In spite of the name, it's not crafts'woman' ;-). I only like that name because my kinsmen and -woman in LOTRO call me that, since all my characters there are female and have the last name 'Blake' ;-)
Oh, sorry, man!
No offense taken, I wouldn't use that name if I had a problem with it ;-)
That I need to 'disable' certain crafting recipes because as far as I know there is no way to disable one. I can only take away the ingredients those recipes use.
You would have to exchange the file in the pak file. Should work, shouldn't it?
Yes, but new mods don't work the way the old ones did in the pre-editor time. I do not want anybody to have to do the 'rename MainLSF.pak' thing.
And since recipes can have multiple output, adding a new one might only add a new output but not disable the old recipe. (Is that understandable ? I mean of course severaly recipes with identical ingredients and identical requirement.)
And if I do not forget I shall add very importand stuff that Larian forgot like for Cyseal's fish seller:
One player missed scissors. How to cut the hair otherwise?
In classic times, I even created an icon for scissors. The problem is that there is still no way to implement hair-cutting ;-)
Well, maybe changing visual resources could be done but that is currently beyond my abilities ;-)
The reason I want to add this TT is that I love this line from the fish seller so much:
"How many crab claws would you like ? Three ? Eleven ?"
I think it's hilarious.
Why did you change trader generation frequencies ? Cannot be because of limited handles. (Because I am the only one paranoid about them ;-)
Changing that will mostly hit crafters because they depend on trader's ingredients, traders are the only reliable source for a lot of ingredients. (Think about the special arrows, where else would you get antlers or teeth ? Most people don't care about that, but crafters do.)
You're not alone (if that's calming for a Paranoid). Since the first time I heard of this precarious matter I developed some pretty fears myself. When will that ticking bomb blow up? And how to handle ticking bombs without, oh God, using handles!
I'm not sure about the relevance of trader restocking. Depends on playstyle (how often you request trades), so the influence of EE is more indirect. It encourages massive trading and crafting much more than Classic did (only level, not time difference relevant). And it forces restocking (more than Classic) when you just come back to buy an item you didn't buy last time (and Classic only refreshed empty slots, if I remember correctly). Well, I see the point: I would hurt those I try to protect.
But there's also a non-handle-related problem I have with the trading system: in Classic I often visited other vendors to compare items. Now I always risk to lose the item (due to time related refreshment) if I don't buy it immediately. And trader assortments (speaking of armor and weapons) become too exchangable with such a high frequency. And third problem: trader items are just too powerful. So the solution would be to make changes on frequency (best only for armor and weapons, not for ingredients) or to change treasure tables (of vendors and/or enemies) in the last case.
I was never a big fan of 'playing the economy game', neither here nor in any MMO I played. I personally don't care if it's 'overpowered' or not and I don't care if other people 'take advantage' of it or not.
Of course there are always complaints of players if something seems easy. Telling people that something in a game - like 'abusing' traders - is not mandatory for them to use doesn't help, they won't have their peace until everyone has inconvenience.
This is might also be the reason for the whole treasure generation change: catering to this group.
I used traders mostly for crafting ingredients, less for anything else. (The air skill seller and the quartermaster in Cyseal were the ones I visited most, because they sell ingredients ;-)
One could count how many different items a trader has and how many restocks it takes until a relly important number is reached. If traders create treasure only 'after demand' (i.e. immediatley after getting their last pre-created treasure) the number would not be very high, unless ALL traders are always visited, which only a tiny minority of players does.
We also don't know, if traders get their complete inventory restocked or only a 'delta'.
One possible solution to soften the problem is to introduce one trader who does not sell anything but has lots of money. Most people use traders only to sell stuff and they have to visit all of them because they want to sell more than traders can give them back in money. With every trade start there is a good chance for a new treasure generation. Removing 'useless' stuff from traders helps too. Traders for example really don't need to carry buckets or cooking pots, because there are enough around everywhere.
Of course, with every change, the 'role playing problem' arises.
So put together: the problem was non existant in classic and occured in EE with more than one person reporting it (myself and others NOT reporting it).
The only thing I can think of that could have a big influence on this is the changed treasure generation, because, what else ?
So ... treasure must be pre-generated. Otherwise it would change after loading.
Yes, that's the big change in EE, to prevent save scumming. To a very high price...
As I said, still don't understand why save scumming is a problem, one does not have to do it ;-)
Treasure MUST actually be created on every levelup, because no one would like to open chests, barrels or crates with loot of the level it had when you first entered an area. You can easily get to Hiberheim at very low level if you visit Wally ... or Willy ?. But you would not want level 5 loot in all Hiberheim. You also enter Luculla Forest a long time before you actually really do something there, because you need to enter it to go to Hiberheim. If you open a container in Hiberheim or Luculla though, it's around your level and not much higher I think. And finally, you stay in Cyseal for a while without ever leaving it, you could open ANY container any time, loot should be at an appropriate level and not level 3, the last time you left Cyseal and came back after the second star stone.
I almost said: Yes, Sokrates, it cannot be otherwise! Now I see clearly: items must be pre-generated on every levelup. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to find legendaries since they require a certain level to drop, as far as I know. And you definitely get legendaries (at least in most cases) after a while on the Cyseal map.
So the difference of quality between trader items and looted items only comes from different treasure tables?
There is a chance though, that only containers in currently discovered areas are 'refilled'. But they would all have to be 'refilled'. There is also a chance, that treasure is even generated after a container has been cleared, but immediately thrown away, since the container is supposed to be 'empty'.
Seems stupid but some performance or efficiency thing in the engine might require it.
(Without info, I believe, a whole area is 'treasured' on the mentioned occasions, just because of internal 'engine efficiency', not having to check a lot of external stuff.)
If I am right and with treasure pre-generation also comes handle acqusition, it means that the change from 'on demand' to 'pre-generated' treasure in a system without any 'handle handling' might have been the single most stupid change from classic to EE ;-)
I never understood the motivation behind it either. If someone wants to save scum, why not, does not hurt others. After you load the game for the tenth time, it gets old and you go with what you have.
I tend to agree.
EDIT: Do we know what CharacterMoveWeaponsToContainer and ContainerMoveAllItemsToCharacter does in that regard? Does it create handles for all weapons/items?
Should not because you move stuff that already has handles.
And do ItemTemplateIsInPartyInventory, ItemTemplateAddToCharacter and ItemTemplateRemoveFromCharacter deal with handles? (I'm scared...)
Depends.
The IsIn() calls cannot do any harm because they create nothing but query only for existing values. (would be more than weird if they did.)
Same for the Remove(), how would removing require a new handle?
AddTo() calls must use a new handle because they create something, which is not different to treasure creation or crafting. There is a chance that no new handle is used if we create a stackable item and a stack of that item is already present (and not full) in the target container. Larian knows that.
As I mentioned - probably above in this thread - handles are no item handles but 'slot handles' or better 'handles of objects that occupy one slot in a container'.
That is the reason why the query GetItemHandleForItemTemplateInInventory() (or similar ;-) does not return a tuple but a single entry for a stack of items.
Since weapons and armor are not stackable, crafting them for sale is real poison in the whole handle problem context.
If I think about it, an essential change I made last year after my two crashes was to no longer require crafting of weapons to make money, instead I crafted a stackable item from bars to sell and I always had one or more of them in the inventory. That suggests that my creation did indeed not use any new handles because a newly created object was added to an existing stack which already had a handle. New handles were only created if I sold the complete stack and started a new one afterwards or if I only sold part of my stack to a trader I had not sold any of those items before, because then the trader needed to get a new handle for this new stack because he/she could not add it to an existing stack and could not take over my existing handle, because that was still used for what was left in my inventory.
In my first two playthroughs I had crafted tons of weapons to sell them.
(Another change was a massive increase to stack sizes. Last year I thought that traders inventories had some overflow that caused the crashes, I had no idea about handles yet. Coincidently, my changes affected pretty much the handle problem.)
But all this is pure speculation, I only try to understand how things work.
As I said, Raze is the man and our only connection to real info, but I guess he is busy enough with D:OS2 ... and support of course ;-)
