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Sounds very cool. The menuing in DoaE is probably one of the game’s rough edges for some folks coming in, even if people do eventually figure out how to fly through them.
LLM code generation has been such a mixed bag. I’m honestly a bit surprised you were able to get that much out of it for ROM editing, given there are some real novel aspects involved in what you described.
I find it can work wonders when you tell it specifically what to do and how to do it, or tell it some specific details about what to fix or how something should be changed. But “vibe coding” as folks call it—seems really rough around the edges to me. It’s been great for making some one-off non-production tools, though.
MiDKnighT, entirely too much by hand, given I built this on the much older Destiny of an Emperor officers section, which in turn was probably prepared in 2002 or the like.
But for this new section I dumped some ROM data, and cross-referenced data with the Japanese release of the game to match some names and details, so a lot of it ended up coming from the ROM, and some old errors got fixed because something didn’t line up. The descriptions are also a mix of some old details written back in the day and some various revisions I wrote while preparing it.
I wrote a little program that can be fed a bunch of profiles from a game with stats, names, etc. and do some fuzzy matching against the encyclopedia to create the encyclopedia links, so that wasn’t too bad other than doing a bit of digging to try and solve a few mysteries (like the Tao Qian thing). Young me would have really enjoyed being able to read a bit about the officers in the game.
That makes sense! More than all member posts being moderated, which I wondered for a moment.
Heck, I wanted to share it here, because this is where all the Destiny of an Emperor happenings are happening these days, and I wanted someone to be able to enjoy this little side project instead of it whiling away unloved in the fetid bowels of Google.
I’ve been very slowly chipping away at trying to update KMA to a new code base, so it can keep on keeping on. But boy has it been a slog. I’m pretty routinely surprised at how much younger me managed to code there, and it’s tricky migrating it a little bit at a time. It’s probably pretty jarring to browse through the old and new content side-by-side, and the navigation is pretty awful. It was a lot of fun preparing this little love letter to DoaE, though. :)
Actually, Emperor Shao was still alive when he was replaced with Xian; Dong Zhuo was impressed by Xian’s superior intelligence.
Unfortunately, he didn’t survive much longer; Dong Zhuo was, after all, Dong Zhuo.
Thanks for the correction. I was thinking of Emperor Ling and somehow forgot about Shao. I must be getting rusty.
AD 189
Emperor Ling dies.
Emperor Shao is enthroned.
Dong Zhou deposes Emperor Shao in favor of Emperor XianAD 190
The deposed Emperor Shao is murdered.Here are two chronologies of major events which should serve well for considering what might take place. There is always some mixup between the novel and actual history, but they generally serve their purpose and any mixup tends to have more to do with fact vs. fiction than order.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Three_Kingdoms_period
http://kongming.net/novel/chronology/Actually, this is something I’m going to have to free up to create more ‘interesting’ battles. What I did in other mods was erase a LOT of filler characters in lieu of more options for different stories, for example, a bunch of Shu officer nobodies who didn’t amount to much in terms of huge impact and don’t make very interesting people to wage war against.
I was speaking about the more prominent characters. Cao Cao had so many wonderful people through his career that it would be easy to create a scenario where the player pretty much ignores the vast majority of characters that come along; even those who are meant to be useful. Thus it would be nice to include variance between Guo Jia, Jia Xu, and Xun Yu, somehow. Same deal with the warriors. It is tricky to balance them out.
I’d love some ideas on new script, but one major fix is completely altering Chapter 1. I have some ideas from Emeperor Ling (or He Jin, they just have to die) on traveling East on the Imperial Highway which takes you from Chang An to the original Turban area. A battle with Li Jue will be spawned after you fight w/ the turbans and you will be unable to return to Chang An until Dong Zhuo/Lu Bu is conquered, or at least that will be my intention w/ the high troop counts I will give them.
Sounds good. It would be wonderful to enrich chapter one and some of the interactions with Dong Zhuo. Chapter one, in particular, offers room for improvement given the limited options to work with in the original mod.
I’m fixing the agility of all the officers, no worries there. I’m actually trying to make stats the most* realistic in this mod than ever. My first mods, the lowest stats for someone was like 120, now I’m trying to use the 50-200 range for a majority of the officers with special cases being above 200.
Agility is one of the things I would have used better numbers for if I had more control over the mod. In any case, we didn’t become aware of the agility bug until down the road. Only toward the end did I start to notice that something wasn’t working properly (such as Red Hare resetting agility or levels adjusting it). I’m happy to share thoughts on stats as well. I would argue that game balance is probably the most important thing, though. If not careful, there will be lots of characters who just aren’t worth bothering over.
Strategists are a particularly good example. Jia Xu and Guo Jia were both brilliant strategists and if they are properly honored Cao Cao is never going to lack a good strategist and there won’t be much reason to put thought into this subject. Not to mention Cao Cao himself being top tier, another issue if he remains in the party. I’m not sure if new changes to the tactics system allows for variance and originality here?
Funny. I’ve made a dragon sprite as well so that was an option in some of my other mods as well to recruit a non-human member of the party. Wang was available for recruit in Flames of Wu if the player met certain conditions.
Sounds cool. It’s nice having options like this for the sake of fun inclusions.
I’m going to try to modify events/the map to make it MORE realistic to history and flow similiarly to history in terms of battle fought. Much of the townspeople’s talk wasn’t modified and I’m going to have to chop sections/add some to create more room for dialogue unless I want to hex everyones text bank/line individually >_>
This was my greatest struggle in the mod—the limited space for text in the ROM. The Cao Cao mod basically brushed against the maximum through much of the editing process and I had to cut what could have been some great dialogue to make things work. It is nice to hear that more text is now possible. On the topic of writing, I’m happy to help out here during the development process.
Question, wasn’t someone else supposed to take over after Emperor Ling (shao?) and Dong Zhuo put Xian in charge?
Emperor Xian was installed after Emperor Shao’s death, and Dong Zhuo used him as a puppet. Xian was used by Cao Cao (quite carefully) and later deposed by Cao Pi, who then declared himself emperor. Areas like this are some where some spice from the novel can add a lot of flavor to the game.
Do you think ‘War Fans’ can be a legitimate weapon in a game >_>
Well, war fans are more or less fictional weapons. How much freedom do we have with weapons? Would it be possible to create a weapon which does more than simply provide attack power? They might have a fun place in the late game as a special goodie, or perhaps as a unique weapon found after the first battle with Zhuge Liang. Or as an item that comes equipped with Sima Yi (if that’s a thing), or a weapon wielded by Zhuge Liang (if enemies bother with displaying weapons). If it is now possible to create items with special abilities I can think of some fun ideas.
About when did Chen Gong join Cao Cao? It was after a falling out w/ Dong Zhuo correct? That’s going to be a hard event to emulate…
Here is the popular accounting of Chen Gong’s involvement with Cao Cao:
http://kongming.net/novel/kma/chengong.phpNot all of this is accurate. The actual history is *quite* dry by comparison (for example, he did not help to free Cao Cao from arrest), and the interactions between Chen Gong and Cao Cao here are some of the most famous stories from the novel and folklore. If you want to elaborate on Cao Cao’s interactions with Chen Gong, I would definitely borrow from this. I can see how it could become quite complex, however.
And there’s Cao Cao’s famous, “Better that I betray the world than let the world betray me.”
There are *many* excellent stories that could be worked in, though it is hard to imagine being able to pay too much of an homage to many of them. Some could be optional side-battles that have special rewards, if that’s possible.
Any thoughts on what I wrote, good sir sonic?
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.
I know some nasty stuff happens if the Guan Yu and Zhang Fei equivalents aren’t in the party when the event triggers to remove them. When working on the Cao Cao mod I wanted to allow their equivalents to be placed in billeting, but if the player left them in billeting at that point in the game bad things happened. I don’t remember what happened, and it wasn’t obvious at first, but the bad things were bad enough that I re-enabled the flag that prevented them from being, uh, billeted.
A 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?
Since 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!
James 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.
Well, 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. :)
Or rather, I should say, undocumented editing based on case-by-case research and advice from other modders. I might still have some of my documentation if it could be helpful.
It doesn’t look like there is much left to figure out, though?
Wow! I just skimmed through everything. Destiny of an Emperor modding has progressed a whole heck of a lot since I was working on the Cao Cao mod. Some of this new stuff looks really cool.
What’s the plan for this mod? To modernize the Cao Cao mod I worked on in times past as we chatted about earlier? Or something else? I would love to see the mod I put so much work into being modernized and expanded, and made more balanced. I just made it too difficult for normal players.
I hope I didn’t make things too frustrating. We didn’t really have tools to do much aside from something to help with scripts and an earlier version of Destiny of an Editor, so there was a fair amount of by-hand editing involved. Some of what was done was never really documented, though it doesn’t look like the two of you have much trouble tracking them down.
I just got pointed over to this thread with a request that I decide who I should be. Didn't we have this thread before? People thought I should be Zhuge Liang because of Kongming's Archives and all. If not, it really doesn't matter much. I guess in some strange way I kinda look like Zhang Fei. Zhao Yun's my favorite, but he's just so sexy. Liu Bei, anyone.
Cool—I didn’t know there were places to submit this stuff.
I’ll give it a shot when I’m finished with the two of them. :)
Huh… that could be much much worse.
I suppose it might always be possible to actually allow level 53 to exist…
