Porting ToME2 to the T4 engine

[Thorondor]

Thanks. I think the mouse-over skill that triggered the crash might have been attempting to phase door to avoid becoming a picnic for some hungry bears...

RE Items that I think should always be available in shops in Bree:
General store: food, a digger, and a light source, and potentially un-enchanted ammo
Either in temple or potion/scroll shop: word of recall, identify / (or offer a shop that provides ID facility), some sort of healing potion. I have no strong feelings about restore life levels/staff of ID
Magic shop: beginners cantrips. I'm undecided about prayer books as there's a lot of them and providing the inventory changes over regularly during the game am less concerned about this.

The idea about fixed items always being available at the start was to remove certain scenarios that could make a character potentially unviable (no digger, light source, food) at no fault of the player, without making the game substantially easier.

[Zizzo]

Urk. I don't know why I thought this one was going to be a quick and straightforward update, but I think I've finally got it all nailed down (famous last words… ). We Apologize for the Delay™:

Release 0.2.7 "Equivalent Exchange"

As promised, this release is mostly about Alchemists and the Alchemy skill. Alchemists get the talents Forge Item, Add Ego to Item, Recharge Wand/Staff, Extract Essences and Detach Rod Tip at skill level 1, and can buy the Artifact Creation ability (which has a prerequisite of Alchemy skill 40) to gain the Forge Artifact talent. Assorted notes:

• As in T2, trying to create a high-level item at a low Alchemy skill level has a chance of (literally) blowing up in your face, and as in T2, you can add gold to the process to reduce that chance. Unlike in T2, we provide an estimate of how much that chance will reduce for a given amount of gold; doing otherwise seemed mean.
• I've gone to some effort to prevent the infamous T2 "corpse-ordering" bug, in which the custom artifact finishing process could pull ingredients out of your inventory in the wrong order and make a hash of your inventory (for instance, pulling your dragon corpse for the Slay Evil flag and then pulling something completely wrong for the Slay Dragon flag). To solve this, we have the player explicitly specify the ingredient(s) to use for each flag if there's any ambiguity:

  

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  select-ingredient2.png (77 KiB) Viewed 10781 times

• As part of the preceding, artifact flag ingredients are pulled "live" out of your inventory as you choose the corresponding flags, and put back into your inventory if you change your mind. (I was going to try to clone the player's inventory and juggle that, but I realized that taking one ingredient from a stack of objects would "bleed through" to the real inventory anyway.) Of course, this brings with it the worrying prospect of erroring out of the create-artifact dialog and losing your selected ingredients to the ether, so I've made an effort to be extra-paranoid about covering my bases, including beefing up the ActorTalents:talentDialog() infrastructure to allow a dialog to have an on_error() method to clean up behind itself in case of error.
• The artifact creation dialog also allows "exploratory" testing — which is to say, it won't stop you from selecting flags or setting a pval for which you don't have enough experience or ingredients, it just won't let you finish the artifact in that state. This is a handy way to answer questions like, "How much more experience would I need to bump the pval up another step?" [This is a serendipitous side effect of having to retool the dialog yet again after my travails with atempting nested :talentDialog() calls… ]
• We also borrow the StatusBox UI element from the T4 module for some status messages; I'm pretty sure that's legit license-wise…

For even more fun: Those of you with long memories may remember my ToME:Arcanorum T2 module, which starts Alchemists with an Alchemic Arcanorum that can store essences and disgorge them later for use. Well, that turned out to be massively convenient for my T2 Alchemist characters, so I've reincarnated it as the Alchemic Arcanorum addon.

Also the usual batch of bugfixes, as tracked down by our intrepid bug finders:

• The Inertia Control configuration dialog was just never going to work the way I had it coded.
• Small typo that would have wrecked the Phase Door Spell.
• Was apparently generating Shadow Blades with no pval, which made their stealth flag useless (and potentially buggy if the code assumed the pval was present…).
• I think I was clobbering learned monster info on alertness by blindly resetting it every time the player learned anything about it.
• Further attempts to get wielding items from the floor working.
• Several object categories weren't appropriately flagged as being destroyed by various damage types: arrows and bolts by acid, bows/crossbows/slings by acid and fire, torches by fire, skeleton junk by acid, and empty bottles by cold.
• Uncursing objects was badly broken…
• When you use a void jumpgate and there's a monster standing on the other endpoint, it's supposed to be swapped back to where you came from. Well… it wasn't.
• Cleaned up some detritus from the artifact definitions that was leading to things like artifact weapons being displayed as though they had a base AC like armor.
• Also, it turns out that most artifact definitions don't actually specify the unharmed-by-fire/cold/acid/lightning flags, counting on the definition parsing code to add those in at load time. Which, needless to say, I wasn't doing.
• Was getting stacking badly wrong, as it turns out.
• "Ripple" effects from skill points (like the small boost in Magic skill you get from spending points in Sorcery) weren't being properly applied by the levelup dialog.
• Was botching the check for wielding 1-or-2-handed weapons with shields — specifically, I was assuming there would be a weapon there, which doesn't work if you're only wearing a shield.
• A few activateable ego items were missing crucial bits of activation-related infrastructure, notably Spectral weapons, weapons of the Thunderlords and Dragon horns.
• Thaumaturgy view spells were botched; I wasn't passing the damage type through properly.
• Was messing up knock-back handling from e.g. Tidal Wave or force-based thaumaturgy spells.
• We now make sure we can see an Actor before showing a tooltip for it.
• Was messing up application of the special extra-might racial flags for Hobbits (slings) and Wood-Elves (bows).
• Morphic Oils were slightly broken (by which I mean looking at their description at all threw a stack trace…)
• The "Clear settings" button on the character creation dialog now actually does something useful.
• Exploding ammo was just not not gonna work like that…
• Stores should no longer stock cursed items.

And unrelated extra features:

• Well, possibly not entirely unrelated: while implementing activations in Alchemy artifact building, I noticed I had left a lot of object activations unimplemented. That won't do. Notably, dragon scale mail breaths are now implemented, as are Rings of Acid, Flames, Ice and Lightning (and Teleportation, which I didn't even know about), Amulets of the Serpents, and the last of the tricky fixed artifact activations. Yes, even the One Ring.
• This in turn gave me the various infrastructure bits I need to implement some other tricky things: Rod Tips of Havoc, Scrolls of *Destruction*, earthquake junkarts the various enchant-armor/weapon scrolls, the Music spell Ambarkanta, Dwarves' Find Secret Passages talent, and the Probability Travel effect.
• And as long as I was in the neighborhood of Music spells, I really should have been able to implement Clairaudience before now…
• Also in the area of spells, turns out my check to prevent casting spells that aren't yet implemented is neatly skipped over by wands and staffs. Fortunately, the only unimplemented spell that can appear on wands and staffs was Magelock, so that's now implemented. (Well, mostly; glyphs of warding don't actually do anything yet… ).
• Also among my massive sweep of picking off unimplemented activations was the Rod Tip of Home Summoning. As a courtesy to the player (and to make implementation easier), the rod tip will access the home you've most recently visited, rather than the home in the town you've most recently visited. Not that dungeon towns are likely to have a hidden home in them when I eventually get around to implementing them, but still…
• Implementing the Crown of Numenor's activation revealed that I wasn't populating monster memory for what a monster can drop, which in turn revealed that I wasn't including that information in the monster tooltip.
• The 'identify' and '*identify*' damage types weren't implemented to affect objects on the floor; since *identify* is kind of important for learning alchemy recipes, that's now covered.
• Some race-based and object-conferred talents can be cast from hit points if you don't have enough mana; the talent description now mentions this, and you will be prompted to cast from hit points if you try to use the talent while low on mana.
• Quest monsters now use the same faction markers as uniques (so be sure to update your "Show faction markers" and "Show health bars" option settings accordingly) and include a "(quest monster)" note at the top of their tooltip.
• Un-ID'd wands and staffs with no charges will now pseudo-id as {empty} when you try to use them. This was picked up as part of fixing stacking; {empty} wands/staffs should now stack with ID'd wands/staffs with no charges.
• Objects will now be ID'd when you sell them to stores or donate them to a mathom house. Also, stores, homes and mathom houses should now sort their stock in the same order as player inventory.

Unsurprisingly, this update has a lot of moving parts, and I've got a really bad feeling that it's gonna break messily (especially after the second or third time retooling the artifact creation dialog… ). As always, here is a good place to report the inevitable bugs.

And as always, the .team file for the release is available from my site, along with the Subversion repo and WebSVN front-end thereto. And for those of you following along on SVN, the 0.2.7 release branch will get bug fixes for all the aforementioned inevitable bugs.

As for the next release, we have various requests from Steven Aus covering several things not yet implemented, including in no particular order:

• Carrying capacity.
• Runecraft, Necromancy, and the last of the spells that aren't yet covered.
• DeathMold movement and anything else DeathMold-related that I haven't covered yet.
• LostSouls and the Halls of Mandos.
• Various bits of missing map generation handling.

Also from Thorondor, we have requests for various as-yet-unimplemented stores, and for various guaranteed items in some Bree stores, which will probably a more general store overhaul to get restocking working properly. Any preferences on priority for these? Any other requests?

[Zizzo]

And some notes and questions looking ahead:

• Parchments is something I'll probably be looking at next. There are two ways I can approach implementing them: the T2 way, as objects that can be kept around and read/re-read as needed, or the T4 lore way, as objects that are read immediately and vanish when you pick them up, and which can be reviewed via some sort of "Show Lore" action from the <Esc> menu. Which would folks prefer?
• …Has anyone found the Phial of Galadriel yet? I'm no longer convinced I'm doing object level placement right for "always-artifact" objects like the Phial or the Ring of Flare, and I'm having some difficulty deciphering exactly how the T2 code handles that case. There are a handful of these artifacts; the Phial is the lowest-level (or one of the lowest), and so the one most likely to have been found by playtesters if I haven't botched things…

[Steven Aus]

What stat/s do Alchemists need to focus on?

[Zizzo]

What stat/s do Alchemists need to focus on?

…huh. Good question. I guess if you're planning to focus primarily on doing damage with wands and staffs, you should push INT and Magic-Device (the latter of which I'd recommend in any event), or if you're planning on building an artifact überweapon and poking monsters with it, you should push STR and DEX. You'll have the ability to manufacture stat potions on the fly eventually, so pushing stats is not an urgent priority.

[Thorondor]

Excellent to see another update - many thanks

[Thorondor]

Hi Zizzo,
I wonder if the thieves quest in Bree is broken at the moment; - have tried with rohanknight swordmaster and a sorcerer (x2). All monsters killed (tried detect monsters); but no stairs.
There's also an error appear when the mouse moves over one of the (presumably as yet unimplemented) rohanknight skills.
Cheers

[Zizzo]

I wonder if the thieves quest in Bree is broken at the moment; - have tried with rohanknight swordmaster and a sorcerer (x2). All monsters killed (tried detect monsters); but no stairs.

Dunno; I'll investigate.

There's also an error appear when the mouse moves over one of the (presumably as yet unimplemented) rohanknight skills.

Do you remember which talent it was? Or alternately, do you still have the stack trace?

[Thorondor]

I think it was the flash aura but crash occurred immediately during mouse-over

[Zizzo]

I think it was the flash aura but crash occurred immediately during mouse-over

[sound F/X: testing] Ah, small typo in the Flash Aura talent description. Fixed in SVN. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

I wonder if the thieves quest in Bree is broken at the moment; - have tried with rohanknight swordmaster and a sorcerer (x2). All monsters killed (tried detect monsters); but no stairs.

[sound F/X: testing] Found it. I did some internal infrastructure tweaks for quests that need to do something when a monster dies, and I got it wrong for the Bree house quest. Should be fixed in SVN. Other quests affected by the aforementioned tweaks are the princess/lost-sword quests, the Bree wights quest, and the Thrain quest in Dol Guldur; I think I got all those right, but let me know if any of them don't work.

[Thorondor]

Hi Zizzo,

A few bits n bobs over the last few weeks, - apologies for radio silence...:

I think this was attempting to get into the black market...
error = "Lua Error: /mod/class/Object.lua attempt to perform arithmetic on a nil value\
At [C]:-1 __add\
At /mod/class/Object.lua:1044 fct\
At /engine/Object.lua:182 forAllStack\
At /mod/class/Object.lua:1042 getPrice\
At /mod/class/Store.lua:257 allowStockObject\
At /mod/class/Store.lua:297 loadup\
At /mod/resolvers.lua:44 check\
At [string \"return function(self, x, y, what, ...) local ...\"]:1 checkAllEntities\
At /engine/Actor.lua:209 move\
At /mod/class/Actor.lua:460 move\
At /mod/class/Player.lua:289 moveDir\
At /mod/class/Player.lua:282 moveDir\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:829 move_or_scroll\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:848 \
At /engine/KeyBind.lua:230 "
seen = true
reported = false

I think this one was using a hotkey to target creeping coins - princess quest
error = "Lua Error: /mod/class/NPC.lua:349: attempt to concatenate local 's' (a nil value)\
At [C]:-1 __concat\
At /mod/class/NPC.lua:349 check\
At /engine/Map.lua:801 checkEntity\
At /engine/Tooltip.lua:313 check\
At /engine/Tooltip.lua:327 getTooltipAtMap\
At /engine/Tooltip.lua:284 displayAtMap\
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:66 targetDisplayTooltip\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:673 "
seen = true
reported = false

Can't remember what this one was:
error = "Lua Error: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:82: bad argument #2 to 'info' (number expected, got string)\
At [C]:-1 \
At [C]:-1 info\
At /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:82 getval\
At /mod/class/Actor.lua:1422 getTalentFullDescription\
At /data/hotkey-icons.lua:86 tooltipText\
At /mod/class/HotkeysIconsDisplay.lua:189 onMouse\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1293 fct\
At /engine/Mouse.lua:78 "
seen = true
reported = false

It's still occasionally possible to 'see' invisible creatures when they attack.

I haven't found the phial yet...
Parchments - I'd be happy with the T4 version of parchments - though haven't really used them much.

Ideas / Wishlist / ramblings...

Once the game is fully operational and debugged will you be incorporating the T4 tileset? It'd be very cool to blast things with a fireball / other spells as per the main game.
This game effectively could become your 'variant' so you could make other tweaks / improvements that aren't in the original TOME 2.3x (e.g. temporary floor effects after fireball similar to that of meteor strike in T4 - temporary burning floor which resolves after a few turns, spider webs that work as per T4 rather than being super-irritating

I also wonder if *long term* it'd be possible to incorporate additional skills to the fighting classes of Tome 2.3x e.g. flurry, shield bash (with a knockback), etc which might make fighting characters less one-dimensional.

I know that there's minimal chance of it happening but it would be really really ace if any bipedal race could have animal riding as a skill (perhaps in place of symbiosis); and it be possible to purchase a horse if a quest was done for Rohan, level of horse available to be dependent upon skill. Rohanknight starts with a horse + decent skill modifier. I think it should be an expensive skill as the benefits are huge.

Could travelling from town to town be achieved by 'buying' an escort (e.g. pay for e.g. rohan knights to take you from Rohan / Helms deep to another town for a hefty price), - perhaps the player could interface with this new 'shop' in a similar way to the Thunderlords. Just an idea, perhaps for limited cities only (as the Last Alliance quest effectively gives this effect once completed)

Could a very high stealth confer low level invisibility?

'Theme' Map option? (+ in Mordor lots of maps on the ground)
More unique levels / quests e.g. Save Helms Deep?
?Stop novice mindcrafters / paladins etc being at low levels of dungeons - they'd be terminated very quickly
Make most townspeople neutral (except urchins / agent of black market etc)

Only a few ideas, I don't expect them to occur / people to agree with them necessarily but as the module becomes closer to 2.3x in functionality you have the opportunity to develop it as you see fit

[Zizzo]

Hi Zizzo,

A few bits n bobs over the last few weeks, - apologies for radio silence...:

No worries. I needed an excuse to put off figuring out how to write a map generator for the Eöl quest anyway…

I think this was attempting to get into the black market...
error = "Lua Error: /mod/class/Object.lua attempt to perform arithmetic on a nil value\

[sound F/X: source diving] …it couldn't possibly have been trying to put a corpse in the black market, could it? Turns out I accidentally neglected to put a price on corpse-related objects, and it looks like the store stocking code was choking on a nil price. Fixed in SVN, if that's what the problem was.

I think this one was using a hotkey to target creeping coins - princess quest
error = "Lua Error: /mod/class/NPC.lua:349: attempt to concatenate local 's' (a nil value)\

[sound F/X: source diving] Ah, stupid typo in the NPC tooltip code; it was trying to tell you what kinds of stuff the monster drops, and I managed to screw up pluralizing "treasures". I'm astonished no one's tripped over that one before, actually. Fixed in SVN.

Can't remember what this one was:
error = "Lua Error: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:82: bad argument #2 to 'info' (number expected, got string)\

[sound F/X: source diving] Hmm, it looks like you were mousing over a talent icon on the hotkeys toolbar and something in the talent tooltip choked. At a guess, I must have my format arguments in the wrong order in the info() method of one of my talent definitions. Do you remember (or can you find out) which talent icon you moused over?

It's still occasionally possible to 'see' invisible creatures when they attack.

Now, when you say "'see' invisible creatures", do you mean that the tile/character for the monster is displayed when it shouldn't be, or that the monster's name appears in messages like "The Clear icky thing hits you" instead of "Something hits you"? Or perhaps both? Also bear in mind that warm-blooded invisible creatures will be visible inside your infravision radius if you have one.

I haven't found the phial yet...

`Sokay, I finally found the spot in the code that causes artifacts like that to be generated, and I've more or less convinced myself that I'm doing it right. More or less.

Parchments - I'd be happy with the T4 version of parchments - though haven't really used them much.

Well, in fairness, most of them are useless anyway. Even the "Map of <town>" parchments only highlight a few grids around the town's location on the worldmap, and by the time you find them you've probably already been to that town and seen its surrounding grids anyway.

In fact, the only actually interesting ones are the ones that confer floor inscriptions, which raises a new set of issues. The floor mana that floor inscriptions use probably would be straightforward to implement (though not knowing whether a floor grid has enough mana for an inscription other than by just trying it is vaguely annoying); the tricky bit would be what UI to use for them. Would the player want or expect a free-form "write-message-on-floor" command, or would we rather have the parchment grant a "talent" for its specific inscription to put on the toolbar — or perhaps some combination of the two? To my surprise, floor inscriptions are actually documented in one of the more obscure help files, although it appears to be in the "spoilers" section.

Once the game is fully operational and debugged will you be incorporating the T4 tileset?

I'm… fairly certain there isn't anything like a one-to-one mapping between objects/monsters/grids in T2 vs. T4 to the extent that I could the latter's tiles for the former.

It'd be very cool to blast things with a fireball / other spells as per the main game.

Oh, you mean visual effects? That's certainly more feasible — or would be if I had any idea how those worked…

This game effectively could become your 'variant' so you could make other tweaks / improvements that aren't in the original TOME 2.3x

Enh, I'm hesitant to deviate too far from T2 "canon" without a broad consensus among the user base. Most or all of the ideas you describe could feasibly be implemented as addons, though.

[Zizzo]

error = "Lua Error: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:82: bad argument #2 to 'info' (number expected, got string)\

[sound F/X: source diving] Hmm, it looks like you were mousing over a talent icon on the hotkeys toolbar and something in the talent tooltip choked. At a guess, I must have my format arguments in the wrong order in the info() method of one of my talent definitions. Do you remember (or can you find out) which talent icon you moused over?

Never mind, I finally figured out a way to do a comprehensive programmatic sweep over the info() methods of all the talent definitions to check them for errors. Were you playing a DeathMold when you got this error? Their Fetch an Item talent's tooltip was the closest error I got to what you list above. Anyway, they all appear to be working now, so I'm calling this one fixed in SVN.

[Thorondor]

this was a human sorcerer. As far as I know i hadn't got very far so it would have been a beginner spell.
Have never actually got round to playing a deathmold though maybe will get round to it one day....

[Zizzo]

Have never actually got round to playing a deathmold though maybe will get round to it one day....

No rush on that, actually; I'm pretty sure Deathmolds' semi-random-teleportation movement mode isn't implemented yet.