Soloing Grimlock with the savegame editor

[lothario]

It's easy with Glyn's tool... takes like one minute. Here's the savegame editor:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2308

Start a new game, and after making the lead character you are going to use, also create 3 "dummy chars" that you will edit afterwards. Make a save game as soon as you are deposited in the dungeon, and then quit. Open Glyn's editor, select the appropriate savegame, click edit on your loaded save, and then:



(optional) Step 1: In the top header, set the 3 "dummy chars" in your party to have "empty.tga" as their portrait, and set the double under each of the empty portraits to 0. This edits how your savegame will look in the saved games listing in Grimrock.



(optional) Step 2: go down deeper into the savefile, and under each header for the dummy chars, you'll see another portrait setting. Change those to "empty.tga" as well, also setting the double underneath to 0.

*THIS IS THE ONLY THING YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST DO FOR EACH DUMMY CHARACTER*
Step 3: Lastly, set the byte right above each dummy char's race to 0. (It's 4 steps down from the portrait setting) You're done! Save your changes in the editor, quit the editor, and play!



Note that this technique can also be used to have a party of two or three as well... it's all about how many dummy chars you "blank out" in the editor.
-Loth

[glyn_ie]

Put a smile on my face to see people using that thing. Looks like a good save. Would definitely be a tough challenge.

[lothario]

Hey man! Thanks for making your editor in the first place!

-Loth

[Thels]

Oh, that seems nifty!

I wonder if we could force that in our custom dungeons with scripts somehow.

[lothario]

Oh, that seems nifty!

I wonder if we could force that in our custom dungeons with scripts somehow.

If they let us script direct changes to savegame files, then this trick would be one way to force custom dungeons to be solo. I actually think that the only "vital" part of this technique is setting the byte above a dummy char's race to 0 -- it seems to be an "active or inactive" setting. The rest of the portrait stuff just seems to be cosmetic.

-Loth

[Thels]

But everything that's in the save game is also in memory. The question is, can we access that with the LUA scripts, to clear out the characters on slots 2-4 upon start of the game, and then add characters as players find NPCs to join the party.

[lothario]

But everything that's in the save game is also in memory. The question is, can we access that with the LUA scripts, to clear out the characters on slots 2-4 upon start of the game, and then add characters as players find NPCs to join the party.

I guess that all depends on how much flexibility they implement in the mod tools... giving us access to the savegame structures doesn't sound overly tough, IMO -- but we would need access on the fly (in RAM) to be able to assign the character ingame without requiring a scripted autosave event and then a scripted load event of that autosave. If we can script autosaves and autoloads, then joinable chars are not going to be all that tricky to do -- but it could be even easier if "on the fly" stuff is programmed in for us. A "join_party" function would be very helpful, and could be paired with a "dismiss_from_party" function. Character data could be stored in a simple txt file, and called by one of these functions to either be activated or de-activated, as it were. What really needs to happen to make this "clean" ingame is some form of dialogue event that can be triggered by proximity to an NPC or something similar... then the player can choose for an NPC to join, and then the functions could get called from those choices.

Assuming no functions like these are added (dialogue doesn't happen either), there might be a way to create a custom item that "summons" an NPC to join the party -- assuming we can script autosave and autoload events. Think of it as finding a genie's lamp... when you rub the lamp, the genie appears. Depending on what the modtools give us access to, this could get really interesting... imagine finding a device in a chest somewhere that summons a pet giant spider to join the party, complete with a custom "hand" attack that look like spider jaws ingame, and a "web" attack on the other hand slot that shoots a paralysis effect up to 2 squares away or somesuch.
-Loth

[Thels]

I was indeed hoping we'd be able to access the variables in the scripts, rather than causing an auto-save, modifying the save and causing an auto-join.

Dialogue would indeed be very helpful when it comes to NPCs.

In general, LUA is a very broad scripting language, though most games limit the possibilities to prevent harm to the end user's computers. I guess we'll have to wait and see what the editor will be capable of.

[Montis]

You know what would be awesome? If you would start out as 1 and then get other people added to your party you meet along the way.

[lothario]

You know what would be awesome? If you would start out as 1 and then get other people added to your party you meet along the way.

Hehe... that's the general idea, yes.

-Loth