Sober's Design Ideas

[Sobersean]

Going to use this thread like my art thread here http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=917, but now that we have brand new subforums I'll just use this "Design" one for this thread. (I'm honestly not sure what all that entails I'm going out on a limb and thinking any kind of design, even ideas and concepts should go here, if not Mod, move me.)

This is a personal thread I'll be updating like my art thread, but in this one I'm going to drop ideas for designs of mods. Sort of a mental scratchpad to keep the ideas semi-coherent and written down somewhere. "But Sean why do it online, did they baN paper where you live?" Well, I want to keep it here, online on these forums so people can riff of it like my art thread. If they like something I post here they can mod it. Or maybe they're stuck on an idea, they might like mine and decide to go with it. Public thread is public, all permission granted to make use of any of these ideas consider it public license you have my blessing. If I put it here it's because I might like to see it as a mod, and however that gets done, by me or someone else matters not to me so go for it and rock well.


Shrines

1. Experience Shrine
Gives a temporary boost to experience gained. Typical stuff. Shrine modeled to look like a statue of an old wizened man with a staff., subtle light blue aura.

2. Magic Find shrine
Gives a temporary boost to your magic find rate by a huge amount. Around 400% of your current base. Shrine modeled to look like a statue of a treasure chest glittering with a shimmery silver aura.

3. Gold Find shrine
See above but for gold. Lasts longer. Shrine modeled to look like an open treasure chest glittering with a gold aura.

4. Monster shrine
Turns you into a random monster for a limited time. All of you skills become the monster's skills. You may become a goblin archer for a bit, and you'll be able to shoot ranged bombs like they do. Wears off after about 4 or 5 minutes. Shrine looks like a fountain, but it's a big monster head with lava running out of it's mouth instead of water. Subtle red glow.

5. Cursed Monster shrine
Same as above but you become the monster permanently until you are cured by finding either healing shrine or by buying a cure potion from the alchemist in town. For a very steep (ridiculously steep) price. Indistinguishable from a regular Monster shrine. Small chance to spawn in place of regular Monster shrine.

6. Mercenary Barracks shrine.
A shrine that spits out a random and generic Alchemist, Destroyer or Vanquisher character of two levels below your current level with random skills and random equipment to fight by your side until they die. They do not level up and will act with the same AI as your pet or other companions, passive aggressive or defensive. When they die, they die. The shrine will look like a small tower with a door.

7. Casino Shrine
A shrine that when clicked queries the gambling merchant's screen and conjures it up for you on the spot. There is no price associated with any of the items, they're all free, but you can only click one item, then the shrine becomes inactive. Shrine looks like a sundial, but instead of a dial, it's a roulette wheel.

8. Skill Shrine
A shrine that grants you a skill boost of 1 point to any skill of your choosing. This is permanent. Shrine looks like a statue of an open book. Extremely rare spawn.


9. Stat Shrine
A shrine that grants you +5 stat points to distribute as you see fit. This is permanent. Shrine looks like a statue of a horn of plenty spilling golden water out of the opening of the horn. Another rare shrine, but not as rare as the Skill shrine

10. Portal Shrine
Opens a portal to a random level in the same fashion as the Portal Beast does. Shrine looks like a stone archway with foliage creeping up the sides and the portal appears in the center of the archway after activated.

*more to come as I think of them, only 10 ideas for now must get back into playing but there's hundreds of ideas I need to put here before I forget them.

[santoriin]

those sound amazing

[lorddax]

Awesome shrine ideas. Some of them seems like they would make your character uberpowerful, but isnt that what this genre is about? We'd love to work out somethign where we could use your shrines in the TCC project, or even have you join the project if we are that lucky

[Sobersean]

Awesome shrine ideas. Some of them seems like they would make your character uberpowerful, but isnt that what this genre is about? We'd love to work out somethign where we could use your shrines in the TCC project, or even have you join the project if we are that lucky

Oh like I said feel free feel free to use anything, no permission needed. Hell I got some of my ideas from currently existing stuff anyway you know. Open to all, regardless of credit or anything, this is just an idea dump for me so when I start modding I'll remember some of this stuff that flows through brainium while playing.

Got some sketches in the works today in between playing levels of ideas for the shrines. I might not color them, but I'll at least get some visuals in this thread at some point.

Also this is a "living thread" so any comments, criticism, flaming me (withing the bounds of the ToS at least), praising me whatever you want is welcome I don't mind. Adding any cool ideas to expand on top of mine is even more welcome.

[Sojyn]

War God Shrine - Increases physical damage by 100%, elemental damage by 50%, and physical defense by 50% (or some such combination of buffage). Effects last for 60 seconds.

[madstuffy]

This is really good stuff

Something fun I'd like to see - even though I realize there are no animations at the 'mob' level to support this:

Monster Mash Shrine
Succumbs all enemies within a xx yard radius to a "dance fest" - 10 second timer (excludes all boss level enemies).

This shrine could depict a couple of goblins standing side-by-side, arms over each others shoulders with a foot & hand in the air (drunk-dance styles) - one holds a mug o beer?

It's late... Torchlight is turning into the Diablo 2 experience - where nights somehow seemed to vanish... no.. more.. for now...!

Cheers,
madstuffy

[Sobersean]

COol I like those. The first one reminds me of the Combat Shrine from D2, hadn't thought of that but I like it.

[Odin]

Rabies Shrine - Your pet gains damage, armor, and speed for 60 seconds.

[lorddax]

Added you to the contributors page of TCC wiki because I know we will be using some of your art and ideas

[Makikou]

Excellent ideas

[Sobersean]

Added you to the contributors page of TCC wiki because I know we will be using some of your art and ideas

Okie dokie, that's fine, thank you.

Here's an idea I had about how to organize skill tree ideas for new classes in photoshop. I used a Mage from WoW as my premise since I'm familiar with that class and think it would be a fun class to mod in (and easy enough).



Tier 1:
Magic Missles: Channeled spell that drains your mana as you cast it. Targets one enemy.. 1 pulse per every two points for a total of 5 pulses at level 10. Each level increases damage and mana cost. No cooldown, no leech.

Blink: Works like Teleport from Diablo 2. Gives you defense and aoe damage after you enter and exit the blink which raises each point spent. One point wonder or max it for pretty good suicide bomber damage. No cooldown, no leech.

Tier 2:
Magic Blast: Instant cast powerful ranged blast that hits one target. High mana cost high upfront damage increasing with each level. No cooldown, no leech.

Mystical Power: Enhances all magic damage from all schools by a 12% per point and boosts critical damage of spells by 5 percent per point.

Tier 3:
Mage Mind: Increases mana regen rate and mana pool by 2% per character level per point for a total of 20% per level at 10 points.

Mana Shield: Uses mana to absorb damage instead of life ala D2. Increases amount of damage absorbed and lowers mana reduction per point spent.

Focus Magic: Increases charm spell level by 1 per point spent. (ala vanilla Torchlight).

Tier 4:
Arcane Explosion: Aoe blast that expands from the center of the caster hitting all targets in range. Damage increases per point spent. No cooldown Extremely high mana cost, no leech, knockback effect.

Tier 5:
Fizzle: Mutes enemy spellcasters and causes spells to have a chance to backfire causing damage to the enemy caster. Duration increases by 1 second per point spent, chance to backfire increases by 10% per point spent.

Tier 6:
Rift Shards: Opens a temporal rift in an area of effect from which shards of arcane crystals pour down damaging all in the area with intial direct damage and a damage over time component if they stay in the area. Damage and duration go up per point spent. No leech, cooldown equals duration of spell, ala "Blizzard" from D2.


More to come on the other trees. This way you can easily modify the Skills from your new custom classes before you set to work in the editor for a quick reference when it's time to actually plug all the numbers in for your custom class. I find a visual aid always helps to organize my thoughts and brainstorm.

[Sobersean]

I'm going to teach myself 3d Studio Max 2009 in this thread as well, since I don't want to create a new thread about it. Runic said today that 3ds Max export tools will be made available with the release of the toolset. SO, since I don't know Max but have a little time until the editor is released this week I will need to teach myself how to use this software to create geometry to import into my TL mods.

So Here goes, 9pm or so and firing it up. Going to create a simple weapon, make uvs for it then texture it using 3ds max 2009 and photoshop. No idea how to use it I've been mystified by it for years it is time I learn it.

Well it's now 2:30 am about there and I took an hour break but I did what I set out to do. Create a simple weapon and assign it UV coords for texturing in photoshop. Unfortunately, I my skills at modelling in max are too slow at the moment and I took the entire evening just learning the interface and how to even click around the screen and move the camera and such (did aliens design this program it's so...different than anything else I've used), so to have something at least to texture I whipped up a real quick model in Hexagon then exported it to max to learn how to UV, which I've never done before either (successfully) I've tried and failed many times to the point of giving up the hobby. But with Torchlight, I need to learn, so I'm sticking to it.

After those short hours I'm left with this:

The hammer modeled low poly in Hexagon, and the following image shows the UV mapping I've done in Max on the imported model. Max imported it with triangles instead of the Quads I modeled it with, I'll have to learn how to model directly in max since I absolutely hate when stuff like that happens. I need more control over the geometry, so learning to model in max is a must. By this weekend I should have it sorted.

Anyway here's the uv maps on the model, nice and clean so that the texturing should be pretty painless.


Now to do a texture for it and put it aside until the toolset is released and I can get it assigned some properties and a name, get it spawned and test it out to see what problems it has with it's center being off, or the size being wrong, although I did remember to at least check the normals to make sure they were unified so at least that shouldn't be a problem. I expect all sorts of other issues to arise however but that's how I learn, solving problems that I create by not know wtf I'm doing and just launching into things like this full steam damn the torpedos. More to come.

[Krageon]

People like you will make this game's modding community great. Keep up the good work, very nice ideas

[Sobersean]

Hey thanks.

Had a couple more good ideas tonight. One will probably be impossible but it's still a good idea.

When you go to the town Gambler to gamble, he gives you his original screen so you pick an item that you want to gamble for. Then once that click happens, Remove the Gambler's interface entirely and replace it with Peggle.

Then when you gamble you get a Peggle screen. It's a fixed fee per ball. You can buy a ball for 1,000 gold.

You'll get an button that says "Buy a Ball and Play?" then when it's pressed, the peggle shooter starts moving and you fire by clicking the mouse.

At the bottom are 5 slots the ball can fall into.

Set Unique Rare Magical Common

The Common slot is the largest, Magical second largest and so on until you see the Set and Unique slots which are pretty small.

Whatever slot the ball falls into at the end you get placed in your inventory.

This takes the /yawn out of gambling in these games finally. But it will probably never see the light of day. At least, the idea is there now.



Secondly I wanted to post about the mod I want to make regarding solving the Enchanting "problem" so to get it here in this thread for easy access when I get to it.

Problem. Enchanting white and green items infinitely leads to lack of need to bother hunting for better items. Takes away drive and motivation for grinding, exploring, and deep diving looking for better loot. Why bother when a level 1 white is going to be better, after enchanting, than any of the high end uniques, making baby kittens and infant squirrels and unhatched chickens cry the world over for killing the soul of the arpg genre outright in one felling blow.



Problem "Fixer" mod.

Fix #1: Tie the amount of enchants you can get on your gear to your Fame level.
This motivates the player to pursue higher levels of fame.
The formula would be 1 new enchantment available per 2 levels of fame. So 5 levels at level 10, 25 at level 50 etc...
This would act the same as a standard "level cap" on enchantments for the sake of balance.

Fix #2: Cap the level of enchants based on the quality of the item regardless of fame level.
Common White items can only be enchanted twice before they're full on enchantments.
Magical Green items can only be enchanted 4 times before they're full on enchantments.
Rare Blue items can only be enchanted 6 times before they're full on enchantments.
Unique items and Set items remain uncapped but of course still tied in to the players Fame level.
Costs remain the same as current costs for enchanting /no change.

Fix #3: Enchanted items will not be able to be equipped until the player reaches the required level of fame.
This prevents one character with high Fame enchanting the item and sharing it to a lower fame character and twinking him with it.


Ok that's all for tonight.

[Dusho]

Nice ideas how to fix enchanting issue.
Also nice would be if every item would have random property specifying how many times you can enchant that weapon - so modifier that tells how powerful the item can get. Number of possible enchants should be like 1-4 (not much) independent on quality - this way green item with 4 possible enchants can still be attractive, but unique with already better properties and 2 possible enchants will be always better.
But don't know if its possible for items to carry another flag restricting number enchants randomly.

[Sobersean]

Nice ideas how to fix enchanting issue.
Also nice would be if every item would have random property specifying how many times you can enchant that weapon - so modifier that tells how powerful the item can get. Number of possible enchants should be like 1-4 (not much) independent on quality - this way green item with 4 possible enchants can still be attractive, but unique with already better properties and 2 possible enchants will be always better.
But don't know if its possible for items to carry another flag restricting number enchants randomly.

Hrm yeah that's a good thought. If you've ever heard of played of a game called Disgaea Hour of Darkness (and it's sequels) they had a system much like that.

If you found a weapon (or any item) it had a random dungeon inside of it that you could battle through to the end to increase the level of the item itself.

Each item had a few random attributes associated with it including how many "specialists" it had living inside of it. Specialists were monsters that you would encounter in the random dungeons contained in the item, that when defeated, would add to the population of the item and the more specialists you had defeated, the more powerful the item became. They were called specialists because each one had a different effect he could lend to the item, ie: defense, elemental damage etc...

So you would always be on the lookout for certain item combinations of specialists and you could get really lucky and find just the right combination and amount to allow you to upgrade to an awesome item. That added to the fun of playing and searching for the best quality of items based on thier "potential."

A system like that would work well here as well and could be a fun secondary mod to the game for sure. There are already flags set for the number of sockets that can spawn on an item, I'm confident that we can sort out how many enchantment "slots" and item can have is either in there somewhere or can be added or hopefully at some point, if it's difficult, can be "spoofed" via tricking the editor into doing what we want it do by applying other properties or spells to it that don't already exist. That sort of thing.

[Sobersean]

Okay I had to write this down to outline the steps I'll need to take to get the Fame based Enchantments mod working when we get the TorchED. This should be complex enough of a task that if I succeed with it will teach me much about modding for this game. Solving the problems inherent in this idea will be tricky if not impossible without writing unique code and will rely on code for things already being in the game, so time will tell at what point I get stopped in my progress. Regardless it will be a learning experience and will build my skill level higher for the trying.

Here goes my outline for future reference.

In distilled form with requirements to meet:

1. Needs to be a indication for an items class in it's properties. Be it common magical rare set or unique. The game has to be able to call on that information to determine what type of item it is, in general first. If that basic indication is not set, then the mod stops there as writing it in from scratch would be outside my range of what I can tinker with.

2. If there is indeed a classification system for items based on their class already written, then I need to look for a couple things.

3. First thing to find would be the set of scripts that the Transmuter uses to find out how many items are in a stack of items that is dropped in his window, so he can determine how many to take and how many to give back during a transmute.

4. Once that's isolated, I need to copy it, and change values of the items that are being referenced to those Item classifications in step 1 and ignore the rest.

5. After that I give the code I took from the transmuter and put that into the Enchanter's repertoire. Which, should be pretty tricky considering you're giving him an entirely new function to perform, that of checking what kind of item is being put into his window. Right now, I don't think he makes that check at all. So it would have to be a new routine, or job, for him to perform. I may get blocked there. But it may be easy to just compare the Transmuter and the Vendor and add some stuff to the enchanter that the transmuter already does like check for things.

6. Once the Enchanter is smart enough to check for item quality, he'll need to be able to see how many times he can enchant that item. That is a code that I would like to give to him and not to the item, for the sake of being compact, but unfortunately I don't see it working like that.

7. The item itself would have to hold the information about how many times it's been enchanted. So a new property would have to be written in for items and that new property would have to populate across all items in it's classification, it's would have to be a new global item property that does not exist in the game yet.

8. That new property may be simple or hard or impossible to add, I can't say yet. I'm going to hope it's easy. If it's easy then I suspect it be almost a mirror of the properties that define how many times a type of item can be socketed. So I will look there first for answers.

9. At this point I will have a item that will be able to show the enchanter how many times it can be enchanted, and how many times it has been already, and then I go back to the enchanter.

10. The enchanter looks at the item now and sees that it can get two enchantments and it has one already used up so his script returns the fact that he can keep going with enchants. But it then becomes conditional for the first time on the player's Fame level.

11. Now, here I would have to find out what is being called and where it lives when the game decides to give you a new title for your new level of Fame. That information would be critical as it's going to be the biggest part of this hole shebang. It exists, of this I'm sure of course as if it didn't you wouldn't get updated fame titles.

12. So at this point we have the enchanter knows the item can get two enchants, and can give you a new one since one is still free. But he has to see if your famous enough to allow two enchants, so he checks your fame level. If you're at level 4 or above Fame then he can do it. I would have to write that check in for him and to do that I would borrow the script on the character itself that checks against an item if it can be equipped at a certain level or not. That's easy.

13. I'll then give that check over to the enchanter and modify it so instead of level it calls up the character's Fame Level. Then it becomes a simple check of if then continue or if not then stop.

15. If the enchanter can enchant your item he will then be allowed to follow through with it and it will be business as normal, except the item that got the new enchantment will be marked as having one more of it's enchantment slots filled up and it in a sense becomes a new item with new enchants and new markers to show how far it's been enchanted.

16. Everything at that point (if I get there, now you see why I said I've thought about this alot, I had to it got pretty complex.) Everything at that point will be set except for the last thing and that will be to ensure that a character of low fame cannot equip an item that was crafted by a higher fame character. So it won't be able to be transferred into his hands.

17. There are a couple ways I think to do this, but the best way I think would be to make the same exact check by the character, not the item, whether he is of high enough level to equip something but attribute the check to his fame and not character level.

18. That would be as simple as borrowing code I've already placed and putting in with each of the character's set of actions they perform when an item is dropped in their equipment window or right clicked or shift clicked or whatever clicked to equip it. Then I'd have to give it the final touch of making the game itself say "You are not Famous enough to equip this item." Or simply just not allow it and make a little error noise if the former is too complicated.


Soooo yeah lots of stuff but I wanted something challenging for myself to work on since I really am enthusiastic for the editor and need to know how to do all this kind of fun stuff to make the mods I want to make. The idea itself is simple enough, but depending on how much stuff like this is in game already will determine how far I'm able to get with it as any time I have to write brand new code i will hit a wall. It's all dependent on how much of the existent code is there for me to simply tweak, cut and paste pretty much.

[Sobersean]

Need to remember to make a mod that activates a new option for one of the NPC's that stands in front of the Shadow Vault.

Since there are no waypoints in that deep dungeon, if you screw up and take the option to rez in town without first placing a town portal down on the floor of that level, then you are BONED pretty much and you have to run back.

Imagine, 1,000 floors down and you're tired and you screw up and don't put that portal down and you die.

You would have to fight back down 1,000 levels! And you would probably want to delete your character, and the game at that point out of frustration at yourself and the design flaw.

So. The mod needs to be made that allows the NPC to teleport you down to the deepest level of the dungeon that you've ventured to so far. For a Fee.

The fee is there to Punish the player for being dumb and forgetting to pop a town portal before he died. The fee should increase the deeper you go, and after awhile it should be a pretty hefty fine so you won't ever forget. 25 gold for a town portal? Or 25,000 gold to get teleported. The choice is yours.

[cacysunlee]

they are really awesome ideas Sobersean, i hope we will see all this in a great mod of you.

[Sobersean]

they are really awesome ideas Sobersean, i hope we will see all this in a great mod of you.

Thank you that's nice of you to say.

I want to leave a brief message here so I don't forget since I thought about this tonight while playing.

I want to talk about +skills on items, just some notes on things I might want to change or add.

• New skills that are added by modders to the game are easy to make. So are new spells (the kind that come from scrolls). Since they're easy to make, we can expect to see alot of them all the time.

• Two things to keep in mind that I foresee with that:

• First thing to keep in mind with that is, there are items that give a bonus to a certain skill that drop as an affix they possess. When you add a new skill into the game, you also need to change around the item drops to include that affix so you can eventually get gear to drop with a bonus to that skill. It's just a more "complete" way of doing things.

• Second thing to keep in mind when creating new spells that drop via scrolls is how they scale with the +defensive +offensive +charm mastery skills of each class when balancing their power levels. Games are better when they're balanced, and that includes the little things like this, compensating for the masteries when introducing new spells so as to not overpower them by forgetting that people can boost those masteries by x10.

• Now, regarding the old skills and spells that are currently in game I have one last thought:

• I would like to make some (high level) unique gear and set gear that focuses on the available vanilla skills we have. For instance make a shield that gives a +3 bonus to Flechette trap and has some nice resists and such. Do something like that for every skill since people have different builds. Then *those* would be the items people want to look for and hope for a lucky drop while magic finding in the dungeons. Once they find that item that boosts their skill like that, then that is the item they start enchanting, a true, "end game" item. Instead of some crap level one white item from the first floor of the mines. Put one of each type of item in the game that boosts a certain skill. Just create a new unique using the models that are in game and just new information, it would be a very quick and easy mod, probably taking no more than one day of just changing numbers around since there aren't too many skills for the 3 character classes.

Ok just so I don't forget.