Hellfire Patch v1.02.A5: Classic HF with less bugs and more polish!

[Belix]

Thanks, everyone. Glad the bleary-eyed hours and lost sleep created something people are still finding and enjoying years later!

It would be nice to add a "No Drops at Death" feature

I too would love a "No drops at death" feature.

By popular request...

Code:

start HF1.02 "No Drops on Death"
45A249 85 81
end

Disclaimer: Should work, but not thoroughly tested. If it only works in certain dlvls or only for the host in an MP game, let me know.

Firstly am I the only one bothered by the Auric Amulet doing nothing?

I don't remember exactly, but I think I had some concerns regarding the Auric Amulet that made me opt not to modify it at the time. I think they were something along the lines of:

-Item is super easy to obtain in every game, so giving it anything beyond very slightly helpful bonuses could be unbalancing
-Lester doesn't drop it properly in MP games, so it goes poof if anyone but the host clicks on him to generate it and pick it up
-The name and graphic for the item don't make much sense for other potential uses I could think of, and if I recall correctly, changing the item would have then made Lester's dialogue not make much sense (in retrospect, however, with the item currently broken it doesn't make better sense than a different, working item would, either).
-I don't think I found an easy way to add an extra line of text to the item on mouseover, displaying some kind of tooltip to explain its new behavior, like:

Code:

----------Auric Amulet----------
Increases something Neat by 100%

... the absence of which would require players to rifle through the readme to figure out what the Amulet does, and again later when they forget what it does.

If I ever make extensive changes to this mod again, I'll revisit the Auric Amulet. In a pinch, the most important thing was to remove its function entirely since dropping gold piles greater than 5,000 and then trying to pick them up without the Auric Amulet equipped would make the excess gold go poof... not good!


Regarding suggestions for the Auric Amulet...

Maybe throw some charges of the Rogue's Disarm Trap skill on it since it looks like a treasure chest?

Interesting idea, but without modification Diablo completely ignores spell charges on any type of item other than Staves. I'm not sure how easy that is to change. Could be a simple value somewhere that makes the game skip checking non-staff type items when looking for charges, or it could be something hardwired to the weapon slot. Off the top of my head I don't remember ever seeing any mods for Diablo/Hellfire exe's yet that allowed charges from non-staves, but it's been so many years...

Or the Thaumaturgic shrine effect?

Another clever idea, but in theory nothing stops a Large Chest in Hell from dropping 3x plate armors, so that could be abused to farm tons of gold, particularly on a good floor with 2-4 chests adjacent to the stairs to town. Not that it is particularly hard to make lots of gold anyway, but I don't want to add an unreasonably easier method than the game already provided. This one would involve editing/creating new spell behavior, which is probably a can of worms I might not be able to handle. Also, making that synchronize properly in MP might be a second can alongside that.

Personally, I'd probably give it the effect of the Search spell in some way.

Another interesting idea, but the item would still be useless to Monks unless it had some other bonus. Maybe if it was combined with the Rogue's trap detection ability? So you can see both treasure and traps easier.

Maybe 100% magic find or something? or 100% to gold find? Like the D2s gloves of chance.

Another interesting idea. I did experiment with a way to increase monster drops, but I abandoned it because of how fiddly Diablo already is about items disappearing in tight spaces and the fairly low limit of how many items can be in one level at once. Given those problems, improved drops would make far more sense than increased drops.

Whew, that wraps up the Auric Amulet... on to other topics now.

Secondly, is it wrong of me to be using Gillian to make the oils I apply to my weapons carry over from each game?

Heheh, that's up to you really. Gillian can be used to cheese all sorts of ways. Farm gold with a high level char, then buy a ton of Elixirs and xfer them to a new character etc. In a normal SP game obviously there were a finite number of oils. Bard damage is already kind of broken (get a Jester's Sword of the Bat in one hand and you're unstoppable). If I ever got the oils 'saved' between sessions somehow, I had some tricky balancing decisions to make. You could buy Godly Rags of the Whale from Wirt, then oil them up to 120 base AC... +200% = 360 AC. That's neat in that it makes those lighter armors useful, but probably too powerful.

Thirdly, I've noticed that the Long War Bow is using a previously unused graphic to set it apart from the Long Battle Bow... is there any desire for other items that use the same artwork to be given new graphics? (Long Bow / Hunter's Bow, Sword / Short Sword, Plate Mail / Field Plate, etc)

I could make that an extra feature, but Diablo doesn't have a lot of unused item icons that would look fitting on base items, so it'd make the inventory start looking less classic and more moddish, if you know what I mean. Would have to start using graphics normally reserved for Unique items, or get new graphics (beyond the scope of this mod), and then there's the headache that the size of the graphic also determines how much space the item takes up in your inventory (HF:Fixed made some changes to stuff where items that only took up 1x3 slots became 2x3 etc. -- that annoyed me more than I cared about the graphic being distinct).


For anyone curious about potential future updates: Still no chunk of free time in sight sufficient enough to do anything significant with this project, but I still check in every couple months minimum. But until nobody plays Diablo any more or a nice open source engine comes out that will make all this work SO much easier, I expect this project will remain relevant and I'll continue to try to maintain it as best I can. Have fun!