Help with Editing Combat Art Tooltips

[SwiftManslayer 3]

Greetings,

I've recently decided to pick up my childhood love again, Sacred 2, for some singleplayer fun. I thought I'd play an Inquisitor, since I've never really spent much time on him before. I'd also like to customise the game to my liking, so I decided to make a little personal mod to revamp some of his combat arts. Now, I must give extensive thanks to all the contributors on the Dark Matter modding forums, the insights I have discovered here allowed me to learn very quickly how to get my mod working. Thank you so much. I was particularly inspired by the work of Flix on his enhanced edition and enhanced spells mods.

I've successfully managed to alter several of inquisitor combat arts effects and graphics/animations, for example, I'm changing Nefarious Netherworld to be more oriented towards ice damage and debuffs, including a frost ray attack using the same graphic as High Elf Frost Flare, and as such I've moved Inexorable Subjugation over to Astute Supremacy, making that aspect focus on magic damage. I've also succesfully decoded global.res and can see easily enough which text to modify to affect the combat art names and description. My issue is with the values the tooltip displays, like the combat art damage and regen time, minion lifetime on inexorable subjugation, etc. These values update with your characters statistics and I'm not really sure how to make a combat art display different ones. The damage and regen time are present most of the time when they are required, so that is fine. But I dont know how to indroduce new elements, such as 'minion lifetime' on the old raving thrust which has been converted to inexorable subjugation. global.res only gives me a hash ID and a text string, nothing really to indicate which combat art I am attaching text to. From what I understand about the game and my reading on this forum it might be that these values are controlled not by the global.res, but rather by one of the .dll files or the .exe, which would make editing them a real pain. So my question is essentially, has anyone had success with this part of the CA tooltip? Or should I resignedly be content with adding some text in the description part of the tooltip, giving a value + increase per level, instead of the sleeker alternative of having it update its total value itself.

[gogoblender 3,069]

On 6/10/2020 at 2:30 AM, SwiftManslayer said:

Greetings,

I've recently decided to pick up my childhood love again, Sacred 2, for some singleplayer fun. I thought I'd play an Inquisitor, since I've never really spent much time on him before. I'd also like to customise the game to my liking, so I decided to make a little personal mod to revamp some of his combat arts. Now, I must give extensive thanks to all the contributors on the Dark Matter modding forums, the insights I have discovered here allowed me to learn very quickly how to get my mod working. Thank you so much. I was particularly inspired by the work of Flix on his enhanced edition and enhanced spells mods.

I've successfully managed to alter several of inquisitor combat arts effects and graphics/animations, for example, I'm changing Nefarious Netherworld to be more oriented towards ice damage and debuffs, including a frost ray attack using the same graphic as High Elf Frost Flare, and as such I've moved Inexorable Subjugation over to Astute Supremacy, making that aspect focus on magic damage. I've also succesfully decoded global.res and can see easily enough which text to modify to affect the combat art names and description. My issue is with the values the tooltip displays, like the combat art damage and regen time, minion lifetime on inexorable subjugation, etc. These values update with your characters statistics and I'm not really sure how to make a combat art display different ones. The damage and regen time are present most of the time when they are required, so that is fine. But I dont know how to indroduce new elements, such as 'minion lifetime' on the old raving thrust which has been converted to inexorable subjugation. global.res only gives me a hash ID and a text string, nothing really to indicate which combat art I am attaching text to. From what I understand about the game and my reading on this forum it might be that these values are controlled not by the global.res, but rather by one of the .dll files or the .exe, which would make editing them a real pain. So my question is essentially, has anyone had success with this part of the CA tooltip? Or should I resignedly be content with adding some text in the description part of the tooltip, giving a value + increase per level, instead of the sleeker alternative of having it update its total value itself.

Welcome to the forums Michael! Happy to just hear that this games been on your play list since    These boards are one of the last hold outs for this game, lots of info, downloads and cheery food

Enjoy the community!

 

gogo

[Flix 5,116]

Hello and welcome.  Though the text itself is encoded in global.res, the dynamically-updating property tooltips for each combat art are hard-coded in one of the dll files.  The exceptions are flat damage and flat armor, which would always display.

For example, you could easily change the "Minion Lifetime" text in I.S. to something else, but the numerical value would always be the duration, so long as the duration spell token was present in the spell entry.  And if you removed duration completely from the spell entry, the tooltip will not appear at all.

So unless there is a shared property between the old and new CA, you would have to craft pseudo-tooltips by adding lines underneath the description text.

[SwiftManslayer 3]

18 hours ago, Flix said:

Hello and welcome.  Though the text itself is encoded in global.res, the dynamically-updating property tooltips for each combat art are hard-coded in one of the dll files.  The exceptions are flat damage and flat armor, which would always display.

For example, you could easily change the "Minion Lifetime" text in I.S. to something else, but the numerical value would always be the duration, so long as the duration spell token was present in the spell entry.  And if you removed duration completely from the spell entry, the tooltip will not appear at all.

So unless there is a shared property between the old and new CA, you would have to craft pseudo-tooltips by adding lines underneath the description text.

Ah I see, this is pretty much what I expected. I did think what might happen if I replace "minion lifetime" with ice damage over time or some other completely different text, but it makes sense that the value would still relate to the old variable given as there is no section to change that in the global.res. Have you perhaps ever tried changing the hard coded segments in the .dlls? I'm thinking of trying that but Im not sure if the effort is worth the result to be honest, if it would even work in the first place. Things can get really tricky if I start trying to de-compile dll files.

On 6/11/2020 at 5:35 AM, gogoblender said:

Welcome to the forums Michael! Happy to just hear that this games been on your play list since    These boards are one of the last hold outs for this game, lots of info, downloads and cheery food

Enjoy the community!

 

gogo

Thank you, I have been reading these forums for many years, I just never posted since I didn't have much reason to. And yeah, Sacred 2 will never get old for me, its still super fun to play, and it originally released back when I was in high school . Sacred 1 as well actually, still extremely fun to this day.

[Flix 5,116]

5 hours ago, SwiftManslayer said:

Have you perhaps ever tried changing the hard coded segments in the .dlls? I'm thinking of trying that but Im not sure if the effort is worth the result to be honest, if it would even work in the first place. Things can get really tricky if I start trying to de-compile dll files.

I have not personally done that but my mod Diablo 2 Fallen features that kind of change because I was working with on the Community Patch with dimitrius154 at the time and he is able to make those kinds of changes.  All I know is he uses Ollydbg to decompile and recompile the code.

[SwiftManslayer 3]

Thanks for your replies Flix. I downloaded OllyDebug and tried it, but for some reason it couldn't open s2logic.dll. I tried both versions, maybe it wont work because my operating system is 64 bit. I think I will just go with the easier route of not messing with the executables and libraries :} I was also thinking of letting my character learn more than 10 skills and editing the GUI accordingly, but I think that also requires meddling with those tricky dll files