My Rave/Rant about Camarilla Edition

First off this is going to be a long post, so if you don’t want to read it all I provided cliffs at the bottom.

Just want to start off by saying thank you for this amazing mod, I bought Bloodlines a few weeks after it came out as I was a big fan of Redemption not knowing what to expect and was pleasantly surprised. I must have played through Bloodlines at least 30 times since release never venturing any further than the unofficial patches. Only approx 1 year ago I decided to start trying mods as I was afraid they would detract from the true lore of the game, I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Thank you for all the work you’ve put into this mod, it has given the game new life and has increased the replay-ability immensely. I don’t know how I used to play without it. So from the bottom of my heart as a gamer, you deserve so much respect for the time you’ve put into this mod, I would literally kiss you. This is exactly what this game was lacking, was actually FEELING like a vampire. Now time for my critique…

The new disciplines make the game FAR too easy and took away from the immersion due to the manner that I found myself using them in. In the original most disciplines did not work against fellow kindred ESPECIALLY boss/powerful Kindred. I literally made it through my entire Ventrue play through using “Trance”, and when it failed I’d use “The Forgetful Mind.” This worked on EVERY difficult situation or Boss I faced. As soon as I felt in trouble I’d use “The Forgetful Mind” and everyone would walk around like an idiot while I beat them over the head and mowed through the game. That discipline needs to be revamped (nerfed *cough* *cough*) as do many other disciplines so they do NOT work on more powerful Creatures/NPC’s and weakened in general. I know you could say if you don’t like it don’t use it, trust me I tried but it’s hard when it is in the game. An option of enhancing the difficulty would also be fantastic, if only to improve realism for veteran players, now that would be amazing. I found the mod overall too easy, even more so then its predecessor. Of course this is my opinion as I’ve only played through CE standalone 4 times now.

This is more so a question, why have you and the producer of Clan Quest Mod not merged your two mods into one single project? Is it because you each prefer to have things in your own design? These two mods would go perfectly together, the constant compatibility patches that Burgermeister releases are always previous versions of CE, and from my two play through using CQM and CE several bugs were noticed which killed the play through for me. The two of you have such a perfect vision for the game which is completely lore friendly, I am more so curious then anything why the two of you have not synced your work together?

Finally I plan on sticking around the forum for a while and bothering everyone with ideas and helping any way that I can. If you are in need of any help with scripts or voice acting I'd love to bounce ideas off that beautiful head of yours.

Thanks for reading, and again I cannot stress how thankful I am for all the time you’ve put into modding this game, it is truly incredible. As I’m sure every time over the next 10 years that I pull this game off my shelf to play it, I’ll only do so if running Camarilla Edition.

Cliffs:
-I want to have Malkavs child
-Disciplined are far too overpowered, mod generally to easy.
-Optional harder mode would be great for veteran players
-Why are Burgermeister(CQM) and Malkav not joining there mods into one glorious project?

Foresight wrote:

Cliffs:
-I want to have Malkavs child

Do you live close to Germany? Could be doable Sorry to be an animal, I couldn't resist

Foresight wrote:

-Disciplined are far too overpowered, mod generally to easy.

Try TFN... I hardly have enough xp to buy traits necessary to do main quests

Foresight wrote:

-Optional harder mode would be great for veteran players

Engine limitations make it impossible. Sorry.

Foresight wrote:

-Why are Burgermeister(CQM) and Malkav not joining there mods into one glorious project?

Malkav? Your new acolyte has a question i can't answer...?

And welcome to the forum, Foresight! We like new blood here
Let's hope you do stick around... There is so much good stuff going on here.

Hey, Foresight,
wlecome to the forum. we will use your fresh blood only for the best purposes

@Feral: I think it's bucket of cold water time...

I agree on at least some of the disciplies being overpowered. The disciplie changes have been done by Zer0, before I took over after 1.2. And I have never been inclined to do something there. There are some reasons for it. First, I have never played all clans, and therefore I'm not familiar with a lot of the disciplines, neither in vanilla, nor in CE. So it will be very hard for me to judge balancing a discipline like Protean that I will never use myself. Then I don't know how many files are involved. And in bloodlines modding, you have to work directly on the game files. That's the main reason why there are so few mods.

For the overall difficulty. It's the same problem. You have to modify the gamefiles themselves. So it's not easy to include choices. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but...

For completely merging the mods, that would be like a ship with five captains, and no crew...

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Childe of Malkav wrote:

@Feral: I think it's bucket of cold water time...

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Sorry...
*rolls over and tries to look adorably *

Feral wrote:

Childe of Malkav wrote:

@Feral: I think it's bucket of cold water time...

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Sorry...
*rolls over and tries to look adorably *

HaaR Huar HARR hAaR

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You didn't address the issue of him wanting to carry your child, you're not going to disappoint your fanbase, are you Malkav?

Karavolos wrote:

You didn't address the issue of him wanting to carry your child, you're not going to disappoint your fanbase, are you Malkav?

*eager nodding*

Karavolos wrote:

You didn't address the issue of him wanting to carry your child, you're not going to disappoint your fanbase, are you Malkav?

I've got a cousin in Germany, I could make some calls. Though I don't know if she will put out when I explain to why...

First off thanks for the welcome guys, and that is very unfortunate about the disciples but it is what it is. If you ever decide to do work on them let me know, I'd be happy to help with balancing/tweaking est. I play through with all the clans once every year or two so in a few more weeks I'll have finished all my play-throughs with CE.

I understand where your coming from saying that would be like a ship with five captains, and no crew. Would sure have been a cool compilation though.

I'm amazed that this game still has such a community after all of these years, really blows my mind.

Again thanks for all your work, and I'm stoked to play the 1.6 Beta

Do you have any links on modding tutorials for Bloodlines I could go through?

Check around the forums, there are a lot of topics laying buried somewhere.

Karavolos wrote:

Check around the forums, there are a lot of topics laying buried somewhere.

All I could find was this w w w .planetvampire.com/bloodlines/files/howtomod/"

All other links on Planet Vampire are dead regarding modding. And that article I posted is from 2008 so I would assume it is outdated by now. Have new methods of modification been developed?

*whines*
Er... There is whole modding section onthe forum if memory serves...

For your cousin, mind sending a photo before any further steps are taken?

For the modding, it all depends on what you know already about computers and programming.

Hm, new discoveries, well the SDK allows making new maps, but according to burgermeister, it's a tough job, because you have to set every light and whatnot manually.

Dheu's manual isn't that good as a tutorial, but when you are more familiar with modding, it is a good reference.
I have learnt most of it by looking into the files, and starting with small changes.
The most important stuff is on the maps, in the dialogs, in the python scripts, and in \vdata\system
Of course you need the patch or one of the mods as a basis, because in the unpatched game, most of the files are not unpacked.
You could start with adding the bloodloss function from CE to the patch. If you use the CE 1.6 version, it works without a map timer.
And we are here most every nights, and answer specific questions. Just don't mind your topics being hijacked for some bickering

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Do you think it would take extensive work to remove the added disciplines from CE and just restore the old ones? That's what my goal is.

While I'm by no means a modder, I'd say if you have a fresh copy of Bloodlines; you could probably readd the disciplines.

Or play with Clan Quest Mod, with CE from it, but with pen and paper mod and other options to make the game harder

Foresight wrote:

Do you think it would take extensive work to remove the added disciplines from CE and just restore the old ones? That's what my goal is.

To be honest, I wouldn't even know where to start. There are particles and other effects in the \materials subfolders, sound effects in the \sound directories, all the disciplinetgt files, and some more files in \vdata\system...

yes i would say, it is extensive work, and you have to do a lot of research, file-digging, and testing. Especially if you haven't made the changes yourself...

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It would be simpler to just increase the blood cost of any disciplines that you consider overpowered.

Childe of Malkav wrote:

Foresight wrote:

Do you think it would take extensive work to remove the added disciplines from CE and just restore the old ones? That's what my goal is.

To be honest, I wouldn't even know where to start. There are particles and other effects in the \materials subfolders, sound effects in the \sound directories, all the disciplinetgt files, and some more files in \vdata\system...

yes i would say, it is extensive work, and you have to do a lot of research, file-digging, and testing. Especially if you haven't made the changes yourself...

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Actually, this is quite simple work. Just replace all the relevant code with the original one, most likely taken from the Wesp's latest unnoficial patch.
You will have to look throughout the stats.txt to replace what you don't like (each non-targeted discipline has there 2 occurencies). Also, the targeted disciplines are located in disciplinetgt_xxx.txt files, so there you can just replace all of those files directly.
The third place to look in is traiteffects000.txt file, there are the numeric effects of some disciplines (among all other effects including items) - the exact names you are looking for are named after the Discipline and you can quite simply trace them from the stats.txt and/or disciplinetgt_xxx.txt files.

Just ask - in the case you will run in some problems with the code/files - I'll try to help you on it, but it is not that difficult and definitely not that much time consumimg (I would say up to 3 hours at most).

~~~

Btw, I agree with you on the terms of overpowered effect of disciplines (for the play). I'm working on a mod for extracting the most fun of the game through some ballance changes and limitation issues - and at the moment I'm going (but unfortunatelly quite slowly) through toning down the power of the disciplines. I'm also in a process of changing some of the discipline effects to a different ones (i.e. something between the vanilla and camarilla versions).

I have a lot of ideas, but I'm very low on a spare time and I've quite limited options how and where to test them all in a game (mostly because of lack of saves). I'm afraid I won't be finished in the nearest future - so you could try the "revised" version for yourself, eventually.

-X-

Wot?! I recetly erased the malkavian penalty -2 on persuasion from the clandoc,but that is still there, and I also did modify back the -4 on frenzy check back 2 on brujah.But that Malkavian penalty on -2 persuasion is still there!Anything i could do about it?

Clandoc only has the descriptions. The actual effects are in traiteffects.txt.

I've actually finished making an addon for altered balance and increased difficulty but unfortunately its for CE version 1.5 and I'm having a hell of a time getting it uploaded anywhere. I'm thinking about updating it for 1.6 but I won't be able to do much testing (only basic) as I'm bloodlined out for the moment.