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Dungeon Siege 1.25 Mod AKA Quarter Mod

What is the Quarter Mod?

To simplify the Quarter Mod would be a mod that'd add some functionality and features that Dungeon Siege II introduced - such as the character ring that shows your current state, or the color changing name over your head - into Dungeon Siege 1.

To the best of my understandings, it'd be relatively easy, but I could use some help and suggestions. All you have to do is point me towards the right files and lines of code so that I can replace/change/add them accordingly to overall improve Dungeon Siege 1.

Things I'd Like to Do:

1. Add the "Health Ring"
2. Add the "Health Name" (When your name changes color as you get damaged)
3. Add the enemy highlighting (maybe?)

blogs: 

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So, I know there's a lot of things different about it, but I mean like, why can DS2 use DDS texture files, and DS1 can't? Are DDS textures more compressed in space it takes? Whatever is different, I'd love a way to fix this so DS1, in theory, takes up less space and is somewhat easier to modify.

HardLess's picture

This is quite an interesting project, I would be glad to see how far you can go.
Do you wish to add only cosmetics features ? Or do you want to go further ?

1. Just add a decal at the feet of the characters with a permanent effect.
3. Must be a shadder effect in DS2 but you must be able to make more or less the same effect with the effect engine of the game.

HardLess's picture

DDS texture compression technic was added to directx in 2000 and the game was already in dev for 2 years when directx 7 was released. GPG did not have the time to add it to their engine being already late because of the move from opengl to direct3D.

There must be a way to add DDS to ds1 but that must be quite a hard work. But if you still want to look at it. You can try to reverse engineer the game hook the functions about texture parsing and add DDS compatibility.

Honestly, I have no idea how I'd do any of those. My knowledge in coding is very simple. Most of the stuff I can figure out is through the gas files explaining it or that's obvious for a regular gamer.

Anyway, I sort of want to do mostly cosmetic things, so as to keep Dungeon Siege's gameplay. I would like to port the animations, but I tried this once, but apparently not having the same skeleton or mesh, it didn't really do anything except freeze your character's animation. I could see someone changing the animations to fit on DS1's model, but that's another thing I don't know how to do.

Also, I contacted someone who reverse engineered Dungeon Siege's engine, and they said in order to update the version of DirectX it uses will have to be done in binary through the exe. Hopefully he can someday do it, but we'll have to wait.

HardLess's picture

I never played around with DS1 effects engine. But to point​ you in the right direction I recommend you to read the effect file of every spell which use a decal on the ground. Those spells like meteor for example draw over the ground when a meteor fall.

You want to do the same, but draw it at the feet of your character. Tweek around to find out. DS1 had an effect viewer in my memory is right. Quite useful.

imagine the changes u want to make are in UI/Interfaces...but ds is a picky beast!

1. Make the overmap work more like it does in DS2 - holding tab displays it and it's overlayed over the game, not the entire screen.
2. Fully working 1280x1024x32 resolution
3. Minor changes to the default controls, such as how Y displays character labels and U displays health and mana.
4. Fully functional windowed mode.

Stretch Goals / Ideas:

1. Better looking water
2. DS1 natively running on a more up-to-date version of DirectX
3. A UI that scales to the resolution
4. More permanent foliage
5. The ability to show foliage on the overmap
6. A journal to read every discovered book on one character.
7. More resolutions!
8. Less jagged and glitchy shadows.
9. Changing the game to work with DDS textures.

Also, Dungeon Siege Quarter Mod is now available on Nexusmods!

http://www.nexusmods.com/dungeonsiege1/mods/33/?

Eksevis wrote:
. . .
8. Less jagged and glitchy shadows.
. . .
Have you already ensured that 256bit textures are used for shadows?

See the corresponding shadow option in system_detail.gas file.
...and I guess/hope even many aged PCs can stand this extra afford easily.

As far as I can tell, the DS2 version already sets the max to 256 bit shadow textures, and therefore so does Quarter Mod's.

Do I just need to add more modern GPUs to the list?