Home › Forums › Destiny of an Emperor › New Mod: Hero of Chaos (Cao Cao Mod)
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January 18, 2014 at 3:44 pm #53093sonic.penguinModerator
Okay, gonna dissect it then:
0x7a660 – 0x7a6df: These are the random rare drops. 8 regions, 16 items per region.
AD9060AABD2064C900D005A908856E
604A4A4A4A856E6000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000So I tried FF’ing out the values and the game freezes at the end of battles. The regular tables seem fine but it’s this one that is wankey. The values here don’t make any sense for items and are likely the end of the code for something else but Lud’s code is still trying to pull from it hence why I got an equipped Nu Long (DO) after battle?
Gonna have to sound the bat signal for this one eh?
- This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by sonic.penguin.
January 18, 2014 at 5:34 pm #53106MiDKnighTModeratorProbably easiest to just copy the item drop table from lud’s example in the guide and go from there.
January 18, 2014 at 5:47 pm #53109sonic.penguinModeratorThere isn’t one for the rare items list, it just indicates where it is stored, unless I missed that in the guide… I had a resurrect equipped earlier >_>
January 20, 2014 at 12:42 pm #53151sonic.penguinModeratorJanuary 20, 2014 at 4:15 pm #53164sonic.penguinModeratorOkay, so here’s the setup… no longer are you going to start w/ the Xiahou bro’s they will be acquired later in Chapter 1/maybe early chapter 2. Lou Sang village has been moved west of Chang An where the Zhao Yun bar used to be. Story is going to start off by the player going to Chang An and being dispatched to destroy the Yellow Scarves with Huangfu Song/Lu Zhi which the player will promptly lose after two battles (if your remove officer code works as intended!) 1 will be lost each battle to go back and report to the emperor. After the destruction of the Yellow Scarves, Dong Zhuo’s hunt for Cao Cao will begin… allowing you to acquire Chen Gong, and shortly lose Chen after showing how evil you are by killing peasants >_>
THEN you will acquire the Xiahou Bros and begin the chapter 2 setup towards wiping out Dong Zhuo. Actually, this is going to feel a lot like DOAE2 when you wandered around just with Liu Bei for the first chapter, but I thought it would be a “different” way of doing the Yellow Turban chapter that starts this mod out with a *BANG!* Somehow I’ve gotta see if I can move the Song bro’s to Chang An (which will be the new Xu Chang)… Actually, is there any way I can have Cao Cao start by himself w/ no officers?
January 21, 2014 at 9:08 am #53175MiDKnighTModeratorActually, is there any way I can have Cao Cao start by himself w/ no officers?
Probably by turning the other 2 IDs to FF. Of course we’d have to fix the starting equipment code too…
January 21, 2014 at 1:24 pm #53176Xian Zhu XuandeParticipantWell, my plan is to go all-out with a total conversion, much like the Rise of Lu Bu 3.0, Rise of Ieyasu 2.0, or the latest Flames of Wu Mod or even the Yuan Shao mod. Give those a try and let me know what you like so we can get a feel of what to incorporate into this mod! While I will try and maintain some parts of the script, I will likely be making some modifications that add more ‘variety’ to the stock DOAE journey: Guan Yu’s aid to Cao Cao (now with a removal code!), Huang Gai’s betrayal, probably Zhou Fang’s betrayal as well but these sorts of things take work to make them believable… Going through and balancing it takes multiple playthroughs, but I already know from my own mods that things had to be toned down even from DOAE 2.0, this mod was just ridiculous but we’ll get it fixed, it was a true pioneer and is what got some people into DOAE modding in the first place. MiDKnighT is a master at code and has souped up some great work in the DOAE hacking world so I think we’ll pull something off nice with this collaboration.
Sounds great! I would very much like to play a role as this is the enhanced and player-accessible evolution of a project I spent so much time working on. It really was a craft of love, even if I did a poor job of balancing the game out for a general audience (which I agree wholeheartedly; that should be fixed, so more people can enjoy it).
A big part of the problem when I created the Cao Cao mod was that we had limited ability to work around certain game mechanics. Some tactics completely destroyed challenge in the game, for example. And there wasn’t much variance to tactics and characters. I actually tweaked the tactics (on a very rudimentary level compared to what you can do today) to make a wider range of characters useful for special battles.
I would also love to continue helping out with writing for new additions. I do like the idea of those new additions. I also like the idea of character deaths. There’s a lot I would have done if I could have.
I suppose another way to explain it would be that I really want to see my labor of love become something excellent, which I believe it can become in the capable hands of the two of you. But at the same time I still want to see the heart of what I originally created, but never got to see a wider audience. Or in other words, for it to be the wonderful remake created by us (obviously with my meaningful contributions having been made to the original and in an advisory role here; both of you are out of my league in terms of editing now). But that’s really what I envisioned when we wrote before. I would never want to do a thing to stand in the way of an excellent new DoaE mod built on my work.
However, since you know the history more than probably anyone around here (I’ve only watched the TV series once and seen a few movies) it would be helpful if you could check up every now and then for questions we might have, granted, in some cases we may have to improvise…
1st. question: Did Cao Song really hang around while Cao Cao hunted the turbans? That was my first thought…
2nd plan of acion: Keeping Cao Cao through the whole mod FLEXX
3rd arrangement: Killing off members of the party!
4th undertaking: Making this mod bug free :alien:I do know the history and I’m happy to answer any questions. What I aimed for in the mod was not a strict historic remake, however. I wanted to take some artistic license with it. It is, of course, ultimately evolving into a story which bears no resemblance to the true history of the Three Kingdoms. This means it can be fun not only to include scenarios from history and the novel, but also to add some fun new plot twists based on unique story evolutions in this mod.
1st: Cao Song’s role in this mod is largely fictional. I took artistic liberty here to work within the game’s structure (where someone needed to take the throne and give orders). Cao Cao seems a logical choice for this because that was largely the role he played in history and the novel, though he did take the field when a cause mattered for him. If I had the opportunity to remove him from the throne on special campaigns and in special circumstances I would have.
2nd: I also like the contrast of certain things. As much as we want to have Cao Cao in the party for the full game, it is also fun to have loss balancing out gains (losing Cao Cao and using Cao Pi). I suppose if I had complete freedom, I would have included Cao Cao in the party longer than I had previously done so, but dropped him after a little more progress to swap in Cao Pi. That would not have been possible while I was working on the original mod.
3rd: I love it!
4th: Yeah. I know the agility bug is prevalent. The agility stats in this mod are quite high (I see you discussed that previously) which really, in retrospect, didn’t work out with character progression and items like Red Hare. There was some kind of bug associated with all the hidden items I added to the game (I think they could mix up). And the level 51 bug (potentially jumping the player to level 52, 53). I wasn’t running into much more than that, though. Not including the game just being balanced poorly.
– – –
One thing I liked was the notion of characters becoming more or less useful as the game progressed. I wanted to emulate this with soldier progression. There are some unused values for soldier progression which can provide a lot of soldiers early on but drop later, or provide fewer soldiers early on but increase later. I was going to use this to make a character like Dian Wei powerful early on, but weak later, emulating his death in the sense of removing him from his role as a powerful character. This also helped to balance usefulness between so many excellent characters. Zhang He, for example (and if memory serves), becomes a much more attractive option later in the game while early on he is a little more redundant.
Character deaths provide a much better solution. And these unused level progression options were largely buggy or not particularly useful. Only a few seemed to work smoothly.
There are some other fun things I wanted to include. Like some special difficult battles (which would have provided options to recruit). One change I really wanted to make was to include a secret battle later which allowed the players to recruit Wang the Tiger (ala DoaE 2.0).
Hey, long time no see over here @ lys :thumright: I wouldn’t say there isn’t anything left as I know there are a number of issues in my book:
1. Increasing the cost of recruiting officers after battles: although now that I think of it this one I think was discovered…. have to check the romhacking guide.
2. How the heck did you put Dian Wei instead of the Yuan Shu messenger in Chang An, when I tried it it broke the game. These “special instance” sprites have yet to be discovered since their X,Y placement isn’t ‘normal’, it’s probably in an array of some sort?
3. Accessing cave interiors and editing them
4. …and anything else you can think of!1) Did I make this change? I actually don’t remember much about this. If so, it can probably be tracked down again by someone who knows what they’re doing by watching the ROM while recruiting is triggered?
2) Ah! So what happens here, if my memory serves, is that the game actually uses certain characters as messengers. For example, when a messenger runs into the room, that might actually be a character from Wei, later in the game. They’re just brought in to borrow their sprite. What I did here is figure out what character that was, swapped that character with a new entry for Dian Wei (so Dian Wei appears), and then shuffled characters around so they appear in proper battles. Finally, to recruit him, in scripts there are special event triggers, and there is one for recruiting. I’ve swapped Dian Wei into that position and he can be recruited (not restricted in the game), so now I just need to trigger the event that allows him to be hired.
I moved a lot of characters around. I also salvaged the four or so characters that previously weren’t used in the game to play a role here or there. I think you can now add more officers than was previously possible? If I could have done that, I wouldn’t have had to resort to this sort of trickery.
3) I didn’t do this anywhere, did I? I think by the time I stopped working on the mod I was starting to piece together how this might be done, though. If memory serves (and MiDKnighT probably knows all about this) there is really only one big map (or a select few?), and doors and stairs just shuffle you around from one location on that map to another. So you could edit any cave in the same way you edit towns and the overworld map. The game does recycle some portions of the map for different locations (especially rooms in cities) so it can become tricky. I ran into some trouble here adding special items.
4) If my role sounds good, I’ll be sticking around to offer whatever assistance I can. :)
January 21, 2014 at 1:30 pm #53177Xian Zhu XuandeParticipantJames has some good stuff on Cao Cao’s history like this:
And definitely read this.
http://kongming.net/novel/sgz/caocao.php
That’s Cao Cao’s official Sanguozhi history. It includes a lot of what really happened.
Though it is definitely fun to take artistic liberty, especially as the story starts to branch form what genuinely took place. Seeing some believable surprises and story branches can only add to excitement of people playing the game—especially people who know the history and the novel and would appreciate being surprised.
January 21, 2014 at 1:32 pm #53178Xian Zhu XuandeParticipantSince this IS a Cao Cao mod, I figured I’d better take time to redo a more “decent’ portrait as the current Cao Cao portrait, while pretty cool for the time, needed a little upgrading. Now he’s got that “I WILL CRUSH YOU WITH MY EVIL STARE!” look.
Love that portrait!
January 21, 2014 at 1:48 pm #53179MiDKnighTModeratorsonic looks like you’ve got a great beta tester & creative consultant in James here :D
As for caves, I know I could progress further in that area but I can only dig into one thing at a time and there’s been more pressing matters (namely bugs with existing features). If we got Niahak back on board I could probably give him what he needs for a cave and town editor (since he did the map editor).
January 21, 2014 at 2:04 pm #53180Xian Zhu XuandeParticipantA question as an aside. How does quoting work on this board? I tried the usual BBCode quote tag but that doesn’t seem to be working properly. And there is no quote button that I can see. It also seems like the ‘Edit’ button vanishes after a certain amount of time?
January 21, 2014 at 2:12 pm #53181MiDKnighTModeratorThe first button should have quotes using the blockquote tag. And the format changed for posts migrated from the old board. Dunno about the Edit thing, maybe LYS can answer that.
January 21, 2014 at 3:04 pm #53184sonic.penguinModeratorProbably by turning the other 2 IDs to FF. Of course we’d have to fix the starting equipment code too…
Yeah, that actually inserts an officer ironically, that glitches the game up. Tried it already.
January 21, 2014 at 3:40 pm #53185sonic.penguinModeratorMaybe it wasn’t Dian Wei, might have been Xu Chu…
At any rate, characters I plan to remove from the party are:
Starting w/ Huangfu Song and Lu Zhi which are removed after the first two boss fights (probably, maybe 3rd?), so it might be solo with Cao Cao for a few battles which I thought would be pretty cool!
After above, add Chen Gong to help w/ some battles, then lose.
Gain Xiahou Bro’s, probably knock off Xiahou Yuan at Han Zhong
Dian Wei, knocked off in battle w/ Zhang Xiu, but gain Jia Xu <--- Jia is a little overpowered w/ 250 INT though.... maybe knock down to 240 and take a Xu Shu role? Guo Jia - lose after conquering Yuan Shao, or just before. Cao Cao probably after Han Zhong and towards an invasion of Shu in which his ub3r stats will be lost... mwahahaha, anyways, the guy on the throne will be Emperor Xian, and the Cao Fang will be Emperor Ling since thats been done in so many mods where they just take the persons father as the guy on the throne (Yuan Shu Mod, I think the Yuan Shao Mod, other misc. mods I've tried) and it's just sort of tacky. Anyone else you think should die? Let me know >_< but I think there is a limit, plus I have to navigate spots where they HAVE to be recruited.January 21, 2014 at 4:04 pm #53186MiDKnighTModeratorAnyone else you think should die? Let me know >_< but I think there is a limit, plus I have to navigate spots where they HAVE to be recruited.
We can make more, just didn’t think anyone would need that many auto-remove events.
As for starting off with 1 guy, I think we explored something like this before and it was more trouble than it was worth. You could just start off with CC, HS, LZ and have the last 2 auto-remove after a couple battles like you said.
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