If I'm posting too much at once, let me know. But I had an awesome idea for a gameplay mod and I want to know if it's possible:
"God Mode" : You play looking down on the battlefield like a traditional RTS, but you can only give commands to Wizards under your control. You can give them commands to act using the AI behaviors that already exist for CPU controlled wizards (based on my observations in Singleplayer I surmise this would allow for a good array of strategic and tactical choices, unless the AI options are simply something like "easy, medium, hard" and not objective/preference based). Your goal is to desecrate the opponent's Ultimate Altar, to which one of those Wizards is linked. Perhaps you have god-only powers such as providing Boons to your wizards on the fly in exchange for souls from your Wizards (depriving them of that resource).
Addendum: I haven't messed around with Scapex too much yet but perhaps this could be done with heavy scripting? Use one of the Game Setting options to interpret it into a number of wizards, pick from a stable of pregenerated Wizards, maybe even assume which god you are based on your player wizard's chosen spells, put your player wizard under AI control and lock the camera high up on the map, piece together a dialogue-option interface for AI commands to said wizard-bots? Not knowing if it's possible to overlay a dialogue and allow the game to still run in the background, I can't conjecture more on this yet (I get an error when launching Scapex or I'd offer more. I haven't yet had the time to troubleshoot it)(Perhaps the commands in the right click radial/gesture interface menu can trigger scripted events? In which case a quick-n-dirty graphics/script mod could quickly turn them into an AI command menu with everything else dummied out, and taking actual units out of player control - perhaps the player wizard would have to be disabled of all abilities in this case, relegated to a necessary spot while we watch non-player wizards duke it out, so nothing can be directly selected by the actual human player).
I am imagining this would play somewhat like a casual "Pet Sacrifice Wizard" battle for those who want to play in the environment without all the in-your-face action, or it could have larger maps designed around macro objectives for a more economic / political feel.
Doc Wheeler (talk) 09:02, November 24, 2012 (UTC)
- Intriguing, but it would be very hard to implement using Scapex alone. Opening up the game and messing with the scripts would seem to be the only option to do this properly.
- I can see the way this could be implemented in Scenario mode. I've seen and made scenarios that (accidentally, in my case) messed up the wizard-panned camera, others that hide wizard options, utilize the AI far better than multiplayer AI could and overall do all the things you mentioned. But there's still the fact that you couldn't play with other people in Scenario mode and that no matter how you see it, it will still be limited to 5 wizards tops (actually 4, seeing as how the god player will be taking one of those slots).
- I remember there being a topic on the old forum of someone coming up with an idea of turning Sacrifice into a turn-based strategy where each land of the world of Sacrifice could be visited and contested (real-time, of course) by players who would play as gods, controlling wizards, soul income and land conversion (it was really elaborate). He asked for people to start creating maps of islands not visited in the campaign, but never really got to the part of scripting the game. Just saying that if you're thinking of similarly using scripts and changing the game, it's not going to be easy (and this time there will be no large-scale community to back it up either).
- About your Scapex problem, there is one thing that usually solves most people's Scapex problems and if that fails, Scapex is most likely not going to work on your computer. Try adjusting your resolution from True Color (32 bits) to High Color (16 bits) (or vice-versa, not sure any more). If your Scapex still isn't working you might want to consider installing Sacrifice on a weaker computer or running a Win98 emulator and even that is not certain to work.
- Eagerly awaiting future development of this idea. -- kertaw48 (Talk) 10:23, November 26, 2012 (UTC)
- That is encouraging, to know that this idea was thought of before. However, I can see that its implementation will be quite complex. Right now I am simply brainstorming ways to deepen the gameplay for multiplayer and widen the potential audience - a coding project of this scope will be near the bottom of my priorities in modding for now. After I get Scapex running what I want to do then is break into the *.wad files that Sacrifice uses and see if I can use any of them to mess with simple parameters and go from there. I have a list in a notebook of different simple things that could be done to weaken the advantage of having overwhelming souls, for instance, though most of them would require code breaking. I'll need a more comprehensive knowledge of the multiplayer metagame once, if it even still exists, as I never played multiplayer before... and I'll need to play of course, but who has time to play the game they want to mod? :P
- As for getting Scapex working, I have essentially tried every solution within a three page radius of googling several different phrases that mean "Scapex error" and "Sacrifice troubleshooting". I documented all my findings and the collected solution suggestions (even for problems I do not have) in a .txt file for the performace of Sacrifice.exe itself, so when I get that formatted into something more attractive I'm going to post it on a dedicated page. Right now I am working on getting a Virtual Machine up and running - VirtualBox has problems with Windows98 and its solution is pretty complex, so I've looked into Bochs, which allows a more fine-tuned control of the emulation. The result is I'll need to learn a lot to get it up and running, but hopefully I can build a virtual machine with absolutely optimized specs for running Scapex... since I can run Sacrifice just fine I'm going to worry less about that.
- This game concept deserves to be preserved and expanded upon and perfected, I fully believe it. There is supposedly a spiritual sequel to this game that looks like it's supposed to be a parody of all things Metal. If push comes to shove maybe someone can make a Sacrifice total conversion mod for it for playing in a more updated engine with a more versatile editing environment?
- And one final note: thanks for reverting my edit on the mission page. I shouldn't mess with things I haven't actually researched, even if they look wonky. >_< FWIW, Charnel is the next God I'm going to play with in singleplayer.
- Addendum: that list of ideas includes the following: decent to excellent mana income from your primary altar (allowing a wizard to defend his home terf with spells much more easily especially if outnumbered); decreased casting time and cost for manaliths (since casting time and cost are both things that matter less to players with power bloat, this would primarily benefit players in weaker positions); a "turret" type manalith with added health, decreased mana income, and a natural attack; the ability to Guardian yourself, and/or a suicide button that gibs your own units but gives you some mana back (use it to unguardian units quickly, including yourself, but the gibbing/auto bluesouling prevents you abusing it on large creatures about to die in the middle of the battlefield - an unguardian option should be necessary I think or else players who use it can cripple themselves and it makes defense a lot more risky (killing your own units is difficult when you end up guardianing more firepower than you have available to kill them)); maps with manafont clusters rather than even spreads to make territory capture more risky (instead of a slow creep).
- Another option I want to look into: an "attack forward" button, either through external scripting or internal modification, which is a hotkey that causes your units to target the ground X distance ahead of where the player is facing. This can mitigate some of the learning curve for micromanagement by enabling players to give a generalized "move out" command without accidentally clicking their own units caused by the third person view. Bonus options; "attack left (to the left of my facing)", "attack right (to the right of my facing)", "attack back (in the opposite direction I am facing)"
- Doc Wheeler (talk) 02:22, November 27, 2012 (UTC)