PROJECT: Arcanum WIP 6.0 Coop Mod v1.0

If only I had someone to play with.

 

I'm volunteer, You can play with me, all night long :lol: :-o

You get a horse ride for free

Edit: Just kidding

 

You can play with me and my friends, Yuki. We have a ventrilo we all use. Here is the information:


208.100.14.165
4348
whiterabbit


You do not have to have a mic, although it is preferred. We are a mix of intelligent gamers from varying countries and genders. My particular group hangs out in the Chillaxin For Just chillin channel. You can find us there in the evenings between 5:00 PM and 3:00 AM (EASTERN). 11:00 PM to 8 AM (GMT)


We usually talk about everything from games (like Arcanum modding), to politics, to philosophy....and so on.



Feel free to join as well Zero Bot.

Your character dies and bleeds out on the ground. Afterwhich, you cannot move. You can be revived. I usually find myself having to teleport back to Tarant to revive my less experienced friends....they seem to think running head-long into the enemy is the solution. The daft fools.

If you are not revived, you can quit and re-join as a different character.

 

How do you fix cells? I mean, like, the Bessie Toone Mine? The Vormantown house works, for instance, in multiplayer.

 

In order to fix it, everything must be on the same map. Arcanum is split up into several maps, whereas VormanTown is on the same map. In order to give the appearance that a place is in a different level, they simply scrolled off the edge of the current location of Vorman-town and created the interior of Vorman's mansion far off on a secluded portion of the map, then had the player teleport there when clicking on the door rather than teleporting to another map.

So I'd need a program that allows me to take the different maps of Arcanum and combine them on the side of the main Arcanum world itself. Right now, ZeroBot has a program like that called Map Converter, that was used to make Multi-Arcanum (I believe). Unfortunately, it is still being worked on and ZB is busy with alot of things.


Until I can get a copy of Map Converter or make a program myself (which my own C++ skills do not allow for) I cannot finish this project to full completion.


Consequently, myself and rroyo can attempt to painstakingly re-create all the different maps on the same main-map. Maybe we can even make new ones or add individual creative licensing to them in the proccess to freshen them up a bit. This is a "brute force" method approach to this, and I'd rather avoid doing this if at all possible.

 

Well, if ZeroBot wishes to explain to me the format and roughly what's required I could probably knock something together. It'll likely be in Python, though as it's a hell of a lot better for RAD and I wont cite an exact timeframe to complete either. Still, it'd be better than nothing right?

 

C++, are you sure Arcanum's coded in C++? Hm, perhaps I should open it up sometimes.

 

Pretty sure it's coded in C and what'd you mean by 'open it up'? You can't modify Arcanum as we don't have the source.

 

Well, its called "Module Converter" (but I should probably call it something like "Map Merger"). And you are right, I'm pretty busy right now, especially now, when school began, sorry... btw, can't you work on something else till I manage to get it working?

Are you sure? because it took me about a week to code that tool, that includes figuring out the steps and order of patching and merging processes. Thats a week, if I don't count in a time required for research of map, sector, terrain, proto and mob file formats, because you must patch them too. Also you must patch scr scripts too (whose file format is already known).

It will be reinventing the wheel, plus I'm not going to release that file format specs before OpenArcanum gets released, sorry :/

[offtopic]

Yep, we don't have the sources, but we surely know who have them. I bet that Tim Cain still have them, but he "can't" release them because of contract with Sierra. Even Sierra doesn't exists anymore, I bet that Activision can take legal action. Maybe somebody else from former Troika staff have them too, but again, I doubt that he will be willing to "release" them.

Also Activision is not going to release them either. They did not even answered to my email. (Why even bother to reply to some random dude, right?)

I also want that source codes, and I guess, that it would speed up a development of OpenArcanum by more than 400 percent...
[/offtopic]

 

Yep, I'm sure. Coding it in Python is usually around 5-10 times faster so that week would become a couple of days if I find the time

You *really* aren't helping the modding community by not releasing your research though, it's not like it'll harm your project at all (you're already months ahead of anyone who'd want to do the same) and there's quite a lot we could do with what you've apparently figured out. Doesn't matter if you haven't completely decoded the formats either, just being able to merge levels like that would be a start.

Think I've had this discussion with you before, people would be so much more interested in what you're doing if you could show them something beyond some screenshots and a couple of videos.

 

Reverse engineering would be much better than whining for the source code, clean room or not.

On a side note, is there a svn repository with public access for this OpenArcanum?

 

I'm not using any version control system at the moment (as I'm the only developer and it's not really at that stage yet) but when it does go public I'll likely use Git or Bazaar and may even let prominent members maintain their own branch on my server. It'll be open source anyway by that point.

I'm sort of reluctant to share the source right now because I'm in the middle of re-factoring a lot of it so functionality is at a bare minimum. Like, literally minimum - objects can't even display an image at the moment and are basically just script states. A lot of the auxiliary methods have been offloaded into other projects as well so I don't have to jerry-rig the main one for testing purposes. Design work is basically done however.

Of course, if you're persistent enough and can come up with a good excuse I'll probably share it anyway.

 

I'm personally not favorable of having cheats too readily available, too many players will cave to temptation and ruin the experience. Something does need to be in place though; it's pretty damn frustrating with no saving.

This might seem a bit arcane, along the same vein as blatant cheating but not quite as easily abused: how about using password codes as a way to restore progress?

You'd have a password for story progress and a password for unique rewards from quests or larger quest sequences. Rebalancing the game around this and the sharing of passwords between friends could provide a bit of metagame for a coop group as a way to establish a feeling of real progress.

Obviously there are a number of issues with this idea but I think it's more fun than setting all the parameters yourself via a cheat panel.

 

Bump, Is there any way to download the mod currently? the provided link doesn't work

 

I forgot to approve this guy's post until just now. Is he correct, however? Are the download links not working?

 

All the links are dead, yeah.