LoC Ragnarok / Atlantis development

[Bumbleguppy]

Porting the base database, assets and map ideas from several failed attempts to a mod in ArtManager. I fooled around just for fun with a mod for Atlantis for awhile and had some new ideas I'm bringing along.

I removed traps from Rogue and added spiders, traps are now with wolves in Hunting
Here is a Warlock in the Gorgon Cave in Normal:


Here is Dream mastery's new Polecat summons:


I've replaced the Frost Wisp in Storm with an Ice Golem

[Medea Fleecestealer]

Hooray!  Keep working on LoC BG, love to play that mod.   

[Cygi]

Yes, he's back!

[sauruz]

:OOOO!!

Im very happy to see this classic comig back


a ideia, if you want, you can recolour the troll boulder to give a more snowy look and give to the ice golen , in later lvls , but of course you know that

[Bumbleguppy]

There's already an ice chunk mesh in the immortal throne xpack, I just wanted to use the snowball because it's silly

[Bumbleguppy]

Simplified the Ordinance you craft from Champion Hearts.

First, the formula only requires two champion hearts of that class e.g. Assassin = 1 warfare heart & 1 rogue heart to craft.

Second, instead of granting additional skills, all Ordnance spawns with the "of the tinkerer" affix so you can further improve them as you see fit.

Keeps it simple and effective.

[Medea Fleecestealer]

Oh!  Nice!   

[nargil66]

Seeing this a bit late... welcome back BG 

[Bumbleguppy]

Added some more to the Jade Palace underground. Also added terra cotta statues that spring to life and a couple new types of champions. My Druid is using the Ordnance torso and the Bog Wisp summon. I've made them normal summons without a timer.



I tried to use the Ordnance recipe with only two ingredient and it crashed my computer...not TQ, not to desktop....total computer restart.

So I added health potion as the third ingredient and it worked like a charm.

[sauruz]

It so weird, i can tell you that,  not allowing having the third component, can crash the whole pc. I remenber long ago, you said something related with that, not sure if is the exacly same situation.

Not sure if im the only one, but when i first read "Bog Wisp" i was thinking right away the " bog dwellers". Dam i feel nostalgic , lol

Anyway nice video as always

[Bumbleguppy]

Added a new inherent skill like the Taunt skill: Flex!


Interesting game mechanic I experimented with and used for this:

Spoiler for Hiden:

Added this skill to each of the (expanded, thank you soa and nargil66) player skill trees like the skill Taunt. Set at level 1 instead of 0 like regular tree skills.

What I wanted to do was have this as a cosmetic fun skill at first, but then make it an ACTUAL useful buff witha  quest.

Didn't know if it would work, but you can ADD POINTS TO A SKILL IN THE PLAYER SKILL TREE WITH A QUEST.

So it's the same skill, but later a quest adds points to the skill so the recharge, duration and stats in the skill file (which all start at zero) are pumped up to where there are non-zero values. Also, the effect has a dummy empty effect in the level 1 slot and then a real effect in the second level slot. SO it's the same skill, but by adding points it boosts all the relevant values up to non-zero values and it's now a working buff!

I add 20 points to the skill so that there's no practical issue with a player's +1 or more to all skills buffs. So each skill value I use has 20 levels of zero values, then positive values.

Also, I examined some dialog mp3s and they are forced 128 bit which I didn't do before. I suspect leaving my audio program to default save values for the bitrate is why some of my mp3s crashed the game before as a new one I used when doing this worked today.

[Bumbleguppy]

I've actually made some significant progress in mitigating the framerate struggling in Atlantis.

There's been lots of good theories, but the one thing I've observed is that the game really lags when you have a lot of corpses flying through the air.

So I set the doLateCrumple and death animations for every monster I could. Some I couldn't as I am not making any animations and couldn't if my life depended on it lol, like Cockatrices; their mesh just doesn't hook to any other death animation in the base game monsters or any DLC monsters. Trust me, I spent several hours trying every single one. There's not many death animations in any of the DLC, I think the devs were pretty happy with the ragdoll physics so they stopped making them except in special circumstances like bosses.  So I used boarman and maenad death animations alot.

I have a feeling, just an intuition, that the new map pathing for controllers is the culprit. Now, you may think "Hey, BG. That map repathing crushed your work on your mod and shattered your creative motivation for years. Don't you think maybe you have a bias?" Well, yes. But it makes some sense: it's the one major game mechanic that has changed since the release of the base game itself. And it stands to reason that the pathing of the map mesh is critical to determine the 3D coordinates to plot the creature mesh in ragdoll.

Doesn't matter, since nothing can be done, but that's my opinion.

It worked a treat. Merfolk used the Gorgon death animation, but their corspes end up floating off the ground, but i can live with that. But the important thing is that my game runs so much smoother now that all the monsters have specific death animations.

[sauruz]

I have my suspicions, the why death ragdoll cause laggs on recent monster is how they implemented the death sound in the monsters animation, maybe.

As well another reason of why outside areas in Atlantis causes fps drops is how they placed the ambient scenario. In the oldest acts the flore is more agruped and more disperse in the world, for exemple you could see in a small area 4-5 plants and few trees, in Atlantis you see the triple, in a small area you see more than 5 -6 diferent types of plants all placed toghter, causing the game force to read all new assets in short period of time, like this for exemple



just look how many assets the game have to read at once, for a old engine with a new brand 3d models different than 2006-2007, its kinda huge.

But i heard in next 2.10 update the performance has been improved (i hope).

[Bumbleguppy]

What I was working on last couple days. New enemies for Atlantis proper. A lot of that time was creating a 4 piece MI set for one of them...my god, it's the most time consuming task next to map creation...so many files to create. ANd meshes for female players, and textures and bitmaps.

Also, moved the Artifact collector and the Exterminator quest givers to the lower Atlantis teleport shrine. Most times I miss the Exterminator quest giver completely lol, oh well. Now I can just 'port to them and move on. I hate backtracking, it's so frustrating and busts up my rhythm.

If you look closely, you can see how I added death animations and dissolve conditions, it's really helping the framerate for me.

[sauruz]

Very fun to watch no doubts.

Didnt expect lions coming from bone pile at all

What is the animation you used for The golden automatons when they cast the ice shards ?