ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So as you probably don't recall, over in the discussion thread for my Melinda on the Map addon, Effigy suggested applying the same treatment to the Lost Merchant quest. Now, at the time that struck me as overkill and mission creep; on reflection, though, sometimes overkill is just extra kill in case you need it, and I've rarely objected to that. The mission-creep objection stands, though, so I split it off into a separate addon, Merchant on the Map.

Merchant on the Map works basically the same way as Melinda on the Map, and they can be used together or separately. I couldn't find a trap door tile to use for the zone entrance, but the tile for the pressure plate trap is partly transparent and produces a nice trap-door-ish effect when overlaid on most passable wilderness terrain tiles, so I went with that.

[Technical info:]

...So, um, yeah, it turns out that the game engine is not, as I thought it was, checking for an existing zone entrance on the map before placing the quest zone entrance. Which means one of the side dungeons could get clobbered. v1a, just released, should fix that. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

The dialog announcing the zone appears even on Embers of Rage. This probably needs a condition to only trigger for the AoA campaign.

Effigy wrote:The dialog announcing the zone appears even on Embers of Rage. This probably needs a condition to only trigger for the AoA campaign.

[sound F/X: source diving] Hmm, fair point. No danger of running into the quest zone itself, at least, as it's on the continent. I gather we also need to disable it for Ashes, then? Will we need to do the same for Melinda on the Map?

Ashes incorporates into the AoA campaign, so it's not problem there. It would only be an issue for separate campaigns, such as Embers and probably Arena and Infinite Dungeon.

Be kinda' surprised if it's a problem for arena or the ID, though. No world map for those 'uns, ehehe.

Ah, right. Well, the necessary check would probably be checking specifically for the AoA campaign regardless.

Effigy wrote:Ashes incorporates into the AoA campaign, so it's not problem there.

[sound F/X: source diving] Ah, yes, Ashes doesn't add a world descriptor to the Campaign drop-down, so it's still in the Maj'Eyal campaign. And as Frumple notes, Arena and Infinite Dungeon don't enter the world map, so they won't trip over this, and thus the only thing we need to check for is the Maj'Eyal world descriptor. That's pushed out as v1a.1. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

This is so good.

One minor quibble: a Yeek will get the "alliance patrol" pop-up while still on Yeek Island which should have never seen an alliance patrol.

Not sure what the right thing to do would be. Maybe have the pop-ups only appear when you enter an Alliance town? So the dungeons would be sitting there for a span of time before you get the pop-up, which is realistic from an in-universe perspective but sounds more annoying to code. I dunno.

Doctornull wrote:One minor quibble: a Yeek will get the "alliance patrol" pop-up while still on Yeek Island which should have never seen an alliance patrol.

Not sure what the right thing to do would be. Maybe have the pop-ups only appear when you enter an Alliance town? So the dungeons would be sitting there for a span of time before you get the pop-up, which is realistic from an in-universe perspective but sounds more annoying to code. I dunno.

[sound F/X: source diving] Ouch, that gets tricky. The dialog is popped up in the same event that places the zone entrance on the world map; trying to postpone the dialog until later could very quickly drift into Rube Goldberg territory. Let me think about it.

Zizzo wrote:

Doctornull wrote:One minor quibble: a Yeek will get the "alliance patrol" pop-up while still on Yeek Island which should have never seen an alliance patrol.

Not sure what the right thing to do would be. Maybe have the pop-ups only appear when you enter an Alliance town? So the dungeons would be sitting there for a span of time before you get the pop-up, which is realistic from an in-universe perspective but sounds more annoying to code. I dunno.

[sound F/X: source diving] Ouch, that gets tricky. The dialog is popped up in the same event that places the zone entrance on the world map; trying to postpone the dialog until later could very quickly drift into Rube Goldberg territory. Let me think about it.

No rush.

It's not even QoL, it's just fridge-logic.

Doctornull wrote:No rush.

It's not even QoL, it's just fridge-logic.

Ironically, I think DarkGod just inadvertently fixed this problem for us. See, the 1.6 release modifies the invisible wandering "encounter" for the merchant quest that we're replacing, increasing its min_level from 6 to 10; v1b tracks this by correspondingly increasing the level at which we add the quest zone to the world map. I don't think even the most industrious Yeek will be able to get to level 10 before crossing over to the mainland.

So apparently 1.7 bumps up the minimum level of the lost merchant encounter again, from 10 to 18. [Presumably to balance the absurdly increased deadliness of the Assassin Lord? Dunno if it'll be enough; I was going in at level 15-16 before and still getting curbstomped… ] Anyway, v1c adjusts our zone entrance replacement to match, along with the addition of localization support.

Extremely small fix in v1c.1, fixing a typo in the dialog popup when the zone is placed on the map: "a merchant from Lost Hope [sic] has been kidnapped". We Apologize for the Loss of Hope.™