Progress report

[jbouley]

I figure I'll just keep a thread up here in the stickies on current progress, more as a way to show anyone who's interested that I'm actually still working on this and haven't vanished.

I spent a good chunk of time just trying to figure out where to move the existing skills as I rebuild character designs, and coming up with new skill ideas to fill in the blanks, since I'm expanding the total possible skills for each character. I've done that now, but I don't quite have the time or stomach for the task of dealing with the skills themselves, since I not only need to do a lot of testing and creating/testing with that, but also need to design entirely new skill tree backgrounds and skill icons/buttons, all of which is going to be consuming my life for weeks upon weeks.

So, in the meantime, I've been working on monsters. Partly on general concepts, partly on learning the new monstats files (new for me anyway, since I haven't modded really since v 1.09 of D2). I've been able to implement dragons in my mod and done some other stuff, so I'm starting to get comfortable both with replacing existing animations, adding new ones and altering monster attacks and such.

This is immensely less time-consuming and hair-raising than skills, so I'll probably be working on monsters for a while and you can probably expect to see the most postings in the Bestiary thread for at least the next few weeks.

Soon, I'll start nibbling at skills, but I have to admit, if there's anyone out there with a modicum of knowledge of image editing in D2 who would like to create my skill tree backgrounds (more accuarately, use existing blank templates of the current design and simply insert the "empty" spots for the skill buttons in the appropriate places) and save me at least a couple hours of tweaking and headaches, I'll be happy to honor you in my mod by putting your name or other honorifics on various items, areas, monsters, etc. Please don't offer if you don't know what you're doing already though in terms of palcement, .dc6 images, etc. because if you don't know what you're doing, I'm better off messing it up myself than fixing someone else's mistakes.

[jbouley]

I'm still working on monsters, but cleared a major milestone. I'm not 100% sure how many new animations I'll be adding into the game, since the more I add, the larger the mod will be in terms of the downloadable files. Not that I expect this is a huge deal for most people, as I think it's relatively common nowadays for people to have broadband connections.

But still, I want to move carefully so that I don't end up with too monster-sized a mod.

Anyway, I've spent a lot of time simply adding all the necessary lines to the animdata.d2 file (only someone who mods will probably know/care what that is). Short version of the story is that I now have all the data in there I need to support adding any of the animations I would care to possibly add in the future. The animdata file is relatively small, so giving myself the option to add a multitude of animations doesn't affect that file size much at all. And it saves me a lot of time in the future as I try to figure out what (and how many) actual animations to add.

With that done, I've been able to start adding some new monster animations and give them some quick tests to make sure they work.

I've also been able to nearly complete some monsters (except for minor tweak like certain stats and their treasure drops). So far, I have the following nearly completed:

1. Fire Dragons (both melee and fire-breathing versions, which tend to spawn together to make your hero's life miserable)

2. Sin Slaves and Cenobites

3. Lilith (queen of the succubi, who will actually appear multiple times in the game across the five acts). I'm not sure if she will spawn with final act bosses, spawn as a superunique in various dungeons or outdoor areas...or a combination of both. she'll be interesting because while her appearance doesn't change, her strategies and skills will be different each time you meet her. And she spawns with several succubi just to make your problems even bigger.

[Necrolis]

It sounds like it is coming along nicely, the monsters/'fighting enviro' are always good to get in first cause then you can make skills around surviving and combating the onslaught... the idea of seeing the same boss multiple times but with different ways to kick your ass >:) sounds really fun . Monster anims aren't too big in size, so unless you import 100 new tokens it shouldn't impact size too much(not like new music :| ) i would offer to help with your dc6/image stuff, but i still owe a few people code work (and Adhin is hounding me for the new blackened code...), so if i somehow complete that then i'll give you a shout (just hope i don't forget with my terrible memory, gotta resort to writing everything down....)

[jbouley]

I'll most likely remain under a hundred monster anim tokens, but I could be easily pushing into the 80s or maybe even 90s.

Read your fine print...no sweat. As it happens, someone has already volunteered to help out with my little graphics problem (e.g. my lack of comfort level and lack of desire to tackle the skill tree backgrounds)

[jbouley]

Material progress on the mod has been a lot slower lately. Partly because of being busy with the holidays and other things, but also because I discovered the wonderful DR Tester tool and have been using it to plow through the D2 data files and inventory various unused missiles, overlays and monster animations that I will need for creatures, spells, and other things.

Just about done with that, and updating my list of spells/skills that I want to add to the game, but will be returning to the the work of adding new monsters soon, which is my major project at this point.

My plan (hopefully by sometime in January or February) is to have a sort of alpha version of the mod that will feature most of the new monsters. New items, skills, etc. wouldn't be in place yet, but it would be a functional mod of sorts (I'd probably call it the Monster Mash mod) and would give people a chance to see the new monsters and bosses up close and let me know if they see any problems with functionality or the way I've envisioned them.

[jbouley]

For those still monitoring my progress, I've slid a tad behind thanks to holidays, my little girl being in daycare only part-time now, and a little side project I took on.

But I'm still on the job, and will have some real upates soon.

[Adam Diggins]

Mmmmm fire dragons...

[jbouley]

Ladies and gentlemen...sorry for my very long absence from here. I do have excuses....er, I mean, valid reasons.

Between work-related things, financial woes and other miscellany of life, I was already held up on progress. But, I have to say, the worst time eater for me right now has been two entirely other things:

1. After being derailed from what good TV there is for nearly 3 years thanks to my daughter's arrival into the world (and the 9 months prior to it), I am finally catching up on shows I missed. Season 1 of "Lost" has finally fallen to me, and I've started Season 1 of "Heroes" now too. I will try not to let TV stuff get entirely in the way. And I'll try not to scare you by mentioning how many other shows I'm trying to catch up on.

2. I started a blog in February devoted to Christian stuff. It's an odd blog, filled with curse words even as I try to lift up the Lord, but it's mine, and I feel it's kind of my appointed mission right now. So, sadly for all of you, it comes first before the mod. If you have problems with that, take it up with God. ;-) And if you want to visit, go to: http://holyhell.wordpress.com/

But, none of this means I've stopped work on the mod...only that it's now even slower than it was before.