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[Eric Blank]

Would it be possible to strip this mod down to a more basic state, like with just a few basic schools of magic (want to make battlemages who would cast buffs on my soldiers and throw debuffs at my enemies.) I just don't want the extra creatures and civs. (not that i dont like them, they just dont really fit with the DF I've custom built) Would removing certain components break the mod, or can I make it so only the magician's study and a handful of spells are available and nothing else?

A lot of it is pretty intertwined between reacrions, interactions, inorganics and creatures/items, so youd have to cherry pick what to remove and be sure to remove references to it, but its easy to break things. You can go into the reactions files and remove the spells youre not interested in from their reactions, i try to make the IDs for everything intuitive. The entity file can be deleted without issue certainly, as can their language files.

If you delete the secret interaction files, everything they call on would be defunct as almost none of it is used elsewhere. You can do the same for the werebeast, wizard and vampire interactions; but weresalamanders would still show up in the caverns. You can delete their creature definition from the werebeasts creature file though. Most of the bogeymen can be deleted without issue as they dont show up anywhere else... i think the witchlight does, though.

Maybe i can release a more modular version or something so folks can decide which facets they like or dont without having to go through this. It wont be coming out with the next version though thats for sure

[squamous]

What exactly is the best way to ensure worldgen-created wizards without minions don't get run out of towns? This is something that happens a lot with my own mods. Is there some series of tags you need to look into or am I just unlucky?

[Eric Blank]

Honestly I dont know, I think its just random or something whether the town population decides they're weird for not aging and kicks them out/lynches them.

I'm currently delaying the release because I'm trying to track down a nasty, but inconsistent crash during creature raw files being loaded. It doesnt seem to corrupt worlds as you can literally try to load the file again and it can work just fine, but something like 25% of the time the game crashes. Has anyone else had this problem recently?

[bloop_bleep]

I'm currently delaying the release because I'm trying to track down a nasty, but inconsistent crash during creature raw files being loaded. It doesnt seem to corrupt worlds as you can literally try to load the file again and it can work just fine, but something like 25% of the time the game crashes. Has anyone else had this problem recently?

The programmer part of my mind cringes at the thought of this.

Since it's not something wrong with the world (since you said it can be loaded just fine afterwards), it must be something that changes during the world loading process that is causing the crash. Perhaps try to recreate the exact same conditions between loads (that is, same apps open, same DFHack startup commands, etc.) to see if the world still crashes inconsistently then. Open Task Manager (or your equivalent preferred performance monitor) and check for differences in memory/CPU/disk usage between loads. Maybe download a fresh DF install without DFHack or any other third party add-ons and try the save there, since it might be those utilities that are causing the crash when loading.

Making the crash consistent is the first and often most important step in debugging it.

[hertggf]

Has anyone else had this problem recently?

No, but I have noticed that when a spellcraft game finishes loading there's a line "undefined local creature material set to default: GILA_MONSTER CHEESE" in errorlog.txt under raw/objects/creature_spellcrafts_wizard.txt
I never posted about it because I couldn't track it down but considering that file has nothing to do with gila monster cheese it sounded like some memory corruption was going on.

[Eric Blank]

I'm currently...

The programmer part of my mind cringes at the thought of this.

Since it's not something wrong with the world ...
Making the crash consistent is the first and often most important step in debugging it.

Unforunately its just happening at random as far as i can tell. I dont have dfhack on the setup i use to test, and i can find no correlation between programs being open or anything.

Has anyone else had this problem recently?

No, but I have noticed that when a spellcraft game finishes loading there's a line "undefined local creature material set to default: GILA_MONSTER CHEESE" in errorlog.txt under raw/objects/creature_spellcrafts_wizard.txt
I never posted about it because I couldn't track it down but considering that file has nothing to do with gila monster cheese it sounded like some memory corruption was going on.

I have had this exact problem too, and i never found a good solution for it. I dont even know what causes it. I was unable to get help regarding that, but for me it revolved around a single file that isnt part of spellcrafts, which was a plant file i was working on. Any addition or removal of new plant definitions to that file would result in a different creature being incorrectly made of cheese, and eventually i copied everything over to a different text file with a different name, deleted the problem file and the issue vanished.

If it is relate to spellcrafts, thats a huge problem im going to have to solve. In the meantime, i guess try cutting out files you may have changed or made recently, when the problem stops you may have found the one its stemming from, and copying that files contents to a differnt file like i did might help...

I can tell fixing this is going to be a nightmare...

[Nahere]

Sounds like this might be useful for tracking down the problem:

This will be a useful tactic for future modders.

DF doesn't tend to shut down when it encounters an error, it simply keeps trying to run until it crashes and burns.  If something throws the parser out of whack, it'll keep going on its merry way, even if that means it'll start sticking materials and creatures where they shouldn't go, leading to the weirdness that happens due to duplicate raws.  I figured whatever the bug was here, it must be related somehow to this phenomenon: something that isn't listed among the illegal operations but throws the parser out of place so you get invincible bandits if you're lucky and crashes if you're not.

So I got a new idea: Instead of playing hit-or-miss and trying to find a pattern for how stable the game was, try to figure out how the game was loading the raws.  How?  Simple: deliberately introduce errors into the files and read the order they show up in the error log.  Turns out the game always loads the raws in the same order: inorganics, plants, tools, creatures, civs, and interactions, and within a type, it loads them in the order the files are arranged (alphabetically).

I couldn't figure out what was making the difference between whether the game loaded or crashed, but I did find that when it crashed, the error logs always stopped at the same creature group, no matter where they were placed.

It's the shellcreeper family sky-blue spinies/paraspinies.  They've been in since the very beginning, not making trouble, but ultimately setting up the stage for an inevitable crash later on.  Rather fitting, no?  Curse you, spiny blue shell!

Remove them and the game is 100% stable.  Problem solved!  (Still haven't figured out what the problem is exactly, but the whole shellcreeper family is kind of knotted together in order to avoid repetition, and it isn't hard to imagine that formerly unknown bugs could come from that kind of data structure.  I'll just give them their own separate section.)

[Eric Blank]

Ill definitely be trying that, thank you.

[edit]
alright, I think I've removed the offending entry causing the crashing (Have to actually figure out what its problem is later, but it isnt important in and of itself) and have finished up most of the changes for the new magic school. I'm going to release an updated version soon, and then continue trying to replicate that cheese bug again, which hasn't been successful thus far.

I am truly sorry that everything is so cheesy.

[Eric Blank]

That update has been uploaded now.

[Abadrausar]

So 7 fearsome dwarves have embarked in a tower with 17 metal summoners 129 ritual corpses and four named corses, then they have proposed an aliance accepted by the metal summoners.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

tweak makeown over each metal summoner

The metal summoners have even become full blown members of the fortrees when their citizenship petitions have been accepted. The 131 metal golems remained neutral, even FPS wise...

The fort is dedied to the study of magic and knowledge.

Years later, an adamantine minecart associated to the trackStop of the main Quantum Stockpile has been animated and possesed by an old evil power before the time.

Until now it has slain 7 legendary champions full clad in decorated masterwork adamantine whose only sin were being in need of something inside the quantum stockpile.

The last champion was gored to death in a 3 pages report where not a single scratch was inflicted to the evil minecar.

The 9 passersby slain children had less luck! They were gored by the invulnerable minecar in less than ten lines of combat report.

As adamantine is impervious to magma they cant  even melt the minecar.

Even if it is encased in obsidian, never his tile could be mined because he would then be liberated from the trackStop to gore every one to the last stand of our civ.

Our Fortress is the last one, beside our King stand only 6 more braves against the oblivion protecting 46 mostly orfaned children and 19 artifacts (11 original books and one tower-slab) that could  preserve the future of the dwarven race.

Now all the wealth of our civ is guarded by something that is even worse than a dragon, you can kill a dragon, but you cant kill the animated adamantine minecart, his corrupted soul...

Now every member of the fort have nightmares where the magic that restrain the Evil minecart to his trackStop weakens and once liberated the Satanic minecart begin the bloody rampage that would crumble the fort to his end.

Desperate dwarves Pray for Divine Help in Holy Altars but their hope is dissipating.

Is this the bloody revenge of Armok for violating his Stockpiling Laws? or a simple challenge to harden his kind, until now no one knows, but everywhere in the fortress resonates the vibration of the hateful minecart fighting his invisible bond with his trackStop, the time of Dwarves is comming to an end, but not before a last brave stand

[Eric Blank]

Did you make an infinite minecart loop or something? You should be more careful, even divine magic isnt as powerful as the laws of dwarven physics.

[Eric Blank]

What features do you guys who've played the mod want to see added or fixed?

[PlumpHelmetMan]

There's a minor bug I've noticed where (at least in legends mode) a slab will read one secret but grant another. Such as, just for an example, a slab that reads "the secrets of summoning fire" saying in the legends that Urist McWizard learned vampire hunter powers from it.

Great mod aside from that, though. Definitely a good enough magic mod to tide me over until the mythgen release.

[Eric Blank]

K, ill double check they have the correct strings for secret slabs, i could have just forgot to change a couple.

[Slozgo Luzma]

Someone asked this question further down on the thread, but I didn't see an answer. Can Vampires/Werebeasts contract the spell-teaching syndromes from the adventure-mode reactions that use slates? My vampire adventurer has imbibed four essences of ice spike without effect (he also learned necromancy earlier).

EDIT: The ability showed up a day later, but another one that I had consumed has not.