Dynamic RPC adjustment

Having finished JA2 Vengeance, replacing UC as my favorite mod BTW, I realize how difficult RPC design really is. It’s hard because in this non-linear game the mod-maker simply cannot predict when the player meets an RPC.

This sucks when it comes to choosing RPC stats. If they are too low and the player meets them later then expected the player will probably not use him or her since all other team members will have advanced to higher levels already. If they are too high on the other hand it will make the character more valuable to the player but the game too easy altogether.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could prepare some LUA scripts which allowed the modder to arrange RPC attributes by the time of encounter? These could depend on the overall game progress, other team members’ stats or just on the weather. Anyway, it would certainly solve the problem described above.

We know there are some efforts of bringing LUA to 1.13. So keep up the work in that direction and enable us to create story rich mods relying on RPCs.

The New Inventory System

Few things – if any – have created a bigger buzz than the New Inventory system (NIV). The masses jump at it as never seen before. I can’t understand why it’s so popular with the community. What the hell makes NIV a must-have?

The old inventory system is fairly simple. There are some pockets and you just dump your stuff in. Big items only fit into big slots and that’s pretty much the whole complexity already. Simple indeed but intuitive at least.

The new inventory system on the other hand is everything else but intuitive to handle. There’re like zillions of slots scattered around the whole interface panel. But only adding some slots is nothing new, we’ve seen that before. Nope, the real new thing is that you can’t drop anything anywhere anymore as we are used to. Now you have to pick certain items like combat packs and such in order to enable some of the new item slots. But not enough. Even if enabled they won’t take just any item but only those designed for fitting in. There’s a whole new science popping up which researches how to actually use this giant new mess. That’s progress.

Yeah, I’m not convinced of NIV, not to say that I don’t like it. Of course that made me lose most of my readers (like I had any). But to me the whole thing seems like an artificial complication in order to justify the addition of hundreds and thousands of items which are all the same basically. This isn’t an enhancement to game play but a limitation to the mess created in the first place. Anyway, it has a huge CAF.

And now with that said to the reason you’re actually here: the download links. Provided that you updated your game folder to the latest SVN revision go to http://ja2.h758491.serverkompetenz.net/ NewInventory/ and download the following files:

Update 29th April 08: download links removed due to final integration with release package, see 1.13 wiki for updated versions. /update

Don’t forget to pay a visit to the Bear’s Pit forums for feedback and support (and to tell them how much you love NIV).

Mission accomplished

Wish we could say that regarding 1.13 at some point. But what is its “mission” anyway? In fact there is nothing like a mission or a primary goal to aim at. At least since it isn’t a platform anymore.

The greatest strength of the v1.13 project is that virtually anyone can contribute anything. If you wanted to get your idea into 1.13 you’d just present it to the community at the forums. If they liked it you’d be halfway there. This is what makes 1.13 a community-driven project. There is no master plan but rather the community chooses from what is offered. You plainly cannot predict how 1.13 will develop since another bomb might hit at anytime. Remember when back in 2005 the focus was on externalizing stuff and nobody talked about something like a new inventory system? Things change continuously.

Thus the project’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Because there so many different additions worked on important things get out of sight or even lost completely. There are too many people working on different things or too few people working on the same things so that real progress is prevented. As usual the features that suffer the most are those which would enhance moddability. These have a too low CAF (community acceptance factor) because their value doesn’t pay off immediately for the average player. Basically the more popular a feature is the more it’s useless in terms of moddability. Cp. NIV.

Maybe we all would be better off if contributors set up a roadmap, joined forces and worked on some really consistent features. But probably they will just continue constraining themselves to their own business.

JA2 Crash Monitor

Have you ever experienced JA2 and/or 1.13 crashing but not just to the desktop but rather freezing completely? Maybe even on a regular basis since you are playing the latest alphas and betas? Is hard-resetting your machine the only solution? Then you have two options to choose from.

One of them is playing in windowed mode if you’re using v1.13. However, this requires you to manually set your desktop color depth to 16bpp. Depending on your screen resolution the game elements may become real tiny though.

If that isn’t an option for you, you may want to try out AndroidXP’s little utility called “JA2 Crash Monitor“. This handy tool does all the work for you. It starts the game and runs in the background checking from time to time whether or not JA2 is responsive. If it isn’t it’ll shut it down. It also comes with some command line options for tweaking time intervals. No hassle involved.

Brilliant.

Do we need a milestone?

Time passes and 1.13 constantly evolves coming up with more and more features. Everyone seems to have a public beta of their new developed stuff and feeds it to the masses. Clearly, they do it to test their stuff and have a chance to eliminate bugs before they merge their code with the official code base. That’s perfectly fine. But with every new feature appearing confusion increases and people demand a unified release with a definite set of features to have a base to build upon – a so-called milestone.

Do we really need one? According to the reanimated discussion on what to include in the milestone over at BP’s, a milestone “is a version or package of the 1.13 project, that incorporates as many new features that work 100% as intended and as few bugs as possible”. Is this a good definition? Or is this even desirable?

Let’s see. “As few bugs as possible” sounds good, doesn’t it? Definitely. On the other hand there are “as many new features that work 100% as intended as possible”. Do we really need every single feature – even if it’s tested and all? Well, if it works it won’t hurt. At least if it’s optional. But what about those serious features required for modmaking? Which are mentioned over and over again, but nobody seems to be interested in implementing them? Surely, those won’t make it into a milestone.

Let’s see again. How is a milestone of any use if it doesn’t incorporate any features of any value regarding modmaking? At least it includes bug-fixes. We know the primary goal for the next release is fixing bugs and keeping out any major new features. Isn’t that a milestone already? Even without nonsense features.

So please take all this milestoning serious, that means get the necessary stability, hunt the bugs and find some appealing things for modders to even consider going with v1.13. The forums are stuffed with requests, you can’t miss ‘em.

JA2 Multiplayer on v1.13

Yep, no need to check your eyesight, there is a JA2 multiplayer project based on v1.13. Kudos to Haydent at Bear’s Pit.

What started as a proof-of-concept release a few months ago has now turned into a pre-beta development release. It actually allows some cool mulitplayer death-match action with up to for players. While suffering from some synchronizing problems in real-time mode it works out pretty well when turn-based.

If you like to check it out visit the thread at BP’s and find someone to play with via IRC at irc://quakenet/ja-galaxy and irc://quakenet/ja2-multiplayer. Remember though that it’s far from finished and very early in development. If you encounter bugs, crashes or other problems, check the v1.13 Bugzilla, file them if needed and help them finishing this cool addition to JA2.

Is it a Mod or a Platform?

When people new to 1.13 join the JA2 forums and write something about the “1.13 mod” it doesn’t take too long for the other users to correct them about 1.13 not being a mod but a platform for other mods to be based on. While this was true back in the days when the project started, as times passes 1.13 turns more and more into a mod itself. Let’s face it: The goal is not making the game moddable any more but simply squeezing in every little pseudo-feature you can think of. This isn’t bad by definition either – just don’t call it a platform when it’s not.

It was okay when they focused on externalizing hard-coded data from the executable. When they made it XML and got rid of stupid game limitations. But for quite a while now they lost sight of continuing that primary goal. Instead, they put in items over items, weapons over weapons. Things that should be left for future mods on 1.13 one could think. Another example is the “New Inventory” add-on. Regardless of whether you like it or not, how does this add to making the game a platform? If I made a mod, I couldn’t care less about the inventory system if it didn’t improve moddability.

The essential key-area to concentrate on should be externalizing data again to legitimate the use of the term “platform”. There are still way to many things begging for XMLification. Think of prof.dat, the animation system, NPC scripting and all those things that would add real value to the game if a modder was able to pick them.

There is one promising addition though. Someone added some LUA libraries to the code, for game scripting obviously. Unfortunately though there is a total lack of making use of them so far. Scripting support however (real scripting support for that matter) could turn things totally around. This would not only be a huge addition to the game when it comes to modding options but also allow people to work on meaningful features since other popular features could be developed separately via scripts. Curios about what coming next.

To draw a conclusion, there’s one thing to say: Keep externalizing. I know it’s hard. I know everyone contributing does it for fun, for the community and for free. So they do whatever they like and not necessarily what should be done. Of course, they got my respect and my gratitude nonetheless. But please, don’t be silly and insist on 1.13 being a platform.

v1.13 – A brief overview

Since you visited this blog chances are that you already know about v1.13. Most people still playing Jagged Alliance 2 do. If you don’t, let me introduce you.

1.13 is a fan-made mod for Jagged Alliance 2 – one of the greatest games on earth ever, a turn-based strategy game released in 1999. Despite the name it’s not an official patch to the latest version 1.12 but a large scale modification thereof. After the publisher released the source code to JA2 back in 2004, one year later Bear’s Pit member Madd Mugsy reported on his work of externalizing some relevant game data into some XML files. What was a not-so-easy task in the past, when modders hacked the hard-coded data within the exe using rare tools, became as challenging as firing up notepad and making some changes to plain XML.

You need to know that although people have been able to produce amazing mods such as “Deidranna Lives”, “Urban Chaos”, “Vengeance” among many others, the process of creating them couldn’t be any harder since the game simply wasn’t made for easy modifications. It’s limited in so many ways that it’s even more astonishing to see so many high-quality heavyweight mods.

With the advent of the very first v1.13 releases not only it became a whole lot easier to make modifications but also limitations were removed which allows for even more mind-blowing mods than what we’ve seen in the past.

So it isn’t very remarkable that a huge buzz began which attracted both contributors and users and resulted into many new features never seen in JA2 before.

Those features include (but are in no way limited to):

• higher resolutions, 800×600 and 1024×786 now supported
• tons of weapons and items since maximums are removed
• many options to tweak the game to one’s liking via ini or XML.

For further information have a look at the v1.13 wiki.

Hello World

Welcome to v1.13 Watch!