Age of Wonders - Shadow Magic

Started by solops, July 08, 2017, 10:50:43 AM

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Greybriar

From a post in a previous thread:

Quote from: ghostryder on July 05, 2017, 07:27:19 AM
AOW3 felt like an unfinished series. It never approached what AOW2 brought to the table in both scope, races and options. You could say the graphics improved and the battles were more fun to watch but on the other hand you never defended four walls in a castle -- the layout only allowed frontal attacks and walls were merely 1 turn or 2 turn delays---in effect giving the impression they were props rather than castles. In every instance they were indeed props. A fatal flaw that simply made AOW3 nothing like the series originally brought to the mix- which in short was an expanded Warlords game.

They also dragged their feet big time in modding tools and the game never saw the wealth of mods AOW2 enjoyed. By the time the tools were available everybody had moved on to better and more complete games. It is the mods that keep AOW2 alive-and to this day there is no better LOTR mod even close to what Lord of the Rings in the Third Age - War of the Ring v1.3 bring to the table. par that with a downloaded soundtrack and you have the best LOTR game going- and one tough sucker to win. I sank over 300 hours into beating that mod--it was the most fun I'd had in ages.

If you own age of magic I highly recommend you give it a go. Read the readme for install instructions

http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=386

This mod doesn't work for me. :(
Regardless of how good a PC game may be it will always have its detractors and no matter how bad a PC game may be it will always have its fans.

ghostryder

#16
You must be doing something wrong during install. Make sure you run AOWsetup in compatability mode--like win98/ME---in there select custom resources and pick the LordoftheRings resource. Also set your resolution (windowed) and language to English. If you copied and renamed files correctly you should be good to go. As per readme--assuming the default installation path

Portraits go in
C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Images\Portraits


In the Dict folder C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Dict ----- find and rename ResStr.MLD to ResStrOLD.MLD (you rename it back when you go back to normal games.) and then copy over the supplied ResStr.MLD  -- this is for all the reworked spells and text and such--and is critical and the one step most people screw up on.

The lord of the Rings resources folder goes in C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\User\Resources --- Note the 'resources' fold may not exit and your need to create it (right-click in location)


And the map goes into C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Scenario\Custom

Custom units go in C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Images\Units

in my winzip program I had to extract each folder seperately after unzipping the downloaded mod zip ---- 

solops

I am having fun playing the un-modded game with the 1.4 and 1.5 patches installed. I set all exe files to run as Administrator in Win98 compatibility mode. I am playing in 1980x1024 res with no problems and the zoom works fine as well. I am somewhat concerned for the future, though. I tried twice to run the game with the 1.4 dataset activated in the alternate rule box of the AOWsetup. When I do so, the game crashes before the loading screen appears. This bodes ill for mod playability. I had to reinstall the games from scratch to get it to run again. No combination of set-ups or patch de-installation would allow the game to run.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin

ghostryder

I never patched my game-whatever the GOG version is...I think 1.3. Mods work fine. the unofficial patches don't add much unless you play a mod aimed at using the new tile sets and such--and things are finicky enough with the game in Windows 10.


JasonPratt

If I recall correctly, the 1.3 version should still be archived by the patching process as a "mod" which can be activated. But I don't think mods can be combined? -- if not, then it's better to have a clean install, with all official patches, before modding to LotR or whatever.
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solops

Quote from: ghostryder on July 12, 2017, 04:19:23 AM
I never patched my game-whatever the GOG version is...I think 1.3. Mods work fine. the unofficial patches don't add much unless you play a mod aimed at using the new tile sets and such--and things are finicky enough with the game in Windows 10.

So, if I have problems with the Rings mod (in my v1.5 setup), then the best solution is to reinstall the game sans unofficial updates. The installation version from GOG is 1.3. Might try some other setup permutations first.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin

Greybriar

#21
Quote from: ghostryder on July 11, 2017, 08:11:42 PM
You must be doing something wrong during install. Make sure you run AOWsetup in compatability mode--like win98/ME---in there select custom resources and pick the LordoftheRings resource. Also set your resolution (windowed) and language to English. If you copied and renamed files correctly you should be good to go. As per readme--assuming the default installation path

Portraits go in
C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Images\Portraits


In the Dict folder C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Dict ----- find and rename ResStr.MLD to ResStrOLD.MLD (you rename it back when you go back to normal games.) and then copy over the supplied ResStr.MLD  -- this is for all the reworked spells and text and such--and is critical and the one step most people screw up on.

The lord of the Rings resources folder goes in C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\User\Resources --- Note the 'resources' fold may not exit and your need to create it (right-click in location)


And the map goes into C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Scenario\Custom

Custom units go in C:\Program Files\Age of Wonders Shadow Magic\Images\Units

in my winzip program I had to extract each folder seperately after unzipping the downloaded mod zip ----

Can you explain to my why the game and its files must be placed on the C:\ drive and in the Program Files directory? I used GOG Galaxy to install the game on my D:\ drive and it works just fine. But when I manually installed the game to a different directory on the D:\ drive and then installed the mod, the mod doesn't work. ???
Regardless of how good a PC game may be it will always have its detractors and no matter how bad a PC game may be it will always have its fans.

ghostryder

#22
It's a permission thing in Windows 10. I usually keep my games on another drive (F:) but when I installed Gog's version on drive F: I had multiple problems. Using the supplied editor when I edited a map and tried to save it Windows wouldn't allow it. But I could go into C: drive and save it. Then manually copy it over to the scenerio folder on F:.

Later i discovered I had wasted half a day's play time when my save file would not load. Those same permission issues corrupted it-although I never got any error messages when I saved the game. 50 turns down the drain. One you play the LOTR mod your undestand how much 50 turns is.  :pullhair:

So i deleted the game and directed the installer to C: and no more problems.

I haven't spent a lot a time investigating but on my now rusty MS experience (I left Microsoft during XP release--hard to believe it's been 15 years) my first guess is it's permissions. When you scroll C: driver -as an example and at the bottom is a folder 'Users' then inside of that your name---that is is short your presensce as far as windows is concerned. Outside of that User folder remains other public accounts--and so forth...and in short if your on drive D: or F: or whatnot you've just left your user account back on drive c: and all it's permissions as the admin.

Somehow the GoG installer is borked and is failing to carry over to any other location those permissions. In fact after installing the game on drive C: and I use file explore the game is completely invisible on the drive and if i need to run the setup file or copy a mod to the folder I locate the folder by the properties inside the destop shortcut (Right click...go to properties and then choose 'go to file location' because the location does not show at all in explorer.

my guess this stuff also effects those patches and mods. The game must be within your 'User' domain...or in short...On Drive c:

I suspect the installer because anytime you install a program windows registers those files inside SFC. Since those files are basically invisible to explorer as far as windows is concerned it doesn't exit. Therefore it's not going to allow a file to update a file windows conciders not there. Nor will it allow DirectX hooks in D3D for something it conciders not there-and is why the game runs better in software mod. Only a borked installer can prevent windows from registering files. Something in it is screwed up. Short of going to every file in the game and going into properties and adjusting permissions installing it under the umbrella of your 'User' account grants those permissions.





Greybriar

I really am sick and tired of jumping through hoops for Windows. :(
Regardless of how good a PC game may be it will always have its detractors and no matter how bad a PC game may be it will always have its fans.

solops

My installation is on Drive G. If I run into a wall, I know what to try.
I hate Windows.
I miss DOS. I liked writing batch files.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. - Winston Churchill
Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. - Benjamin Franklin

ghostryder

...and boot disks and messing around with IRQ interrupts for soundblaster cards..... :crazy2:

Frankly it's the game industry at fault. you can spot the bad ones easy enough. Their the ones on the forums explaining away their bug ridden game with the long time excuse "well....there's so many different hardware configurations...." . Perhaps the average joe believes it but I for one absolutely know they in no way are directly writing to any hardware on a system level in any way. Windows handles that. And that is what they are writing to. if any of them ever bothered reading the SDK they'd even know the correct way to do it.

That's why MS pushed the soundcard out of the system. the clowns wrote such horrid drivers that kept engineers at MS busy costing millions. By the time win2000 came around we finally solved the problem of everyone replacing system .dlls breaking 20 other programs dependant on that .dll. And at the head of the list of the worse violators were game devs. Now if a game tries to replace a system .dll Windows puts it back. Now the game won't run but then again now it doesn't break 10 other programs.

in other words Windows always had to go in the direction of strong arming devs to do things right because they refused to do it on their own.

On the plus side...this is exactly why those yearly Fdisk and windows reinstalls are no longer necessary...and likely also why that old win98/95 game won't run. because it's trying to replace some system /dll and winXP onward will nuke the bad .dll and put the correct one in. 

It's the only way to have a stable OS. No one ever replaced DOS files--so I never understood the logic of them doing that in windows. But that's is exactly what has led to this kind of thing.