progress updates

[barocca]

i will, from time to time, post where i am at,
(given multiple RL commitments i can generally only squeeze an hour or two every second day into the mod)
(i can also only play online WHEN i have no other commitments, this will usually be alternate weekends)

currently the new yarisam animation set is built, with their txt controls still to convert,
their unit icons are also done, but not tested (there is usually a couple of pixels that look fine in preview, but get bent out of shape in game)
the monk cav animation is also built, txt controls still to convert and icons still to make


i have drawn a list of where each animation folder will wind up, and have had to revise that due to my recolouring of the Chiv_Knight armoured horse for Mongol Leader Cav to use, (currently they use east armoured),

monk cav will use light armoured horse in a recoloured form.

ALL in ALL there are four animation folders carrying future expansion animations, and one single solitary spare empty folder,
every other aniamtion folder will be used, and not a single one will hold the original animation files!
it will be quite a download!

so right now i need to finish this horse,
then write the controls for yari samurai and monk cavs,

then almost exclusively it is writing controls files for the rest of the animations and making unit icons, the vast majority of animation files are Done and Dusted.

i will, before December 15, back the whole lot up onto DVD so that mrs B can post them to you lot should the need arise.

as always if anyone wants to make an array of unit icon and review panel icons (matching pairs) and submit them for appraisal that would be MOST welcome - all different types of horse would be grand, monk cav are based around turks cav and burncav, with plent yof recoluring of faction display areas, so try to avoid pinks and greens - look what i did for samurai cav and try to do something similar?
i generaly make the horseman and weapon seperate and then rotate weapon to align with horse and blend the two before shrinking to size.
it is ALWAYS easiest to take an original and edit over the top,
use irfanview to turn the lbm's into tga's and i use GDS to turn the tga's back to lbms
(GDS contact me if you dont have it)

[^Glyndwr^]

If only I had the skills and knowledge to be able to help you with these. Unfortunately it is out of my range.
I can make the time but lack the experience.

[barocca]

no matter, it will be done, you just have to wait for me to have time is all

now, all the horses are finished, so we have two different types of horse with faction coloured cloaks,
as well as the black horse "ala METW", the standard "kata" armoured horse, the standard light horse and the inbuilt samurai and mongol horses - one of the coloured horses i want to use for Hoganji, the other will become the Mongol general's horse.

did you know that armoured & unarmoured horse have IDENTICAL stats?
if you are a horse there is no bonus for being armoured...
i am going to try to see if i can do anything about that, but it looks unlikely.


lots still to do...

[barocca]

toddling along,

the plan already includes a katana armed samurai unit,

also considering a veteran katana/archer unit (dismounted hatamoto if you will)
but not entirely sure if i have a suitable animation for it.

anyway everything is ticking along as and when i have time.

[^HUN^]

Strange that horse armour offers no protection. Does it affect fatigue? Well, you did say IDENTICAL so I guess it doesn't.

[CBR]

Nothing strange about it really. The horse and soldier is counted as one. You just add the armour and defense to the unit stat file.

CA's used following system for MTW*:

Horse Armour Factors
Logical Name	Description	Defense	Armour
NONE	No horse or unarmoured horse	0	0
BARDED		0	1
ARMOURED		1	2

*Note that in MTW an unarmoured cavalry unit starts at armour 2 whereas an unarmoured footsoldier had armour 1.

[^Glyndwr^]

Thank you for your input CBR. Appreciated.

[barocca]

ah yes, that explains a lot about the medieval unit stats too,

adding a point to the unit defence factor i had not considered,
i will have to be carefull when re-assinging horse types to units.


did you know we have 9 different horses? and only 2 of them are unaltered from MTW.
(light and eastern), it will make for a good look and feel


the trickiest part i am seeing is getting the units (on field) scale to match between the different source types,
(STW sourced men are a larger base size, so i need to scale them down a fraction...)
(and i need to tweak some of the dead too - the monk dead are larger than the monks themsleves - will shrink the dead a fraction)


all data of value was recovered from the crashed local drive,
all data on the crashed external drive was non game related and/or pure backups, but i recovered it all from that drive too.
currently have 2TB of free space between server and my box - have not managed to have time to burn off the 1.5TB that still needs archiving.

and now work have me building win98 bootable install CD's for some silly customer who is STILL running win98 on their business network... i have to make unique installs for each machine, oddly (or not) win98 dows not like you trying to integrate drivers...

[^HUN^]

My work laptop is Win98

[barocca]

win98 is not natively secure, and is very hard to plug all the holes
(XPP was not expensive)

ah well, businesses like that keep me employed...

[^Tomisama^]

We still have a single Win95 running some older remote control operations.

All the rest are XP or 2000 Servers.

Oh yes, and one Apple G5 on the side

[^HUN^]

I think we can now draw a line under this mod and consign it to the past. Who were we trying to kid anyway? Only ourselves.

[barocca]

it's not dead yet,

to be fair i was in very bad shape after my back surgery, while it went well in that i have avoided a wheelchair, the results were not optimal and recovery was very slow.
In 2009 requests for aid continuing the mod went unanswered, we were all extremely busy and that is nobody's fault.

I have been in a Court Battle for my children ever since, that continues to this very day with them only recently located and finally recovered to my care. Oddly enough that is not the end of it, there will be more days in court yet, but i expect they will be a little easier with the major hurdles finally behind us.

Tragedy - ALL sam-wars backups, EXCEPT the hard-drive earmarked to be posted to the khans if i died in surgery, were totally lost in a flood. People around here died in that flood, (there has never been anything like it around here), we were lucky only to lose outbuildings, one of those buildings had all my computer gear.
I have only yesterday recovered the "kahn" backup drive, it's waterproof packaging was still sealed and the drive still works. (reminder - any further progress will be slow)

With the Mizu server being lost to the org, the First task is to find a new home for the beta8 file-set itself.
B.

[^Tomisama^]

OMG Hiya B!

Your post sent me looking through my "stuff" collection, and actually found I still have a copy of beta5.

Good to hear from you  

[barocca]

good to see you too.

I have a copy of beta 908,
i intend to remove a couple of units from 908 => ashi archers, song tribal cav, song xbows and korean archers, (too many options),
and add in mongol warriors (foot/archers).
then build a basic mongol tech tree (they dont need much) and give them a couple of starting provinces and let them go on campaign!
(guns will Not be available vs the mongols)

THE most time consuming thing to do create tech tree icons and info sheets and unit icons (panelmen bifs etc.),
easy things are is swapping which textures/men the units will use, and weapons and shield matrix additions to the textures/men that i intend to use.

this will be done as soon as i can,
B.

[^Jochi Khan^]

Hi!! Barocca
Long time no see!  

I shall have to 'fire-up' my old pc that hasn't been used for about three years to check what I still should have on there for Samurai Warlords.
I know we lost our Links for the Orda Maps on the upload server due to 'lack of use'. (MediaFire) and the game downloads when the Mizus.com closed down.
That is the links in the stickies at the top of this subforum.

[barocca]

when i was made moderator of files after tera-gate my personal goal was to ensure that no fan created totalwar mods, maps, tools or whatever was ever lost. I spent countless hours tracking down authors based at other fan sites getting permission to host files at the org, If they were averse to that I could invariably talk them into letting me mirror the files and give them bolded links to their sites.
That the Mizu moved all the big stuff off the Org & onto their server and then closed their server without copying them back to the org, or putting it into a torrent even, shows their opinion of the community. I am sure some of them were aghast at that decision, but at least one of the big names was personally known to Tosa's family and if the server was Tosa's alone they could have done something to save the files.

(So insidious was mizu influence that this is the only totalwar site (of those existing in 2008) where I have not been banned.)

I have some Orda Maps on the recovered hard drive, as well as most beta's up to 908a, and most of my working files.
^^Coastal Assault.jjm, ^^Desolate.jjm, ^^MongolWars 01.jjm, ^^MongolWars 02.jjm, ^^The Shrine.jjm and ^^Watchtower.jjm

I have noticed that the Ashigaru Archers that I was building are not here. (was copying ashi heads onto sam archer bodies and recolouring the sam archer bodies black, and their puttees off-white.)

I have been looking back over old posts here And for pete's sake, if Mizu did not want the mongols they could have just let us use multiple unit files, one set of sams only, one set with the mongols - and IIRC we did not modify any of the old samurai units away from Puzz's stats. We were dumbing down the Mongols because we made them far too strong to start with.
I created new sam units. which I am going to put on hold for now, but IIRC we did not tinker with the original sams themselves.

I have puzz's castles mod that has been in-built into someone elses variant of samwars, i have not tested it yet so i dont know what they are like, i should be able to extract them.

B.

[^Jochi Khan^]

Managed to get my old pc fired up today. Took ages.
I have all the Sam Wars and Samurai Warlords games still installed on it.
Beta's 5..8.0..8.1..9.08 (with Mongols)..and 9.08a and the Sound file.
All the game files appear to be intact.

Didn't have much time to test all the installations because my C: drive is VERY short of disc space (only a few MB left) and I kept getting a warning message to free up disc space.

[barocca]

do you have the puzz castle install files?
SW_castles_2.rar?? (i have them pre-installed, but not as a separate install file)
i can make it, but much easier if i dont have to!

also
need more info about your old system to know what advice to give,
BUT
MTW is standalone once installed, you can move it all to another drive, (or put it on a usb thumb/key and move it to another computer), and it will be happy, shortcuts will need to be fixed, or simply make a new one!

When TMS was running copies on a heap of old pc's trying to find the MP crash bug (in 2008?) thats what he did to ensure same changes made to all test machines!

[^Jochi Khan^]

No I don't have the SW_castles_2.rar install files.

[barocca]

no worries, when i have a little time i'll go through the mod that ahrens made to our mod, and extract puzz castles and check what changes puzz made to the models text file (i have installed ahrens mod for testing)

[^Jochi Khan^]

Puzz3D has posted links to the castles_2.rar file on the .org (in his signature) in Samurai Warlords topics.

[barocca]

i wonder if the failing castle maps are mountain maps?
when i look through the TW-VI executable hilly/flat/plains is always grouped with mountain, transition maps (eg hill2flat)are not used for castles, neither are coast/river/inland maps, but i wonder if mountain requires it's own castle map?
B.

[^Jochi Khan^]

Couldn't contact you on the chat box. (bottom left of Home page)

Link => Mongol Yurts

[^Jochi Khan^]

Link added to the previous post.

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