Ideas for lenghtening Act IV

[Joel]

YEs a bit shot isn't t ?

What could i do to enlarge it (map speaking ?) or making him more than a simple Izual-Forge-Diablo rush ??


Same for Act II, but in reverse meanings , how to SHORTEN it !!

[Baz]

for act2, you should play with levels.txt and make all levels lead to other levels, so that the whole act is shorter.

for act4... adding levels is impossible, so... I would add a few superuniques and make more monsters appear, and make the level where diablo is (chaos sanctuary I believe) more interesting thru .ds1 editing. And make the monsters toughter so that going thru the act takes a few days, instead of a few hours

[Myhrginoc]

This is pure speculation on my part, but if you want to experiment, you might try stealing a few levels from Act 2 and see if you can access them in Act 4. Say for example you move the Horadric Shaft from Maggots Lair and stick it somewhere else, say Stony Tomb. Then take the warp in Far Oasis and either replace the special tile with a normal tile, or send the warp to a new access somewhere else, such as Ancient Tunnels (then you would have two ways to get to Lost City, heh heh). Now add a new warp in one of the mesas of Act 4 that links to the entrance to Maggots Lair 1. Edit Levels.txt to match. If this even works, then you have some palette work ahead if Maggots doesn't look good in Act 4 colors.

[Joel]

Quite nice ...

Will look at this one with Paul and get on report.

Baz, for the act II, I think of making some shortcut between every underground temples from the beginning, allowing you to skip the overworld route.

[Joel]

Ok act II with shortcut sems neat. Got two routes now both under or over ground (desert and temples)

For Act IV, i'll try to change Maggots lair into an Act V hell level types with Portal to enter, king of 'Inner Hell' as Act IV is now the UnderDark (home of drows)

[lorddrekas]

Seems and don'T quota me on this, but I was able to increase the size of the river of flame to twice its normal size with just the levels txt, normally we have had little success changing top side areas, but since river of flame is totally random like caves I think it worked for me when I was playing around with it let me know if I'm sadly mistaken

Lord Drekas

Another idea struck me but I haven't had time to look into it, doing some code editing so thats taking all my time. IN act 2 the chaos sanc there are a mutlitude of portals and was thinking about looking into using those since we can't actually create new portals just kinda rearrange exsisting ones, not sure if we could move those portals out of the sanctuary and out em in different parts of act 4 or something like that. if any one has tried or wants to look into this let us know what ye find

[Olorin]

Just interested to know where this went.

[Joel]

Well, faield to add subterranean level to Act IV.
I'll try some tileset changes ofr the Act 9 and 14 too

[kingpin]

If you have tried too add "Act V hell level types, like Abandon" into "Act IV" you will fail ;/

But, if you try and add for example Caves from Act 1 it will work (othervise it's strange).

[Joel]

Do you mean you succeed to add caves to Act IV ????

[kingpin]

I can try that right now, i havn't try. But, i can't see why it should not work

I post a mess if i get this too work.

[Joel]

Nice !

try simple, adding a caves right next to the hellforge for example.

[*Astalion*]

I tried moving tower cellar level 2 to act 4 (between river of flame and city of the damned), and it crashed after I walked a bit. What possibly could work is to change all areas except town and chaos sanctuary to caves, and put a warp in town and in the chaos sanctuary entry (with that you could increase act 4 through rooms column in lvlmaze.txt). Making the caves look like act 4 areas would be possible, someone had worked on that and posted in general mod making.

[Joel]

Culd be nice, the Act IV in CWAT is indeed a pure cave like the Moria in the lotR ...
Maybe by using the same method that kingpin used to curn wilderness into caves ??

[kingpin]

I tried to turn River of Flame into a "normal" Cave. But got this error "MazeLevelGenerate() - Some really bad voodoo here!" The most funniest error message so far

I think it would work too turn all wilderness into caves for Act IV as the way i did with Tamoe Highland.

The next step for me now is to add a new cave entrance somewhere and try to add a cave to it. Just a simple levelswap dosn't seems to work in River of Flame.

[Joel]

try to put a cave entrance in the hellforge or next hadriel

[Olorin]

Ack, hate to repeat myself, but since there's a mysterious silence lingering...was it a "Success!" , or "Oh well, back to the drawing board" experiment?

[Joel]

Well, the warp adding was working but the linking to a previous act level
results in an obscure Assertion. Currently seeing what cause it.

[Olorin]

Hmm. "obscure" is never a good word.
Ah well, good luck on your hunt.

[54x]

If you could add in a WP for the CS, lengthening the River of Flame is likely a good idea

[Joel]

As soon as possible, I'll grab the SG new level stuff and test it. If i can have it to work nicely, I'll surely add some caves to Act IV and maybe hijack all the borrrring Plains stuff

[Emperor d3st]

Well, there are 15 acts, but are they as long as the original acts in LOD, maybe every act is a new town? Hmm, I'm a bit confused.

[Xcolibri]

That is because you don't read thoroughly enough, I guess

Joel will play around with maps alot, also it's 15 acts because he's using three different mpqs for each of the former difficulties. So there are really different acts, not just five which gets harder.

The discussion was how to change the length of the quite short act IV by map editing. E.g. inserting act V portals (the red ones) to sub-levels.

[Rattlecage]

You put the seals in different spots.