Dungeon Adventure MOD MOD

[Lutefisk Mafia]

I am posting this to share some progress I've made with a FfH2 MOD MOD I've been working on.

Basically, I am trying to convert the game to make it more of a dungeon adventure. As I get into this more, I realize what an insane amount of work it is and just how finicky the Civ4 engine can be (often spits out new NIFs).

Pre-Alpha release here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=6820283&postcount=400
patch "a" (unzip into "Adventure" subfolder of Mods directory) = http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=69364

A replacement shortcut is posted below. It may resolve some Vista issues. On the other hand, it may not. Vista is like that.
http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=69467

Here is a link to the Intro Movie, posted on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhFzrzvS5nk

Here are some in-game videos that show certain features:

Claim function = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OI1BAPtwDA
Snack Rats and Weirdeer = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJK5T6Z8ETw
The Green Death = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R42BAWVEHZY
Bats = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmx_ygFFpl4
Altars = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsWZ5WWco6Q
Glyph and Trap = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMYvv7yN0M4
Lantern and Unknown Potion = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv5mdl04dkc

Here are some screenies:

Spoiler :

Starting Malakim Base Camp in Dungeon

WorldBuilder look at larger area

OooH! A Dragon's Lair!

Across the lava, kill the Azer, and get the Hammer. But how?

Explorer comes to a door

And, yes, these doors open!

Hmmn. A void in the central area, but no door?

Let's go up here and use the Thief's "Search" ability (one of the potion icons)

Hey! I found a secret door!

Anyway, I've added some neat things -- new textures and features, secret doors, regular doors, a few new potions and equipment, monster spawning sites.

I even figured out a way to make certain resources (like horses) moveable. The idea is that you can find horses in the dungeon and "pick them up." Either use them as a "mounted promotion" or drop them near your camp site to be used by your henchmen who hang out there. Leaving horses at the campsite can make it possible to upgrade along certain paths later in the game.

I envision a classic dungeon crawl along the lines of a very simplified D&D adventure. This mod would be more like a version of Rogue actually. (Bonus points if you are old enough to even know what Rogue is!)

Anyhow, I think I have a good start, but could use help and suggestions. I would be thrilled to collaborate with Kael and the FfH2 team, but don't know if they would be interested in working on yet another project.

But I'm happy to share my work, and would really appreciate any feedback. (Disclaimer: This is the first time I've done any work in XML or Python, so my approach to programming is: Bang on it until it works. The results are functional, but by no means elegant!)

Thanks!

 

[woodelf]

I think this looks super. And I do remember playing Rogue and Dungeon Hack and Nethack.

I don't have much to add right now, but if you need anything graphically let me know and I'll try to help you out.

 

[xienwolf]

Wow... kinda harsh you did all this work and .31 has a feature built into it to incorporate many things which you did, but it looks awesome, and I am sure that you can mix what you did with the new stuff to get some incredible results.

 

[kenken244]

The Dragon horde screenshot makes me wonder if you could steal his horde since he is not on it. You could stack them and give the horde the always visible tag so it will still appear even when arceron is stacked with it.

 

[Vehem]

This really does look excellent - nice work

 

[Lutefisk Mafia]

The Dragon horde screenshot makes me wonder if you could steal his horde since he is not on it. You could stack them and give the horde the always visible tag so it will still appear even when arceron is stacked with it.

This Archeron can move and chase people. The mod right now is coded so that only the human player can open doors. So Archeron has free run of only his room.... until you open the door that is.

It is possible for a fast character or a Thief (sneaking) to get the gold before Archeron can react. Adds to gameplay!

 

[Lutefisk Mafia]

Wow... kinda harsh you did all this work and .31 has a feature built into it to incorporate many things which you did, but it looks awesome, and I am sure that you can mix what you did with the new stuff to get some incredible results.

Oh. Well, crap.

I guess I will look forward to .31 then. Still, I might be able to salvage something worthwhile.

 

[woodelf]

Definitely don't despair! This is a great concept.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

Amazing Work!

 

[xienwolf]

Aye, it is great work. The walls, doors, abilities and all of that is still quite useful. I guess you had missed the post about "Adventure Mode" so here is a link to it.

 

[Kael]

This is amazing work and it doesn't conflict at all with what we are doing. "Adventure Mode" is a game option that makes things like this easier. It drops all units to single unit meshes (so there is never more than 1 unit in a group) and it doubles the scale of all objects.

The real work that you are doing around design of objects, unit abilities, etc is the real work and isnt done at all in the main mod. So Im hoping we will just make your job easier.

 

[Lutefisk Mafia]

This is amazing work and it doesn't conflict at all with what we are doing. "Adventure Mode" is a game option that makes things like this easier. It drops all units to single unit meshes (so there is never more than 1 unit in a group) and it doubles the scale of all objects.

The real work that you are doing around design of objects, unit abilities, etc is the real work and isnt done at all in the main mod. So Im hoping we will just make your job easier.

Thank you, Kael! That definitely cheers me up. And it seems like there is sufficient interest in something like this to justify further work on it. So, I'll keep plugging away at it and try to post updates on my progress in this thread from time to time.

BTW, to all of you folk on the FfH2 development team: What is it about adding new NIFs that the Civ4 engine hates so much? I swear, adding those doors was a royal pain. Is there a methodical way to do this that avoids conflicts? Quite frequently when I add new NIFs, the mod won't even load.

Anyway, thanks for the input so far and keep it coming. The more ideas and feedback the better!

 

[Lutefisk Mafia]

I think this looks super. And I do remember playing Rogue and Dungeon Hack and Nethack.

I don't have much to add right now, but if you need anything graphically let me know and I'll try to help you out.

Thank you kindly, woodelf! I count myself as one of the many who have much respect for your virtual paint-slinging skills.

And it is nice to know that I'm not the only one who wasted countless hours playing an ASCII dungeon game. Heh, good times.

 

[kenken244]

It might be cool to merge this with some things in afterworld.

 

[JDexter]

VERY nice concept! I'd definitely love it and I hope you manage to release a playable version at some point (no stress, but don't loose motivation ).

 

[thomas.berubeg]

Lutefisk mafia.

You might not be at that point yet, but an interesting idea for one of your scenarios could be the bannor journey through hell...

 

[Lutefisk Mafia]

It might be cool to merge this with some things in afterworld.

Heh. Already done to a certain point. If you take a very close look at the doors, you will see that they are a NIF stretched, partly re-skinned version of the "simple door" feature asset from Afterworld. You can still see the stringy things on top that are supposed to bit of rebar -- I colored them to look like stone so that they blend in better.

But aside from that, the intent is to give it more of an RPG feel than 4X, so definitely more like Afterworld.

 

[Kael]

Here is a treasure chest for you. Have fun!

 

[Lutefisk Mafia]

Here is a treasure chest for you. Have fun!

Ooh, I love it. Absolutely love it!

Thank you!

I can use this as a theme-matching "goody hut," which is awesome. You just saved me a massive amount of time, because I was trying to figure out how to coax a good container out of my only NIF program, SceneViewer. (Easier said than done.)

Mod Pimp and mind reader!

 

[Lutefisk Mafia]

Okay. So I have Kael's lovely Treasure Chest, which I have looked at and admired in SceneViewer, but I cant seem to introduce it into my mod correctly.

The approach I took was to first unzip the files, which produced the "treasure chest" folder with the chest NIF and DDS file, plus the boundshape.nif.

I copied the whole folder into the asets/art/structures/improvements folder. Having made only that change, I tried to load the mod. No go. It looks like it starts to access XML, but crashed to the Vista "this program has stopped working" pop-up.

I tried removing the boundshapes.nif and tried to restart. No luck.

I then changed the XML code in the Civ4artdefines_improvement.xml file under the "goody hut" entry to change the path of the nif file to the one in my new "treasure chest" folder. The kfm line was changed to a blank entry. Still no load.

Why will the program crash if you simply add a folder and a few files into a sub-folder of "assets," even if nothing in the XML is trying to access that file yet?

This is the issue that I have been running into again and again. I sometimes eventually get my stuff to work, but honestly have not been able to figure out exactly what I did that actually fixed it.

Any suggestions?