Originally Posted by
Metal Gear Rex
That's pretty awesome.
So how exactly are new creatures to be added / how well can they be modified once a copy is created? I assume it shouldn't impact existing global data, so I should be able to add it to the current patch map without having to redo all the patch modifications.
Also, big question, are you able to attract the new Goblin through the portal normally, as in no script force attracting?
I was looking back through the posts on this, and I realized that yes, it's already possible to add the Maiden to 1.3 by adding the 1.7 global data file (and the main .kwd file I think?) to a 1.3 map as you mentioned at some point, provided you also have all the proper 1.7 resources in meshes / engine textures. I believe I tried this before but apparently I was missing the engine textures inside DK2TextureCache, I thought the engine textures.wad was enough. I added her in successfully and have been experimenting with her functionality this morning.
The Maiden is almost fully functional, but I noticed one particular problem that can't really be overlooked, which is that she won't come through the portal. I set her as the only attractable creature but she refuses to spawn unless I force attract (although she does come out just fine in that case). I'm not sure why. I'm worried this is data inside the executable, unless it's something associated with the Portal room itself.
In doing this I also simultaneously tested the possibility of adding new Traps / Rooms through the Jack-in-the-Box and Mercenary Portal, which does suggest that new Doors / Keeper Spells might also be possible. I wouldn't personally bother with any of it though as new Rooms I don't think would have any functionality on their own, and one of the unfortunate downsides of 1.3 is there's no scroll functionality for the Keeper Spell / Manufacture tabs ingame, meaning there's a finite amount of space for options. Keeper Spells already runs into space issues from specials, and I'm already hitting the Manufacture tab item limit by changing the Good variants into normal Trap / Door variants. Lastly, new Rooms also gave me problems within the editor with crashing when I went to the room tab. I had to do weird work arounds while experimenting. I needed to have a loader map to load the Maiden's data before loading my actual test map, but I needed to access the room tab in the editor before actually loading the loader map, since that gets around it trying to load the new room inside the room tab and avoiding the crash that way.
Lastly, I did find a couple interesting things. I tried force attracting a Knight as a separate test and the Knight was able to come out of the portal perfectly fine. Normally in 1.3, all Heroes and the Horned Reaper get stuck at the bottom of the Portal and need to be picked up. This means that there's data in there to fix the attraction of those units so they come out of the portal normally, which would be a very nice quality of life change. I also tried adding Elites and Mercenaries to see if it added their unique skins or not, and it did not. So that data is not in there and is probably in the executable.
I am still hoping for the possibility of eventually changing the texture resource as I'm sure the elite / mercenary skins could be accessed that way, which would allow for a lot of actually new units. Especially if it's possible to change model scaling.