NEW Project: Sacred 2 Purist Fixpack

[idbeholdME 387]

On 2/15/2022 at 12:29 AM, Flix said:

Sorry, by Addendum I mean Dmitriy's Mod. 

Ah, thanks for the info.

So far, I am continuing playing my ranged Shadow Warrior (currently level 20). Still haven't dropped a single ranged energy weapon to test with Frenzied Rampage (RNG hates me). But other than the general FR behavior shenanigans with pretty much everything ranged (described in the edit of my previous post), all else seems to be running smoothly and without issues.

Any thoughts on the double hit mods actually working with ranged attacks of FR? It seems to contradict any info available online (which claims ranged attacks can never Double Hit), which I find very weird since it is the vanilla behavior. As for the PFP, the text of the mod should probably be changed back, because it currently says it only works with melee.

EDIT:

Energy weapons seems fine. Same behavior as Bows.

 

EDIT 2:

Had a strange thing happen today. The "Mutated Black Bear" quest just gave me 2 Set Items and 2 Unique Items as a reward. Not sure what that was about.

Just turned in the Kobold Chieftain quest and the same thing happened again. 2 Set Items and 2 Unique Items in the reward. I don't really remember this ever happening to me before. Anyone else encountered this?

Edited February 16, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Vishanka 236]

On 2/15/2022 at 2:07 AM, idbeholdME said:

Just turned in the Kobold Chieftain quest and the same thing happened again. 2 Set Items and 2 Unique Items in the reward. I don't really remember this ever happening to me before. Anyone else encountered this?

Quests have always been the best source for set items at least, and sometimes uniques, although there seems to be some kind of "common uniques" from quests, I only get the same few uniques.

The amount of  items varies for me from 0 to 4.

Higher Star Quests are more likely to drop sets.

I don't remember that to have been different, I used to grind the Bloodforest questline for items.

[idbeholdME 387]

3 hours ago, Vishanka said:

Quests have always been the best source for set items at least, and sometimes uniques, although there seems to be some kind of "common uniques" from quests, I only get the same few uniques.

The amount of  items varies for me from 0 to 4.

Higher Star Quests are more likely to drop sets.

I don't remember that to have been different, I used to grind the Bloodforest questline for items.

Quests were definitely a good source, but I don't remember ever seeing 4 at once. Guess it must have been a changed in Ice & Blood, which I've played a lot less compared to just Fallen Angel. Not that I'm complaining and it seems like it's normal from what you're saying, so all good. At least quests are a bit more worthwhile to do now  

As I'm playing through the campaign, I've so far got 2 quests that gave me 4 items and a decent amount of them gave me 2 (always 1 set and 1 unique).

 

EDIT:

Another strange thing just happened. Playing the Shadow campaign, I just finished the "Thwarted Attack Plans" quest. But I also had Meliondor from the "Unexpected News" quest with me at the time. After clearing up the enemies in the battle in front of the camp, all the Inquisition troops threw themselves at Meliondor (the poor guy). They are non-stop attacking him but doing no damage to him at all. Not sure if this was always happening or is a new bug. It doesn't really matter as they can't kill him, but kinda funny xD. I'd assume that Meliondor was probably the most "perished" escort NPC in the game, considering where you get him and how far you have to walk with him. The poor guy doesn't deserve this 

Edited February 16, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

35 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

As I'm playing through the campaign, I've so far got 2 quests that gave me 4 items and a decent amount of them gave me 2 (always 1 set and 1 unique).

I found the problem there.  Will be fixed in next release.  Until then enjoy all the loot.

[idbeholdME 387]

33 minutes ago, Flix said:

I found the problem there.  Will be fixed in next release.  Until then enjoy all the loot.

Oh? So it actually was a bug? Good to hear that my memory actually wasn't tricking me.

Also forgot to mention, that when the drops happened, there were very often duplicates, which was another thing that tipped me off.

[Flix 5,116]

Yeah, I tried to also add the unique armor droplist as a possible reward for quests, but instead of choosing between the two lists, the game just drops one of each.  This was just meant for EE anyway, it never should have been added to PFP.

[Vishanka 236]

50 minutes ago, Flix said:

I tried to also add the unique armor droplist as a possible reward for quests, but instead of choosing between the two lists, the game just drops one of each.  This was just meant for EE anyway, it never should have been added to PFP.

I always got the same unique armor pieces from the quests (as Seraphim: Blade Breaker, Aelfren's Corsage, Bodhie's Vestment and Muadib's Visions), never anything else.

I read it that no uniques will drop from quests anymore, but you could check if there's a problem with the other items for EE or if it was just very bad luck. I have about 30 units of Blade Breaker and 20 Bodhie's Vestment.

[Flix 5,116]

48 minutes ago, Vishanka said:

I always got the same unique armor pieces from the quests (as Seraphim: Blade Breaker, Aelfren's Corsage, Bodhie's Vestment and Muadib's Visions), never anything else.

I read it that no uniques will drop from quests anymore, but you could check if there's a problem with the other items for EE or if it was just very bad luck. I have about 30 units of Blade Breaker and 20 Bodhie's Vestment.

All unique armor pieces are present in that drop list, and they all have the same weighted probability (well except for the newer CM helmets which were slightly more rare).  It was actually an unused list containing all unique armor that I thought I could put to good use.  1538,{ -- droplist_unique_armor

When dropping from enemies & chests, unique armor is grouped together with rare/set armor in a different droplist.  1475,{ -- Droplist_all_armour_from_rare

There's actually yet a third group of droplists used for merchants (these are organized by equipment type rather than rarity), and I followed the existing convention of including all unique/set/legendaries in these lists even though merchants can't actually sell items of that tier.

At any rate I'm going to return it to just selecting quest rewards from the "All Set" droplist - which includes every set item in the game and nothing else. 1498,{ -- Droplist_all_set . This is the only time this list is called upon.

I think having two droplists within the same drop pattern was making it freak out when it came time to hand out quest rewards.

[idbeholdME 387]

15 hours ago, Vishanka said:

I read it that no uniques will drop from quests anymore, but you could check if there's a problem with the other items for EE or if it was just very bad luck. I have about 30 units of Blade Breaker and 20 Bodhie's Vestment.

Same trend here. A couple of items seem to get repeated quite often in a lot of quests reward drops.

But as a fix is in the works already, I assume the behavior of quest rewards will be the same as in vanilla.

 

EDIT:

I'll keep playing for now and just discard any Uniques I get from quests as if they didn't drop. Really enjoying my ranged Shadow Warrior so can't wait for the next release before continuing playing

Edited February 17, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

3 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

But I also had Meliondor from the "Unexpected News" quest with me at the time. After clearing up the enemies in the battle in front of the camp, all the Inquisition troops threw themselves at Meliondor (the poor guy). They are non-stop attacking him but doing no damage to him at all. Not sure if this was always happening or is a new bug. It doesn't really matter as they can't kill him, but kinda funny xD. I'd assume that Meliondor was probably the most "perished" escort NPC in the game, considering where you get him and how far you have to walk with him. The poor guy doesn't deserve this

Oh, Meliondor, whatever shall we do with you?

I believe I can set his faction to something that doesn't provoke hostility.  Will look into it for next release.

[idbeholdME 387]

I have one question about this change in the PFP:

All sources of "Experience per Kill," whether from equipment, potions, statues, or combat arts, will now stack correctly, rather than overriding one another.

I assume, this makes it no longer possible to maintain the statue buff indefinitely using mentor potions? I remember being able to use an experience statue, gain double XP and as long as I prevented the buff from dropping using mentor potions, it would maintain the +100% XP instead of the +50%. Correct?

Also, I assume it makes the mods like Tutor or Insight worth considering now, as they stack with other sources. Correct?

Edited February 18, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Vishanka 236]

I keep experiencing NPCs suddenly sliding away from my position, sometimes enemies, sometimes merchants.

They just... slide away indefinitely into a random direction over the map.
Once it was the blacksmith and he slid from the Dragon Islands downwards until I could not see his symbol anymore. He was gone for the rest of the session.

Another time it was a questmob and I could not complete the quest anymore.

I notice that every day once or twice, really strange.

 

Edited February 18, 2022 by Vishanka

[Hooyaah 2,816]

I remember when I was playing Sacred II Fallen Angel, before the Ice & Blood expansion, I would witness a random character (not involved in an active quest) slide by me on rare occasions and at a rate of speed way too fast to pursue. However, I haven't seen in in FPF as of yet.

[idbeholdME 387]

The sliding characters is a thing I also remember, yes. But it was very rare. I think with the PFP, I encountered it once so far (a random NPC in Sloeford just flew away). But it's fixed on game restart, should it affect any important NPC.

One more thing. As I keep playing and exploring the map, I noticed that the valid teleport locations, ports etc. always show their labels (area names) on the fullscreen map, including the active resurrection monolith. It somewhat clutters up the map as I explore more and more locations. Especially the "Activated Resurrection Monolith" one covers up a ton of the space on the map (it goes all the way from Sloeford past Thylysium on full zoom out) . As these labels always stay the same size, the more you zoom out, the more of the map is effectively covered by them. These labels only showed when you hovered over the respective areas in the vanilla game. Would it be possible to revert this to the original behavior? Meaning that they would show only when you hover over them? It makes looking at the map to look for quests a bit more annoying than it should be, constantly having to change zoom levels etc. to see whether a quest circle is obstructed by the label or not or when you are simply in the surrounding area and the label is right on top of your character indicator.

I assume this was a change that got carried over from the CM Patch (it happened there too) and is related to the teleport location changes. So my hopes for being able to change this are slim, as map behavior is in one of the .dll files I think. But still, thought I'd ask, just in case. I am OK with the teleport changes, but getting rid of the permanently displaying labels would be nice  

 

And one more minor, map related thing. The 2 buttons in the top right (eye and pin) behave very strangely. When you hover your mouse over either of them, it keeps constantly swapping the highlight between the two, making it a lottery as to which one you will press once you click. It happened to me in vanilla too so it's not strictly PFP related, but it was always a very minor thing.

Edited February 19, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

On 2/18/2022 at 11:27 AM, idbeholdME said:

Also, I assume it makes the mods like Tutor or Insight worth considering now, as they stack with other sources. Correct?

Yes. Previously other sources of XP Per kill didn't even work at all if these mods were active.

13 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

As these labels always stay the same size, the more you zoom out, the more of the map is effectively covered by them.

Yeah I'm not a big fan of that either. That one is right in the main exe IIRC.

One solution is not to zoom all the way out if you need to examine the map - after all what use is it to zoom that far out if you need to closely examine the area around Thylysium? 

It is also helpful to turn off world objects in the top right corner.  This is useful if you're just looking for quest markers or merchants.

On 2/18/2022 at 3:17 PM, Vishanka said:

I keep experiencing NPCs suddenly sliding away from my position, sometimes enemies, sometimes merchants.

That's a bizarre report, the first time I've ever heard of it and not something I've seen myself in all these years of playing.  I'm stumped on that one.

[idbeholdME 387]

32 minutes ago, Flix said:

Yes. Previously other sources of XP Per kill didn't even work at all if these mods were active.

OK. I've tested the statue prolongation technique and it still works. Using a statue and then not dropping the buff using mentor pots still results in +100% as long as you keep the effect. Would the XP mods stack on top of that too?

35 minutes ago, Flix said:

Yeah I'm not a big fan of that either. That one is right in the main exe IIRC.

One solution is not to zoom all the way out if you need to examine the map - after all what use is it to zoom that far out if you need to closely examine the area around Thylysium? 

It is also helpful to turn off world objects in the top right corner.  This is useful if you're just looking for quest markers or merchants.

Mostly to just bask in the glory of how much of the map I've already explored. It was way better to look at without all the labels. World Objects hides it, yes, but having to constantly flip it on and off gets tedious after a while. The area names are not THAT bad, but the "Activated Resurrection Monolith" is egregiously long. Always obscures the surrounding area when moving around it and makes me not want to click them, honestly, because it will move the label to the area I am currently in 

 

[Vishanka 236]

6 hours ago, Flix said:

That's a bizarre report, the first time I've ever heard of it and not something I've seen myself in all these years of playing.  I'm stumped on that one.

I'll try to record it the next time I see it I haven't noticed anything that would cause that behavoir. It's like they glitch through the map but sideways, their model animations also stop.

[jwiz 68]

I just had a quick look at the purist pack and am seeing some ugly textural artefacts on the upper body skins of the dryad and highelf, no matter if I choose default or elite textures.

This had not been the case before.

P.S. happens also on the Seraphim though less noticable due to more diverse body armour

 

Edited February 21, 2022 by jwiz

[Vishanka 236]

1 hour ago, jwiz said:

P.S. happens also on the Seraphim though less noticable due to more diverse body armour

Noticed it too but I wasn't sure if it was that way before.

Seems to be some issue with the shadows

[jwiz 68]

Yep, now that I kept looking for it, I can see it on NPCs too.

Seems to me something is off with bump mapping.

 

Edited February 21, 2022 by jwiz

[idbeholdME 387]

It is the shadows, yes. But if I remember correctly, the game always did that. Here is an example from my Shadow Warrior, shadows set on Very High:

 

Most noticeable on the face and under the shoulder plates. Generally whenever a light source is obstructed from above.

Just wait for night, stand under a lantern or some other light source and zoom in on the face. The shadows keep shimmering nearly constantly.

I am 99% sure this is not a PFP issue but an issue in the game itself about how it renders shadows. Because I remember noticing it on a High Elf even when I played just the base Sacred 2: Fallen Angel like 10 years ago.

Putting shadows on medium mostly eliminates the shadow shimmer but the lines can still be visible sometimes. And you also lose out on the overall shadow quality. Your choice. Just compare the face between the screenshots.

It happens on both Very High and High shadows settings. Only on medium and below does it go away. Probably an effect that was intended to make shadows look more realistic on obstructed objects, but did not turn out very well.

 

Edited February 21, 2022 by idbeholdME

[jwiz 68]

Yes, the shadows/reflections have always been somewhat bugged.

But the textural artefacts I mentioned above are gone when I deinstall the PFP.

You might just try it for yourself on a newly created highelf or dryad.

 

[idbeholdME 387]

2 hours ago, jwiz said:

Yes, the shadows/reflections have always been somewhat bugged.

But the textural artefacts I mentioned above are gone when I deinstall the PFP.

You might just try it for yourself on a newly created highelf or dryad.

 

Just tried and you are correct. I lumped the "shimmer" issue with the one you are describing under one, but that is obviously not the case.

The "shimmer" I showed on the Shadow Warrior was 100% always happening. But the one with the lines is definitely caused by something in the PFP.

Even without the PFP, you can still spot the effect happening above the cleavage area of the HE, but much, much less visible. Like 90% less. Some change in the PFP must have amplified this effect drastically.

 

EDIT:

The "under a light source at night" issue is yet another weird shadow thing that happens in vanilla too. Here is an example:

And without helmet:

 

For some reason, the shadows cast by the helmet, armor pieces or facial features like nose are extremely pixelated. These pixelated dynamic shadows also completely disappear, same as the shimmer effect I described above, when shadows are on medium quality or lower.

However, it's not related to the original issue with the lines described above (which seems almost exclusive to the PFP), nor the shimmer effect in my previous screenshots. Just posting this here to show what I meant by the "under a light source at night".

Edited February 21, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Flix 5,116]

Probably from the diffuse maps being edited to prevent skin color from bleeding onto eyes and teeth. Something with the compression perhaps. Might be the normal maps though, we'll see.

[idbeholdME 387]

1 hour ago, Flix said:

Probably from the diffuse maps being edited to prevent skin color from bleeding onto eyes and teeth. Something with the compression perhaps. Might be the normal maps though, we'll see.

Thanks for looking into it. I noticed it too, but attributed it to the overall iffy shadow behavior in the game.

Here is quick side by side for reference. As said above, NPCs are also affected:

Vanilla:

 

PFP:

Edited February 21, 2022 by idbeholdME