Invasion from the Unknown (1.9.99) for Wesnoth 1.4

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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Espreon
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Post by Espreon »

Xargon wrote: I did not find the void armor, but I guess with the void armor, the chainmail, the strength, berserk and drain potions and the speed ring given to Galas, you could take on most levels with him alone. Maybe some limitations would be good, like 2 or 3 items per hero. Ruling out certain combinations (such as the drainserker, or both armors on one hero, if that is possible) might be good as well to avoid overpowering single heroes.
Yeah if Galas obtains the Void Armor he does not obtain the Chainmail...
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Post by cafu »

Hi.

I tried to play the campaign with version 1.3.16 and 1.3.19, but there are problems:
With version 1.3.16 after the first round in the secons scenario, I get: "game_error:invalid side(33) found in unit definition"
With version 1.3.19 I cant even start the campaign.

Can someone help with this errors or tell me with which version the campaign runs?

Thanks

Cafu


p.s. And please forgive my english if it should be horrible... 8)
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Post by Xargon »

Shadow Master posted a new version here, though I haven't tried if it works with 1.3.16. Making it compatible with 1.3.18+ seems to be a lot of work, but making it compatible with 1.3.16 is rather quick and easy: The only problem is the syntax used in the scenario cfgs to spawn loyal units.
It currently is LOYAL_UNIT SIDE TYPE X Y DESCRIPTION USER_DESCRIPTION (like this: {LOYAL_UNIT 1 (Elvish Fighter) 19 16 (Myname) ( _ "Myname")}). However, it should be LOYAL_UNIT TYPE DESCRIPTION USER_DESCRIPTION SIDE X Y (like this: {LOYAL_UNIT (Elvish Fighter) (Myname) ( _ "Myname") 1 19 16}).
So all you have to do is open Wesnoth\userdata\data\campaigns\Invasion_from_the_Unknown\scenarios\xy.cfg (insert scenario name for xy), search for "Loyal_unit" and rearrange the arguments.

However, this solution works only if you have not already started the scenario (i.e. everything up to the automatic save at the beginning of the scenario is fine, but everything starting from the autosave at turn 1 won't be affected). If you are reluctant to replay the scenario, you can unpack your save file, search for "side=" to find the units which are causing problems, and rearrange the arguments. Then you have to get gzip and recompress the file.

Both methods worked for me.
At one point, Wesnoth would not load IftU anymore, even after reverting the changes, but deleting and redownloading worked (I probably got something wrong when editing the files, but I've got no idea why reverting the changes did not have any effect...)[/url]
Last edited by Xargon on February 29th, 2008, 10:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by cafu »

Thank you very much. I will try...
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Post by Xargon »

It might sound difficult/confusing, but actually, it's not ;) I understand nothing of WML and still managed to do this. With a bit of trial-and-error, you can probably figure it out.


Another note about the campaign, this time the musicpack: While I really like the new music (and I mean it - these soundtracks were the reason for me to listen to Wesnoth music again, instead of winamp), chaos.ogg seems to be cut off rather abruptly when it loops.
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Post by Iris »

NOTE: tested with Wesnoth 1.3.18 only! But it should work anyway on 1.3.19 and later; remember they are RCs of the 1.4.x series. ;)

I am deeply sorry for the hasty response I gave you all the last time I got around to check the forums and my campaign's thread. I didn't have much time before leaving the capital and returning to home, where I don't have Internet access (because of various reasons you don't want to know, really).

I do acknowledge, however, that every post of you, people, in this thread, has helped me both to learn the magic of Wesnoth's Markup Language (directly or indirectly), to learn a bit more of what people like and don't like in campaigns, and not to give up the maintenance of this campaign for the sake of my other software project. Nor to abandon Wesnoth development, of course.

Your valuable feedback allowed me to continue working on this campaign until I finished it. It also helped me improve existing scenarios after completing the plot's outline, giving more depth to certain historical events on which this story relies. I started this campaign with little, if any, hopes of seeing it completed. Whenever I was about to give up everything, I read the comments on this thread and felt refreshened to continue working. The sleepless nights seem to have been worth the result.

But let's clarify some things first, shall we?
  • Analia is one of the predefined template names for female elves on Wesnoth. If you don't believe it, check /data/core/macros/names.cfg file's contents in your Wesnoth data dir, looking in particular for the ELVISH_NAMES macro define, attribute "female_names". I don't intend to change Analia's name, even though you all english-speakers complain about it.(*) Sorry for any inconveniences. Translators are free to rename Analia always, as all the user sees of her name's mention are a bunch of translatable strings.
  • The campaign's loader code was broken after a WML Preprocessor change that occurred during my absence, between 1.3.15 and 1.3.18; I didn't find out of it until a few days ago. I have fixed the broken code in my campaign already, and I hope that this new version is enough to compensate for any inconveniences ocassioned as a side-result of the acting of your computer, your dog, cat, or other third-parties. Macrosoft Corporation (c) 2008, All Rights Reserved.
  • For Espreon: Deathblades cannot use the bow. It is intended as they are the classic "I-am-a-superb-short-range-fighter-but-I-cannot-learn-proper-defense-nor-the-usage-of-a-bow-or-crossbow" kind of unit.
  • For Espreon too: the "Silver Lands" are supposed to be the "Eastern Lands" as they were known in Wesnoth times. I have vague references of their existence, one from A New Order (the Akladian came from the Eastern Lands, that were described as some kind of wasteland) and other from Easter Invasion (Mal Ravanal's capital was located in the deep Eastern Lands). Since they do not tell much by themselves, other than that the Great Continent extends to the East of Wesnoth to, I decided to use a vague reference to them in my campaign too, until someone documents this "undefined behavior". I don't have any story for the Silver Lands yet, but supposedly they were completely dried after the Fall of Gaia (the third sun as I named it), to the point that even the dirt was burnt. Therefore, the only thing that was left in those plains, formerly swamps, was... sugar and salt. Hence "Silver" lands.
Well, now it is time to do the real announcement.

Version 1.0 is out!.

Yeah, you read correctly. It is version 1.0. I didn't do extensive playtesting of this release, but if you find any bugs tell me and I'll publish a new fixed version shortly. Now, what does it mean fo rme to reach version 1.0? Nothing special; the campaign's plot is mostly consistent, the gameplay is almost identical to what I intended from the beginning, and most artwork has been polished by moi (i.e. me) to be the most mainline-quality-compliant possible for a single man project. Single man standing for that I wrote all the story, WML, and I was the only one who updated poor-quality-yet-good-concepts kind-of artwork that was put inside, except for some minor exceptions, where I received external help (/me looks at wayfarer).

I consider parts of this campaign real crap (not mentioning any specific scenarios here), and I'll rewrite them during the Wesnoth 1.5 development-cycle, hopefully achieving my goal quality. I'll also break apart this campaign into several "episodes", following ESR's advice, purely for gameplay purposes; the campaign will still be a single package, but you will play it in a less... tiring manner.

Now, what are you doing here? Go away and play!

(*) Heck, didn't you know that "Theta", without the 'h', means "tit" in the chilean (and possibly other latin-american) variant of Spanish? Yeah, it's very used as the generic angle variable name in math, and a Northern Rebirth character is named Sister Theta, but I have lived with it in mainline for a long time. I, having the power to claim this as an issue to the other developers, didn't do it because I think that linguistic coincidences such as these are completely normal and should not be misinterpreted. Also, remember that our star text-prose-doctor, Eric S. Raymond (ESR), wrote The Hammer of Thursagan (TM), were you get a level 2 Annalist eventually. And ESR was aware of the possible misinterpretation, and went ahead nevertheless. I'll do the same with Analia here.

-------------------------

Do not run wmllint unless you know specifically what you are doing. This goes mostly to mainline developers; if you ever happen to be struck by a truck and change your mind, and decide to bring this campaign to mainline, don't do it without my approval and surveilance unless you really want to handle the worst WML mess ever seen (which is likely to cause you a heart attack). You've been warned.

Okay, just for the curious, these are the changes since the last *official* release:
  • A secret scenario was added for episode 1. Keep your head low and fly high to find it.
  • "The Dawn" was remade.
  • "Bye and Behold" was remade.
  • "Welcome to the Lair" was remade.
  • Elynia's sprite was animated by Shadow Master (mwaahaha!). A few improvements to the baseframe were done shortly before releasing 1.0, though, and they were not applied to the animation frames in time. They were my worst piece of crap anyway, so I'll change my animation technique and update them later.
  • Death Baron has *some* animations.
  • Some custom terrains have got proper transitions, but there might still be glitches, caused both by lack of artwork and experience with the terrain-graphics WML structure. In particular, Dark Hive tiles (Y*) might display a borked transition when a water tile and a non-water tile happen to be in the same side (east/west) from the dark-hive tile, adjacent.
  • The Spanish translation is closer to completion, as Shadow Master decided to work again on it.
  • Some important, yet difficult to notice bugs, were fixed. Some WML chunks were heavily optimized. Some units were balanced, Biomechanical Drones in particular.
  • Some poorly-designed scenarios were left out.
  • The campaign was updated to work properly on Battle for Wesnoth v1.3.18+svn (23987M).
And a load of others that I forgot, or am too lazy to include in the announcement. Read the included ChangeLog in the campaign's dir if you really want to know; note that it might be incomplete too.

-------------------------

Downloading and installing
Alternatively, the campaign should be available on the 1.4.x campaign server soon. If it is not, try to communicate with Mythological about it. If the doesn't answer, do panic or download from the external website link above instead. Do not ask me how to install the campaign's main package. I shall not answer.

The sound track package is an exception to the rules above, though. It will not be published on the campaign server due to its limited bandwidth (campaign server's). But it is recommended to get it anyway for the best experience. If you have enough bandwidth, you can use the other link above to download it as a BZip2 tarball. But what do you have to do with it? Um...

Simply put, all you have to do is get a program which can uncompress the tarball. For Windows, as far as I know, WinZip, WinRAR and 7-zip can; I prefer WinRAR somehow. For GNU operating system users (i.e. GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd users), your distribution probably already provides the GNU tar package and the BZip2 (bzip2) compression back-end. If it doesn't, Google is your friend. For other UNIX operating system, I suppose you know better than me ;). Desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME provide cool front-ends (i.e. GNOME's archive manager and KDE's Ark) for the die-hard mice.

Windows users:

Create a directory at <Wesnoth installation directory>\userdata\data\campaigns\Invasion_from_the_Unknown, called "music". Uncompress the archive there, restart Wesnoth and enjoy.

UNIX or GNU operating system users:

Create a directory at ${HOME}/.wesnoth/data/campaigns/Invasion_from_the_Unknown, called "music" (note it's lowercase!). Uncompress the archive there, restart Wesnoth and enjoy.

Simple enough, eh? Enjoy!

------------------

PS: If you downloaded the unofficial revision I made, you can use the file at http://shadowm.nfshost.com/wesnoth-UMC/ ... tar.xdelta to upgrade it. It is an XDelta patch. I'm not giving instructions of use, though; if you don't know how to use it or what to use it for, disregard this paragraph and download directly from the website link or campaign server the real package.

------------------

PS2: Don't go back and complain that the soundtrack package contains mainline duplicates! I know and I'll fix that soon, but that requires a 1.0.1 release of the campaign too, as the music files' names changed too.
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Post by Iris »

Changed plans. If this doesn't appear in the campaign server, there is a very good reason for that. Await 1.0.1 instead unless you really need to play the campaign.
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Post by Espreon »

Shadow Master wrote: For Espreon too: the "Silver Lands" are supposed to be the "Eastern Lands" as they were known in Wesnoth times. I have vague references of their existence, one from A New Order (the Akladian came from the Eastern Lands, that were described as some kind of wasteland) and other from Easter Invasion (Mal Ravanal's capital was located in the deep Eastern Lands). Since they do not tell much by themselves, other than that the Great Continent extends to the East of Wesnoth to, I decided to use a vague reference to them in my campaign too, until someone documents this "undefined behavior". I don't have any story for the Silver Lands yet, but supposedly they were completely dried after the Fall of Gaia (the third sun as I named it), to the point that even the dirt was burnt. Therefore, the only thing that was left in those plains, formerly swamps, was... sugar and salt. Hence "Silver" lands.

May I make a story for the Silver Lands?

Oh and Questions:

-Why did you remove the Rayblade, the Reaper and the Reaver?

-When are you going to make descriptions for the Heavy Assault Trooper and the Mindraider?

-Is the Shaxthal Wyrm used in the version?

-Why did you remove the Chaos Invader's animation frame images (I saw you were redoing the Chaos Invader's sprite and the changes are hardly noticeable, IMO, thus I think it was not necessary to remove the images.
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Re:

Post by Iris »

Espreon wrote:May I make a story for the Silver Lands?
Sure. Wesnoth's history itself would mostly not exist if it wasn't for users.
Oh and Questions:

-Why did you remove the Rayblade, the Reaper and the Reaver?
The rayblade was one hell of an unit for balancing. The reaper and devastator drones were removed because I couldn't make up my own art for them, their units had no contribution to the storyline and would be new balancing issues.
-When are you going to make descriptions for the Heavy Assault Trooper and the Mindraider?
IIRWIIR (It Is Ready When It Is Ready). Argh.
-Is the Shaxthal Wyrm used in the version?
In versions 1.0.0 and later, yes; only in one scenario atm; they should be used in secret scenarios that have not been made yet.
-Why did you remove the Chaos Invader's animation frame images (I saw you were redoing the Chaos Invader's sprite and the changes are hardly noticeable, IMO, thus I think it was not necessary to remove the images.
No idea.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown (1.0.1)

Post by Iris »

Published 1.0.1 on the 1.4 campaign server. I'll post external packages tomorrow or so.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown (1.0.1)

Post by Espreon »

Shadow Master, I see you are changing the graphics for the Elvish Warrior Spirits and I think it does not look too good. Specifically due to the ghostly tail thing looking like it was crudely drawn on... I also see you (or someone else) is redoing the graphics for the Chaos Humans (or whatever they are called) and I think the refurbished graphics look nice...
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown (1.0.1)

Post by Iris »

Espreon wrote:Shadow Master, I see you are changing the graphics for the Elvish Warrior Spirits and I think it does not look too good. Specifically due to the ghostly tail thing looking like it was crudely drawn on... I also see you (or someone else) is redoing the graphics for the Chaos Humans (or whatever they are called) and I think the refurbished graphics look nice...
You might be talking about the /images/units/undead/elvish-warrior-spirit-new.png; it is not used in game yet, and is far from completion. I stalled work on it giving preference to Chaos units.

The Chaos Humans are being remade by me and Shadow/wayfarer; he has updated only the Invoker at the moment. I'm, OTOH centering my attention on fighters.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown (1.0.1)

Post by Iris »

Alright. Not much time has passed, but release 1.0.2 is out.

It implicitly supersedes 1.0.1, the last release published through the campaign server; it also supersedes 1.0.0, the last release that was published in my website's UMC tree.

There are very few changes, but one of them is essential enough to invalidate your saved games. Analia has been renamed to Anlindë, as per ESR's suggestion. I also restored some animation frames which Espreon considers vaguely different to the baseframes (I cannot understand his reasoning, though).

There are also greater changes that were introduced with the legendary 1.0.1:

* This campaign works on SVN branch 1.4; therefore you need release 1.4.0 or later to play it (no need for SVN if you don't know what it is).
* Many issues related to macro parameter orders have been fixed. They were introduced during the period between 1.3.19 and 1.4.0, in mainline; I consider this pure evilness, but it was beyond my control at that time.
* Musicpack is no longer required: most of the music included in it was added to mainline before releasing 1.4.0; therefore you just need to make sure you have Wesnoth's music tracks installed (which should be the default unless you use Debian GNU/Linux, according to the rumors).
* Some cosmetic modifications were made to scenarios and portraits. They include, but aren't limited to, changing the background music according to the plot context; I did it based on West's suggestion on #wesnoth-dev.
* "Dealing with Orcs" is being refactored; however, it is still hidden.
* Walking Corpses are spawned in the same hex a player's unit died at; this requires Wesnoth 1.4.0 or later. Period. You cannot use Wesnoth 1.3.19 or earlier; attempting to do so may cause a crash.

Therefore, you just need to download the campaign.

* At the Wesnoth campaign server, for 1.4.x. Bandwidth seems to have been dramatically increased, thus you shouldn't worry much about it.
* Additionally, you can download the campaign at my website; please note that I'm not providing installation instructions for it, and you should consult Wesnoth's wiki instead.

Downloading from the campaign server is worth 11.6 MB aproximately; if you can't afford that much you might want to download and install it manually from my website; since that package is transferred in its compressed form you can save pretty more than half its size via that medium.

I'd like to thank the following people for their help:

* Mythological, for bug-fixing published releases during my absence, even though I didn't ask/force him to do so.
* ESR, for his prose-doctoring work (although at the moment of this release it included just 3 scenarios).
* Kitty, for providing me a high-res portrait that now serves as Elynia's placeholder.
* An anonymous user who sent me a gettext patch to my e-mail address. Well, it wasn't anonymous, I just don't recall his or her name at this moment.
* Hamish A., for web hosting.

For translators: this campaign's .po and .pot files should be updated already on WesCamp-i18n

Now, go to play and enjoy!

EDIT:

We have run a test of this campaign and a script in the campaign server, breaking the uploaded version. Please use the external link until Shadow Master's get around to upload the campaign again. -- We.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown (1.0.2) - compatible with BfW 1.4!

Post by ShikadiQueen »

Re uploaded to the 1.4 campaign server.
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Re: Invasion from the Unknown (1.0.2) - compatible with BfW 1.4!

Post by Sly »

I found a bug with the Dire Bat : when she kills a living unit, sometimes she gain more than 1 HP (8, 9 or 11 usually) ...
Maybe the problem is with the FEEDING ability or with the combination of FEEDING and DRAIN :?

I have a Bat with 300 HP on 7th scenario :mrgreen:
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