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NEW Project: Sacred 2 Purist Fixpack


Flix

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23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Animation blending speeds improved so that projectiles from ranged weapons are no longer fired into the ground sometimes.

Yes, it's the same animation blending time speed solution from CM 1.60.  They aren't cut so much as sped up. The file s2render.dll can be deleted and the game will still run just fine.  But I would need to list all the fixes that would go out the window before I recommend anyone do that.  I don't have the competence to edit the file myself, and Dmitriy is continuing on with his own project.  In fact the collaboration dissolved because of constant disagreements about solutions such the animation blending.  I remember hating this change at first but now I actually prefer them, which is cold comfort I'm sure. 

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Pelting Strikes: Now has improved Ranged Weapon animations with an appropriate amount of projectiles.

This one I need to contemplate some. I know the file responsible but it's a major dll file that has a bunch of other fixes bundled in with it.  I believe it's s2logic.dll. 

As an aside, I actually believe in this change from a balance perspective, because it adds consistency by bringing ranged attacks up to par with melee (4 hits across the board).  Before it was very lopsided in favor of melee.  You cite the BFG as being overpowered but that weapon is already monstrously powerful compared to other ranged weapons, as it should be since it takes up a buff slot, a weapon slot, and requires rune investment.  For a Seraphim playing with bows, throwing weapons, pistols, or even regular energy staves, vanilla Pelting Strikes has a harder time comparing to Soul Hammer.  For one, the damage boost of PS is only about 3/4 that of Soul Hammer, with a something like 30% longer regen time.  Plus each projectile has its own chance to miss.  Launching an attack that shoots two piddly arrows, both of which miss, and then waiting 8 seconds to try again feels frustratingly futile.

But in any case it's more a glaring balancing issue than a bugfix.  Honestly this not a hill I want to die on, but for the fact that I'm stuck with either including this file as a whole (with all its fixes) or simply omitting it.

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Removed Knockback effect from all enemy attacks because of a serious bug

You would never forget it if it happens, it's horrifying.  There are only a small number of enemies who cause knockback in Sacred 2.  Gar'Colossus, Octagolamus, and the Abishai are the only ones that come to mind.  There were many others that had the ability in mods before I removed it.

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

I hope this truly means enhanced and not straight up removed like in the CM Patch.

That is correct.  There was some calculation error that led to 10x the amount of debris swirling in the wind.  Rather than delete all the particle files, Dmitriy just corrected the error.

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

For consistency, Ship Ports and Hot Air Balloons now work the same as Portals. After activation, they may be accessed from the world map at any time.

That's another one I'd be fine with letting go but for that's it's bundled in with other fixes as a hard-coded change. I think that one's directly in sacred2.exe.  My post-hoc rationalization is that the devs got lazy with portals in Ice and Blood, and created all the hot-air balloons as a quick script-only substitution rather than code full-fledged portals as the regions really deserved.  I feel like being able to portal to the expansion areas now brings them in line with the main regions.

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Regarding Scarabs, I remember there being a discrepancy in XP for Elite Scarabs.

I was never satisfied with the CM fix either, so I re-did this one from scratch in PFP.  Neither normal nor elites had template creature ID's, which all enemies are supposed to have.  In CM, at some point some values were just guessed at and assigned directly to the bugs.  I've now started over and created insect templates then added appropriate bonuses on top of that, with higher values for the elites.

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Ephrahim's Nightmare/Heavy Burden quest.

CM Patch did something with this quest where they combined the last 2 phases together, then added a new final phase with an additional boss.  I didn't do any of that.  In PFP the quest has the original 3 phases then it ends appropriately.  I didn't see any lingering quest markers during testing.  I did catch that the ranged companion Lydia has a broken bow animation so she now uses throwing potions.

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

1) 34 "Unlock" items will now drop normally.

The unlock items are overwhelmingly swords, which I agree already have a robust selection of uniques.  On the other hand there is also a modest selection of item types which don't boast many uniques, like bows, shields, or staves.  I feel the decision to have them drop normally makes them feel earned, rather than having the player google some codes and instantly spawn level-ready uniques at will.

If there's uproar about this change, fortunately, it is easy to separate out into an optional module, since it would only need an altered drop.txt to add them back to the game. 

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

The Olm cave in the Swamps no longer plays jazz music from the Desert Cantina.

It is an arresting moment when you first experience it, isn't it?  But definitely an error as the wrong region ID was assigned.  A certain file within persector.zip can be replaced to restore it to the original jazz.  I will have to fire up the sector editor and check before I can say which file it was.

 

23 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

I also remember that the CM Patch removed the golden shimmer effect from elite enemies.

Well, that was a side-effect of trying to solve that fact that elites did not have special surface FX like fur applied.  Turns out the elite shimmer overrode it.  Given that there were 2-3 other ways to identify elites (the minimap icon, golden nameplate, and often larger size/different skin) we pushed this change through, though not without some trepidation.

Once again I believe s2render.dll is doing this work.

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13 hours ago, Androdion said:

What's the relation between this and the trimmed Elite Textures pack, if there's any? Do you still need to use the trimmed version to have HD textures? Is this about the reworking you did on the char's items or something like that?

This one is an old CM fix that I've recreated.  Some vanilla normal maps are not compressed so the file size is massive. This change will improve Minimal, Default, and Elite texture settings.  Since it only affects normal maps (which are the "trimmed" part of Elite Textures Trimmed), there's no interaction or conflicts with that mod.  If someone were to stubbornly stick to the official Elite textures they would benefit from better performance with PFP, though not nearly to the same extent as someone with Elite Textures Trimmed.

 

13 hours ago, Androdion said:

Game World - Corrected the alignment and positioning of several points-of-interest on the world map. -> Could you expand on this please?

This is another classic CM fix that I've ported over.  This has to do with how, when you explore the map, cities, towns, and other points of interest will appear on the map.  That is, the actual artwork on the map changes, so that an empty field will become a town, that kind of thing. Their positioning has been adjusted so that the new points appear more seamlessly onto the map.  I honestly had no idea this was part of CM Patch until I started this project. I think it was undocumented.

 

14 hours ago, Androdion said:

Combat Alert, Rallied Souls, and several other buffs no longer cause drop in FPS. -> It's like when we had that change that allowed for the Idol mod to be used with Nether Allegiance right?

Yes that's the same fix from CM 1.60 where the FX no longer causes the frame rate to plummet.

 

13 hours ago, Androdion said:

Does transforming still shuts down the buff and you need to recast for it to be active? I also remember something around the lines of the effects stacking after you turned back from those forms, so how's the current status of this?

Ahhh, yeah that bug persists.  The stat boosts from Familiar will persist and stack when switching between forms.  I can advise people in the ReadMe to not use buffs while shifted for the most purist experience. The thing, is the buff slots and the potion slots came as a pair.  A shifted Dragon Mage could always use potions, but in vanilla he had to open his inventory to access them.  Dmitriy later discovered a way to force the buffs to stay active when shifting and then prevent them from being switched off while shifted to solve the problem.  But I can't make use of his files without bringing in an absolute slew of non-purist changes.

 

14 hours ago, Androdion said:

is this the same change made in the past where some pieces just wouldn't drop like the Black Death jewellery? I.e., new change or old change?

CM 1.60 + EE 3.0 maybe includes 40% of what I've fixed with drops in PFP.  I went through every single item in blueprint.txt to make sure it was present where it needed to be.  Took over a week.

 

14 hours ago, Androdion said:

Ah, so no more lightsaber "swoosh" sounds on relics? Great!

Well, yes, for two reasons.  One is the aforementioned fix. The other is because all the lightsaber sounds were CM inventions so I didn't include them.  They sound like any other sword as in vanilla.  There's none of the separate classification/naming, no Willpower attribute governing damage, and none of the increased drop frequency or static quest rewards. They remain as they were in vanilla: basically a very rare type of easter egg longsword.

 

14 hours ago, Androdion said:

On the first you mention the Mutation sets, but the Dragon Mage's is absent, why is that?

Ascaron never made so much as a hint of a mutation set for the Dragon Mage.  I invented Draco's out of whole cloth around the time CM 1.50 was released.  I have been considering an optional module which would add it back to PFP, but I'd first need to decide if the Unlock Items were going to be optional or integrated.

The other Mutation sets, to my surprise, were fully completed by Ascaron in the vanilla release.  They simply didn't drop.  However, these are not the Mutation sets that everyone is familiar with.  For some reason, CM Patch took these already powerful sets and added even more bonuses to them.  In PFP, Mutation Sets have their vanilla bonuses, which are sockets only, and the only other bonuses come from the set bonuses.  Accordingly they are only slightly more rare than any other full armor set.

 

14 hours ago, Androdion said:

On the second you mention the jewellery of the Black Death mini-set dropping as legendaries, so what happens to the hammer? The same for Kira's Wall and its respective jewellery. Do they also drop as legendary items now?

Kira's Wall and Nitao's Hammer already dropped (sort of). So all I had to do is add them where they missing.  The jewelry was entirely absent so had to be added in even more places.  The so-called "Sets" that these items belonged to were blank, empty, devoid of any data.  The CM Patch invented some set bonuses.  I on the other hand removed the empty set entry, which in turn changed the color of the item names from green to orange, since they were already Legendary tier.

 

16 hours ago, Androdion said:

So, are the Abishai's traps less deadly now? I remember insta-dying a few time due to them.

The poison trap isn't among the Abishai's set of traps. The most notable opponents who use it are the Poison Lord, some T-mutants, and various High Elf pirates and robbers.  I have vivid memories of falling dead to those pirate traps on my first vanilla playthrough . 

 

16 hours ago, Androdion said:

The Alpha Ursacin (crystal bear boss) will now spawn in the cave west of The Blue Star in the Crystal Plane. -> I can't for the life of me remember this boss...

No one ever bothered to make him spawn, though he is listed as a potential kill-target in the Hunting Fever quests.  Since he never spawned though the player would never see him.  In appearance he's just a larger elite Ursacin.

 

16 hours ago, Androdion said:

 Gartor the spike turtle boss will now spawn in the Legendary Pirate Treasure cave. -> More precisely? It's kind of a small place and kind of a big boss.

Well, the turtle boss that Ascaron designed is a far cry from the giant fire beast that CM Patch presented us.  We're getting vanilla Gartor who is more suited to an early-game encounter.  In appearance he is a slightly larger elite heavy turtle (the ones with the lava cracks on their backs).  There's no summoning of obsidian monoliths, meteor showers or any of that.

 

16 hours ago, Androdion said:

All mortal quest escorts should no longer be subject to unfair one-shot kills (within reason). -> But they do die again, right?

They are still mortal without a doubt. That was, after all, the developer intention - the player must work to keep their charge alive.  However now they will not simply vanish in a puff of smoke as soon as they sustain a hit.

 

16 hours ago, Androdion said:

So you know where all of them are, except you don't know which ones you've contacted already?

I should probably update that description.  Basically what would happen before is that any time you talked to any Ascaron employee (before the quest was taken) a blue marker would appear and would never go away, until you took the quest - at which point all the markers would vanish.  This is basically the opposite of what you would want.  Players not undertaking the quest might carelessly talk to the employees and find their map littered with blue markers, while those actually attempting the quest would have to search from scratch with no guidance.  Now the blue markers won't appear until after you take the quest.  Then as you talk to each employee, the markers will vanish one by one.

 

16 hours ago, Androdion said:

So you're "physically" separating this from The Northland Expedition, as in, a separate piece of content? Can I ask why?

Well, it has to do with developer intention.  The Christmas quest was meant to be seasonal content, that would appear once a year, and the rest of the year the Northland would be in its place.  I played through the vanilla game in preparation for this mod, and I found that the vanilla Northland is actually quite a bit different from the Christmas Island that we're presented with in the CM Patch. It's not just the presence/absence of a quest; the background music, environment, enemy spawns, even the town itself, all change with the Christmas content added.  Essentially it's Christmas year-round in CM Patch, and the Northland vibe is just kind of shouldered aside for it.

The PFP will come the closer to actually recreating the original behavior, where Christmas will "arrive" once a year (or whenever the player installs the module), and the quest and all it's visual/audio trappings can then be removed at will to leave the Northland as vanilla.  The Northland quest series will be present no matter what.

 

18 hours ago, Androdion said:

Screenie please? A before and after since probably no one even reminds what vanilla Sacred 2's inventory menu looks like.

 

18 hours ago, Androdion said:

Prepared some savegame thumbnails that were missing. This should prevent the blue placeholder icons in the savegame list. -> Again, a screenshot with be interesting to have a better visual idea, though I think I understood what you meant here.

Sure thing, I can put some visuals together.  May take a little before I'm back at my main workstation.

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1 hour ago, Flix said:

This one is an old CM fix that I've recreated.  Some vanilla normal maps are not compressed so the file size is massive. This change will improve Minimal, Default, and Elite texture settings.  Since it only affects normal maps (which are the "trimmed" part of Elite Textures Trimmed), there's no interaction or conflicts with that mod.  If someone were to stubbornly stick to the official Elite textures they would benefit from better performance with PFP, though not nearly to the same extent as someone with Elite Textures Trimmed.

So basically there's no interaction and to use HD textures the recommendation is still to use the trimmed Elite Textures?

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Ahhh, yeah that bug persists.  The stat boosts from Familiar will persist and stack when switching between forms.  I can advise people in the ReadMe to not use buffs while shifted for the most purist experience. The thing, is the buff slots and the potion slots came as a pair.  A shifted Dragon Mage could always use potions, but in vanilla he had to open his inventory to access them.  Dmitriy later discovered a way to force the buffs to stay active when shifting and then prevent them from being switched off while shifted to solve the problem.  But I can't make use of his files without bringing in an absolute slew of non-purist changes.

Thought as much, it's Addendum stuff as far as I can remember. Either you don't use buffs that will stack when transformed, or you do and abuse it, or you reload a save after using it to "reset" it, I guess.

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Well, yes, for two reasons.  One is the aforementioned fix. The other is because all the lightsaber sounds were CM inventions so I didn't include them.  They sound like any other sword as in vanilla.  There's none of the separate classification/naming, no Willpower attribute governing damage, and none of the increased drop frequency or static quest rewards. They remain as they were in vanilla: basically a very rare type of easter egg longsword.

I had no idea about this. Well, I think I remember vaguely that Power of NIF had a sword-like behaviour, but it was so long ago that I can't even remember what was vanilla and what was CM stuff in the end. But the fact that the Willpower attribute isn't being accounted for the damage is interesting, since a lot of stuff was built around that factor (lightsaber Shadow Warrior with Grim Resilience buff for instance).

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Ascaron never made so much as a hint of a mutation set for the Dragon Mage.  I invented Draco's out of whole cloth around the time CM 1.50 was released.  I have been considering an optional module which would add it back to PFP, but I'd first need to decide if the Unlock Items were going to be optional or integrated.

The other Mutation sets, to my surprise, were fully completed by Ascaron in the vanilla release.  They simply didn't drop.  However, these are not the Mutation sets that everyone is familiar with.  For some reason, CM Patch took these already powerful sets and added even more bonuses to them.  In PFP, Mutation Sets have their vanilla bonuses, which are sockets only, and the only other bonuses come from the set bonuses.  Accordingly they are only slightly more rare than any other full armor set.

I'm not sure what the dilema about the Unlock Items is. Sure they're vanilla stuff, yet not present on drop lists. But it's like you said before, if they don't drop and people get to summon them from the air because the codes are public knowledge then why not have them drop anyway? That's my two cents on that. As for the Mutation sets, yeah, I remember the no-bonuses versions. They were OP due to the amount of sockets but the absence of modifiers did balance that, so I'm cool for vanilla Mutation Sets. I think the Dragon Mage's could be included for consistency's sake, though the set pieces should have the same no-bonuses treatment to mirror the vanilla pieces. Poor Dragon Mage had so little of his stuff finished and is such a peculiar class that I think it deserves to be treated like the rest of the other classes.

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Kira's Wall and Nitao's Hammer already dropped (sort of). So all I had to do is add them where they missing.  The jewelry was entirely absent so had to be added in even more places.  The so-called "Sets" that these items belonged to were blank, empty, devoid of any data.  The CM Patch invented some set bonuses.  I on the other hand removed the empty set entry, which in turn changed the color of the item names from green to orange, since they were already Legendary tier.

Aye, they dropped... You know the joke about that. :D But it's what I thought, they shall now drop as legendaries, which they already were in drop tier. Works for me if the mini-sets were never official anyway.

1 hour ago, Flix said:

The poison trap isn't among the Abishai's set of traps. The most notable opponents who use it are the Poison Lord, some T-mutants, and various High Elf pirates and robbers.  I have vivid memories of falling dead to those pirate traps on my first vanilla playthrough . 

Oh, my bad. So is this common behaviour for all traps and the poison one was acting differently? Why the change on this one in particular?

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Well, the turtle boss that Ascaron designed is a far cry from the giant fire beast that CM Patch presented us.  We're getting vanilla Gartor who is more suited to an early-game encounter.  In appearance he is a slightly larger elite heavy turtle (the ones with the lava cracks on their backs).  There's no summoning of obsidian monoliths, meteor showers or any of that.

Ha ha, ok then. I'm here imagining a sub-level 10 char running into giant meteor shower Gartor and thinking "WTH?!". :D

1 hour ago, Flix said:

I should probably update that description.  Basically what would happen before is that any time you talked to any Ascaron employee (before the quest was taken) a blue marker would appear and would never go away, until you took the quest - at which point all the markers would vanish.  This is basically the opposite of what you would want.  Players not undertaking the quest might carelessly talk to the employees and find their map littered with blue markers, while those actually attempting the quest would have to search from scratch with no guidance.  Now the blue markers won't appear until after you take the quest.  Then as you talk to each employee, the markers will vanish one by one.

Ah, excellent then. Finally those quest markers can act "normally" then.

Furthermore, I can live with the Christmas content being a separate module. In fact I remember being awfully confused when it first became a part of the vanilla game. And it avoids players having two chain quests running at the same time in the same region, which was great for doing XP runs, but other than that it was mighty confusing even for experienced players.

 

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24 minutes ago, lujate said:

Almost an un-mod mod. 

Ha ha, yeah. It's pretty much what many have been asking for years. And it's finally materialising! :bow:

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3 hours ago, Androdion said:

So basically there's no interaction and to use HD textures the recommendation is still to use the trimmed Elite Textures?

That's right.  Elite Textures Trimmed would be the only companion mod I'd recommend for use with PFP.  I'd consider it a "fix" for the Elite Textures.

3 hours ago, Androdion said:

I think I remember vaguely that Power of NIF had a sword-like behaviour, but it was so long ago that I can't even remember what was vanilla and what was CM stuff in the end.

It's true a lot of the older CM Patch changes feel like part of the base game since it's been around so long.  I was a bit surprised at how much I ended up cutting because it was just complete invention.  Even Power of NIF won't exist anymore in PFP, that was another total fabrication.  There will only be the random rare lightsabers. 

3 hours ago, Androdion said:

I'm not sure what the dilema about the Unlock Items is.

Yeah I agree that's why they're currently added. But I'll give some weeks to see what people think.

3 hours ago, Androdion said:

So is this common behaviour for all traps and the poison one was acting differently? Why the change on this one in particular?

I suppose they could all benefit from this change, since damage is flat on all traps and of a similar intensity.  I'd just never noticed any of the others being so lethal.

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4 hours ago, Flix said:

Even Power of NIF won't exist anymore in PFP, that was another total fabrication. 

That's also news to me, but I guess it's due to the fact that CM changes started so long ago that they've indeed blended with the base game a bit too much.

4 hours ago, Flix said:

I suppose they could all benefit from this change, since damage is flat on all traps and of a similar intensity.  I'd just never noticed any of the others being so lethal.

Most likely yes, and when you come to think of that the Abishai is the perfect testing spot since he has several. I think it was his yellow one that was totally brutal. Not sure how much of this is an actual rebalancing though.

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11 hours ago, Androdion said:

Not sure how much of this is an actual rebalancing though.

Yes, now that I've considered it, I think I'd better not change the damage of the poison trap.  It is in perfect alignment with all the other traps, and if the damage is too brutal, well that's just the balance the devs gave us.

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Sorry for the delay, couldn't quite get back to this thread in the past week.

On 11/17/2021 at 10:20 PM, Flix said:

Yes, it's the same animation blending time speed solution from CM 1.60.  They aren't cut so much as sped up. The file s2render.dll can be deleted and the game will still run just fine.  But I would need to list all the fixes that would go out the window before I recommend anyone do that.  I don't have the competence to edit the file myself, and Dmitriy is continuing on with his own project.  In fact the collaboration dissolved because of constant disagreements about solutions such the animation blending.  I remember hating this change at first but now I actually prefer them, which is cold comfort I'm sure. 

Yeah, I know they are just extremely sped up but the result is that they might as well not be there. I was honestly always amazed by how fluid the animations like when the character started/stopped running/walking looked in Sacred 2. I knew something felt "off" when I first started playing with the CM patch and it took me a while to realize what it was, but once I noticed it, I tried switching back to vanilla for a moment and the difference was jarringly noticeable.

Can also confirm from my testing back then that these changes are unfortunately baked into one of the 2 big files (s2renderer.dll and s2logic.dll) together with a multitude of other changes. Meaning that if the base are the files from CM, it will definitely be hard to separate.

 

On 11/17/2021 at 10:20 PM, Flix said:

This one I need to contemplate some. I know the file responsible but it's a major dll file that has a bunch of other fixes bundled in with it.  I believe it's s2logic.dll. 

True. Again, an unfortunate consequence of going the route of removing changes from the CM files instead of implementing only the desired changes on the vanilla files. But I am afraid that ship has sailed a long time ago....

On 11/17/2021 at 10:20 PM, Flix said:

As an aside, I actually believe in this change from a balance perspective, because it adds consistency by bringing ranged attacks up to par with melee (4 hits across the board).  Before it was very lopsided in favor of melee.  You cite the BFG as being overpowered but that weapon is already monstrously powerful compared to other ranged weapons, as it should be since it takes up a buff slot, a weapon slot, and requires rune investment.  For a Seraphim playing with bows, throwing weapons, pistols, or even regular energy staves, vanilla Pelting Strikes has a harder time comparing to Soul Hammer.  For one, the damage boost of PS is only about 3/4 that of Soul Hammer, with a something like 30% longer regen time.  Plus each projectile has its own chance to miss.  Launching an attack that shoots two piddly arrows, both of which miss, and then waiting 8 seconds to try again feels frustratingly futile.

But in any case it's more a glaring balancing issue than a bugfix.  Honestly this not a hill I want to die on, but for the fact that I'm stuck with either including this file as a whole (with all its fixes) or simply omitting it.

A note about the balance: I felt that the 2 shots were pretty well justified considering how powerful regeneration and other on hit effects are. The very last char I played before I stopped playing was actually a ranged Shadow Warrior and it was when I saw the Frenzied Rampage behavior with bows (shortly after starting act 2) and how it was effortlessly mowing down anything I encountered that I actually started looking into how exactly CM changed these CAs and incidentally found out that the change also affected the BFG. Melee having 4 strikes requires you to get close to the enemy and the animation actually takes some time, making you a sitting target. The almost instant spray with the ranged CAs in the CM patch really made me feel very OP. Not only does this basically double the damage potential of the skill, but also the number of procs or even the Succession or Double Attack skill mods (20% chance for a double hit, triggering all the other procs even more often), which IMO was an unforeseen side-effect, allowing ridiculous stuff like Pelting Strikes with 15 second cooldown to be effortlessly spammed non-stop even with minimal amount of regen per hit. In melee, even if you fully regen the CA before the animation finishes, you can't start another one until it does finish. The nature of the new ranged animation allows for non-stop machine gun spam that melts even bosses faster than anything else in the game.

On 11/17/2021 at 10:20 PM, Flix said:

That's another one I'd be fine with letting go but for that's it's bundled in with other fixes as a hard-coded change. I think that one's directly in sacred2.exe.  My post-hoc rationalization is that the devs got lazy with portals in Ice and Blood, and created all the hot-air balloons as a quick script-only substitution rather than code full-fledged portals as the regions really deserved.  I feel like being able to portal to the expansion areas now brings them in line with the main regions.

Ahh, true. To be honest, I don't have that much experience with the Ice and Blood content (think I actually went through it only once, was on just the base game for many years). But if there are actually no portals there, then I agree that this is a good change.

On 11/17/2021 at 10:20 PM, Flix said:

The unlock items are overwhelmingly swords, which I agree already have a robust selection of uniques.  On the other hand there is also a modest selection of item types which don't boast many uniques, like bows, shields, or staves.  I feel the decision to have them drop normally makes them feel earned, rather than having the player google some codes and instantly spawn level-ready uniques at will.

If there's uproar about this change, fortunately, it is easy to separate out into an optional module, since it would only need an altered drop.txt to add them back to the game. 

I've never even seen those code items but if you say they are well balanced, then I guess they might as well be able to drop. But making it an option would be the ideal solution IMO as it will make farming specific items (especially swords) much harder than it originally was, especially since all of them are uniques.

Edited by idbeholdME
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1 hour ago, Dragon Brother said:

Food for thought - have you considered other characters with their equivalent CA? I believe the dryad for example shoots more than two projectiles with its equivalent CA so don't see much difference between that and this change. Especially as in the non CM patch version of the game the dryad was the best class for stacking crazy %LL (shuriken + detheyas set) and could melt bosses almost instantly. The way I see it is that this game has never really been well balanced and this just brings some consistency across characters. Either way, my feel is the advantage of the bug fixes it comes with outweigh any concerns over this change...

I want to add my appreciation for your work Flix. I realise that there has been a lot of discussion over the years regarding the CM patch and subsequent follow up efforts and the changes from the base game, but this version is a true labour of love by you for any fans who's vision lay elsewhere to yours with the enhanced edition, diablo mod and latest versions of the CM Patch. Truly impressive work.

I have to concur with this post. Sacred 2 was always imbalanced from the start, some classes and CAs absolutely brutal in comparison to others, some stuff apparently unusable in Niob whereas others would be functional and borderline OP. Let's face it, you can kind of force "god mode" in this game, assuming you choose a certain path and stick to it. That's probably why so many people tried to rebalance the game over the years and it still seemed like something was missing, and honestly speaking I don't think you can ever achieve a true consensus regarding this game. Either it's "too strong" or "too slow" or "too easy" or "too RNG"... It's pretty much the same argument over and over through the years.

Let's face it. In a perfect world we could have an open game code and full control over it, but we can't. People who've studied the code for years still find new things in it. So it's never going to be or feel "whole". Thus I guess that the best we can have are efforts like this, and other older examples of modding in this game. Will it be perfectly corrected vanilla Sacred 2? Nah. But will it be closer to that, without the dreaded memory leak and a million other issues? You bet. So I guess that we have to be happy about this materialising, and try to understand that it won't be perfect. Expectations meet reality, let us face reality and enjoy it. :)

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Main Problems:

Damage mitigation should have a flattened curve, never reaching 100% ,perhaps 60. I made a patch for myself 10 years ago, by giving each item with damage mitigation a vulnerability.

10% all damage mitigation but -20% to a fith for example. A seraphim capped around 60% all damage mitigation in niob this way, no longer this above 100%.

 

x% life leech: you can play without it, even with a weaponless character. And if you think it is OP for weapons, ever played a high level voodoo dryad? Cast disease on a boss, run away and come back after 5 seconds and it is dead,

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19 hours ago, Dragon Brother said:

Either way, my feel is the advantage of the bug fixes it comes with outweigh any concerns over this change...

Considering that there are no alternatives, I have to agree as we can't separate most changes/fixes. Although I would have preferred CAs to remain mostly untouched from vanilla behavior. All the other changes in this patch just fix bugs or replace non-functional or broken stuff. But this change fundamentally augments the performance of the 2 affected CAs.

 

But the one main thing I had hoped would be possible with this patch was the original animation blending speed. Will probably try playing with the vanilla s2renderer.dll and see how that turns out.

Edited by idbeholdME
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12 hours ago, chattius said:

Main Problems:

Damage mitigation should have a flattened curve, never reaching 100% ,perhaps 60. I made a patch for myself 10 years ago, by giving each item with damage mitigation a vulnerability.

10% all damage mitigation but -20% to a fith for example. A seraphim capped around 60% all damage mitigation in niob this way, no longer this above 100%.

 

x% life leech: you can play without it, even with a weaponless character. And if you think it is OP for weapons, ever played a high level voodoo dryad? Cast disease on a boss, run away and come back after 5 seconds and it is dead,

Yeah, those two modifiers have been pretty much broken from the start. Nevertheless, if the idea is to keep it a bug fix patch with the least changes possible to how the devs made the game then trying to rebalance it just won't work.

I'd be all for the fix Dmitriy was going for with %LL not being correlated to the absolute life total rather than its relative value, but I'm not even sure he ever made that change work. On top of that there's no way to implement Addendum fixes that are hardcoded without bringing the rest behind as well, so that's that.

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On 11/25/2021 at 5:29 AM, chattius said:

Damage mitigation should have a flattened curve, never reaching 100% ,perhaps 60. I made a patch for myself 10 years ago, by giving each item with damage mitigation a vulnerability.

10% all damage mitigation but -20% to a fith for example. A seraphim capped around 60% all damage mitigation in niob this way, no longer this above 100%.

 

x% life leech: you can play without it, even with a weaponless character. And if you think it is OP for weapons, ever played a high level voodoo dryad? Cast disease on a boss, run away and come back after 5 seconds and it is dead,

Dmitriy capped Damage Mitigation at 80% in his mod and also made Leech Life X% scale from the enemy's current hitpoints rather than total hitpoints, as it always should have been.  Alas, if I were to copy his files over it would change the game in many other radical ways.

I know enough to open the dll files with an appropriate program, but have no way to decipher what I'm seeing without some intensive course in C++.  It's just raw code.

 

On 11/25/2021 at 10:40 AM, idbeholdME said:

But the one main thing I had hoped would be possible with this patch was the original animation blending speed. Will probably try playing with the vanilla s2renderer.dll and see how that turns out.

I do not believe you will lose anything too critical. Primarily the fixes relating to FX will be lost (the missing DOT FX, buff FX appearing/disappearing on minions, missing elemental FX on energy weapons and all projectiles, missing impact FX on magic staff projectiles, missing fur FX on elites, some FX performance improvements).

 

6 hours ago, Schot said:

I get the sense that this will be a new base mod to work from.  Is that a part of the intent for this mod?  To build off of it in order to create shiny new tidy code mods? 

Well, it certainly could be that.  Really though this is meant to be a gift for the purists.  A good faith attempt to present just the fixes.  Over the years I've seen many such successful patch projects that I wish to emulate, the most recent being Brothers in Arms for The Witcher 3.  This team resisted all urges to tweak and rebalance, instead focusing solely on stomping every bug in sight.

Sacred 2's Community Patch was a wonderous thing, but it had the tendency to draw all mod projects to it like a magnet.  So it accumulated so much fan content over the years.  Heck, a ton of it was my own inventions.  I wanted to strip it down to the core idea, that of just a patch, nothing more fancy than that.  :wink:

 

3 hours ago, Hooyaah said:

Please pardon me if I am mistaken, Flix, but I believe that what your intention is would present us all with the optimal vanilla game that Ascaron intended from the beginning. That would mean the game would have minimal glitches and crashes, the unused elements would be present which were never included in the release, such as regional banners, etc. would now be in this finished product. It shall stand as a well-polished, shiny new experience, unencumbered by fluff added by later contributors who were not part of the original team, having made contributions that were not original to, or envisioned for, inclusion in the game. Although, I am certain that there are mods which have been made already which would work fine with this marvelous creation, nevertheless.

Quite right.  It is meant to stand alone as the closest thing to a "final official patch" that we could have gotten.

I believe I owe you an apology. For some time I had insisted that the Mutation sets were fan inventions when in fact they were created and completed by Ascaron all along. They simply never dropped in the base game.  Now in this mod they will drop with comparable rarity to any other armor set.  They are slightly weaker than the CM Patch versions, which had some extra bonuses on each item.  The true Mutation sets in PFP are "sockets-only," plus the set bonuses.

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Will  never cease being amazed by your ambition for this game. Thank you for your non stop love for the fans. You've worked on so many iterations of this game, CmPatch, Enhanced, Diablo, and now this new take or *return* to pure (lol its funny but when I saw your topic first go up, I had just gotten out of watching an old Harry Potter episode and couldn't help feeling the connection between the series' "pureblood" and "half"blood and now your mod :D ), original vision of the Devs.  Its hard work to go back to what original intent is was specially with all the bugs this game came out with, who knows what was meant ? I know that you're going to make many fans happy with you create, there's always been a clamor for "original, original, original" and I was amused by what you said about all the team on CM carting in all their own ideas and just stitching them all together.

You worked with that team for so long, however, won't you miss just a few of the CM's nifty ideas.. cool sounding *cough* throw potions maybe ?

:D

 

gogo

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10 hours ago, gogoblender said:

You worked with that team for so long, however, won't you miss just a few of the CM's nifty ideas.. cool sounding *cough* throw potions maybe ?

I may have allowed myself one single, solitary easter egg reward at the end of a certain "Dark" quest line that was restored.  :cool:

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On 12/5/2021 at 4:14 AM, Flix said:

I do not believe you will lose anything too critical. Primarily the fixes relating to FX will be lost (the missing DOT FX, buff FX appearing/disappearing on minions, missing elemental FX on energy weapons and all projectiles, missing impact FX on magic staff projectiles, missing fur FX on elites, some FX performance improvements).

I'll try, although I remember some stuff breaking when I used the vanilla file with the CM Patch. But that might have been because I did it on an existing character. IIRC, I was testing it on the BFG Seraphim. When I used the vanilla file after playing for a long time with the CM, the BFG refused to fire at all.

But when I created a new Seraphim, she could shoot just fine. So it will hopefully be fine when I use it from the start.

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