Repairing the Cogs of Morrowind #12 : III - Morrowind

» Fri May 27, 2011 5:21 am

BTW, my Holiday Mod does actually integrate the old MonthFix script - do I need to install some sort of check to toggle this off in my mod if people are using the patch, or will it be OK?

begin a1jw_thm_Monthfix		;based on Month Bugfix Script v2.0 - Zennorious	;thanks, rougetet, for the mercantile stuff		short LastMonth	short Yesterday	short ShorterMonth	short LongerMonth	short Leap	short doOnce		if ( Day == Yesterday )		return	endif	if ( CharGenState > 0 )		return	endif		if ( Month == 1 )		if ( LastMonth == 11 )			if ( Yesterday == 30 )				set Year to ( Year - 1 )				set Month to 11				set Day to 31			else				set Month to 0			endif		elseif ( LastMonth == 0 )			if ( Yesterday < 31 )				if ( GameHour < 1 )					set Month to 0					set Day to ( Yesterday + 1 )				endif			endif		elseif ( LastMonth == 1 )			if ( Day >= 29 )				set Leap to ( Year / 4 )				set Leap to ( Year - ( Leap * 4 ) )				if ( Leap == 0 )					if ( Day == 30 )						set Month to 2						set Day to 1					endif				else					if ( Day == 29 )						set Month to 2						set Day to 1					endif				endif			endif		endif	elseif ( Month == 3 )		set ShorterMonth to 1		set LongerMonth to 1	elseif ( Month == 5 )		set ShorterMonth to 1		set LongerMonth to 1	elseif ( Month == 7 )		set ShorterMonth to 1	elseif ( Month == 8 )		set LongerMonth to 1	elseif ( Month == 10 )		set ShorterMonth to 1		set LongerMonth to 1	endif		if ( LongerMonth == 1 )		set LongerMonth to 0		if ( Day == 31 )			set Month to ( Month + 1 )			set Day to 1			set Yesterday to 31		endif	endif		if ( ShorterMonth == 1 )		set ShorterMonth to 0		if ( Day == 1 )			if ( Yesterday < 31 )				if ( Yesterday != 1 )					set Month to LastMonth					set Day to ( Yesterday + 1 )				endif			endif		endif	endifif ( doOnce == 0 )	if ( Random100 > 90 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 1		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 10	elseif ( Random100 > 80 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 2		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 20	elseif ( Random100 > 70 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 3		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 30	elseif ( Random100 > 60 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 4		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 40	elseif ( Random100 > 50 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 5		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 50	elseif ( Random100 > 44 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 6		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 60	elseif ( Random100 > 36 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 7		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 70	elseif ( Random100 > 30 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 8		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 80	elseif ( Random100 > 23 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 9		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 90	elseif ( Random100 > 16 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 10		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 100	elseif ( Random100 > 10 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 11		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 110	elseif ( Random100 >= 0 )		set ajw_thm_assign to 12		Journal "1jw_thm_birthdayjnl" 120	endif	Addtopic "New Life"	Addtopic "Birthday Celebration"	Addtopic "--Celebration"	set doOnce to 1endif		set LastMonth to Month	set Yesterday to Day	startscript "a1jw_thm_celebratescript";	Messagebox "starting main startscript"	end

Also, it seems to have a dummy script but I can't for the life of me remember what this is referencing

begin _spzYearPatchActivatorScriptend

Somebody should answer the cute bunny's question before she bites you!
In my opinion, providing an esp patch would be the best option.

» Fri May 27, 2011 9:28 am

Yes, I know. Maybe Morrowind behaves like that already, but what I mean is, are absorbing effects (not reflected ones) absorbed by spell absorption?

Spell absorption is just an x% chance to absorb whatever hits you before any effects are applied.

Something I forgot to mention before, relating to bartering. You can sell a stack of any stackable item and get gold, or you could sell each one individually (Without even needing to exit the bartering screen. It's at least understandable if the transactions are made in different "sessions".) and end up with more gold than selling everything at once. I'm sure it's not supposed to work like that. I don't suppose that it's fixable?

As far as I can tell this only applies to items that have a value of 1 gold, and I know how to fix that.

BTW, my Holiday Mod does actually integrate the old MonthFix script - do I need to install some sort of check to toggle this off in my mod if people are using the patch, or will it be OK?
...

It does add a few extra days here and there that shouldn't be there. But this shows an interesting way of doing things. MonthFix compatible mods know about the correct number of days per month, the months start at zero and the names are right. On the other hand the MonthFix mod breaks script checks in other mods, that's why it was phased out. If I reverted to my first version, then you could just delete the monthfix script and everything would otherwise work.

Could that be the same issue causing meshes with alpha channel textures (e.g. some hair meshes, transparent glass weapons, etc.) to disappear when underwater when looking from above? I'd really like to set this on the to-do list for this great project.

It is the same thing. It's a classic z-sorting issue which is a long standing problem. The proper way would be to sort every transparent face, but this is too inefficient to work in scenes with real complexity, so an approximation is made using the model bounding box. It's failing here and drawing the faces in the wrong order.

At this point, I favor no patch. If lore must be preserved then I suppose I could live Hrnchamd's first attempt at a fix. Since I recognize the need I can rewrite my own scripts. The rest is someone else's problem. As for my suggestion (the current fix) I do not like to think I am responsible for breaking someone else's work so I might sleep easier without it.

I'm seriously considering reverting the change unless anything else comes up.

» Fri May 27, 2011 11:50 am

Thanks Hrnchamd for mention the Inventory Quick-Slot bug (now it also have a name) and my workaround, it's an honour and fun too see my name in your Morrowind Code Patch thread. I'm famous :lol:

. Hope you'll fix this little bug someday. I highly admire your work on this amazing project.

» Fri May 27, 2011 12:43 am

As far as I can tell this only applies to items that have a value of 1 gold, and I know how to fix that.

I had never actually tried this before, but it appears that what happens for each transfer is the asking price is rounded down, unless that would make it zero, in which case it's one. So this can be exploited either way. For items worth one, you transfer the items to the shopkeeper one at a time, then back to you all at once. For more expensive items, do the opposite. Either way you get free money, though the first way is much more convenient.

» Fri May 27, 2011 5:57 am

As far as I can tell this only applies to items that have a value of 1 gold, and I know how to fix that.

Cool. What's the solution?

I'm seriously considering reverting the change unless anything else comes up.

For now, I think that is the best choice. Modders can make or adapt their scripts to the MCP, or make alternate ones. It's not such a bad compromise for the value of the fix. Maybe just include a warning in the readme or even the patcher that it may invalidate some time dependent scripts.

I had never actually tried this before, but it appears that what happens for each transfer is the asking price is rounded down, unless that would make it zero, in which case it's one. So this can be exploited either way. For items worth one, you transfer the items to the shopkeeper one at a time, then back to you all at once. For more expensive items, do the opposite. Either way you get free money, though the first way is much more convenient.

Not really worth the hassle, for sure.

» Fri May 27, 2011 9:53 am

The Morrowind game engine has a 16-bit height range limit. Ironically the Construction Set doesn't. This limit restricts the usable height range to approx +/- 32768 game units (+/- 4095 THU or +/- 467 metres), so, technically, mountains are impossible in Morrowind.

(:()

Would that be possible to fix? :hehe:

» Fri May 27, 2011 3:23 am

Thanks Hrnchamd for mention the Inventory Quick-Slot bug (now it also have a name) and my workaround, it's an honour and fun too see my name in your Morrowind Code Patch thread. I'm famous :lol:

. Hope you'll fix this little bug someday. I highly admire your work on this amazing project.

I guess I just fixed it, though it needs testing.

I had never actually tried this before, but it appears that what happens for each transfer is the asking price is rounded down, unless that would make it zero, in which case it's one.
...

Yeah, that's true, the rounding errors add up after a while. A bit too much trouble to fix, have to change 15 code points to fix this properly.

Would that be possible to fix? :hehe:

In the ESMs the height map is stored as an 8-bit differenced map + base height. In game it's stored in 16-bit buffers.. changing the thousands of lines which could access them is bad enough, missing one could mean NPCs fall through the landscape occasionally or graphics glitches. Too much work to do properly.

» Fri May 27, 2011 10:14 am

It does add a few extra days here and there that shouldn't be there. But this shows an interesting way of doing things. MonthFix compatible mods know about the correct number of days per month, the months start at zero and the names are right. On the other hand the MonthFix mod breaks script checks in other mods, that's why it was phased out. If I reverted to my first version, then you could just delete the monthfix script and everything would otherwise work.

I'm not sure what you really mean by "phased out" - as far as I knew, Zennorius' mod (from which the first section of my script is unchanged) was widely used, and/or simply integrated into other mods, right until your patch came along. :shrug:

It's really no trouble to me to upload a replacement .esp for my mod that just deletes the "Zennorius" part. If I need to do that to ensure compatability with your patch, just let me know.

» Fri May 27, 2011 10:58 am

Month fix was removed from UMP because there was a bad interaction with powers (the once per day spells), sometimes they didn't reset and would fail to do so from then on. To quote Thepal "all methods of MonthFix create problems". If you could just have an option where the monthfix isn't present it would be fine.

Can anyone reproduce these consistently? I need clear directions on how to make it happen.

RemoveItem glitch by Alexxx

Example 1: I have 5 snow wolf pelts and order a piece of armour requiring 2 pelts. I check my inventory and find that I still have 5. I drop them on the ground. When I reload I have 3 pelts in my inventory... No wonder that my encumbrance is 20-30 units below what it should be.

Example 2 (by Tyraa Rane): say I have 20 pieces of crab meat to give to one of the NPCs from Cutthroat's Minor Quest mod. I talk to him; he takes the crab meat. I click "goodbye" and open my inventory--the crab meat's still there. Go and talk to him again, pick up the quest again (you can do the quests ad infinitum if you want), and re-open my inventory...no more crab meat. It's almost as if the inventory isn't "refreshing" properly.

These don't occur for me. I need something that happens often enough to track.

Crash with cell transition door by DavidB1111.
(not reproducible, not confirmed yet)

Create a monster that has summon Bonelord spells, or bonewalker, anything, and get it to cast the spell near a cell transition door. Now kill it, and before it finishes the death animation, which kills the summons, walk through the door. Bam, instant Crash to Desktop. With an error message. This is easy to do with BigMod 2 with the Uber Bonelords that summon bonelords.

I used unmodded Morrowind except for a mod that changes a few standard creatures to have summon spells. It doesn't crash. Does it still happen if you disable scripting?

» Fri May 27, 2011 5:43 am

Arghh! I mean that in a good way too.

I'll go test it later, not a big fan of it now, if it doesn't work for you.

I don't understand. It should do that. Are you timing it perfectly? You have to go through the area door at the exact moment you kill someone.
You have to stab them, and then immediately go through the door. You'll hear the summoning sound, and then wham, instant crash.
A NPC does it more often then creatures, but still, the Bonelords who summon more bonelords in BigMod 2 will cause it all the time.
Arghhh.

» Fri May 27, 2011 2:10 pm

Is there anyone available for testing MCP with the Russian version of Morrowind? I want to release the next MCP as soon as possible.

» Fri May 27, 2011 1:53 am

Hey, when you release a an updated version, notify me first. I can update the file at GHF and still preserve your download count there (assuming you care about download count. :shrug:)

» Fri May 27, 2011 2:38 pm

I'm not worried about that kind of thing, as long as it works.

Stuff going into 1.4 so far:

- MCP Version appears on the title screen. You can see if it installed properly.

- Rare inventory bugs. Fixes issues with inventory updates when:
.Using potions via quickslot; when you used the last potion in a stack the icon would remain, clicking on it could crash the game.
.Soul trap; when another NPC used soultrap and captured a soul, your inventory display would be overwritten by the NPCs.

- Spellmaking changes.
Allows you to use a spell effect more than once when making spells.
Area effect spells cost modifier is now cost * (1 + area^2/400).

- NPC item use AI
Potion drinking is limited to once every 5-6 seconds game time.
NPCs now drink magicka potions if their magicka goes below 50%.

- Dispel no longer (invisibly) stacks with itself if you keep casting it.
- Creatures cause armour damage.
- Variable spell magnitude fix now applies to all restore spells as well.
- Hand to hand damage now varies with strength. It is equivalent to original Morrowind damage at 40 str and increases up to 2.5x at 100 str.
- Mercantile fix. Disposition effect is back to normal, instead the deviation from base price from all skills and effects is reduced by 50%.
- Gloss map fix. Allows gloss maps to work. Stops Morrowind from removing the gloss map entry when loading NIFs.
- Menu button change. Allows double width main menu buttons.

» Fri May 27, 2011 9:59 am

Stuff going into 1.4 so far:

- MCP Version appears on the title screen. You can see if it installed properly.

-clip-

@Hrnchamd
Are you interested in also including with the v1.4 release the optional menu_morrowind screens I made for v1.2 that graphically indicate the code patch? A graphical indication would compliment well the MCP version appearing in text. There are 2 versions - one which just 'watermarks' the main menu splash screen by filling in the daedric 'V' with red; and one which adds 'Code Patch' below Morrowind in the graphic.

http://www.liquidanvil.com/mw/tetchy_mcpwatermark.7z

Probably best to include an option in the gui that could be checked to also have the menu_morrowind.dds added when a patch is applied, and removed when all patches are uninstalled.

Thanks again for your efforts to continue to improve the game! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

» Fri May 27, 2011 12:58 am

That list looks great Hrnchamd!

Is there any chance the zoomed in "city"-markers could be made less blurry by any chance? I'm not sure if the markers get printed onto the map texture, or are an overlay.

» Fri May 27, 2011 1:11 am

When can we expect this 1.4?

» Fri May 27, 2011 2:55 am

- Gloss map fix. Allows gloss maps to work. Stops Morrowind from removing the gloss map entry when loading NIFs.

Just ace! Thanks so much!

» Fri May 27, 2011 10:43 am

I'll get 1.4 out as soon as the Russian edition test cycle is done. If it takes too long I might get a chance to add arrow bundle enchanting before it ships.

Is there any chance the zoomed in "city"-markers could be made less blurry by any chance? I'm not sure if the markers get printed onto the map texture, or are an overlay.

It's part of the texture. If I figure out how it works I'll change the map filter to point sampling instead of bilinear.

» Fri May 27, 2011 12:12 pm

I'll get 1.4 out as soon as the Russian edition test cycle is done. If it takes too long I might get a chance to add arrow bundle enchanting before it ships.

Arrow enchanting? Awesome! I've always wondered why arrows weren't enchantable, and I'll love this with my next archer!

» Fri May 27, 2011 8:40 am

Fixing H2H damage by G-Flex
(fix available in next release)

Here are the formulas used by morrowind to calculate h2h fatigue and health damage:

fatigue-damage = hand-to-hand * fHandToHandMult
health-damage = hand-to-hand * fHandToHandMult * fHandToHandHealthPer * fCombatKODamageMult

The constants are defined by default as:

fHandToHandMult = between fMinHandToHandMult and fMaxHandToHandMult
fMaxHandToHandMult = 0.5
fHandToHandHealthPer = 0.1
fCombatKODamageMult = 1.5

Some little calculation shows that the health-damage is indeed really low, even for higher h2h skill values. Therefore the monk mod increases the fHandToHandHealthPer constant to 0.4. It is hard to believe, but Bethesda somehow forgot to take your strenght or agilty into account when calculating the damage...

If I do not misunderstand, this fix will allow to damage health, not only fatigue, using H2H combat, right?
If so, then it is an invaluable fix! To my knowledge, there is no efficient way to fix H2H for damaging heath, since the scripting method does allow to make H2H damage only on 1 fighting opponent. Others mods I've tested never worked at 100%. So thanks so much!

» Fri May 27, 2011 3:24 am

holy crap, arrow enchanting!

» Fri May 27, 2011 4:14 am

If I do not misunderstand, this fix will allow to damage health, not only fatigue, using H2H combat, right?

No, it's the same as before, damage when the opponent is knocked down. It makes the hand to hand damage increase with strength (like with weapon damage) instead of depending only on the skill level.

holy crap, arrow enchanting!

I just got it working. Pretty sweet.

» Fri May 27, 2011 4:40 am

No, it's the same as before, damage when the opponent is knocked down. It makes the hand to hand damage increase with strength (like with weapon damage) instead of depending only on the skill level.

so strength affects fatigue damage, and also health damage when there's a knockdown? that's a huge boost to brawlers, and werewolves.

» Fri May 27, 2011 4:30 pm

I just got it working. Pretty sweet.

That IS pretty sweet. It'll make a magic/marksman combination class a lot more effective and fun.

» Fri May 27, 2011 2:01 am

Gold Weight Bug:

Is anyone else experiencing this and, if so, can it be fixed in the MCP at some point?

When I drop large amounts of gold my character's weight carried goes down significantly (in some cases to zero) despite all of the other equipment carried. I am not using feather or anything that should cause this.

It looks like the bug is caused by any mod that add's weight to gold

http://www.mwmythicmods.com/Archives/Mods/Gold%20Weight%20Bug.htm