nemaara / a_new_order Goto Github PK

So, I first noticed this when trying to use the macros in S04 (Battle of Barnon), but it's a more generic issue than that if you look at how the macros are actually implemented:

See:

Right now use of the {OBJECTIVE_NOTES} macro looks kind of weird, can conflict with other note= keys, and can get cut off if the text gets too long:

See also:

On Discord @knyghtmare noted seeing repeated names

I have my own fork of A New Order that I'm working on, and, once I'm done with it, I'd like to know whether this is the correct place to submit my changes, or if szopen has his own repository somewhere. My fork is here, btw: https://github.com/cooljeanius/A_New_Order

This isn't really so much a bug report as it is a discussion question: does it make sense for Gawen to have traits or not? It feels kinda weird how he doesn't have any currently, but then again, on second thought, that kinda makes sense from a story POV: throughout most of the beginning of the campaign, he's trying not to be who he is, and thus is avoiding displaying any notable traits. It's only later once he experiences character growth and accepts his role that he starts to display personality. Also, from a gameplay POV, I'm not really sure Gawen needs anything; usually when one of my heroes dies, it's one of my other ones, and I usually manage to get Gawen to level 3 (plus an AMLA or two) by the end of the campaign. So, while he might not technically need any traits, that blank space in the sidebar where traits ought to go does still kinda bug me...

So IMO the messages that you're not supposed to kill Bor Cryne and Uri van Roe in S04 still aren't quite enough; there remains the possibility that the player won't actually stop what they are doing, in which case, what happens then? The player could theoretically just keep playing forever without actually reaching an end to the scenario... see further feedback from @knyghtmare on Discord...

Currently all units with unique portraits have those unique portraits used via the macros in macros/messages.cfg; much of the time the portraits aren't actually embedded in their unit declarations in the main scenario WML, though, which can lead to the unique portrait getting left out if the unit triggers a message intended for a generic unit. This can be fixed by ensuring all heroes with unique portraits have those portraits set via the profile= key in their UnitWML, which I can do, but I might miss some by accident.

The traits I'm adding in PR #43 are mostly for gameplay purposes, and don't make as much sense from a flavor standpoint... @nemaara suggested I create some new traits that do basically the same thing but have a different name, which I think could be worthwhile once I figure out how to do it. That's out-of-scope for that PR, though, so I'm opening this issue to track it separately.

• In a previous review, @nemaara said I might want to increase the turn limit; that would require changing the code in a lot of places, though, so I didn't do it at the time. It might be worth revisiting, though.
• The dialogue about there being "too many of them" should only display if there are, in fact, too many enemies (i.e. the case where they outnumber you... I'm not sure how to filter for that, though)

From cooljeanius/A_New_Order/7. I fixed the Wonderman, but the Darknite's sword's sound effect is still broken.

Specifically, the "Description", "Website", and "Topics" fields. Compare my version of the repo (not the one forked from this one, but rather the separate one):

See here:
https://github.com/cooljeanius/A_New_Order/blob/master/units/macros/abilities.cfg

I think "Terror" and "Obscures" make sense for Grekulak; I'm not quite sure about the rest, though... I think "Protection" is there for back when the Dunefolk were still Aragwaithi, but maybe now it makes sense to put it onto the Akladian Protectors? Since Akladian Protectors are present throughout the campaign, though, changing the entire unit type to have that ability would affect balance of the whole campaign, and require testing, though... also, how about "Dauntless" and "Intimidates"? (I don't think I'm actually going to use any of the "sylvan" abilities, though, as those are pretty heavily tied to IftU/AtS, but if I did use them here... maybe Kyobaine could get one of them upon advancing to level 3?)

I plan on doing this after I finish up with cooljeanius/wesnoth_mods#3 and cooljeanius/wesnoth_mods#5 on 1.14, but if someone else who's already on 1.16 wants to get things started first, I'm sure @knyghtmare would appreciate it.

Part of ANO's reputation is that it has code tracking player reloads in it, however, this code isn't actually currently used, despite what players think. It might be worthwhile investigating if this code can be reactivated, in order to meet player expectations:

There have been new contributions that should be noted, and Wesnoth 1.16 fixes the bug where BfW crashes on credits that are too long, so the credits should be updated when porting to that version.

When I started editing this campaign, in the arc starting with S17, the player was only supposed to be able to recruit Peasants, at least until they became able to recruit Mages. However, in S19c, "The Oracle", I noticed a commented-out recruit= line that allowed the recruiting of Fencers again, so I un-commented it, since I was having a hard time anyways, and needed the extra recruits. However, that had the effect of creating a contradiction in some of the dialogue in S24, "Fall of Freetown", where it refers to being able to recruit Fencers "again", as if they were still unrecruitable up until that point. I should either rework that dialogue, disable recruiting of Fencers again after S19c, or come up with some other solution.
Refs:

This can be kind of hard to test; I don't think I've actually seen all the text in-game yet:

This is basically a dup of cooljeanius/Son_Of_The_Black_Eye_Easy_Edition#15 except for ANO; IOW, a reminder to myself to port the snowshoe-related portion of cooljeanius/Son_Of_The_Black_Eye_Easy_Edition@74c91d3 over to this campaign.

Kind of a follow-up to #51; screenshot of where I asked about it on Discord:

The fact that this campaign has the large-scale "strategic map" scenarios where you can talk with other characters gives me the idea that this might be the perfect place to try out implementing my idea for FE-style support conversations in Wesnoth. Basically, it would involve adding some support points variables that get incremented whenever two of your heroes fight next to one another, and then when you go to your camp to talk to them (in S13, S18, & S20), if you've built up enough support points with that character, you'd get a new dialogue option with them to have a "support conversation" that would increase their overall support level. The thing that would make these different from the existing conversations you can have with characters at your camp would be the conditionality of them: being able to know how emotionally "close" characters are to one another would allow us to make additional assumptions in the dialogue as to how the characters should interact.

Marximillian reported some issues with them in his playthru that I wasn't able to reproduce; if they are truly gone, then I can just remove the comments

Most other scenarios put [gold_carryover] in their objectives, so it is rather unusual not to see it here.
git grep gold_carryover turns up nothing.

• In an attempt to ensure no branches of ifdefs were left blank, I tried adding the placing of an image in a side declaration. However, that doesn't work.
• Heinric the Redbeard and the old medic should have unique portraits done for them; see ART_TODO.txt and cooljeanius/ANO_art#2
• Setting Gawen's health at the start is pointless, since it just gets overwritten by an event (also, as @knyghtmare has pointed out, the event doesn't make much sense itself, as it's supposed to represent him being poisoned, but Wesnoth has an actual "poisoned" status that we could be using for him instead)

From cooljeanius/A_New_Order/6. I filled in captions for most of the messages that were missing them, but there are still a few remaining where giving them a caption would involve something a little more complicated than just copying the 1st parameter to the 3rd parameter. I tried to mark all the ones I could find with TODO comments, so they should be easy to notice.

From cooljeanius/A_New_Order/4. I did a lot of copyediting, but there's always more wording choices that can be tweaked.

one thing @knyghtmare complained about recently was how big the download was, well a lot of that comes from there being a bunch of old cruft leftover in the repo. We should use wmlscope to find stuff that's unused, and then either actually use it (as I plan to do with abilities.cfg as per #55), or just remove it.

@cooljeanius Your code here doesn't behave how you might think it does:

Turns out you can make him run between your keep and his own so he gets stuck in limbo and doesn't recruit again. Makes the scenario a lot easier to just defend forever.

I tried doing so, but it doesn't seem to work:

Scenario 10, Siege of Haeltin, marks the start of winter. Everything before that is soon before it, so it should still be autumn. This can be confirmed by looking at images/story_images/gawen_alone.png, which has a background with fall colors in it. Any maps in the first 10 scenarios should be updated to use fall terrain when applicable, for example, with any deciduous forests.

Reme maintains his spiky "hero" even after he stops being necessary to keep alive. Meanwhile, other units that are necessary to keep alive don't get the spiky "hero" ellipse (e.g. Deorien). Also I think Rob Roe has the wrong crown thingy under his orb... I can fix some of these myself, but not all of them...
Edit: making a checklist:

• Rob Roe looks like a hero, but isn't
• Deorien is a hero, but doesn't look like one
• Need to use {UNMAKE_HERO} on Reme at some point

I came across this unused map when doing some cleaning of the maps in general, and thought it would be interesting to have it actually be used in a scenario... I'm not quite sure where to fit it in, though... possibly as an alternative to 15b ("Repelling The Orcs")?

Pretty much all the explicit time over events in this campaign that result in defeat have messages that mention something about reinforcements arriving; it would require less willing suspension of disbelief if these reinforcements were actually shown using {SCATTER_UNITS} or something.

In cooljeanius/A_New_Order@30d5bcb I put a ghost there but really it should have a better secret, one that uses the entire encampment... Tezereth on Discord recently gave me an idea...

Specifically, this part:

From cooljeanius/A_New_Order/1. Basically sometimes allied AI sides kill units that the player might want to kill for EXP, and there should be a way to stop them from doing so. It might actually be better to do this in core Wesnoth rather than limiting it to an add-on, as I've come across many other instances where such a behavior would be useful, as well. But that would require some discussion.

With the Akladian Homeguard line (Homeguard/Shieldguard/Protector), they all deal impact damage, but sometimes the sound effect and/or graphic for their attack looks/sounds like a blade. Ideally things should be brought in sync. Including the text in their unit info.

• Battle music should only play once the player has discovered the orcs; before that it should be calmer and more mysterious
• Clear fog to show orcs speaking

• Maybe the lizards should be able to join you? I dunno, it's just something Marximilian suggested... (also be sure to test dialogue in that area, too)
• Make a macro to reduce repetition of the moveto events
• Ensure modifications to saurians to represent their sluggishness in the cold actually work properly (and consider updating them as necessary)
• unused macro cleanup; see issue #57 (for example, the PROPOSE_PEACE_LIZARD macro)

AI_CONTROLLER is being removed so we need to get rid of it. Probably replace with a microAI or just make the player play the side which I am leaning toward.

See, for example, this dialogue:

I dunno what to do about this...

(This is S13, "Scouting", btw... possibly related to issue #24?)

To reproduce: Start Bontom, leave Reme caged, and then move Gawen to the signpost and tell him to retreat. Reme will still be freed even though he's not supposed to be. I think the issue here is in the {NEXT_SCENARIO_CONTINUE} macro...

The copyediting I did as part of the 1.3.0 release changed a lot of strings, which probably broke a lot of translations. I updated the potfile as part of that release, so translators should be able to use msgmerge to update their pofiles and then work from there.

Originally reported by @knyghtmare on the forums. This breaks the units.wesnoth.orgdisplay; note how Akladian Warriors aren't visible on it: https://units.wesnoth.org/1.14/A_New_Order/en_US/A_New_Order.html
The advancement path may very well have been szopen's original intention (or not; we don't know), but I think this does in fact count as a bug due to the way it breaks the u.w.o. display. I have no idea how to fix it, though.

• Color-changing animation code when Deorien drives off Grekulak's darkness on turn 16 doesn't really work or look right (and it also takes too long, now that I added delays to it)
• Bridge-destruction dialogue needs to be improved based on scenario conditions
• Only the single-tile bridges should be destructible, not the 2-tile one (or at least, not the whole thing of it)
• Side 8's recruitment_pattern should be updated when it becomes allowed to recruit new units
• Don't let the {RISE_UP_RISE_UP} macro capture villages (at least not on EASY), for consistency with how the "Plague" mechanic works
• Handle the case where victory is reached before Grekulak's arrival
• Ensure all level 3 units are counted properly for the final score tallying (S30, "Final") (low priority, as I'm pretty sure they already are)
• Change music on Grekulak's arrival, and when he tries his spell of darkness
• Countdown timer for how many turns Lorin has to retreat
• Clean up moveto event for when Lorin arrives at keep, so there is dialogue if it's reached between turns 13 and 18, too
• Ensure zombie IDs are properly quoted

On turns 15 to 30, Uri Van Roe has a [leader_goal] tag directing him to move towards Gawen's keep. However, there is no dialogue indicating that he's going to start doing this, nor is there any dialogue once he's gotten there, which can lead to player confusion as to why he's suddenly acting "suicidal" (seemingly - he has events to guard him, though). More code and dialogue should be added to explain why he's moving and when he's stopped. He could also be protected a bit better.

I started porting ANO to BfW 1.16 without porting the Akladian Music add-on first and then got confused when it wouldn't play; adding a check to make sure it's installed would have helped me avoid that.