(WIP) Finisterrae mod

[Duncan1246]

I have the pleasure to present you a new mod for LG2: Finisterrae.

Explore the Nine Realms, decipher its mysteries and face the monsters which took up it. Dig up the secrets of the peoples which were fighting here during the war of Runes, discover how to restore the former alliance and return life to Edenia!

Largely inspired by Irish mythology and more generally of northern peoples , story played a central role in Finisterrae . Much of this world will be accessible to you from the beginning, so you can choose your path freely but you will find out how to access some secret places, seeking information, fighting or even negotiating. You will need to solve puzzles, discover strange machines that you will learn to use to increase your strength, you will climb a mountain temple...

On second thought, I decided to leave to the players the free choice of the team. But it's better to start with a new party.

My work is not ended yet, but I think I can put on-line on the forum a beta version from next month onwards. I hope that some of you will be willing to test it to help me to detect the inevitable bugs even if I hope that they will be a few.

My English being approximate, do not either hesitate to help me to correct my errors (including in this presentation). Finally I owed, of course, to create or to modify some elements, with very approximate results for lack of skills in modelling techniques, your help will be also welcome.

This work would not have been possible without essential loans:

- extra essences (Minmay)
- grim_assets et dm_assets (Germanny, Minmay)
- sx_urban_town et sx_winter_tileset (Skuggassveinn)
- dark_elf_temple (Daniv, Sutekh, Prozall)
- sx_town (Eleven Warrior) ... (yes minmay, I know, but I have found no replacement for some assets)
- fw (Jkos)
- gtk (John Wordsworth)
- runebooks (Mutman)
- mam (AdrTru)
- lava (Andak Raynor)
and so many others ...

Also thank you to all who have answered my questions on the forum ...

Here are some screenshots in the Editor:http://s1148.photobucket.com/user/Duncan4612/library/

[minmay]

How are you planning to use that much model and texture data all in one mod? From the screenshots it looks like you are using all standard assets (about 600 MB). The sx_town tileset is another ~140 MB, the dark elf temple another ~80 MB, the winter tileset another ~40 MB, and the Dungeon Master Resource another ~320 MB. That's about 1.1 GiB just for asset data, nearly double that of Isle of Nex. This leaves you about 300 MiB for everything else the game needs to keep in memory (DirectX eats up a lot of the 2 GiB address space so you really only have about 1.4 to 1.5 GiB), which will leave pretty much no room for the memory balloon that is created when you save the game. I would be seriously surprised if you were able to save in this mod on Windows with texture resolution on High. You may not even be able to start it. And if people have to decrease their texture resolution and downscale the textures to total shite, what's the point of using custom textures at all?

Btw the dark elf temple conversion is broken even worse than the sx_town one. Literally every object is wrong - usually they're "just" missing minimalSaveState and missing OccluderComponents (absolutely a FATAL error, but easy to fix), plus sometimes they have complete nonsense stuff like ItemComponents. You NEED to fix the missing minimalSaveState on these objects because otherwise your mod will certainly run out of memory and crash when saving. And you also need to fix the other things because otherwise your mod will be totally broken and nobody wants that.

[Duncan1246]

How are you planning to use that much model and texture data all in one mod? From the screenshots it looks like you are using all standard assets (about 600 MB). The sx_town tileset is another ~140 MB, the dark elf temple another ~80 MB, the winter tileset another ~40 MB, and the Dungeon Master Resource another ~320 MB. That's about 1.1 GiB just for asset data, nearly double that of Isle of Nex. This leaves you about 300 MiB for everything else the game needs to keep in memory (DirectX eats up a lot of the 2 GiB address space so you really only have about 1.4 to 1.5 GiB), which will leave pretty much no room for the memory balloon that is created when you save the game. I would be seriously surprised if you were able to save in this mod on Windows with texture resolution on High. You may not even be able to start it. And if people have to decrease their texture resolution and downscale the textures to total shite, what's the point of using custom textures at all?

Btw the dark elf temple conversion is broken even worse than the sx_town one. Literally every object is wrong - usually they're "just" missing minimalSaveState and missing OccluderComponents (absolutely a FATAL error, but easy to fix), plus sometimes they have complete nonsense stuff like ItemComponents. You NEED to fix the missing minimalSaveState on these objects because otherwise your mod will certainly run out of memory and crash when saving. And you also need to fix the other things because otherwise your mod will be totally broken and nobody wants that.

I use only some of the assets of each set, so I have now 324 Mo non compacted of models, textures and sounds added, and I plan to reduce this amount before releasing the mod. I have to import only a part of the standard assets also. I haven't tested to save the game for now, but the game start.
I have added already minimalSaveState when it's missing, i plan to add also occluders and to examine carefully all the assets to correct them (or replace and delete if I can't find another solution).
It's clear for me that I can't release this mod if it can't works normally.
Duncan

[Azel]

And if people have to decrease their texture resolution and downscale the textures to total shite, what's the point of using custom textures at all?

Custom textures still display their uniqueness even with the lowest settings, or have you not tested this out for yourself? Besides, despite your protests, I'm pretty sure that people will take "fun factor" over "graphics" when it comes to the Dungeon Crawler genre 9 times out of 10. You are at the top of the list of making this exception: http://grimrock.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... 94#p101182

[minmay]

If your mod has to be played with texture resolution on Medium then 75% of your custom texture data is never actually used. On Low, 94% of your custom texture data is never used.

[Azel]

All objects are 100% distinguishable at any graphic setting, including custom.

[Duncan1246]

All objects are 100% distinguishable at any graphic setting, including custom.

Anyway, I intend to make a mod playable with high texture resolution... and please, don't fight again! I appreciate your advices, and I will try to use them for the better, I hope.

[Azel]

All objects are 100% distinguishable at any graphic setting, including custom.

Anyway, I intend to make a mod playable with high texture resolution... and please, don't fight again! I appreciate your advices, and I will try to use them for the better, I hope.

lol no one is fighting, it'll be okay

But to minmay's point, he is right in that depending on how many objects (walls, etc) of some of those custom assets you use, then playing at a High Texture resolution won't be possible no matter what you do. Unless you plan to literally rebuild those assets from scratch.

[Duncan1246]

First test done: the dat file weight 230 Mo, saved in game without problem for the moment (with high textures and filtering)... BUT I suppose that the save file must grow with the playing time? If it is so, I have to test the mod further ...

[Azel]

It will greatly depend on how large the Mod is (how many levels?) and yes, how often the player clicks that Save button