NEW Project: Sacred 2 Purist Fixpack

[Flix 5,116]

On 2/12/2023 at 2:09 PM, idbeholdME said:

Even dimitrius sounded off in one of the threads that my assessment seems to be correct and he also restored them. He might also be investigating a bit more into it, so wouldn't hurt asking him if he found out anything about the melee/ranged check on the attacks.

Alright the melee ATTACKX animations are reinstated for the player characters, though in a somewhat different way than your file.  I rolled back the initial changes and turned SM24 back into ATTACKX. This also preserves the new SHOUT entries.

If you want to keep using your file I would double check some of your additions; there were some instances of the ATTACK entries skipping or duplicating numbers, and you preserved  (I believe) at least one vanilla bug where a shadow warrior's mounted ATTACKX for daggers has no ATTACK entries at all.

I'm leaving the ones for the unarmed monsters as SM24, since they don't have weapon skills, and it has the same practical effect anyway.

I was also premature in declaring the VICTORY voice lines fixed, although I have everything in place, all four instances still refuse to trigger.

I did manage to make the "approach" line for General Terus work at least.  The player speaks the line directly after Terus finishes speaking and combat begins.
I could not get the approach lines to work for Nimonuil or Gahanka.  With Gahanka, the fix may have worked but just never triggered during testing because the player never shuts up when commentary is turned on.  So every single time I approached Gahanka the character would comment about a fleeing kobold or something similar.

@idbeholdME  This is the change log for 1.4.  Can you think of anything else that hasn't been addressed?

Spoiler

[Quest]

• "Among Orcs" (Light path): Troll targets west of Entruag will now fight the Grurag Orcs.
• "Attack is the Best Defense" should no longer give XP as soon as a new game is loaded.
• "Attack of the Undead": added the family's crashed wagon.
• "Barazi's End": Opponents in the cave should no longer walk around idly during the fight.
• "Differing Opinions": Attackers are now equipped with weapons.
• "Ghost Whisperings": The Shadow path version of this quest is now restored. Begins in the same place.
• "Throne of Conflict" (Light & Shadow): Opponents when escorting the Alchemist are now armed with weapons.
• "The Undead Legion": restored player pre-fight commentary after speaking with General Terus.

[Combat Arts]

• Baneful Smite: casting FX no longer has black box artifact along the edges of the halo.
• Divine Protection: gold mod "Mirror" changed back from reflect spells to block spells (vanilla value) and description is instead updated to match the modifier.
• Pelting Strikes: Fixed incorrect animation introduced in v1.3 with 1h weapons while mounted.
• Propelled Levitation: bronze mod "Capacitor" tooltip corrected.
• Viperish Disease and Eternal Fire: Reverted all changes back to vanilla. These spells are not actually bugged, just poorly designed.

[Creature]

• Kobold Chieftains (normal rank) now give less XP than their elite variants.
• Leaping Plants will now prioritize their leap attack over their other attacks.
• Ranged enemies for Stone Warriors, Moldered Undead, Thraconians, and Trolls will again switch to melee weapons if engaged in close combat (restored vanilla behavior).

[Item]

• Seraphim wings: Fixed missing T-Energy FX on a random drop.
• Blade of Mages and random rare shields are no longer duplicated in a droplist.

[Misc]

• Restored the melee double hit player animations that were disabled in the initial PFP release. These animations trigger from any left-click attack and the chance increases as the appropriate weapon lore skill levels up.
• Prepared localizations for multiple languages.  The following languages are now supported: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian.

 

This is the "confirmed bug but can't seem to fix" pile:
 

Spoiler

• Voice lines playing when approaching Gahanka, Nimonuil.
• "The Forgotten City": missing player commentary after the hologram directs them to go to Dyr-Lain.
• "Green Islands" (Light path): missing player commentary after rescuing Dyria.
• "Igniting the Devil's Fire" (Shadow path): comments about fighting the Garganthropod before the Prince talks about the monster, not after.
• Near the end of the game, after the Seraphim vs Inquisitor fight on the bridge, the Seraphim is holding a sword, but uses barehanded animations to attack (punches despite holding a sword).

 

[idbeholdME 389]

14 hours ago, Flix said:

If you want to keep using your file I would double check some of your additions; there were some instances of the ATTACK entries skipping or duplicating numbers, and you preserved  (I believe) at least one vanilla bug where a shadow warrior's mounted ATTACKX for daggers has no ATTACK entries at all.

Entirely possible. I've been doing some hurried last minute edits before sending it to you. Still didn't have all the ranged ATTACKX animations removed for all the characters so probably the source of the bad numbering and also probably nuked the dagger animation for the SW. Thanks for pointing it out.

EDIT:

Landed on these timings. Seem to be in sync with the animation.

["entry663"] = 
        {
            ["name"] = "ANIM_TYPE_RIDEATTACKX-SPECIAL_DO",
            ["marker"] = 
            {
                ["ANIMSTART"] = 0.0000,
                ["ATTACK"] = 0.5000,
                ["ATTACK1"] = 1.2000,
                ["ANIMEND"] = 1.8000,
            },
        },

14 hours ago, Flix said:

 

@idbeholdME  This is the change log for 1.4.  Can you think of anything else that hasn't been addressed?

  Reveal hidden contents

[Quest]

• "Among Orcs" (Light path): Troll targets west of Entruag will now fight the Grurag Orcs.
• "Attack is the Best Defense" should no longer give XP as soon as a new game is loaded.
• "Attack of the Undead": added the family's crashed wagon.
• "Barazi's End": Opponents in the cave should no longer walk around idly during the fight.
• "Differing Opinions": Attackers are now equipped with weapons.
• "Ghost Whisperings": The Shadow path version of this quest is now restored. Begins in the same place.
• "Throne of Conflict" (Light & Shadow): Opponents when escorting the Alchemist are now armed with weapons.
• "The Undead Legion": restored player pre-fight commentary after speaking with General Terus.

[Combat Arts]

• Baneful Smite: casting FX no longer has black box artifact along the edges of the halo.
• Divine Protection: gold mod "Mirror" changed back from reflect spells to block spells (vanilla value) and description is instead updated to match the modifier.
• Pelting Strikes: Fixed incorrect animation introduced in v1.3 with 1h weapons while mounted.
• Propelled Levitation: bronze mod "Capacitor" tooltip corrected.
• Viperish Disease and Eternal Fire: Reverted all changes back to vanilla. These spells are not actually bugged, just poorly designed.

[Creature]

• Kobold Chieftains (normal rank) now give less XP than their elite variants.
• Leaping Plants will now prioritize their leap attack over their other attacks.
• Ranged enemies for Stone Warriors, Moldered Undead, Thraconians, and Trolls will again switch to melee weapons if engaged in close combat (restored vanilla behavior).

[Item]

• Seraphim wings: Fixed missing T-Energy FX on a random drop.
• Blade of Mages and random rare shields are no longer duplicated in a droplist.

[Misc]

• Restored the melee double hit player animations that were disabled in the initial PFP release. These animations trigger from any left-click attack and the chance increases as the appropriate weapon lore skill levels up.
• Prepared localizations for multiple languages.  The following languages are now supported: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian.

- Restore the gold Confidence mod on the Inquisitor's Paralyzing Dread, so that it properly increases your attack value. If I remember correctly, after landing on a fix for the Augmenting Guidon Fear mod, you mentioned that the Confidence mod could probably be fixed in a similar way. It still currently uses the change from the inital release and increases evade chance because it was originally considered broken.

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18337-modifying-combat-arts-and-understanding-flags-spellstxt/&do=findComment&comment=7136242

I also retested the Guidon fix in our chat conversation "PFP 1.3 TEST" in a message from July 1, 2022. So it should hopefully be possible to restore the PD mod too.

 

- The dual wield item bonus fixes, with them spawning on TG helmets and not spawning on Dryad helmets. Although I am not sure how big of an impact this change would have on existing rare items. If it's going to wildy reroll tons of items as with the last time the usage bits were touched, might probably be worth ignoring...

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/69265-new-project-sacred-2-purist-fixpack/&do=findComment&comment=7139300

 

- Restore the original NPC in-fighting damage scalar. It is currently only 10% of what it was originally.

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/69265-new-project-sacred-2-purist-fixpack/&do=findComment&comment=7139414

 

- Align the auto-loot raidus/circle graphics. Either make the radius smaller as it was in vanilla, or increase the visual size of the circle so it is the same as the increased pickup radius in the PFP. Currently, it picks up items beyond what the visual circle indicates.

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/69265-new-project-sacred-2-purist-fixpack/&do=findComment&comment=7139329

 

- Potentially edit the Spell Resistance Mastery description.

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/69265-new-project-sacred-2-purist-fixpack/&do=findComment&comment=7138840

 

- Revert the "kills" stat in your character info back to the flavored ones. "Collateral damage" for Light characters and "Victims" for Shadow characters.

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/69265-new-project-sacred-2-purist-fixpack/&do=findComment&comment=7139179

 

- Potentially add the generic enemy "tauntall" voice lines to the same pool as their "attackshout" voice lines. Ignore the bad/good flavored ones, but I feel the tauntall ones would fit there very nicely. Although this might be way too time consuming to do with every enemy. I really have no idea how you are doing all the voice line edits, so can't tell personally.

 

Will go through my backlog to see if I missed anything and add it.

Edited February 16, 2023 by idbeholdME

[idbeholdME 389]

Also, one more potential thing for investigation:

Leaping Plants also have a working melee attack, they just never use it, because they are set to use trap AI behavior. Discovered it by reviving them with Shadow Warrior's Rallied Souls and the revived ones attack enemies in melee range because they use a different AI. Did some tests with their AI but so far, no success in having them use their melee attacks when in melee range. Or when they did, they became stuck after leaving melee range. Details here:

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72480-leaping-plants-do-have-a-melee-attack-after-all/

I feel like a custom AI could be created to make them behave better (so they'd attack any enemies in melee range between spell casts), but all my experiements in behavior.txt failed.

Edited February 16, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

13 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Restore the gold Confidence mod on the Inquisitor's Paralyzing Dread

increase the visual size of the circle so it is the same as the increased pickup radius in the PFP

edit the Spell Resistance Mastery description

All done, just forgot to document.

13 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

"Collateral damage" for Light characters

Done.  I think the joke either went over my head or I thought it was so dumb that I changed in EE, and it leaked over into PFP texts.

13 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

"Victims" for Shadow characters

Doesn't look like I ever changed that one.

13 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

The dual wield item bonus fixes

I can't find any issue with the dual wield usagebits, it's been the same since vanilla.

usagebits = 65423,  binary = 1111111110001111

That should be allowed for Seraphim, Dryad, Shadow Warrior, Inquisitor, and excluded for the rest.

13 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Potentially add the generic enemy "tauntall" voice lines to the same pool as their "attackshout" voice lines

I'll try a find/replace operation in soundprofile.txt as follows:

event = "TAUNT" --> event = "SHOUT_ATTACK"

This should avoid activating any of the character or alignment-specific lines, and also will not affect the player characters since they don't use events by those names.

It will also double or even triple the amount of lines spoken by enemies.  Altogether 808 new lines.  Some of these are so corny. 

[idbeholdME 389]

13 hours ago, Flix said:

Doesn't look like I ever changed that one.

Hmm, I was pretty sure it used to be victims for Shadow characters. Maybe in the vanilla Sacred 2 without I&B? This post from 2010 seems to confirm my memory:

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/15488-detailed-kill-count/&do=findComment&comment=6892443

 

What about the NPC damage scalar? It is actually quite important for the true vanilla feel. Makes all enemy in-fighting much more interesting and also restores stressing about quest NPCs dying on you 

 

13 hours ago, Flix said:

It will also double or even triple the amount of lines spoken by enemies.  Altogether 808 new lines.  Some of these are so corny. 

Indeed. The amount of voice lines recorded for this game is simply staggering (1.1 GB). Even sadder the fact that a very large chunk of them actually went completely unused, or there is little to no opportunity to ever hear them (like enemytype_helfpriest/helfguard). So finding excuses to add more of them so they can play in the game is always a good thing

So I take it you managed to implement the generic TAUNT lines to play in the same pool as SHOUT_ATTACK? If so, then that's incredible.

I assume the character/alignment specific ones can't be used as there is no way for the enemies to discern, what alignment/character you're playing when it comes to voice lines (tauntbad/good, taunt<class>)?

 

Also, one more observation about voice line behavior in the past couple months. To stop them from being interrupted when using weapon CAs, you have to teleport somewhere after game load to stop that. No idea why, but it just works. Until you teleport, they will be regularly interrupted and once you do, they will mostly play as they should. They can even overlay without being interrupted at all if the chance procs quickly in succession.

BTW: If you want to hear the Temple Guardian voice without the filter, give quest_1622_voice_victory_tg a listen :O

Edited February 17, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

6 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Hmm, I was pretty sure it used to be victims for Shadow characters.

Can you please share a quick screenshot of the text your Shadow character sees for this tooltip?  I'd like to compare it with the hash I'm looking at.

What I meant was it should be Victims currently, and should have always been Victims.

6 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

So I take it you managed to implement the generic TAUNT lines to play in the same pool as SHOUT_ATTACK?

I'll have to test, but that's the plan.  The fact the game expects text hashes for spoken lines might complicate things.  I may have to reshuffle all the lines in global.res which would take forever.  That's 800+ lines and then 7 languages.

Alternatively, I also have a theory that the game may require the file name to match the loka-ID of the text to be encoded.  If so, then the lines should work without any further work needed.

But, if this does turn out to be true, this would explain why my quest_victory player voice fixes didn't work, which would mean I'd have to rename the associated ogg files for those quests, and also change the file name references in the soundresources.txt file for each localization.

6 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

What about the NPC damage scalar? It is actually quite important for the true vanilla feel. Makes all enemy in-fighting much more interesting and also restores stressing about quest NPCs dying on you

It makes me physically sick to release a mod with that sadistic of a value, but I'll bump it back up some.  Enjoy all the town guards being murdered and spending 75 healing potions on each escort quest. 

 

@dimitrius154  Related to the discussion about spoken lines and hashes in global.res, I wanted to draw your attention to the fact the CM Patch texts we have been working from have deleted from global.res:

• 619 entries which read: *Scream*.  The hashes for these entries match the Loka-IDs for various "screamdeath", "screamwounded", and "screamattack" sound resources.  For example npc_highelven_male_screamattack01, hash 1572292267 is present in vanilla texts, but not in CM Patch and later.  I genuinely don't know if these need to be in global.res or not.  I have heard monsters and NPC's give death screams, after all.
• Hundreds of entries that read similar to the following: 3868593466    <pant>  I don't know what the Loka-Ids for these entries are, or if they're needed to trigger any audio.  But I recollect instances of the player character panting after running for a long period of time in Sacred 1.

[idbeholdME 389]

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Can you please share a quick screenshot of the text your Shadow character sees for this tooltip?  I'd like to compare it with the hash I'm looking at.

What I meant was it should be Victims currently, and should have always been Victims.

Sorry, it actually is Victims for Shadow characters, my bad. Means that only changing the kills to collateral damage for Light characters is needed.

1 hour ago, Flix said:

It makes me physically sick to release a mod with that sadistic of a value, but I'll bump it back up some.  Enjoy all the town guards being murdered and spending 75 healing potions on each escort quest. 

Not to worry, go all the way to the vanilla value - 500. I've been playing with the NpcFightDamageDownScaling = 500 ever since it has been brought up in this thread and it is actually fine. The only quest that becomes really problematic is the family you have to rescue from the undead attack near the lake northeast of Clearview in act 1. It becomes very hard to kill the skeletons before they murder the family, but it's part of the charm. Otherwise, most quest NPCs can take a few hits and it's nothing a quick finger on health potions can't fix.

But more importantly, NPCs hostile to each other is actually meaningful and can realistically kill each other. Really kicks up the immersion factor.

 

And commendations for the effort with the voice lines

Edited February 17, 2023 by idbeholdME

[dimitrius154 612]

13 hours ago, Flix said:

I genuinely don't know if these need to be in global.res or not.

They definitely should be present. The sound playing function is checking for each corresponding hash, no hash, no sound.

 

[dimitrius154 612]

13 hours ago, Flix said:

I also have a theory that the game may require the file name to match the loka-ID of the text to be encoded. 

That's the way it is.

[Flix 5,116]

3 hours ago, dimitrius154 said:

They definitely should be present. The sound playing function is checking for each corresponding hash, no hash, no sound.

3 hours ago, dimitrius154 said:

That's the way it is.

  Good to have confirmations but that means a lot of tedious work ahead. 

[idbeholdME 389]

Discovered one more Monolith that does not have a location screenshot in the load menu. I've seen you add them to some who were missing screens in the past releases, so noting this one here too:

   

 

----------------

Also, the Inquisitor's Doppelganger can mutate when exposed to T-Energy, at which point it loses its weapons, freezes in place and does nothing, so you have to recast it. Could the clone be prevented from mutating?

Edited February 22, 2023 by idbeholdME

[dimitrius154 612]

24 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

Could the clone be prevented from mutating?

By making it a Ghost, or a T-Mutant. 

[Flix 5,116]

4 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Discovered one more Monolith that does not have a location screenshot in the load menu. I've seen you add them to some who were missing screens in the past releases, so noting this one here too:

   

 

----------------

Also, the Inquisitor's Doppelganger can mutate when exposed to T-Energy, at which point it loses its weapons, freezes in place and does nothing, so you have to recast it. Could the clone be prevented from mutating?

Will fix both in upcoming release.

Doppelganger has incorrect T-Energy creature ID, it should be set to himself (1929) to prevent mutation, instead it's set to the Inquisitor's ID (51), so he's sort of mutating into a stock standard Inquisitor with no gear.

EDIT: Got the thumbnail added. Funny enough all the thumbnails were present in the vanilla game with correct names and extensions but something must have been wrong with the encoding for about 6 of them because they don't show up unless replaced with a fresh TGA file.

[idbeholdME 389]

One more case of unarmed NPCs which probably should have weapons - the Cut Off quest in act 1. The three soldiers you are supposed to help don't have their usual guard swords but just run around trying to punch Kobolds to death

[Flix 5,116]

PFP v1.4 is released!

All links have been updated in the first post.

Among the bug fixes, this release also adds support for several languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian.

These translations contain all the text fixes (but none of the extra bits) from the Community Patch and Enhanced Edition provided by fans over the years.

Thanks to @idbeholdME for rigorous testing and the relentless reporting.

[jwiz 68]

Great job Flix, it must have been really painful to restore all the missing text files from the original sources.

Small detail, though, the download link description in the starting thread should be updated from v 1.3 to v. 1.4 as well to avoid confusion.

 

[Vishanka 236]

Thanks for the 1.4

I finally managed to install Sacred on win11 and as I lost my savegames I will have the opportunity to test it from scratch.

[denoshir 4]

Hi I'm new here. A query... can this patch be merged with the CM patch? or is it better to have it separately?something else the sacred 2 EE can be used together or with some other mod? From now on thank you very much

[Timotheus 416]

Since the purist fix pack is focused on giving you the optimal vanilla experience, where the community patch goes the complete opposite direction. Merging them isn't possible.

The S2EE mod requires the CM patch, other than that the question is fairly broad. What other mods are you looking to use?

[Flix 5,116]

18 hours ago, denoshir said:

Hi I'm new here. A query... can this patch be merged with the CM patch? or is it better to have it separately?something else the sacred 2 EE can be used together or with some other mod? From now on thank you very much

 

Hello and welcome.

Timo is right, you don't want to combine Purist Fixpack with any other mods.

I develop this mod in parallel with Enhanced Edition, so if you install CM Patch 1.60 + Enhanced Edition 3.2, you will have all the same fixes that Purist Fixpack offers.

The difference is that PFP is only fixes, whereas CMP+ EE additionally offers a lot of new content and gameplay changes.

[gogoblender 3,069]

On 3/7/2023 at 10:58 PM, denoshir said:

Hi I'm new here. A query... can this patch be merged with the CM patch? or is it better to have it separately?something else the sacred 2 EE can be used together or with some other mod? From now on thank you very much

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelcome to our little Sacred corner of the Universe!

HOping you're able to find that perfect mixing for this game you're seeking 

gogo

[jwiz 68]

@Flix

do you have a list which speech text resources differ between the lastest EE mod and the PFP?

 

I was thinking of doing a spell check for the german localized version of the PFP mod as well, but I'm loathe to slog through 55k text strings again.

 

Edited March 25, 2023 by jwiz

[Flix 5,116]

1 hour ago, jwiz said:

@Flix

do you have a list which speech text resources differ between the lastest EE mod and the PFP?

I was thinking of doing a spell check for the german localized version of the PFP mod as well, but I'm loathe to slog through 55k text strings again.

Well, I can share my "to-do list" that I compiled when I converted all EE texts to PFP. It's possible I caught some more things during the work that I didn't document here, but it should be most of it. You can check it out and judge what might be more work:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12z2V4EL6pgUSlpWnlXSfvflyUXb3Axh6/view?usp=sharing

I mostly just listed the hashes, not the entire contents of the string. Since I had several languages to work with, the hash was the important thing.

The "Add" and "Delete" sections should be obvious: entire strings were either added or deleted. 

"Restore" means I kept the hash but changed the contents of the string back to vanilla.

"Move" means the contents of one string were moved to another hash. A necessary evil, since the CM Patch (and therefore EE) liked to overwrite vanilla stuff that I preserved in PFP.

Nevermind the Hungarian bits at the end, that was from me adding the Goblinoid book and the Ghost Whisperings texts; Hungarian just happened to be the final language I translated. Most of it was already present in vanilla but needed to be moved around.  In EE/PFP/D2F those strings are all present and in the same spots.

[Lindor 438]

I'm working on questscripts.txt fixes and readibility cleanup. The function CM_convertPosition_To_SimpleTable has an unused variable I. Just delete the line "local I". Also interesting for EE and Addendum (@dimitrius154)

BTW maybe I'm able to shorten this function and speed it up significantly.

EDIT why does this forum convert my lower case letter I to an upper case letter? When I say "local I", "I" is meant as a lower case letter.

Edited May 20, 2023 by Lindor

[Timotheus 416]

Doesn't that have something to do with your language settings? My phone sometimes gets confused as I use Dutch and English frequently, sometimes both in the same message as the wife and I have somehow grown into a bilingual way of talking with eachother. It'll start correcting similar to what you're experiencing.