amanulu and everything seems in order in the elf-town. Surprisingly (or not) the Giant Trilisk did autolevel up with some unusual results. Vitalus and Brune had about 2500 more hitpoints at level 22 than they are suppose to have at level 19. However Malac had 9704 hp when he's suppose to have only 1000. Didn't matter one bit as all the heads went down easily enough though the mages were in constant danger of getting wiped out.

So the Monster_Level_Adjust mod is working great up to the end of Act 1 with DS2 Adepts.

I've also made some Cat Mansion Giants and Dwarves. Still tinkering with the dwarves but I think the Half-Giants come out quite nicely. And to answer bare_elf's question, yes they are the same size as regular Half-Giants.

Unfortunately if anyone already has a half-giant in their party when the next alpha is released then he will probably be messed up. However new recruits will work properly.

I made it to Amanlu without any major issues. All quests primary and secondary for act 1 completed well except for the one that takes all game to finish. All characters seem to be working correctly. Got sidetracked in finding all the secondary quests in Amanlu, then drank to much summer wine and spent the remainder of the day in the Amanlu Arena. Will journey on tomorrow.

So the gang is off to find Princess Eva, after picking up some extra help. A few of the cat mansion summons, a Gunner, a school girl, a beach girl, a monk. The green aura kind of hides the summoned character, but at least you know they where cast by a spell. So this means that if you have a party of six and each has a summoned cat mansion character you really have a party of 12, unless you are using an unlimited summons which I do not recommend as there are so many good guys you can not find the bad.

if ya want the green color removed or changed color I can do it.

It is really kind of funny that DS2 Cat Mansion Characters have an aversion to beds, chairs and other things one might sit on, when their DS1 Counterparts went out of their way to sit on things and swing their legs in the air. I wonder if there is a missing mesh or animation in the ds2 characters? In any case it is quite funny that Lord Kalrathia is stuck waist deep in his chair, there have be others but not really as funny. Oh by the way Iryan making Lord Kalrathia a cat mansion kid did not break anything beyond the cat mansion chair/bed issue. Can not remember but are any of the primary quests needing a half giant? If not I will play on if so I will wait in Kalrathia for the next release/

It is odd that normal DS2 characters can sit in a chair or sleep in a bed or hammock and the cat mansion characters can not do it correctly. I thought real hard last night trying to remember which DS1 maps had a lot of chairs and benches to sit on. Then sometime in the Elddim of the night it struck me.
Dark Tide Rising. In this map any type of character can sit in a chair or sleep in an empty bed.

Now I wonder why this works. A character mesh missing from DS2 Cat Mansion? A difference in the mesh for the bench, chair or bed. They appear to be blocking objects in both DS1 and DS2. I will try to figure out what is different. Iryan I wonder if making a quick conversion of the map to DS2 would provide a clue as what to do? If you do not have a copy of the map let me know as I do.

Making a test map for trying these things out isn't difficult. In fact if you look at the alpha test character maps you'll see all the npcs in their various poses. For instance the sitting npcs are still sitting but in empty air. It would be a simple matter of just placing various chairs and objects underneath them to see what works and what doesn't. The same for the lying or sleeping characters.

here is summon test alpha build 0.1 I change the color in the summon flick of nature summons, not sure how much it will change the color, I need a tester as I have no summons currently

http://www.siegetheday.org/?q=node/2561

Thanks DE I will give it a look tomorrow

Umm it does seem to work but on combat summons, nature summons showed no change.

It also doesn't change the color at all, just the intensity of the light so the maximum pulse is nearer to the previous minimum. An improvement but lets see what bare_elf thinks.

hi iryan,
had a few days downtime cause I am currently on dialup and took me a while to find a modem that has win7 64 bit drivers.
I didn't change combat summons yet, just nature light, currently playing combat mage (level 6) so will be able to test combat eventually, just got deru as 3rd party member so I can level her nature to eventually test nature summon, I am slow cause I explore all area of map, and I have forgot map since have not played game in long time.

I have seen the mentioned anim issues with the sleeping on tents in affirmary, also tanzai fight with hak'u she didn't fall down but these are known issues, imagine can be fixed by using the ds2 versions of the sleep anim in the body but not sure.

However nothing I tried did any good. Placing the characters high in the air still saw them under the cots, even worst than the current situation. Changing the bounding volumes and path-finding of the beds also caused strange behaviour.

So I'll have to try testing Dark Tide Rising and see if I can get a clue there about the sleeping in hammocks issue.

EDIT: The problem is due to the cat mansion characters (at least the girls) not supporting the a_c_gah_fg_fs0_whf-03 animation which the sleeping DS2 characters in the cots use (I instead substituted it with the sleeping animation which is completely different). I presume the a_c_gah_fg_fs0_whf-03 animation is an injured character lying down floating in the air. So I don't know if it can be fixed. I certainly don't have the knowledge or expertise to fix it. If nobody else can fix it before the mod enters Beta then I'll probably substitute the hammocks for straw beds as used in the captured fort in Ehb and for Ulora's bed in the crypts.

The scripted NIS sequences are controlled through flick and I imagine the flicks are calling for animations that simply aren't supported by the cat mansion models. That's why the celia introduction is so messed up and why the Tanzai fight goes like that. To fix all of that the flicks will have to be changed.

I've found a little quirk when recruiting Deru after starting a new game with the monster_level_adjust_mod activated. Her level remained at level 3 when recruited by a level 7 hero. No big deal that early in the game but still I would have expected her to be level 6 or 5. Note that there's no flick support in the DS2 adepts mod due to compatibility reasons if players choose not to use the monster_level_adjust_mod.

Talking about compatibility DS2 adepts should be quite compatible with Aranna Legacy except for the npc templates. Not sure how the mods will work together with that conflict but if DS2 Adepts has the higher priority then things should work reasonable well (and I can work further compatibility into the npc templates) but if Aranna Legacy has the higher priority then DS2 Adepts will be quite broken.

Will find out when I get a chance to try them together.

Dark_Elf and Iryan

I looked at the summon test, the summoned characters I have spells for look better as the aura is toned down a bit. However after reading your post Iryan I decided to go to the test map and pick up all of the cat mansion summon spells and have a look at them. I did this with a new character since the adepts items test map does not like a party of 6. I got the spells, saved the game. Next I went to Sharkhull's My test world so that I could quickly build up the character in combat and nature magic by fighting the harpy. I grabbed some of the free money so that I could pick up a few things at the traveling salesman and I got this error when I clicked on the primary salesman.
A Fatal Error has occured and the app must shut down -- Content Error -- Template:base_gloves_cm_cmage does not have a valid aspect model. If this is a piece of armor its defend block may be set up wrong.

Now I thought this was odd because the only change I made was adding the summontest. So I removed the summon test and the error was still there so I disabled the items test map. The error was still there.
So I looked for the offending template in the latest adepts logic. There is no base_gloves_cm_cmage anywhere in DS2BW_Adepts_Logic_Alpha_1e.ds2res. I have not added or changed any other mod because I have been testing Adepts. So I am not sure what is going on. So I loaded up my test party and went to the map and things are fine. My test party was started with DS2BW_Adepts_Logic_Alpha_1d.ds2res but that should not allow them to work and a new character not.

The is lost

UPDATE

After some additional testing I have discovered the error has nothing to do with the revision of Adepts as it appears in 1c, 1d and 1e. It is not being caused by any mod external to adepts as I turned off all the other maps and mods. It happens on any map DS2 or the converted maps. Could not test broken world because I do not have a cat mansion party that can go there yet. Now here is the odd part. It happens only when the cat mansion character is new with combat, nature, melee and ranged at skill level 0 (zero). As soon as any skill is above 1 the problem does not exist. Now this error does not occur with DDilulu's cat mansion girls or boys when adepts is not installed nor does it occur when all cat mansion mods by AlphaDD/Ddilulu or Iryan's Adepts are not installed (regular DS2). So the problem is this.

Adepts enabled and no other cat mansion mods installed.
Enter any DS2 Map or Converted DS1 map with a new cat mansion character of any race or sex.
Now without fighting any thing go to the first vendor and attempt to purchase anything and you
get the message A Fatal Error has occured and the app must shut down -- Content Error -- Template:base_gloves_cm_cmage does not have a valid aspect model. If this is a piece of armor its defend block may be set up wrong. However if you fight any thing as any class (melee, ranged, cmage or nmage) and raise your level above 0 then return to the vendor all is good. no error
Weird is it not.
Now if this only occurs with my game then I will just remember to kill a few things before going shopping. Like road rage on the way to the mall :). But if any of you other testers see this what is causing this?

Sorry my fault, there was an error in this file; http://www.siegetheday.org/~iryan/files/adepts_amr_bases.gas

Please download it (save target as) and ensure that it ends with gas instead of txt, and replace the existing one found in the interactive folder. The nature mages, gloves were also broken. Siege Editor helped me find them.

sounds like there is some kind of divide by zero error on a piece of equipment that is designed to scale according to level. once the skill level is no longer zero the error disappears. :?

I also could not see any difference in the file I just downloaded and the one in Logic 1e when I looked at it with my file compare program. I must be missing something so simple that I can not see it. You know like not being able to see the forest because of the trees.

I have look at the gas and the name template is written with an upper case for the T in 3 places: ranger, nmage, cmage, base glove.

Iryan must have post the wrong gas. That's happen you know.

As for the animations i have make some but they are not all in the heroes's template. The hammer is there(2 animations plus the one for making the armor in the FLICK). The catboy should have all the animations but you must rewrite them in the template because at first i was using dungeon siege 1 animations before switching for the hack(scaling up the model). So a simple copy paste should do it for the boy but not the girl.

You know for the girl i remember a tutorial from Xaa where he took a sim mesh and merge it with farmgirl's skeleton. If we can do the same for catgirl all the animations will work. I have never done it but it's doable. The new model will be good for a NPC not a player but it should be perfect for Adepts.

AlphaDD

Iryan Hi,
Now here is a weird one concerning the base gloves. If the character is level 4 in any one class or combination the problem does not occur, it occurs when the character is less than level 4. Weird is it not.
I think that AlphaDD may be correct in that the wrong file was sent because I ran a compare program on the Base Armor Gas file from Alpha-1d and the one I downloaded today and they where exactly the same. I have a few ideas I am going to try based on the base armor located on the DS2 base_armor gas file.

played some more today, made southern greilen, cath valley is next, got taar in party now, am very happy, got the cat mansion maid summon now and a sangor, the sangor tends to stand in place a lot, so as a part time modder, I spent some time modding it to see if there is a way to fix it, and ended up making 2 new gorillas, a white one and a black one which I will test tomorrow, I have some screen shots of some things that may need fix, but being on dialup I will have to wait another day to post em, as pics take forever to upload now. anyways think this is longest I have played ds2 in a year or 2 so its starting to come back the desire to play that is....

It's great that you're enjoying playing DS2 again.

The issue with the evoked summons plagued me a bit but I finally fixed it by simply referring jat_brain in the mind template to brain_monster rather than brain_hero (except for the vulk which takes a long time to wake up). I also have guard_caster = false; in the summon block of the spell as we don't want them guarding the caster at all. For the regular cat mansion summons I also reduced the cast range down to 4 from 10 as when testing they sometimes got stuck running on the spot.

I've currently got 26 cat mansion summons and 34 evocations but the gorgak isn't one of those so good work. Some of the DS1 monsters that are available as art packs (drake, gargoyle, kell, skeleton, raks and rock beast) have been included as well as some third party monsters such as the serpent and hydra.

The only thing I'm not sure how strong to make these evocations, how much mana should casting them take or how long their summons should last. The idea is that they should function a bit like some of the Final Fantasy summons which are more like powerful spells rather than regular summons. Maybe they need a special summoning aura of their own to signify that they're different to normal summons and/or make them translucent, etc. Any ideas on this front extremely welcomed.

Good Pickup - I never notice the capital T in those three templates. There's a simple explanation however, as all I did was copy all the original templates and renamed them so that the cat mansion equipment will be about 10% better than the regular DS2 equipment. The explanation is that this quirk exists in the original DS2 and Broken World armor_bases.gas as well. So it would seem that the game engine treats a capital T as a lower case t.

That said it is strange that the error bare_elf encountered was with a template beginning with a capital T. It seems that the engine was expecting a leaf template and not a base one as it was complaining about a missing model. For armor and weapon leaf templates that lack a pcontent block the game engine creates them as a level 0 item. You can see this in the special adept test map that has weapons and armor in it (that's why it's pointless picking up any of those items to use in a regular game).

I possibly haven't encountered this bug because I've been testing DS2 Adepts with the monster_level_adjust mod activated.

It would be good if bare_elf could rename those templates to lower case t to see if that makes a difference (never know stranger things have happen). Otherwise I'll simply remove the offending templates and change the inheriting templates to inherit from the base_gloves_cmage template instead.

The file I gave a link to is definitely the updated one. All I did in it was rename base_gloves_nmage to base_gloves_cm_nmage and base_helms_cmage to base_helms_cm_cmage as they should have been. It obvious now that it couldn't fix the error as the problem was base_gloves_cm_cmage but at least it means a number of broken templates now work.

As I noted in my previous post I saw the upper case T on the templates I was having problems with so changed them prior to reading AlphaDD's post. So that is not the reason for the problem. I wonder why they work in the basic DS2 but not in Adepts? seems strange since it is a simple template and there is only a name change. I tried putting the defense block back to the way it was in the regular DS templates with no luck what so ever. Seems that the error message was not really telling the truth. You said you where testing using DS2 Iryan, I am using broken world start. could that be the issue?
Should I move the adepts to the DS2 resources folder and see what occurs when I start a game from DS2?