Converting other 3rd Party DS1 maps to DS2

@bare_elf: If the SE2 ever will open without a complaint, you had to wonder whether or not your PC is broken now... :P
Key problems is here a bit to estimate how far such a complaint is really important and should/can be fixed.
If you miss the *.hlp file, it's (also) inside the logic.ds2res tank I think, hopefully it works with a newer Windows too.

 
However it's also possible to multiply start positions for one spot manually.

Basically the start positions are stored in /world/maps/your_map/info/start_positions.gas.
Look there for a block starting with [start_position] with id=1 (it's [start_position], not [start_positionS]). This block you can copy+paste 6 times, and increment each id then.

You can maintain the existing position for all of them, it won't look good in-game though but later you still can try to modify the coordiantes manually a bit.
Since the map is already a *.ds2res file, it should be possible to put start_positions.gas alone into a independing mod.

Hi Iryan

Think I will make a run through the original map up to this point just to refresh my memory on things.
Then I will post images of the same places.

@bare_elf: Which game version are you currently using?

However, the usage of DS2Mod and unpacking the map into a custom 'bits' folder would offer a simple way for editing files manually (and sometimes it's even faster than with the SE2) - assumed you like to do this.

For the church for example, you know the region and the node, so it shouldn't be a big problem to find and revise the corresponding actors manually in the actors.gas file of that region.

Hi Iryan,
I think the first thing to address with Loridan is the shop keepers in the first town. The second would be the lack of NPCs to Hire. One or two in the starting town should cover that need. There where really not any quests worth speaking of, in the original map, so we could make them up. Since everyone seems to have gone to the wedding in the second town. Maybe finding a wedding gift would be a good quest. Or being tasked with bringing the priest to the wedding would work too. Kind of like in Abstraction when you meet the lost little girl and you have to get her to town without her being killed, and she has no offensive skills or defensive armor. The priest could be like that. Where you had to protect him across half the map. Quests are kind of open ended.

Hi Iryan

So far I have found three save points all of which are working correctly. Currently at den Bergpass controlling Teleporter. I have encountered two Forest Klaws that where dead near the broken bridge that continue to fight. Not really an issue since you can not attack them and their magic has no impact on the party.

I have been busy fixing Legends of Aranna in the main mod but have put up a test version so I'll try to concentrate on this map for the next week. I am having motivation problems with Realms of Kings - the map design is interesting but............ it's a nightmare trying to find appropriate positions to put save points apart from the towns of course. There's generally no marked roads or routes through each region which means unless you're familiar with the map you could either stumble on the shortest and most direct route through the region, in which case you'll miss about 80% of the region, or get lost in the wilderness.

While I could easily mark a path through each region, like I did in the Great Northern Forest in the Utraean Peninsula, that would substantially change the design of the map from the original artistic design of the author. As you know we can't contact the original authors of these maps so it makes such a prospect ambiguous to implement. While the original authors probably wouldn't mind us porting these maps to DS2 as long as they remain true to the originals and due credit given to the authors, they may not like substantial changes to their original artistic design.

So I think the following is acceptable and anything not on this list isn't and won't be implemented;
- Making the map playable in DS2 or Broken World
- Using the original monster/npc placement
- Adding appropriate DS2 shopkeepers, including the new DS2 types such as necromancer and alchemist
- Adding save points

Hi Irwin,
Just on the off chance that Runiclare (Author of Realm of Kings) was still around I sent him an email. He said "I received your email about the realm of kings map and yes you got the right person and you have my full permission to modify the realm of kings map. I'd love to see yalls work soon, cheers!!"

Therefore adding NPCs to add to party, sign posts pointing the way to things not just towns, adding new vendor types, radar, random save points, changing monsters or reducing their number is also okay.

Runiclare seemed quite pleased that we were going to make the map playable in DS2.

I would think most authors would love to see their work distributed as far and wide as possible and most DS1 map authors are probably unaware that DS1 Maps can be made playable in DS2. All credit to the map are naturally still theirs with additional notes on who did the conversions, testing, etc, as per the official maps.

@ iryan
Started looking around Training the Hero again because of the 29a updates to the Legendary Mod just to make sure nothing much had changed.

I believe the cows where okay before the 29a update

I am not sure because I have recently played both the DS1 and DS2 versions but I think the old man was there last time in the ds2 map

I wonder if you needed to have all the jewels to get the teleport to work? I guess it was possible, but I always sold the gems for the money and because I hated a cluttered inventory. Yeah, now we have the DS2 storage locker to put important item in.

There are a lot of things not working correctly in the Town of Mounine and I will cover them in another post tomorrow, after I go back and take a few screen shots.

Here are some things that need fixing too.

This door not opening is a game stopper -- I will look at the ds1 version on Thursday 7/10/2014 right now I must prepare dinner for the old folks.

I got tired of working on Training of the Hero so using Siege Editor 2 and following the tutorial about same. I created a radar image for each section of the training of the hero and then stitched them together and saved the file as a ds2mod. The radar appeared to work, however when I converted from the Training of the hero. ds2mod to ds2res the radar stopped working. I next tried adding the folder radar from the bits directory to the existing map. Still no radar. I will keep trying and with luck I will get there. Now I just saved it as a ds2map file and turned off the ds2res of the same name and the radar works just great. Iryan or KillerGremal why is this true?

Now on to Mounine and all the stuck doors. If I recall correctly, Psycogun2003 had trouble setting the trigger point for doors (or whatever you call them) so you had to try over and over to get some doors to open, you could if you kept trying in ds1 but not in ds2

Training the hero

The flames in the fireplace are fun to watch as they go down not up( yes I am easily amused)

I also stopped to stare at the guy sitting in mid-air

I thought going back to DS1 and looking at "Training of the Hero" To get the quests and their locations correct might be a good Idea.
All these shots where taken in the Town of Frontenac. You can not miss the town as you must pass through it to get anywhere else.

However when I tried loading the map in vanilla DS2 it crashed! So I wonder if you have tried Training of the Hero in regular DS2?

Another oddity was that the map name changed. Instead of Dungeon Siege I: Legends of Aranna it was plain old Legends of Aranna.

I also noticed from your first image containing the radar that it was a black background with the corresponding dots representing actors, objects and radar icons spread about. It should be textured similar to the terrain you're on. This is similar to what occurs in LOA in the caves near the end - there must be some sort of connection with how the radar is generated for these regions.

@bare_elf: I have not much experience with *.ds2mod files. It would be another resource folder to 'manage' with an additional mod-priority dimension to think about.

@iryan: I was able to access the 'Training of the Hero' map with DS2Mod without anything extraordinary in the log files. So I guess it should work with v2.2 as well, but it's critical tricky to generalize this...

I made it to the town of Mounine after picking up Karma the first NPC and then in Mounine I picked up a dwarf to add to my party, completed the quest to seek the oracle and clear the mountain pass. The oracle asked us to subdue the dragons and save the fort, oh goody another quest. off to hunt dragons and post useful screen shots

I unexpectedly found that there appears a limitation of how many maps can be displayed in the DS2 map selection menu screen. It seems to be set at 9. Broken World can display at least 11 maps including the official ones.

I was testing some of the Legendary Maps together with the alpha third party maps in DS2 when I discovered this as Dungeon Siege 2 wasn't been displayed (as it's the last on the list).

Another issue is how many alphabetical characters can be displayed across each line on the map selection screen in DS2 v2.2. In Broken World something like Dungeon Siege 1: Legends of Aranna is easily displayed but in DS2 v2.2 it occupies 2 lines. Thinking that this may explain the map limitation issue in the menu screen, I renamed the maps to something like DS1: Legends of Aranna so that the names now occupy only 1 line in the selection list. Unfortunately the limitation of 9 maps was still present.

There's also the minor annoyance that the info panel doesn't work either with these maps. Possibly due to the edits made to them in order for them to work in singleplayer mode with a new level 0 character in DS2 v2.2?
EDIT: I tried removing all of the DS1 Mod Maps from the resources folder and just used Dark_Elf's maps downloaded from here, which goes into the maps folder. Same result. I do apologise if this has already been reported before but there is no search functionality in these forums so it's impossible to know. I do think it would be difficult to have tested the map number limitation before as there's never been that many third party maps made for DS2. So another bug in DS2.

Any ideas on any of this? Would it be possible or feasible to mod the Map Selection Menu panel to display more maps? Or would it be hard coded like for instant the number of party members that can be stored in the Inn?

I will still keep the shortened map names as they look better in DS2 rather than taking up two lines.

The maps load in Broken World when setup like this but crash in DS2 v2.2.

At present I have 23 maps including the original DS2 and Broken World installed and broken world displays all of them correctly. Some are in the DS2 resources folder, some are in the DS2 maps folder and there are a few in the DS2BW maps folder. I have every map installed that can be found here related to DS2 or Broken world. I will have to seek maps on some other sites that are not duplicates.

I will attempt to find my ds2 disks so I can check that too.

not sure if editing the ui for the map chooser and making the rect height/width would help display more or not, with the newer widescreen monitors seems like the older dimensions are kinda small for today, also could change the font to a 12p to get long titles in but then the map name may be hard for the eyes since the font would be smaller
here is the default ds2 Bits\ui\interfaces\frontend\map_chooser\map_chooser.gas

[t:interface,n:map_chooser]
{
modal=true;
skrit = [[

SelectDifficulty$()
{
UIFrontend.PlayFrontendSound( "frontend_next_button" );
UIFrontend.TransitionFromMapSelect();
UIFrontend.TransitionToLoadGame( true );
}
]];
[t:button,n:button_back]
{
i draw_order = 27;
help_text = "Back to Character Select";
rect = 13,536,176,600;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
texture = b_gui_fe_mn_back-up;
uvcoords = 0.359375,0.000000,1.000000,1.000000;
[messages]
{
onbuttonpress = call(SelectSinglePlayer$());
onlbuttondown = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_back-down);
onlbuttonup = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_back-up);
onrolloff = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_back-up);
onrollover = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_back-over);
}
[t:text,n:text_back]
{
i draw_order = 31;
font_type = b_gui_fnt_22p_ringbearer-gold;
justify = center;
i parent_offset = 16;
rect = 30,547,131,590;
b allow_parent_centering = false;
text = "Back";
uvcoords = 0.000000,0.000000,0.074774,1.000000;
}
}
[t:button,n:button_next]
{
i draw_order = 28;
help_text = "Continue with the selected map";
rect = 625,536,787,600;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
texture = b_gui_fe_mn_next-up;
uvcoords = 0.000000,0.000000,0.632813,1.000000;
[messages]
{
onbuttonpress = call(SelectDifficulty$()) & notify(map_button_ok);
onlbuttondown = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_next-down);
onlbuttonup = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_next-up);
onrolloff = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_next-up);
onrollover = loadtexture(b_gui_fe_mn_next-over);
}
[t:text,n:text_next]
{
i draw_order = 32;
font_type = b_gui_fnt_22p_ringbearer-gold;
justify = center;
i parent_offset = 16;
b allow_parent_centering = false;
rect = 676,548,777,591;
text = "Next";
}
}
[t:listbox,n:listbox_maps]
{
i active_color = 1426128895;
b common_control = true;
common_template = listbox_mp-chatbox;
consumable = true;
i draw_order = 24;
font_type = b_gui_fnt_16p_ringbearer-gold;
i invalid_color = 1442775040;
i left_indent = 0;
b permanent_focus = false;
rect = 274,179,528,347;
b rollover_select = false;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
i selection_color = 2147483647;
x text_color = 0xFFFFFFFF;
b tool_tip_on_select = false;
b consume_dblclick = true;
[messages]
{
onldoubleclick = call(SelectDifficulty$());
//onselect = notify(select_map) & playsound(s_ui_ig_list_selection);
}
}
[t:text_box,n:map_description]
{
b center_height = true;
i draw_order = 23;
b fixed_location = true;
font_type = b_gui_fnt_16p_ringbearer-gold;
justify = center;
i max_height = 58;
i max_width = 254;
rect = 285,384,522,458;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
uvcoords = 0.000000,-0.450000,1.170507,1.000000;
}
[t:text,n:text_load_map]
{
i draw_order = 38;
font_type = b_gui_fnt_32p_ringbearer-gold;
justify = center;
rect = 264,138,544,165;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
text = "Select Map";
}
[t:text,n:text_map_info]
{
i draw_order = 202;
font_type = b_gui_fnt_22p_ringbearer-gold;
justify = center;
rect = 278,356,528,376;
text = "Map Info";
}
[t:window,n:window_info_left]
{
i draw_order = 60;
rect = 216,551,280,615;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
texture = b_gui_fe_mn_info-left;
}
[t:window,n:window_info_middle]
{
i draw_order = 200;
rect = 280,551,524,615;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
texture = b_gui_fe_mn_info-mid;
uvcoords = 0.000000,0.000000,3.812500,1.000000;
wrap_mode = tiled;
}
[t:window,n:window_info_right]
{
i draw_order = 200;
rect = 524,551,588,615;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
texture = b_gui_fe_mn_info-right;
}
[t:window,n:window_maps_bg]
{
i draw_order = 21;
rect = 147,88,659,600;
f rotate_point_x = 0.500000;
f rotate_point_y = 0.500000;
texture = b_gui_fe_mn_loadmap;
}
}


The important thing to see here is the listbox.
You could also modify the base template of the listbox, which is "listbox_mp-chatbox".

Here is the template,

[t:listbox,n:listbox_mp-chatbox]
{		
	element_type		= text;
	font_type			= b_gui_fnt_12p_ringbearer-gold;
	gi_background		= ui_c_dialog_mp-chatwindow;
	item_rect_deflate_x = 5;
	item_rect_deflate_y = 10;

	[t:selection_box,n:selection_box] 
	{
		alpha = 0.75;
		texture = ui_c_selection;
	}

	[messages] 
	{
		oncreated = setelementheight(16);			
	}	

	[t:slider,n:slider]
	{
		b common_control = true;
		common_template = slider_mp;

		right_fixed		= true;
		rect			= -16,16,0,-16;
	}	
}

But there isn't any difference between the listbox used in DS2 and the one in BW despite the background texture used.
This is really strange that it's working properly for bare_elf.
@Iryan and bare_elf : What is your screen resolution ?

Search for the Past Notes

Start point for character 1, any others currently get scattered, but NOT randomly

The racks need to do item drops.

She gives you what should be a quest, and unless you head right to her she gets knocked unconscious. Maybe made recruit-able?

The deeper water covers labels making drops hard to find

Quest completion point, maybe recruit-able?

The table should have some item to further the main quest, map, mysterious note, lorebook or the like.

Merchant needs activating, one of the Undertakers could be something else, maybe an innkeeper type, the other activated.

The waterfall needs cleaned up, also a good possible location for a teleporter/save/start point.

The map areas of the Mines need to be joined better, also several of the Giant Scorpions are level 0 summoned :silly:

Pet seller maybe?

Darklings in grassland?!?, Rune Fiends/Casters or the Flightless Bird types would be a better fit.

True Gom Here
:jawdrop: :wacko:

There really needs to be some reason for a Major Boss at this location, maybe needing a quest completion and/or find a key to open the door.

The traveling merchant needs to be activated.

There are a LOT of monsters but very few re-spawn. A better balance of monsters with some lore items to flesh out the plot would work well, I think( I know, thinking for me is dangerous :silly: :goofy: )

the screen resolution used to run the game is irrelevant when at the menu screens. the resolution when at the menu screens is always fixed at 800x600 for ds2 and 1024x768 for bw.

@ HardLes

My system's screen resolution is 1600 x 900. I have updated the system detail gas file to support the Nvidia GeForce GT520. However in the games themselves DS1, LoA, DS2 and BW I have the screen resolution set to 1024 x 768. For two reasons the first it makes it easier to edit screen shots and when testing I want to make sure problems I encounter are not being caused by a custom screen resolution. Which has happened to me in the past.

Now a way we could test this would be to create say 30 DS2MAP files not playable but that contain the title such as they would be displayed would let us know what the upper limit is.

It seems that the last few quests are interwoven. After speaking to the oracle she sends you to the fort to save it from the dragons. Make Sure as your heading to the fort you do not take the side path to the main dragon. After saving the fort and hiring the wizard there and polking about in the basement talk to the dwarf in the middle of the fort again. He will give you the quest to kill the boss dragon. Do that now. Go back to the oracle in Mounine and talk to her. She will thank you for snuffing the dragons. She has more quests. First you need to go under the house through the basement door that would not open before. Here you meet and defeat the town's previous hero. He gets to rest and you have to go on. The oracle will next send you back to the pyramid by the Oasis remember the door that could not be opened in the pyramid in a previous post of mine. you now have the tools and skills to open it. There is also a side quest in Mounine where some person asks you to find her brother in an ice cave. look at the cliff walls about mounine and you will find him. He can be hired but why, he has no skills and no weapons and this late in the game?

As LadyFemme said resolution doesn't have any impacts in the menu because it's hardcoded to 1024x768 unless you have a resolution like 800x600.

The problem that Iryan have is really strange. I could try to make a bigger listbox but I don't really know if that could help.

Looking at DS2 (after finding the CD so I could start the game) It appears that the maximum number of maps that Dungeon Siege 2 version 2.2 can display is 16 so long as the title of the map takes only one line. If Any map has a title that is two lines long it reduces the number of maps by 1. Therefore if you have eight maps each with a title of two lines long you will only be able to display 8 maps. There must be something in the code that creates the screen that allows you to change the number of lines available for display. I can display in DS2BW a total of 33 maps, it could be more but I could only find 33 ds2 maps on the web.