Bloodloss effect only

Is it possible to play the game using only the bloodloss settings from CE, preferably combined with the plus patch?

If you want to use the bloodtimer only, open -bloodlines\vampire\python\vamputil.py with a texteditor (Notepad if you don't have a better one).

then add this code:

Code:

#### CE Bloodloss, added by Malkav
def Blood():
    onOverfeed()
    __main__.ScheduleTask(0.1,"onBLEvent()")

def onBLEvent():
    pc = __main__.FindPlayer()
    G = __main__.G
    BLOOD_MAX_COUNT = 7+pc.stamina
    if(pc.HasItem("item_p_occult_blood_buff")): BLOOD_MAX_COUNT += 1
    G.BloodCounter += 1
    print "BloodCounter increased"  #can be removed, except for testing
    while((G.BloodCounter >= BLOOD_MAX_COUNT) and (pc.bloodpool > 1)):
        pc.Bloodloss(1)
        print "Bloodloss 1 Blood point"  #can be removed, except for testing
        G.BloodCounter = G.BloodCounter - BLOOD_MAX_COUNT
    if(G.BloodCounter >= 2* BLOOD_MAX_COUNT):
        try: __main__.ccmd.frenzyplayer()
        except: pass
        print "hunger induced autofrenzy"
    __main__.ScheduleTask(30.0,"onBLEvent()")

def onOverfeed():
    pc = __main__.FindPlayer()
    G = __main__.G
    BLOOD_MAX_COUNT = 7+pc.stamina
    if(pc.HasItem("item_p_occult_blood_buff")): BLOOD_MAX_COUNT += 1
    while((G.BloodCounter <= BLOOD_MAX_COUNT) and (pc.bloodpool >= 16)):
        pc.Bloodloss(1)
        G.BloodCounter = 0
        print "Bloodloss due to overfeeding"    #can be removed, except for testing
    __main__.ScheduleTask(5.0,"onOverfeed()")

#### Bloodloss and related stuff end

Then edit -bloodlines\vampire\vdata\system\stats.txt:
find bloodpool and change "max" to 16

Now you have to make certain that the initializing function Blood() is called exactly once per character. You can either do it manually via console, or better make it automatic. For automatic call, edit -bloodlines\vampire\dlg\main characters\jack_tutorial.dlg
Add the red text to lines 12 and 13, exactly one TAB in front of and behind every text entry. For this kind of dialog editing you need a normal texteditor. The downloadable bloodlines dialog editor from PV only allows for editing the male, female, and malkavian text fields.

{ 12 }{ Who are you? }{ Who are you? }{ 21 }{ not IsClan(pc,"Malkavian") }{ Blood() }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }
{ 13 }{ The rain of ages plots again to wash away revelation. }{ The rain of ages plots again to wash away revelation. }{ 1011 }{ IsClan(pc,"Malkavian") }{ Blood() }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }

This should work with any patch or mod, and also with the vanilla game. But for vanilla, you might have to extract some of the files from the archives.

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EDIT: I have changed this whole message to use of the most recent version of the bloodtimer. It is python only and makes the whole messing around with maps unnecessary.

It's awesome of you to take the time to explain how to do this. Very much appreciated.

Camarilla Edition has a lot of different features that impact the game in a lot of different ways. It's probably insane at this point to consider a modular installation, but personally I would love it. The bloodloss, additional controls, slow healing, and email college are gold to me, but the changes to disciplines, tweaks to clan balance, and augmentable bloodbuff/blood heal much less so.

That said I can't wait to play Final Night because it will be different enough that I will not be comparing it in my mind to the vanilla clans.

It was not that much trouble for me to explain this, because I have all the necessary things to set the bloodtimer and some other things like my personal keyboard setup ready for cut and paste. Whenever I download a new version of Wesps patch, I install the bloodtimer before testing it.
If by additional controls, you mean the "auto walk" and "toggle walk/run", look it up in autoexec.cfg. It's handled in the "alias" lines. I think Wesp has the pause function in his patches already, else you can find the keybindings in config.cfg. They are the first lines and start with "Bind"

I don't mind explaining things to interested people. I don't get money or have a real copyright on them, so why not. And "How to get the bloodtimer work with Wesps patches" was the very question that brought me to this site in the first place
And then I got stuck, because of the great community here

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One thing I forgot in my original post about the bloodtimer:

You only have to put the logic timer on the game relevant maps. That is all of the hub related maps: ch_, la_, hw_, and sm_.
For the sp_ maps you need giovanni, soc, and observatory. You can put it in the tutorial if you like. If you want the bloodloss to continue in the cutscene when you first come downtown (ninesintro), or on the taxi with "Caine" (taxiride), put it in, else leave it out.
The same goes for the rest of the sp_ maps: you don't need the bloodtimer, but it doesn't harm either.

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Childe of Malkav wrote:

Whenever I download a new version of Wesps patch, I install the bloodtimer before testing it.

Only a Malkavian could do all that work every time a new patch comes out. You have to be a bit crazy for that...
I only did it once and my eyes are like this >>>

I have a question about the blood timer: does it run when you are engaged in a conversation too? How exactly does that work?

For your first remark, I don't play every version of the patch. Only if there are some interesting new features, or major bugfixes. Plus a lot of the maps don't get changed from version to version, so it's just a matter of cut and paste for most of them, and only a few where you actually have to do the editing. And often I have to do it anyway for updating CE to a new version.

For your question about the timer running also in dialog: Yes the timer runs all the time the character is on the map, no matter what he is doing. And every 15 seconds, it calls the python function that sets the counter, and causes the bloodloss whenever the maximum is reached.

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Childe of Malkav wrote:

For your first remark, I don't play every version of the patch. Only if there are some interesting new features, or major bugfixes. Plus a lot of the maps don't get changed from version to version, so it's just a matter of cut and paste for most of them, and only a few where you actually have to do the editing. And often I have to do it anyway for updating CE to a new version.

For your question about the timer running also in dialog: Yes the timer runs all the time the character is on the map, no matter what he is doing. And every 15 seconds, it calls the python function that sets the counter, and causes the bloodloss whenever the maximum is reached.

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Well, if i got this right, then you should lose 1 blood point every 15 seconds if you only have 1 point in stamina right?
And also, what happens if you are engaged in a conversation, and you lose your last blood point(which should normally cause you to frenzy pretty soon); so i was wondering what if the frenzy triggers when you are in a conversation? Is that possible, because that could screw up a lot of things in that case.

And sorry for the stupid questions, i`m just not familiar with anything scripting-related.

No, the timer and the counter are different things. Bloodloss is 1 point every 4 minutes for Stamina 1, plus half a minute per additional point of Stamina.

I've never tested if you actually can frenzy during dialog. But on the other hand, my characters usually don't go below at least 3 to 4 points of blood. So that leaves at least 10 minutes to end a conversation, and refill.
Besides, most forced conversations where you can't refill your bloodpool before engaging the dialog are very short ones like the haven bum, or they happen in Elysium, which is NoFrenzy area anyway, or are triggered by a boss enemy, where you usually don't go unprepared.

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I don't think you CAN frenzy during conversations, I think you would frenzy after the conversations end... though I could be wrong about that.

Zer0Morph wrote:

I don't think you CAN frenzy during conversations, I think you would frenzy after the conversations end... though I could be wrong about that.

The only time that would happen, is if you use Dementation, or Dominate, and you only have enough blood for the cost, or you don't. It ends the dialogue, and you immediately attack the person you where talking to. I don't think it happens if the "Need Blood" prompt appears.

Hope y'all don't mind a new member reviving this thread... I found it while trying to find out how to do the same thing as the OP. Thanks for the tips so far, by the way.

I had a couple questions of my own I wanted to add, hopefully you fine folks can help me with them:

If I want to change the rate of blood loss, it's the BLOOD_MAX_COUNT value I need to change, right? It occurred to me that factoring Humanity (pc.humanity, I'm guessing?) into the formula as well as (or in place of) Stamina might be an interesting tweak.

Will this also cause automatic frenzy at zero blood on its own, or is there a separate bit of code that does that? I'm not a big fan of the idea. Instead, is there a way to make hunger a factor in frenzy risk but only when provoked anyway, especially if it makes those with high Humanity no longer immune while hungry?

Another thought, possibly instead of or in addition to the above, would be for the PC to start losing health instead of blood once they're out. How hard would it be to do that? I'd also like to turn off regeneration when not feeding, but I wonder if I should ask about that in another thread.

Lastly, regarding adding the logic timer to the map files, is there any way to batch process that? Alternatively, if I weren't using any other mods, could I just copy the Cam Edition maps over the originals, or are there other things in there that will freak out and die if I'm not using the rest of the mod? For that matter, why does the Cam Edtion mod only include a handful of map files if the timer has to be added to nearly all? What will happen if I add it to just the map files the Cam Edition mod includes (the original copies, I mean, not the modded ones)?

Oh, a fledgeling with a latin name? Spent a lot of time in torpor? Well fresh blood always tastes sweet

For your questions
Yes, it's blood_max_count. It's blood_max_count times 15 seconds from one bloodloss to the next one. You could add humanity to that, though I don't see any reason, why a moral code should influence the amount of blood you need to keep your undead body working.

There are hardcoded rules for frenzy checks, depending on your hunger. So there are only a few possibilities for a modder to change the probability. And when you go really low on blood, you actually loose health as well.

While it is possible to make a character heal only when feeding, I prefer the way it's handled in CE. You heal normally over time, but you don't get any extra health while feeding.

The problem is, you have to open the maps with the bloodlines tools that come with the unofficial patch. And they are a rather ugly hack anyway, so I don't think there is a chance of doing it with a batch file.

And with a handful of maps to change, you got me wrong. Of course, CE uses all the maps. I was just stating, that I don't have to edit all maps, if I use a new version of the unofficial patch with the bloodtimer. And there are more changes to the CE maps than merely the bloodtimer. And these things are controlled by the dialogs and python scripts. So it might be possible to use the CE maps with the UP, without gamebreaking problems. But I can assure you thet you will encounter some strange effects, and most probably will have problems with some quests as well.

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Childe of Malkav wrote:

Oh, a fledgeling with a latin name? Spent a lot of time in torpor? Well fresh blood always tastes sweet

Heh. Nah, some friends of mine gave me the nickname "Claudius" after watching the BBC series "I, Claudius". It's because we both stutter and have had our intelligence underestimated for it.

Quote :

Yes, it's blood_max_count. It's blood_max_count times 15 seconds from one bloodloss to the next one. You could add humanity to that, though I don't see any reason, why a moral code should influence the amount of blood you need to keep your undead body working.

It's not supported by the tabletop mechanics or lore, but it just came to me as an interesting alternate take. I'm actually a big fan of Vampire: the Requiem, White Wolf's followup game, and some of the supplement material openly endorsed hacking the game to suit your own vision. The idea of Humanity lessening a vampire's hunger, or a lack of humanity increasing it as the Beast comes closer to the surface, intrigues me, especially in a computer game where you can have more finely tuned math running behind the scenes where the players don't have to manage it themselves.

Quote :

There are hardcoded rules for frenzy checks, depending on your hunger. So there are only a few possibilities for a modder to change the probability. And when you go really low on blood, you actually loose health as well.

Nice to hear that about health. The thing I was particularly concerned about was what I read in description for the Camarilla Edition mod that said a vampire without any blood left would automatically frenzy at intervals. (I've never actually run out of blood in the game, but I gather this is an addition.) I just wanted to make sure I can add the blood loss function without the automatic hunger frenzy kicking in.

And you said there are "few" possibilities for modders to alter frenzy checks? Can I take that to mean not zero? What should I be looking for, and do you know what I can change with it?

EDIT: After a search through the Bloodlines directory for all files containing the word "frenzy", I found rules.txt which seems to outline the formulae behind the frenzy mechanic. It looks like it penalizes you for low blood already, and also seems to force hunger frenzy checks at 3 blood points and below? Am I reading that right? If that's so, what does the Cam Ed mod do differently? There's also some frenzy-related stuff listed in VTMB ModDevGuide.txt (put there by the unofficial patch, I believe), but I'm more familiar with Ruby than Python, so I'm not entirely sure what they do.

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While it is possible to make a character heal only when feeding, I prefer the way it's handled in CE. You heal normally over time, but you don't get any extra health while feeding.

That is accurate to the game, true, so if that's your goal that's the way to do it. I like how the act of feeding itself replenishes health as well as blood, though (there's an optional rule for that in one of the supplements for the new World of Darkness). I'd just like to nix the default regeneration rate, or maybe just drastically reduce it (say, so that normal damage heals like aggravated did before). I suppose you could say I'm trying to tweak things towards my own preferences rather than canon.

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The problem is, you have to open the maps with the bloodlines tools that come with the unofficial patch. And they are a rather ugly hack anyway, so I don't think there is a chance of doing it with a batch file.

I didn't necessarily mean using a DOS batch file, just if there was some tool that could batch process a bunch of files at once. For example, the San Andreas Mod Installer for GTA:SA allows you to script a series of actions on the game's data files. I was just wondering if anything similar existed that could do the same for these kinds of files.

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And with a handful of maps to change, you got me wrong. Of course, CE uses all the maps. I was just stating, that I don't have to edit all maps, if I use a new version of the unofficial patch with the bloodtimer. And there are more changes to the CE maps than merely the bloodtimer. And these things are controlled by the dialogs and python scripts. So it might be possible to use the CE maps with the UP, without gamebreaking problems. But I can assure you thet you will encounter some strange effects, and most probably will have problems with some quests as well.

Right, so, bad idea to try.

Part bump, part re-asking a question a didn't quite get an answer to:

If the logic timer has to be added to every map file, why does the Cam Ed mod only include a handful of them? What would happen if I only modified the same maps that the Cam Ed includes?

EDIT: Never mind, I appear to have downloaded a patch to the mod, not the mod itself, hence the confusion over it not including all the map files. me == derp

So if I just want to fiddle with the formula for max_blood_count I only need to open vamputil.py and edit that? I don't have to open all the maps with that tool?

About Humanity influencing bloodloss, in the p&p game vampires are naturally pale, corpselike, and cold and they have to spend bloodpoints in order to look alive. And the amount of blood required for that depends on Humanity.

Another thing is, I vaguely rember something somewhere about having to delete .pyc files if you edit a .py file. Can someone explain what that is about?

Dragatus wrote:

So if I just want to fiddle with the formula for max_blood_count I only need to open vamputil.py and edit that? I don't have to open all the maps with that tool?

Pretty much, yes. That's what I did. the code on the map files just calls the python function, which is what determines the actual effect.

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About Humanity influencing bloodloss, in the p&p game vampires are naturally pale, corpselike, and cold and they have to spend bloodpoints in order to look alive. And the amount of blood required for that depends on Humanity.

For a tabletop game, anything more complicated than one blood point per day would just be too fiddly, at least with the range of numbers used in the White Wolf system. I just thought, since video games let you hide the math from the player and handle the rules in the background, it presented an opportunity to play around with the concept, try out some different ideas and see what happens.

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Another thing is, I vaguely rember something somewhere about having to delete .pyc files if you edit a .py file. Can someone explain what that is about?

The c in .pyc, as I understand it, means "compiled". The python interpreter generates that file from the plaintext .py file so it can read and execute it more quickly and efficiently. If there's already a .pyc version of a particular file, it'll just work from that and won't bother rereading and reinterpreting the original .py file. Deleting it forces it to do just that.

Thanks for the answers.

CLAVDIVS CAESAR wrote:

For a tabletop game, anything more complicated than one blood point per day would just be too fiddly, at least with the range of numbers used in the White Wolf system. I just thought, since video games let you hide the math from the player and handle the rules in the background, it presented an opportunity to play around with the concept, try out some different ideas and see what happens.

I didn't mean to use the p&p rules directly, I just wanted to point out that having bloodloss affect by Humanity does make some sense. You spend a fair chunk of the game interacting with people so you'd want to make yourself fit in and that costs more blood for inhuman kindred, which gets simulated by increased bloodloss.

For the pyc files: You don't have to delete them, but if you do, it's easier to see if the new py was compiled, or if there is a syntax error in your script.
The game engine checks the date flags of both files, py and pyc. That's why I usually suggest deleting the pyc to make sure the py gets recompiled.

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It appears the .pyc file gets overwritten once you save the .py file in the same directory as the .pyc. I've made changes to a .py file outside of the directory that the .pyc resides, then moved the new .py file into the same folder as the .pyc and it did not update in my game. It wasn't until I edited the .py keeping it in the same directory as the .pyc did it actually update.

But as Childe said, it's best to just remove the .pyc to make sure it recompiles properly.

You sure, your py had a newer date flag than the pyc? And no syntax or indnetation errors. Plus the game only checks the py and pyc date flags, and tries to recompile if necessary, when you load the map that needs this particular script. Except of course for vamputil.py(c), which is loaded at every game start.

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CLAVDIVS CAESAR wrote:

The c in .pyc, as I understand it, means "compiled". The python interpreter generates that file from the plaintext .py file so it can read and execute it more quickly and efficiently. If there's already a .pyc version of a particular file, it'll just work from that and won't bother rereading and reinterpreting the original .py file. Deleting it forces it to do just that.

That would be correct. The .py file is a human-readable file. The .pyc is a compliled, "computer-readable" file.

It's good practice to always delete the compliled version whenever you edit the text file it comes from. Maybe VtM let's you get away with not doing it, but you may mod some other games later on that don't. If you delete the compliled file, you force the game to recompile the text file you editted (or the game could crash and die a horrible death, if it isn't set up to check for recompliles).

And of course, always back up files you screw with so you can put them back if you need to.

The 'tinypic' showing the python code is gone

Can you put it up in a regular [code] block?

If not, using a courier or courier new font will keep the formatting (both monospace fonts).

I have rewritten the whole first message of this topic to reflect on the new version of the bloodtimer. That will make the whole messing around with map files obsolete, and add the bloodstar give a bonus on the bloodloss time plus the overfeeding functionality to guarantee that you have the full time until the first bloodloss occurs, if you can get enough blood out of your source.

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Sweeeeeet!!!