The Quirky Fork: Keeping the Quornhole vision going

Jonzay

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Since spark seems to have disappeared for now, I've been making tweaks to their last release (3rd April, 2023) in order to add additional QoL and fix a few issues, both legacy and mod-introduced. I'm open to feedback and suggested changes, so please reach out in this thread with any comments!

Latest sc.dll file date: 19 May 2023

As per spark's post, you must install the sc.dll file in your MSC installation(s):

  1. Download the zip file attached to the latest release post and copy the sc.dll file inside it to /msc/dlls, overwriting the original sc.dll (back up the original if you want to revert later without reinstalling).
  2. If you're playing on a dedicated server (HLDS), do the same on both the server and the client.

Please note that my changes are not compatible with the Quirky Quornhole server, and I am not affiliated with that server.

Using spark's "sc 2023-04-03.zip" as a baseline, here is my current changelog:

14-May-23:

1. Overhauled the first part of the Edana mayor conversation. You can't speak to him through walls anymore, he doesn't somehow know your true name, and he now correctly handles the conversation if you start it with the word you are meant to provide during the quest.
2. Fixed the frost bow "resistance doesn't work first time you pull it out in a map" bug.
3. Tundra can now provide its unique reward, even if there is only 1 player (previously required a minimum of 2).
4. Adjusted the chance of the Summon Bear scroll to appear in the final chests of its map to be roughly 20% per chest.
5. You can now run lodagond-4 repeatedly and still fight the boss. Previously, defeating the boss would require you to start from lodagond-1 again if you wanted them to spawn again. However, if you wish to have the alternate reward, you will still need to talk to the correct individual on the correct map again before fighting the boss.
6. Modified lure based entities. Now, only critical NPC lures (such as the crystal and old_helena NPCs) should be invulnerable. This should fix maps such as phlames being impossible to complete.

16-May-23:

7. Roland, the Gatecity blacksmith, will now respond to "ore" in localchat (if you have the ore and the broken axe) to start the conversation about repairing the golden axe.
8. Once Roland makes his offer to repair the axe, the menu that gives you the option to accept or decline will be forcibly opened, eliminating the need to press F on him.

19-May-23:

9. Bloodshrine, ms_snow, Nashalrath, Phlames, ms_cave and Tundra (I missed a chest last time) can now correctly drop all of their loot for a single player.
10. Undercliffs had a few chances of giving you no special reward item, even if you rolled a successful reward item roll. That was a bit rude, so I removed those chances.
11. Catacombs used a really weird drop distribution system that I haven't seen on any other maps. I've drastically simplified it. All rewards should be droppable for a solo player now.
12. Adjusted Lodagond-4's final chest to have a minimum drop chance of 20% for each item. Previously it was as low as 5% for certain items.

Upcoming intended changes:
  • Overhaul of Unholy Blade distribution method to make it more accessible for solo players


The latest version of my changes can be found attached to this post. Earlier versions can be found in posts throughout this topic.
 

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Jonzay

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Version: 14-May-23

1. Overhauled the first part of the Edana mayor conversation. You can't speak to him through walls anymore, he doesn't somehow know your true name, and he now correctly handles the conversation if you start it with the word you are meant to provide during the quest.
2. Fixed the frost bow "resistance doesn't work first time you pull it out in a map" bug.
3. Tundra can now provide its unique reward, even if there is only 1 player (previously required a minimum of 2).
4. Adjusted the chance of the Summon Bear scroll to appear in the final chests of its map to be roughly 20% per chest.
5. You can now run lodagond-4 repeatedly and still fight the boss. Previously, defeating the boss would require you to start from lodagond-1 again if you wanted them to spawn again. However, if you wish to have the alternate reward, you will still need to talk to the correct individual on the correct map again before fighting the boss.
6. Modified lure based entities. Now, only critical NPC lures (such as the crystal and old_helena NPCs) should be invulnerable. This should fix maps such as phlames being impossible to complete.
 

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Jonzay

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Version: 16-May-23

This version includes a change made as a result of the conversation found here: https://www.msremake.com/threads/qu...-party-mod-for-ms-c-nov2015a.7280/post-123738

7. Roland, the Gatecity blacksmith, will now respond to "ore" in localchat (if you have the ore and the broken axe) to start the conversation about repairing the golden axe.
8. Once Roland makes his offer to repair the axe, the menu that gives you the option to accept or decline will be forcibly opened, eliminating the need to press F on him.
 

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AJD09

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its good to see that someone else has taken the step to continue mr. spark's work although too bad that there are no public servers to be opened for this version
 

Jonzay

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Version: 19-May-23

I was sent a DM asking me to review the ability for several maps to drop their best loot for servers containing a single player. From that, I identified several instances where it was not possible, either due to a hard playercount requirement, or a HP requirement that could not be met by a single player (or sometimes two or even three).

I have made the following adjustments:

9. Bloodshrine, ms_snow, Nashalrath, Phlames, ms_cave and Tundra (I missed a chest last time) can now correctly drop all of their loot for a single player.
10. Undercliffs had a few chances of giving you no special reward item, even if you rolled a successful reward item roll. That was a bit rude, so I removed those chances.
11. Catacombs used a really weird drop distribution system that I haven't seen on any other maps. I've drastically simplified it. All rewards should be droppable for a solo player now.
12. Adjusted Lodagond-4's final chest to have a minimum drop chance of 20% for each item. Previously it was as low as 5% for certain items.

I have not reviewed other maps at this time, as the code is extremely inconsistent from level to level and even from chest to chest. If you feel that a particular map is refusing to drop its unique items, reach out and I'll review them.
 

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Himself

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Version: 19-May-23

I was sent a DM asking me to review the ability for several maps to drop their best loot for servers containing a single player. From that, I identified several instances where it was not possible, either due to a hard playercount requirement, or a HP requirement that could not be met by a single player (or sometimes two or even three).

I have made the following adjustments:

9. Bloodshrine, ms_snow, Nashalrath, Phlames, ms_cave and Tundra (I missed a chest last time) can now correctly drop all of their loot for a single player.
10. Undercliffs had a few chances of giving you no special reward item, even if you rolled a successful reward item roll. That was a bit rude, so I removed those chances.
11. Catacombs used a really weird drop distribution system that I haven't seen on any other maps. I've drastically simplified it. All rewards should be droppable for a solo player now.
12. Adjusted Lodagond-4's final chest to have a minimum drop chance of 20% for each item. Previously it was as low as 5% for certain items.

I have not reviewed other maps at this time, as the code is extremely inconsistent from level to level and even from chest to chest. If you feel that a particular map is refusing to drop its unique items, reach out and I'll review them.
Many thanks for going through and fixing things up. And wow, a chance of just not giving you anything at all? That is rude.

its good to see that someone else has taken the step to continue mr. spark's work although too bad that there are no public servers to be opened for this version
Agreed. There were some other non-passworded Quornhole(or at least in reference to?) servers up at one point, I could connect and they even had my FN character, was impressed. They don't seem to be constantly up though, not sure what the exact situation with that is.
 

Age

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Hey, those are my servers and I'm happy to host them if there's a demand, I happen to have an old FN archive that I was able to drop into them as their local character vault. However most of the community is focused on the Rebirth project and I'm already hosting a bulk of servers for that, so between that and the fact that hosting servers for base MS:C is generally painful, I tend to kill my MS:C servers whenever I notice a lull. I expect anybody with interest would pop up in the MS:C discord and I usually gauge interest by that.

That said, many of the players that were playing Quirky MS recently had transitioned to MS:Rebirth as access keys were opened again recently, it was around that time I chose to pull my Quirky servers back down. It only takes a few clicks, so just let me know.
 

Himself

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Hey, those are my servers and I'm happy to host them if there's a demand, I happen to have an old FN archive that I was able to drop into them as their local character vault. However most of the community is focused on the Rebirth project and I'm already hosting a bulk of servers for that, so between that and the fact that hosting servers for base MS:C is generally painful, I tend to kill my MS:C servers whenever I notice a lull. I expect anybody with interest would pop up in the MS:C discord and I usually gauge interest by that.

That said, many of the players that were playing Quirky MS recently had transitioned to MS:Rebirth as access keys were opened again recently, it was around that time I chose to pull my Quirky servers back down. It only takes a few clicks, so just let me know.
Ohh, gotcha! I was quite surprised when I joined them and saw the FN characters, and I really appreciate that they were/are/can be there at all. And yeah, can understand dropping them if it seems like nobody is really using them. I didn't know MS:C even had a discord. Access keys, eh? I'm guessing this was something in the Discord also. I'll see if I can find a link.. And thank you for popping in to drop some info.
 

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Heyhey, glad to see this is still going. Any chance there's a way to increase the max skill levels? Feel like it'd make things a bit more long-term for playing, and give solo players a way to advance through the maps that're just real dead-set on making the enemies too crazy for 1 player to handle
 

Jonzay

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Hey Grid, I'd have to have a deeper dive. I recall spark mentioning that he couldn't find a way to do it, but I'll have to double check in the code.

I haven't abandoned further changes, I've just been busy with life. In my latest internal build I have a functional method to swap between a single felewyn shard and the unholy blade (adjusting the current forge method to only require a single shard of your choice, and using an existing NPC to convert the unholy blade back to a shard), but it lacks polish and shouldn't be released in the state it's in.

When I get back to this, my tasks are to polish the swap method, enable the April fools mode for all servers (not just specific FN servers which are no longer accessible), fix tundra ice staff STILL not being accessible (I'll lower the required amount of completed chests for it to have a chance to spawn since one of the required chests is behind a minimum total player HP requirement), and I'll look at raising the cap.
 
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PyroManiac

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Hello there, good job that you keep the custom project alive. Personally I don't feel exactly like to download custom versions, since a lot of balance altering was done to it and a lot of content was removed from MSC which I hate, such as plenty of removal of good features like blunt stuns, axe AoE attack and my favorite quick dash (which could of been disabled client side via console anyway). Not to mention some enemies lost their niche.
If anything, the dash needs not only returned, but allow you to activate all 3 side dash (left flank, right flank and backward) in order to activate hyper jump that you could do prior the FEB2015 update - one of the most fun and very useful mobility tool of the game that was unfairly removed.

Can I ask you, is it possible you make a light version of your mod? Something very simple just to make the mod functional for private games such as bug fixes and ability to obtain all of the items that only spawn with +4 players on server, including the rare custom (and now practically useless) crests and fun developer's joke features such as Trollcano spell.
One feature I really want to have is to ability to permanently vote for exp amplifier and you could define whatever amplifier you want as you see fit since it's a private game anyway and. So it could wary from +200% exp buff to +20000% exp buff, since once you reach 40+ level the game just becomes impossible annoyingly grindy and at this point many people just leave. The exp buff will stick to the server and anyone can always vote to 0% amplifier any time they want.

As for the bug fixes, there are some of the game breaking bugs I'm talking about:
1) The raw mouse or m_mouseraw 1 doesn't allow my mouse to look around, it's only limited for like 50 degree view, which is unfortunate as I always used to play with raw mouse input on.
2) When clicking to talk to NPC or click chest, then click cancel, the dialogue window never shut down.
3) can't collect gold from dead NPC enemies that supposed to have one, even though I tried +use and +getuse and none give results.
4) the +shift_slots12 and +shift_slots24 doesn't work, I tried everything and none give the desired result of having extra quickbind slots.
5) the +shift that suppose to make me run and dodge depending direction I'm clicking also doesn't work. Tried it for several times and no results.
6) Bloom after steam pipe update is just outright broken, activating it turns your whole screen in to a permanent flashbang eyesore.
7) Something to be done so you could plan on LAN game without the need to create separated dedicated server. As of for now, playing LAN is close to impossible, about 50% of all maps don't work and changing map will result in to crash so you'd have to restart game all over again if you want to change maps to the ones that actually work.



If I dared to suggest some balance changes, then the most obvious would be - the Magic buff. It sucks so bad in current form and shape. Like, REALLY sucks damn a lot and hardly mechanically function even in most extremely situational unnecessary support that nobody ever uses. Not only the damage is extremely weak even for """end game""" spells, but they are poorly functional. The volcano, for example - something that used to be the game's best spell, is almost impossible to hit a thing with it due to amount of projectiles it emits been reduced like 5 times in 2010 update or so, and even if it hit something, it does some pathetic damage and as result nobody uses spells anymore even as tiny support feature. Majority of spells don't even do direct hit damage and instead set enemies to have affliction stick to them that do Damage-Over-Time (DOT). Spells like dragon's axe breath shoot pretty beautiful flamethrower, but only serves to push enemies around (that aren't immune to it) and do insignifican't DOT damage instead of direct hit. Same thing about Lightning Strom\Blizzard - it summons AoE box that whoever gets inside it just once set to have DOT, which makes it obsolete to keep Lightning Storms and Blizzard around. And to give severe insult to the injury, like 90% of all enemies in the game at late levels are IMMUNE to elemental attacks even if they provide explosion to the face like fireball, which makes no sense at all.
So here we have it, what kind of buffs we need is:
1) make old existing spells at least have function properly mechanically with reliable big hitboxes. Stuff like fire wall are impossible to hit anything with, volcano is already mentioned about why it sucks, ice wall is a joke of a spell - should have health and forcibly cause any foe stuck in to ice - forcing the said foe attack the ice wall if it wants to get out.
2) all of the existing spells should cause direct hit damage, that includes the flamethrower, lightning storm and, yes, even Freeze Sphere that is obviously entirely useless of a spell despite how rare it once was. Any spell that previously only set people to have affliction status (i.e. DOT) now should as well cause them to feel direct hit damage, all for the sake of common sense, immerse, balance and fun. After all we want to feel like we are capable to shoot deadly elemental attacks, not just dropping colorful curses toward enemies, right?
3) Damage buff. Stuff like volcano should get like 5 times the damage buff (along to make it spam as much projectiles like it did prior 2010 update) so players will actually consider using it. Lightning Storm should have bigger AoE and any foe that enters it's hit gets continuously damage every 0.5 second of it's current DOT damage, and still apply DOT affliction on top of that. Same thing applies to Poison Cloud, Firewall, Chain Lightning, Lightning Rod's full (green) charge attack, numerous weapon's wave attacks that only at best push enemies around and many others.
4) Completely remove immunity to elemental damage from all of the enemies, being forced to NOT play magic is simply not fun and discriminating. At very worst just keep 50% resistance, and only to enemies that would make sense to have such as elemental incarnations foes. Maybe this time in million years the old spells such as Freezing Sphere finally get some usage after all these years.
5) Direct damage spells like Chain Lightning, Flamethrower and such should be more deadly for 1vs1 high dps outcome.
6) Have an ACTUAL end game spells. Something that create HUGE ground AoE attacks that cause continuous high DPS to all foes within the range of AoE attack like a true Wizard from a proper RPG game would do, something that we can see in this video basically -
Obviously without the need to use bottles or potions since that's just stupid, afterall true Wizard is independent of material handouts and entirely relies on the Spiritual power from within.
7) Then, the whole scale of Magic tree needs a rework. You only have 5 spells yet to gain a Spellcasting level up you need to level up 8 times of either elemental school. Doesn't make sense, and result you can't have same levels of spellcasting like you can have with any other weapon school in game.

This way the magic users can truly be independent and last more than mere ara walkthrough.

Thanks you for your time to read my feedback.
 

fancyghost

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Hey, this is fantastic. Out of curiosity, would you ever consider porting these changes to the MS: Rebirth branch? I'm not remotely capable of tinkering like you or Spark, and I think there's enough interest in MS:R that its vanilla state is still great for multiplayer, but I've always preferred to solo and Quornhole is a MASSIVE breath of fresh air. With these changes AND the MS:R updates and additions, it feels like a truly complete game.
 

Jonzay

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Hey, this is fantastic. Out of curiosity, would you ever consider porting these changes to the MS: Rebirth branch? I'm not remotely capable of tinkering like you or Spark, and I think there's enough interest in MS:R that its vanilla state is still great for multiplayer, but I've always preferred to solo and Quornhole is a MASSIVE breath of fresh air. With these changes AND the MS:R updates and additions, it feels like a truly complete game.
I'm glad that spark and I could help :)
I'd have to check the code to see if there are fundamental differences that would make it difficult, and have a chat with the devs to see if it would be a great aggrievance to them.
 

fancyghost

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I'm glad you're at least open to the idea! Before MS:R, I'd never even played Isle - I think even as far back as 2011 it just wouldn't work in singleplayer. MS:R is much more accessible, polished and stable, and I'd love to see the two of them merged.

Speaking of, I'm not sure if it's just me, but I'm suddenly having difficulty loading Orc_For and the only difference I can think of is updating Quornhole's sc.dll :confused: Might be worth investigating!
 

Jonzay

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I'm glad you're at least open to the idea! Before MS:R, I'd never even played Isle - I think even as far back as 2011 it just wouldn't work in singleplayer. MS:R is much more accessible, polished and stable, and I'd love to see the two of them merged.

Speaking of, I'm not sure if it's just me, but I'm suddenly having difficulty loading Orc_For and the only difference I can think of is updating Quornhole's sc.dll :confused: Might be worth investigating!
What error are you getting? Are you using a dedicated server or trying to run it purely within the client aka "true singleplayer"? You mentioned the isle issue, so it sounds like you might be using true singleplayer.
 
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