Enchanted Arrows and Bolts

Enchanted Arrows and Bolts

Description: by Nefarius

Categories: Tutorials (1.09x)


Files you will need:

STRING.TBL

AUTOMAGIC.TXT

MISC.TXT

TREASURECLASSEX.TXT


Tools you will need:

STAROFFICE, MS-EXCEL or any other good spreadsheet.

DARKSTORMS TBL EDITOR or any other TBL editor.


What you should known:

The basics, such as working with MPQ files and DIRECT TXT mode.



The Goal:

Creating new arrows and bolts that will randomly spawn with
elemental damage and have lower quantity without effecting the normal
arrows and bolts.




Step 1 - Add the elemental damage modifiers:

Open up AUTOMAGIC.TXT in your spreadsheet
and go down to the end of the file. We will start with fire damage, we
will create 4 affixes per elemental damage, so we will end up with 16
for all elements.

To start, add 16 empty rows at the
bottom of the file. The name is not important in this file as these
string codes are not used anywhere so simply name it something like
FIRE1-4, COLD1-4, LTNG1-4 and POIS1-4 or anything you want, it doesn’t
matter in this case.

Set VERSION to 100, so that the
game will know this is an expansion only effect. Set SPAWNABLE to 1,
this controls if the affix can spawn on items, thought in this file it
doesn’t seam to have any effect. Set RARE to 1, just for formality,
because we wont have any non-normal arrows or bolts.

Now we need to define level grades,
the first FIRE affix should be lvl1, so put 1 in the LEVEL column, lets
say it increases by 20 each time, so for FIRE2 you would use lvl21,
then for FIRE3 you would use lvl41 and finally for FIRE4 you will use
61, this is pretty even so use these level grades for all the affix
groups you created.

Now another important part arrives:
We don’t want Hell-difficulty Baal to drop crappy arrows with 1-4 fire
damage, this will just make our new arrows useless later on in the
game. So, for the lower two affixes of each group you should set a max
level. I would use lvl41 as a max level for FIRE1 and lvl61 as a max
level for FIRE2, so simply do so and enter 41 and 61 in the MAXLEVEL
column for the two first affixes of each of your new groups. Now we
also don’t want low level characters using +100 fire damage arrows so
we will need a level requirement. I think a requirement of 10 less then
the drop level is fine, so leave LEVELREQ blank for FIRE1, make it be
11 for FIRE2, 31 for FIRE3 and 51 for FIRE4 do so for the other groups
as well.

Now we move over to frequency, we
can play around with the overall frequency of appearance of a specific
group here, poison damage and cold damage will probably be used most of
the time, so we could make them a bit rarer then fire and lightning
damage (so that people will actually use fire and lightning) to do so
set frequency to 8 for fire and lightning groups, next simply set
frequency to 4 or 2 for the poison and cold groups, to do so edit the
FREQUENCY column.

Now we need to define a new unique
group for our affixes, so that we can assign them to our new arrows and
bolts (which we will create later) to do so enter an unused group
number such as 350 in the group column, do so for all of your new
modifiers, aka all types of damage should have 350 as their value in
the GROUP column, this is the heart and core of this effect.

Now the fun part starts, in the
MOD1CODE column type 'dmg-fire' (without the quotes) for all the fire
damage affixes, set MOD1MIN to something like 1 and MOD1MAX to
something like 4, and upgrade them per row, aka FIRE1 is 1-4, FIRE2 is
5-20, FIRE3 is 15-50 and so on, your highest level arrows should be
around 30-120 damage to make them tasty for higher level players. Now
move over to the cold rows, for these we use “dmg-cold”, set MOD1PARAM
to the number of frames the freezing should last, remember 25 frames =
1 second, so a value of 100 or 150 is pretty nice, but you should start
lower for low level arrows, somewhere around 50 is ok. Dont forget to
set MIN/MAX values for the damage! Next do the same with lightning
damage by using “dmg-ltng” its the same as fire damage so you dont need
to enter a value into MOD1PARAM and last but not least, you use
“dmg-pois” for poison, it follows the same rules as “dmg-cold”, note if
you want to imitate blizzards style of using poison use the same value
for minimum and maximum for the poison modifiers, but you don’t need
to. We are almost done with this file, all we need to do now is edit a
few more fields, go to ITYPE1 and enter “bowq” without the quotes of
course, in ITYPE2 enter “xboq”, this tells the game to allow this
modifier to be assigned to bolts and arrows. Finally set DIVIDE,
MULTIPLY and ADD columns to 0, you dont need to bother with those now,
we are done with this file. Save AUTOMAGIC.TXT and exit your
spreadsheet.




Step 2 - Create the new arrows and bolts:

This step is allot shorter then the
previous one, we will not need to do allot here at all, to start, open
up MISC.TXT in your spreadsheet. Go down to the ARROW row and copy it
to the end of the file, do the same with the BOLT row, what you have
just done is known as item cloning.

This way you can create tons of
clones of items without effecting the original ones. This will not work
with special items such as potions, as this will require some more
advanced practices but its possible nonetheless, but for now, you
should rather keep yourself focused on TXT editing until you master
this discipline. In the two new rows, change NAME and NAMCO to
something like 'Special Arrow' and 'Special Bolt', this is only used
internally and has absolutely no effect on the game and is only there
for yourself to make notes about an item.

Now go over to COST, we want our
arrows and bolts to be a bit more expensive so you need to change this
to something like 500 or 1000, or whatever value you want, now change
the CODE column to say EAQ in the new arrow row and EBQ in the new bolt
row, this is very important, write these codes down on a piece of
paper.

Now we will come to a bit of
advanced practice, add a new COLUMN to the file after the code column
and type 'auto prefix' in the header, it must be exactly as shown here,
with the space (just without the quotes), generally its not a smart
idea of adding columns blindly, but you can move columns around from
weapons, armor and misc.txt as the game counts all of these as one
large file, hence all columns from any of them will work in any of them
even if it didn't have this column specified before. In the new column
type 350 (its the ID of our new affix group if you remember) for our
new rows. Now go to MINSTACK, MAXSTACK and SPAWNSTACK and cut the
values in here in half, just for the sake of making these arrows run
out faster. I prefer to set all three of the columns to the same value,
to prevent people from finding half-empty quivers. Finally, move over
to the NPC columns (aka CHARSIMIN/CHARSIMAX etc) and clear any entry in
them labeled as 1, to prevent npcs from selling your new arrows and
bolts. After this is done save MISC.TXT and exit your spreadsheet.




Step 3 - Making them findable:

Finally, the last TXT editing part has
arrived. Open up TREASURECLASSEX.TXT and go down to the AMMO row, here
you will see two codes of the normal arrows and bolts, what we will do
is expand this row a bit, set ITEM3 to EAQ and ITEM4 to EBQ, now set
PROB1 to 2 and PROB2 to 2, set PROB3 and PROB4 to 1, this will make the
chance of getting our arrows or bolts about 1/6 for each, which is
pretty good. This was really fast wasn't it? Simply save the file and
exit your spreadsheet now.




Step 4 - Adding the strings:

This is by far the easiest part, open
your TBL editor and load STRING.TBL. Click the 'add string' button of
your specific editor and type EAQ, in the text-area part of the screen
in case of DARKSTORMS TBL EDITOR you will type 'Arrows', repeat the
steps, just this time do so for EBQ, by adding the code EBQ and typing
'Bolts' in the text area. Save STRING.TBL.

Now all you need to do is open up the game and play and of course, ENJOY!


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[url=https://www.d2mods.info/forum/kb/viewarticle?a=200&sid=26b5d5a37b30099f6ca0a0865e937e0a]Knowledge Base - Enchanted Arrows and Bolts[/url]