Arcanum:WIP 6.0 now available

Does this work with the GOG version?

I can't find the supposed chest anywhere, but I get new backgrounds and portraits. :???:

 

Was the Virgil romance ever added into this mod? *looks hopeful*

 

Yuki: The game engine isn't seeing the patch1 file. You may have to do a re-install to clear this up.

hel: Welcome to the forum!
Not yet - sorry.

 

A bit late, but thanks anyway.

 

There seems to be a problem with the divination mastery quest. I have learned all the spells in the college, but there are no dialogue paths when talking to the Divination Master (Mistress, to be precice) to unlock the mastery trial.

Also, she is not carrying the mastery medallion - problem? And no, I definitely did not filch it myself.

Any words of wisdom?

 

I noticed after playing a while that the game still poses no challenge on hard difficulty..
I've taken only virgil and sogg and I haven't really minmaxd my character (focusing on charisma/persuasion and a bit of sword and magic).
Any thoughts on making some encounters tougher or something?
I don't remember there being any tougher fights later into the game and I'm at level 20.


Also, I'm thinking perhaps a good mod is a lot more work than it appears.

See, if you add more content then u add more gold and XP, meaning chars can level up too fast.

So you slow down levelling.

But now you have the player possibly missing all the important stuff that requires high skill checks in the main plot (and the player would be actively focusing on those skills, but it still won't be enough, so he may not get the benefits he should be getting), so you have to now go and make somewhat sure that the player gets to those non-plot areas that were added at relatively constant points in the game so that he could skill up to meet main plot skill checks ... etc etc etc.
hardish



but really my only gripe is that combat was peas pudding in vanilla and there are still no encounters that are hard after level 15 or so

 

So I installed WIP not long ago for the first time. I installed it like the readme said to and then popped on the hi-res patch.

Started a new game just picking some character and noticed the brown chest there so I figured everything was good to go.

Problem I'm having is that in making a new character, the game locks up at random times when clicking through the backgrounds. More often than not, if I clicked the left button to go backwards through the lists, it crashes right away and every couple of tries I get maybe one or two to pop up before crashing. I've tried a couple different races and sexes and had the same results. I even tried clicking to the right to go all the way through the list, getting through a few of the new backgrounds and again got a crash.

I had the UAP and some other mods installed prior, but I uninstalled and completely deleted the Arcanum folder.

I unpacked the Arcanum5.dat to look at the background folders as I was thinking I'd add a couple quick new ones in to see if it would crash on those but I figured I'd pop in here first and wondering if I should just flat out reinstall again or not.

 

I did experiment with the extra backgrounds and I kept renaming both arcanum5.dat files to see if there was any noticeable difference. There wasn't.

I also tinkered with making a custom background and it made no difference either. I also double checked the three files for the backgrounds to see if perhaps they copied over funny or had some grotesque spelling/syntax errors/whatever issues and they looked fine.

Only thing I think I can do is reinstall entirely. If I'm not mistaken, there's a 0-399 limit in the effects file that WIP is supposed to change? Perhaps that got messed up because I noticed I can go pretty far into the custom backgrounds hitting the arrow to go right, but it crashes instantly now when hitting the left button (starting from No Background).

EDIT:

Yup, a fresh clean install did the trick. Suppose I could have tried that first instead of tinkering the the background files and all that. Ah well, nothing ventured nothing gained I suppose.

 

hobbit hole??

Okay so first of all I would like to thank rroyo for his great work. :thumbup: second, this may sound stupid, but i cant find the owner of the hafling house for sale. kept following his trail and ended with just the hafling woman weaka ( sorry for the name) so any hints how could i continue to find him ? and thanks .

pss: by the way the star rubies in the cave is it a spacific test ? if so where does it start? cheers.

 

Hey, just stopped by to say this mod is awesome, I can see it must have taken incredible amounts of work. I for one appreciate the effort

Also, I got the impression from previous posts that there are some "Upsy Daisyium Gems" somewhere in the game, which would be great for the Solo characters I make. (Playing without followers means I'm always having to carry everything around)

Sadly I've yet to come across any, and I've no idea where to look. Are they in the current version?

 

Indeed they are.

They can be bought at Harry Baules' Pawnshop here. As you can see, rroyo placed it right next to the Garillon Bridge in Tarant, in a building that was but a minor unimportant storehouse back in vanilla.

Be warned, you will have to acquire all the gems you are interested in the first time you visit the place, for while the shopkeeper's stock resets, the gems do not. As they are very expensive, you may appear to be lacking the coin at the moment, so be sure to save before you even talk with the owner.

 

Haha, never would have looked there. Thanks for the fast response and screenshot no less! You've been most helpful good sir

Ohhhh boy. Ok, lets start off with the fact that in order to make the game significantly more difficult you first have to balance it, or certain characters become impossible to play.

First and foremost, this game has a lot of variation. You can choose from any number of different playstyles and combat tactics. For this reason, its extremely difficult to truly balance. Certain tactics and spells are incredibly powerful in comparison to others, and while some efforts could be made buff some abilities and weaken others, truly balancing would require a complete overhaul of the game. Might as well build it from scratch.

Let's say you try to make it difficult even for the most powerful of strategies- disintegrate, as an example. I've always thought of disintegrate as cheating, myself, but if you made the game difficult for someone using disintegrate, chances are you'd be making it outright impossible for a lot of characters.

I could go on, but suffice it to say, balancing the game and adding difficulty is an incredibly difficult undertaking.

In my opinion adding difficulty lies with the player. There's many ways you could try, to start off I'll name a few of the simplest approaches you could consider. All of the following approaches include not using disintegrate.

1. Use no items, on yourself or followers.
2. Use no spells.
3. Play the game solo. (No followers, dog, arachnids, etc)
4. Try playing with as little dexterity as possible on a solo playthrough doing turn based combat (it makes you very slow, so you get hardly any actions per round, meaning you have to actually plan and such. Traps, throwables, spells like entangle, etc become practical when doing this playstyle). Start the game with a background that decreases dexterity from the start, and never put point into it or use items that buff it. For added challenge, carry heavy things to give yourself encumbrance, further slowing your speed (this has the disadvantage of making you move slower, which becomes tedious..).
5. All of the above!

Obviously there's a great deal of things you could try. Show some imagination, lemme know what you come up with

 

please help????

I entered the new iron clan , and believe me i searched it throughly for many hours . but couldnt find the room filled with iron treasure chests . it is the new room after the throne . the problem, is that the river there denies acces to it. it seems that there is a ladder, that leads there but cant find the passege to it or its room. so please would anybody lead me to it.

 

If you found the notes, they should tell you you'll find a key in Caladon and there's a second entrance just a little ways north-west of the original portal.

 

Hey rroyo, I'll answer to your PM in this thread as you asked.

I noticed the Tesla Pistol and Arbalest (too bad the Divine Fire Pistol is no longer there, the description sounded really interesting) and have already gathered the info about those weapons. Are there no other new weapons in A:WIP compared to 1.0.7.4 vanilla Arcanum (added by yourself or existing in added locations such as the Well of Lost Souls or Vormantown)?

From what I recall, there are very few changes to weapon parameters in the UAP (Drog concentrated of fixing bugs rather than rebalancing the game), those of the Schreck's Pistol and Levered machine Gun being the only ones I noticed.

I did notice some changes to already existing weapons in A:WIP that are not present in the UAP itself, though. A few examples from my notes:

• Dagger of Speed: damage increased from 1-4 to 1-6
• Mechanized Gun: damage increased from 1-30 to 5-30, ammo consumption reduced from 6 per shot to 2 per shot
• Feather-Weight Axe: damage increased from 1-16 to 4-16
• Hand Cannon: damage increased from 5-35 to 5-40
• Marksman Rifle: damage increased from 4-14 to 4-24

And the list goes on.

While the last two and many others are introduced by Krupps' Ranged Weapons Mod Beta and mentioned in its readme (the only weapon rebalancing hack incorporated in A:WIP, if I'm not mistaken), making the changes quite easy to find, the first three aren't mentioned anywhere in the changelog of A:WIP, neither directly nor indirectly.

My point being, if there are unmentioned changes to already existing weapons such as the three mentioned in the A:WIP, the only way to find all of them would checking all of the weapon parameters of all of the weapons one by one, which would take as much time as the info gathering and typing in part of creating the database for Arcanum 1.0.7.4 + UAP v091225 did, which would be, well, quite some.

Unless - and here is what I wanted to ask you about - you would happen to be in possession of a certain list and would find yourself willing to share it. A list specifying what exact changes to which weapons have been introduced in A:WIP (an absolute dream for me) or at least one listing the names of weapons that were changed in any way in the A:WIP (still something that would make creating a weapon database for A:WIP remarkably easier - checking for example 50 weapons would be significantly quicker than checking 226 ones).

 

I've got bad news and worse news for you. Sorry.

The bad news is I used the protos from Car-Arcanum as the initial foundation for my hack, and Chris has tweaked most of the weapons.
The worst news is I have no listing for the ones that were and weren't modified.
That means every last one of the proto will need to be compared....

One bit of good news - When you update your weapons list for Car-Arcanum, you'll already have most of the info.

BTW: We can take this back to your thread if you want.

 

It would probably move the discussion to its appropriate place, yes. Continuing here.

 

rroyo,

I've run into a problem in my vanilla+UAP game, wherein I found myself unable to continue playing following the "conclusion" to the Half-Ogre Island quest. I'm told that your impressive seeming mod adds greater resolution to the quest, but I can't find any indication of this in the changelog that comes with the download. Could you confirm that this is the case, before I go starting a new game? Thanks very much.

 

You will have to forgive me, rudyhenkel, it would seem I recalled it wrongly and therefore have misleaded you.

I did some searching and found that according to this post (post date - 27.09.2009, release of A:WIP's current version - 14.12.2008), the continuation of the Half Ogre Island quest is something that is yet to be done.

If you're interested, here you can see how initially rroyo planned to implement the extended ending.

 

I'm also looking for the owner of the Underhill house in Brandybuck... can someone help me please?