PLIGHT - Psyringe's Lush In-Game Help Text
A mod for Master of Magic that expands, corrects, and clarifies the in-game help texts
Current version: v0.7 beta Download Link
Quick'n'dirty instructions:
- Replace the original HELP.LBX file with the one from PLIGHT (make a backup first).
- Check the following link for updated versions, and leave feedback and error reports there:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=391983
(or the thread you're currently rerading.
)
Note: Using the excellent unofficial MoM Patch 1.40 by kyrub is recommended, although PLIGHT will function with official 1.31 as well. Get 1.40n from here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1430...de140n.zip
IMPORTANT: Installing the 1.40 patch after PLIGHT will overwrite PLIGHT, so you'll need to install PLIGHT again.
Content:
1. Master of Magic and its UI
2. PLIGHT's features and goals
3. Problems and Caveats
4. Installation procedure
5. Version history
6. Permissions and the future
7. Feedback, Questions, Contact info
8. Credits and Thank-Yous
9. Disclaimers
Appendix A: Abbreviations used by PLIGHT
Appendix B: Technical Information
1. Master of Magic and its UI
Master of Magic was, and still is, a great game, one of the true classics in its genre. One of its most popular features was the vast amount of content it offered: 214 spells with often unique effects, 84 distinct types of units (not counting the 35 different heroes) using dozens of special abilities, 33 city buildings, and 14 distinct races. However, the huge amount of unique effects and special abilities also necessitated an intricate rules system, especially for combat (but, to a lesser degree, also for city development and spellcasting). While many players report that this complexity contributes to their enjoyment, others may feel a bit overwhelmed, and even competent players rarely know all of the rules and exceptions by heart.
To help players in dealing with that complexity, Simtex had furnished their game with a UI that was, for its time, excellent. Sporting mouse-over information, detailed economy breakdowns, and small usability touches like graphical sliders, it included many features that were quite new for strategy games of that time, and far from being standard. One of the most striking features of this UI is the ease with which the player can access context-based help and further information. Almost everywhere in the game, a right-click displays an information screen or help text for the respective item. The game comes with 807 help texts in total.
However, even with this excellent system, there are flaws. As good as the texts are, a substantial amount of information is described ambiguously, incomplete, or even wrong. PLIGHT tries to expand on Simtex' already excellent work by expanding, correcting, and clarifying the game's many help texts.
2. PLIGHT's features and goals
PLIGHT expands and/or reworks nearly all of the game's 807 help texts with information collected from various sources (see the "Quit To Dos" help text in the main menu for a list). Prominent features include:
- Wherever there is a button labeled "Ok", "Done", "Accept", or "Close", its help text now contains general information on how to use the screen. It also notes how the help texts for this screen have been organized (sometimes you may find information at non-obvious places). A good strategy to get in touch with PLIGHT is to right-click on any such button you see.
- All spells now list their rarity, magic realm, research cost, and state clearly whether they can be cast in combat or overland. "Target" now correctly specifies whether a spell can be cast on friendly or enemy items, normal or fantastic units, etc.. Summoning spells now list the stats and abilities of the creatures they summon. All damage spells now list if and how they can be defended against. Spells which allow the caster to put additional mana into them now list the available mana range. Dozens of spell icons have been added to spells that had none in their spellbook help text, but had an icon for their effect. Where adequate, spell effects are explained in greater detail, potential uses and synergies or counters are mentioned, and some common misunderstandings are hopefully cleared up.
- All buildings in the city scape now list their cost, upkeep, effects, requirements, which units they provide, which other buildings they enable, and which race has access to them.
- A timeline of the combat phases (including specialties like gaze attacks, life stealing, etc.) is available from the combat screen. Also, the meaning and exact effects of the unit stats (swords, bows, crosses etc.) in combat is explained in much more detail.
- The help texts for the different races now list all their advantages and disadvantages, their growth rates (for cities and outposts) and the general inter-rachial tension they cause, the units they can build (including their race-specific units along with their stats and abilities), and the buildings that are inaccessible for them.
- The help texts on the 'Wizard info' screen (when you right-click on a wizard's face) explain diplomatic relations and what affects them. The help text for treaties (right-click on the icons to the right of a wizard's gem) now list explicitly what's expected from wizards who have pacts or alliances.
- Many formulas have been worked into the help texts. For example, right-clicking on the "Buy" button in the city screen now explains how the buying price is calculated. Right-clicking on "Population" explains how a city's growth is determined, the same goes for clicking on the "houses" display of an outpost. The help for the astrologer and historian graphs explain how the depicted values are calculated, the help text for the "skill staff" in the Magic screen explains how much mana needs to be invested to gain a skill increase, etc.
- Many tables have been worked into the help texts as well: Hero classes and their skills and stats, buildings and their costs and effects, standard units and their stats, inter-racial unrest levels, spell availability depending on spellbooks picked, exact AI bonuses per difficulty level, diplomacy penalty for having too many cities depending on land size and difficulty, etc.
- Special care has been taken to address common misunderstandings or false assumptions in the help texts. For example, the help for the "Change Production" button now explicitly states that changing the build orders will completely transfer the already invested production points to the new project (instead of wasting some of them during the transition), and it also mentions that any overspilling production is simply lost (i.e., not transferred to the next project or converted into gold). Both mechanics work differently in many other strategy games, so players may have false assumptions about how they work in MoM, hence the help text makes an effort to clarify that. Or, the original help text for the spell "Flying Fortress" was somewhat misleading, making players think that it could only be cast on a wizard's enchanted fortress, so the spell's help text now makes a special effort to explain that this is not the case.
- New players should now find much more information on how to use the game's interface (some interface elements are probably a bit counter-intuitive for players who are used to modern games).
- The HELP.LBX file has been cleaned of nearly one Megabyte of unused junk data. Additionally, more than 100Kb of unused duplicated text remnants, which existed in each of the file's 807 text blocks behind the actual texts, were cleaned to ease the handling of the file for anyone who wants to build upon PLIGHT.
- And some more things that I forgot to mention.
- Also, as a special service, I switched the original labels for Tauron ("demonic force") and Rjak ("warlock") around. There's no reason for the master of chaos to be a demonic force (when demons belong to the domain of death), and little reason for the master of death to be a warlock (when warlocks cast Doom Bolt, a chaos spell). Also, just show anyone the two pictures and ask them "Which of these is the demonic forece?". This has irked me since 1994. Really.
3. Problems and Caveats:
I passionately hate it when people only inform about the advantages of their products while concealing the disadvantages and leaving those for the users to find out (probably one of the reasons why I don't get along too well with marketing people). Here are the things that didn't quite work out for PLIGHT. If you can offer a solution for one of the problems, please contact me.
- Columns in tables often aren't aligned properly. The reason for this is the proportional font used by the game. As soon as a row contains a character with a non-standard width (like i, l, m, w, or eben the number 1), it's difficult to get the following text in this line properly aligned. I mixed spaces (full width) and dots (half width) to alleviate this problem somewhat, but it still looks weird in many places. The only real fix I can think of is to add several "space" characters with different widths to the help font, this way any usage of smaller or larger characters could be compensated for. (Working on the font might be a good idea anyhow since some of the characters look awfully similar, especally when using post-processing algorithms to smooth the pixelation. The width of the existing characters should remain unchanged though because hundreds of lines of text have been tweaked to work with those.) If you know how to do this, please contact me. Until then, the best I could do was to put alternative highlights on the columns in the tables, this should make it harder to confuse them.
- Speaking of highlights: This is an experimental feature that the original game never used. The display doesn't work perfectly, sometimes black pixels appear around the white highlighted text, which may look irritating especially on LCD monitors. This can only be fixed by reverse-engineering and hex-patching the engine. I think that the usefulness of the highlights outweighs this problem though, so I used them nevertheless. A solution to this would be greatly appreciated, but definitely requires a reverse-engineering of the display code.
- Due to the limited amount of space PLIGHT has to work with, some information is tucked away at non-obvious places, or had to be split across several pages. I tried to refer to the non-obvious places from the obvious ones, and split pages usually mention where you can find the other parts. Also, non-obvious help texts are usually mentioned on the "Ok" / "Done" / "Close" help text of the respective screen.
- Some pages (tables especially) had to make use of abbreviations. I hope they are intuitive enough to be immediately recognizable by someone who has already played the game, but in any case, I'm adding an appendix below which lists the common ones. When possible, I also added pages which explained the abbreviations next to the pages that use them.
- In some cases I had to remove or shorten information that would have been helpful for new players. For example, the original help texts displayed the graphics for the farmers, workers, and rebels of a race in that race's help text. This was useful to recognize them, but left too little room to give a complete complete list of the race's modifiers, units, limitations et. Hence i removed them (but added an explanation elsewhere how farmers, workers, and rebels can be distinguished by the direction in which they look and whether their arms are raised). I believe this to be the best solution since a player, after he learned the game, will be more interested in complete information than in an explanation of graphics he already knows. But it might be a bit more inconvenient for players who don't already know the graphics.
- In a few cases I replaced atmospheric original descriptions with dry factual information. I tried to prevent that as much as possible, and actually even added some new flavor texts here and there, but sometimes there just wasn't enough space for all the information and the flavor text.
- Some information contained in PLIGHT may be wrong. Master of Magic is a very complex game that was patched several times. The manuals, the official strategy guide, the user-created FAQs, and the original help texts all have outdated information (next to the still current and very useful parts) in one part or another, and although I usually performed my own tests whenever they contradicted each other, it's impossible for a single person to check every bit of information in a reasonable timeframe.
So, be all means, be skeptical! If something is described differently than you remember it from your games, test it. If you spot incorrect, incomplete, misleading, or otherwise problematic information, even typos or layout problems, please contact me by the means given in section (7).
The one thing I ask for is that you don't just write things like "The help text for X must be wrong because the manual says something different" - because as said above, none of the external sources are 100% reliable. Please test the situation in-game. Note that you can also upload zipped savegames to make it easier for me to reproduce your findings (but if you can't or don't want to, don't let that stop you from reporting errors).
- Finally, one general caveat: PLIGHT does some things that the original help texts never did - offset paragraphs, highlights, longer texts in general. The HELP.LBX file reserves 1000 bytes for each help text, of which the original game uses 602 at most. PLIGHT has several entries which use more than 990 bytes. It's theoretically possible that some part of the game's code assumes that no help text will be larger than 602 bytes, and corrupts data when longer texts are encountered. I think that this is very unlikely (it wouldn't be very smart to code the engine in a way that it couldn't cope with the whole data strucure, and I never encountered any corruption problems in my tests), but you never know. Likewise, the whole highlight feature was completely unused by the original game and might have some hidden problems. That said, changing text entries is one of the least intrusive things one can do with a mod, and I really don't expect any problems in that regard - I just can't guarantee it.
4. Installation procedure
Go to your Master of Magic folder. Backup your old HELP.LBX file by renaming it to something different, then copy PLIGHT's new HELP.LBX file into the folder.
In tests, Master of Magic and PLIGHT proved to be quite robust. Even overwriting the original HELP.LBX file while a Master of Magic game was running in the background caused no problems, the engine seems to reopen and reread the file anytime it needs it. (Actually, 95% of PLIGHT was developed by changing data while the game was running.) It's still recommended to close Master of Magic (and Dosbox, if you're using it) before installation though, better be safe than sorry.
PLIGHT was written for Master of Magic 1.40h and later, but functions with v1.31 as well. If used with v1.31, three help texts on the Settings screen will not match, and in some cases the game might work differently than described, but 99% of the information should apply identically to both versions.
Note that PLIGHT's file is much smaller than the original one. This is not a bug, you're not missing anything. Actually it's a fix. The original v1.31 HELP.LBX file consisted of nearly a megabyte of junk data, the same 8,192 Bytes were repeated 103 times without ever being accessed by the game. I suspect that at some point during development, Simtex' internal tool(s) for creating this file malfunctioned, and this was apparently never noticed nor fixed. (I vaguely recall that the help file in the original, unpatched game was indeed smaller, and then suddenly got larger with one of the patches.)
5. Version history
v0.1 - sometime in the second half of the 90s
Just fooling around with a hex editor, checking the file format of the HELP.LBX file to see whether I could correct some mistakes I noticed (and that I kept forgetting about when picking the game up again after a break). Online communities were in their infancy back then and so I never got into contact with other MoM players, the thought of releasing an updated help file never occurred to me at that time.
v0.2 - sometime between 2000 and 2005
Adding some more stuff here and there.
v0.3 - 2006
Systematically adding race and spell pick info to the game's setup screens. Starting to think about adding some more texts and releasing the thing as a mod, but losing steam when getting the impression that MoM was mostly forgotten anyway (I couldn't find any online community to speak of).
v0.4 - early September 2010
Picked up MoM again after being disappointed by a newer game, and found out that someone had created an unofficial patch for MoM in the meantime. So there WAS still an interest in the game. Picked up PLIGHT again, planning to add some more information, polish it a bit, and release it as a mod. Completed help texts for the game's UI. Updated some help texts to make the information match with patch 1.40f.
v0.5 - late September 2010
As usual, project totally got out of hand. Complete and systematic overhaul of the 214 spell help texts. Systematically experimenting with the engine and finding a way to highlight texts, then overhauling all 214 spells again to make use of this feature. Mild signs of sleep deprivation and malnutrition. Ignored.
v0.6 - 2nd Oct. 2010
Completed hero tables.
v0.61 - 4th Oct. 2010
Completed buildings and city screen.
v0.62 - 6th Oct. 2010
Completed normal units and "choose build project" screen. Signs of sleep deprivation worsening. Had to go shopping due to severe depletion of food resources. Hopefully bought enough to finish the project without further distractions.
v0.63 - 9th Oct. 2010
Completed combat stats and unit info screen, redid combat UI help.
v0.64 - 12th Oct. 2010
Completed skills/abilities and effects.
v0.65 - 15th Oct. 2010
Completed artifact info. Systematically went through the file from beginning to end for polishing and checkup.
v0.7 - 16th Oct. 2010
Some general polishing. Added changes from changelog of unofficial patch 1.40h. First public beta release of PLIGHT. Hallucinating response posts due to continually rising level of sleep deprivation (response posts would be nice, but will people really be interested in a mod to a 15 year old game?). Decided to sleep.
6. Permissions and the future
You may redistribute these files, expand them, change them, and use them for your own work, as long as the endeavour remains free and non-commercial. Informing and/or crediting me is not required, but definitely appreciated.
I don't have a fixed email address associated with this project, but I'm trying to give it an official home - see section (7) for contact information.
If you asked me a question and I didn't answer for a week, assume that my answer is in your favor. The only exception for this is the question "Can I use your work for a commercial project?" (and all ways to paraphrase that), in which case my written permission is explicitly required.
Please note: While I like to think that I do reasonably well in creating stuff, I'm absolutely horrible in maintaining it, and often stop to support my work completely after a while - usually because I'm off creating something else which captures my full attention. Therefore, if you note bugs or have an idea, please mention it now, while THIS project still has my full attention.
The future planned for PLIGHT is to have a public beta now, collect feedback, ideas, and corrections (given the sheer amount of information, there must be a lot to correct), and successively work them into the project until a version 1.0 can be released. Afterwards I'll probably consider it finished and will perhaps actually try to play a game of MoM again.
7. Feedback, Questions, Contact info
The current official home for PLIGHT is the CivFanatics forum, specifically this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=391983
New versions will be posted there, and as long as I'm supporting the project, I'll be present there, collecting feedback and answering questions.
8. Credits and Thank-Yous:
- Steve Barcia and the whole Simtex team for giving us a gem of a strategy game
- Alan Emrich, Petra Schlunk, and Tom Hughes for the excellent Prima Strategy Guide, highly recommended - 462 pages of detailed info, get it if you like Plight!
- Bryan Jacobson, Dan Simpson, and the many contributors, for the MoM user FAQ
- kyrub for the unofficial MoM 1.40 patch, and a lot of help in determining values hidden in the game's files (and correcting me if mine were different)
- The Woman Of My Dreams ™ for putting up with me being obsessed with my MoM, and spotting mistakes in my Plight
- everyone else who helped
9. Disclaimers
Master of Magic was developed by Simtex, and published in 1994 by Microprose Systems. Simtex closed operations in 1997. Microprose changed hands several times and ceased to exist in 2001. At the time of this writing, I was unable to reliably determine its current owner due to contradicting claims on various websites. The rights to Master of Magic are currently owned by Atari Inc.
All trademarks belong to their respective owners. PLIGHT is a purely non-commercial fan project that tries to enhance the players' enjoyment of the game. No infringement on any copyrights or intellectual property is intended.
Although it would come as a surprise if PLIGHT interfered in any way with the proper function of your Master of Magic game, or your computer in general, none of this can be guaranteed, and you agree to use it at your own risk.
Appendix A: Abbreviations used by PLIGHT
Appendix B: Technical Information
(Both appendices skipped here. they are present in the readme contained in the archive.)
Thanks for reading, and have fun!
-- Psyringe
I'm excited about the new Master of Magic community forming at Realms Beyond, and I'm hoping for feedback, ideas, and corrections in this thread here.
A mod for Master of Magic that expands, corrects, and clarifies the in-game help texts
Current version: v0.7 beta Download Link
Quick'n'dirty instructions:
- Replace the original HELP.LBX file with the one from PLIGHT (make a backup first).
- Check the following link for updated versions, and leave feedback and error reports there:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=391983
(or the thread you're currently rerading.
)Note: Using the excellent unofficial MoM Patch 1.40 by kyrub is recommended, although PLIGHT will function with official 1.31 as well. Get 1.40n from here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1430...de140n.zip
IMPORTANT: Installing the 1.40 patch after PLIGHT will overwrite PLIGHT, so you'll need to install PLIGHT again.
Content:
1. Master of Magic and its UI
2. PLIGHT's features and goals
3. Problems and Caveats
4. Installation procedure
5. Version history
6. Permissions and the future
7. Feedback, Questions, Contact info
8. Credits and Thank-Yous
9. Disclaimers
Appendix A: Abbreviations used by PLIGHT
Appendix B: Technical Information
1. Master of Magic and its UI
Master of Magic was, and still is, a great game, one of the true classics in its genre. One of its most popular features was the vast amount of content it offered: 214 spells with often unique effects, 84 distinct types of units (not counting the 35 different heroes) using dozens of special abilities, 33 city buildings, and 14 distinct races. However, the huge amount of unique effects and special abilities also necessitated an intricate rules system, especially for combat (but, to a lesser degree, also for city development and spellcasting). While many players report that this complexity contributes to their enjoyment, others may feel a bit overwhelmed, and even competent players rarely know all of the rules and exceptions by heart.
To help players in dealing with that complexity, Simtex had furnished their game with a UI that was, for its time, excellent. Sporting mouse-over information, detailed economy breakdowns, and small usability touches like graphical sliders, it included many features that were quite new for strategy games of that time, and far from being standard. One of the most striking features of this UI is the ease with which the player can access context-based help and further information. Almost everywhere in the game, a right-click displays an information screen or help text for the respective item. The game comes with 807 help texts in total.
However, even with this excellent system, there are flaws. As good as the texts are, a substantial amount of information is described ambiguously, incomplete, or even wrong. PLIGHT tries to expand on Simtex' already excellent work by expanding, correcting, and clarifying the game's many help texts.
2. PLIGHT's features and goals
PLIGHT expands and/or reworks nearly all of the game's 807 help texts with information collected from various sources (see the "Quit To Dos" help text in the main menu for a list). Prominent features include:
- Wherever there is a button labeled "Ok", "Done", "Accept", or "Close", its help text now contains general information on how to use the screen. It also notes how the help texts for this screen have been organized (sometimes you may find information at non-obvious places). A good strategy to get in touch with PLIGHT is to right-click on any such button you see.
- All spells now list their rarity, magic realm, research cost, and state clearly whether they can be cast in combat or overland. "Target" now correctly specifies whether a spell can be cast on friendly or enemy items, normal or fantastic units, etc.. Summoning spells now list the stats and abilities of the creatures they summon. All damage spells now list if and how they can be defended against. Spells which allow the caster to put additional mana into them now list the available mana range. Dozens of spell icons have been added to spells that had none in their spellbook help text, but had an icon for their effect. Where adequate, spell effects are explained in greater detail, potential uses and synergies or counters are mentioned, and some common misunderstandings are hopefully cleared up.
- All buildings in the city scape now list their cost, upkeep, effects, requirements, which units they provide, which other buildings they enable, and which race has access to them.
- A timeline of the combat phases (including specialties like gaze attacks, life stealing, etc.) is available from the combat screen. Also, the meaning and exact effects of the unit stats (swords, bows, crosses etc.) in combat is explained in much more detail.
- The help texts for the different races now list all their advantages and disadvantages, their growth rates (for cities and outposts) and the general inter-rachial tension they cause, the units they can build (including their race-specific units along with their stats and abilities), and the buildings that are inaccessible for them.
- The help texts on the 'Wizard info' screen (when you right-click on a wizard's face) explain diplomatic relations and what affects them. The help text for treaties (right-click on the icons to the right of a wizard's gem) now list explicitly what's expected from wizards who have pacts or alliances.
- Many formulas have been worked into the help texts. For example, right-clicking on the "Buy" button in the city screen now explains how the buying price is calculated. Right-clicking on "Population" explains how a city's growth is determined, the same goes for clicking on the "houses" display of an outpost. The help for the astrologer and historian graphs explain how the depicted values are calculated, the help text for the "skill staff" in the Magic screen explains how much mana needs to be invested to gain a skill increase, etc.
- Many tables have been worked into the help texts as well: Hero classes and their skills and stats, buildings and their costs and effects, standard units and their stats, inter-racial unrest levels, spell availability depending on spellbooks picked, exact AI bonuses per difficulty level, diplomacy penalty for having too many cities depending on land size and difficulty, etc.
- Special care has been taken to address common misunderstandings or false assumptions in the help texts. For example, the help for the "Change Production" button now explicitly states that changing the build orders will completely transfer the already invested production points to the new project (instead of wasting some of them during the transition), and it also mentions that any overspilling production is simply lost (i.e., not transferred to the next project or converted into gold). Both mechanics work differently in many other strategy games, so players may have false assumptions about how they work in MoM, hence the help text makes an effort to clarify that. Or, the original help text for the spell "Flying Fortress" was somewhat misleading, making players think that it could only be cast on a wizard's enchanted fortress, so the spell's help text now makes a special effort to explain that this is not the case.
- New players should now find much more information on how to use the game's interface (some interface elements are probably a bit counter-intuitive for players who are used to modern games).
- The HELP.LBX file has been cleaned of nearly one Megabyte of unused junk data. Additionally, more than 100Kb of unused duplicated text remnants, which existed in each of the file's 807 text blocks behind the actual texts, were cleaned to ease the handling of the file for anyone who wants to build upon PLIGHT.
- And some more things that I forgot to mention.
- Also, as a special service, I switched the original labels for Tauron ("demonic force") and Rjak ("warlock") around. There's no reason for the master of chaos to be a demonic force (when demons belong to the domain of death), and little reason for the master of death to be a warlock (when warlocks cast Doom Bolt, a chaos spell). Also, just show anyone the two pictures and ask them "Which of these is the demonic forece?". This has irked me since 1994. Really.
3. Problems and Caveats:
I passionately hate it when people only inform about the advantages of their products while concealing the disadvantages and leaving those for the users to find out (probably one of the reasons why I don't get along too well with marketing people). Here are the things that didn't quite work out for PLIGHT. If you can offer a solution for one of the problems, please contact me.
- Columns in tables often aren't aligned properly. The reason for this is the proportional font used by the game. As soon as a row contains a character with a non-standard width (like i, l, m, w, or eben the number 1), it's difficult to get the following text in this line properly aligned. I mixed spaces (full width) and dots (half width) to alleviate this problem somewhat, but it still looks weird in many places. The only real fix I can think of is to add several "space" characters with different widths to the help font, this way any usage of smaller or larger characters could be compensated for. (Working on the font might be a good idea anyhow since some of the characters look awfully similar, especally when using post-processing algorithms to smooth the pixelation. The width of the existing characters should remain unchanged though because hundreds of lines of text have been tweaked to work with those.) If you know how to do this, please contact me. Until then, the best I could do was to put alternative highlights on the columns in the tables, this should make it harder to confuse them.
- Speaking of highlights: This is an experimental feature that the original game never used. The display doesn't work perfectly, sometimes black pixels appear around the white highlighted text, which may look irritating especially on LCD monitors. This can only be fixed by reverse-engineering and hex-patching the engine. I think that the usefulness of the highlights outweighs this problem though, so I used them nevertheless. A solution to this would be greatly appreciated, but definitely requires a reverse-engineering of the display code.
- Due to the limited amount of space PLIGHT has to work with, some information is tucked away at non-obvious places, or had to be split across several pages. I tried to refer to the non-obvious places from the obvious ones, and split pages usually mention where you can find the other parts. Also, non-obvious help texts are usually mentioned on the "Ok" / "Done" / "Close" help text of the respective screen.
- Some pages (tables especially) had to make use of abbreviations. I hope they are intuitive enough to be immediately recognizable by someone who has already played the game, but in any case, I'm adding an appendix below which lists the common ones. When possible, I also added pages which explained the abbreviations next to the pages that use them.
- In some cases I had to remove or shorten information that would have been helpful for new players. For example, the original help texts displayed the graphics for the farmers, workers, and rebels of a race in that race's help text. This was useful to recognize them, but left too little room to give a complete complete list of the race's modifiers, units, limitations et. Hence i removed them (but added an explanation elsewhere how farmers, workers, and rebels can be distinguished by the direction in which they look and whether their arms are raised). I believe this to be the best solution since a player, after he learned the game, will be more interested in complete information than in an explanation of graphics he already knows. But it might be a bit more inconvenient for players who don't already know the graphics.
- In a few cases I replaced atmospheric original descriptions with dry factual information. I tried to prevent that as much as possible, and actually even added some new flavor texts here and there, but sometimes there just wasn't enough space for all the information and the flavor text.
- Some information contained in PLIGHT may be wrong. Master of Magic is a very complex game that was patched several times. The manuals, the official strategy guide, the user-created FAQs, and the original help texts all have outdated information (next to the still current and very useful parts) in one part or another, and although I usually performed my own tests whenever they contradicted each other, it's impossible for a single person to check every bit of information in a reasonable timeframe.
So, be all means, be skeptical! If something is described differently than you remember it from your games, test it. If you spot incorrect, incomplete, misleading, or otherwise problematic information, even typos or layout problems, please contact me by the means given in section (7).
The one thing I ask for is that you don't just write things like "The help text for X must be wrong because the manual says something different" - because as said above, none of the external sources are 100% reliable. Please test the situation in-game. Note that you can also upload zipped savegames to make it easier for me to reproduce your findings (but if you can't or don't want to, don't let that stop you from reporting errors).
- Finally, one general caveat: PLIGHT does some things that the original help texts never did - offset paragraphs, highlights, longer texts in general. The HELP.LBX file reserves 1000 bytes for each help text, of which the original game uses 602 at most. PLIGHT has several entries which use more than 990 bytes. It's theoretically possible that some part of the game's code assumes that no help text will be larger than 602 bytes, and corrupts data when longer texts are encountered. I think that this is very unlikely (it wouldn't be very smart to code the engine in a way that it couldn't cope with the whole data strucure, and I never encountered any corruption problems in my tests), but you never know. Likewise, the whole highlight feature was completely unused by the original game and might have some hidden problems. That said, changing text entries is one of the least intrusive things one can do with a mod, and I really don't expect any problems in that regard - I just can't guarantee it.
4. Installation procedure
Go to your Master of Magic folder. Backup your old HELP.LBX file by renaming it to something different, then copy PLIGHT's new HELP.LBX file into the folder.
In tests, Master of Magic and PLIGHT proved to be quite robust. Even overwriting the original HELP.LBX file while a Master of Magic game was running in the background caused no problems, the engine seems to reopen and reread the file anytime it needs it. (Actually, 95% of PLIGHT was developed by changing data while the game was running.) It's still recommended to close Master of Magic (and Dosbox, if you're using it) before installation though, better be safe than sorry.
PLIGHT was written for Master of Magic 1.40h and later, but functions with v1.31 as well. If used with v1.31, three help texts on the Settings screen will not match, and in some cases the game might work differently than described, but 99% of the information should apply identically to both versions.
Note that PLIGHT's file is much smaller than the original one. This is not a bug, you're not missing anything. Actually it's a fix. The original v1.31 HELP.LBX file consisted of nearly a megabyte of junk data, the same 8,192 Bytes were repeated 103 times without ever being accessed by the game. I suspect that at some point during development, Simtex' internal tool(s) for creating this file malfunctioned, and this was apparently never noticed nor fixed. (I vaguely recall that the help file in the original, unpatched game was indeed smaller, and then suddenly got larger with one of the patches.)
5. Version history
v0.1 - sometime in the second half of the 90s
Just fooling around with a hex editor, checking the file format of the HELP.LBX file to see whether I could correct some mistakes I noticed (and that I kept forgetting about when picking the game up again after a break). Online communities were in their infancy back then and so I never got into contact with other MoM players, the thought of releasing an updated help file never occurred to me at that time.
v0.2 - sometime between 2000 and 2005
Adding some more stuff here and there.
v0.3 - 2006
Systematically adding race and spell pick info to the game's setup screens. Starting to think about adding some more texts and releasing the thing as a mod, but losing steam when getting the impression that MoM was mostly forgotten anyway (I couldn't find any online community to speak of).
v0.4 - early September 2010
Picked up MoM again after being disappointed by a newer game, and found out that someone had created an unofficial patch for MoM in the meantime. So there WAS still an interest in the game. Picked up PLIGHT again, planning to add some more information, polish it a bit, and release it as a mod. Completed help texts for the game's UI. Updated some help texts to make the information match with patch 1.40f.
v0.5 - late September 2010
As usual, project totally got out of hand. Complete and systematic overhaul of the 214 spell help texts. Systematically experimenting with the engine and finding a way to highlight texts, then overhauling all 214 spells again to make use of this feature. Mild signs of sleep deprivation and malnutrition. Ignored.
v0.6 - 2nd Oct. 2010
Completed hero tables.
v0.61 - 4th Oct. 2010
Completed buildings and city screen.
v0.62 - 6th Oct. 2010
Completed normal units and "choose build project" screen. Signs of sleep deprivation worsening. Had to go shopping due to severe depletion of food resources. Hopefully bought enough to finish the project without further distractions.
v0.63 - 9th Oct. 2010
Completed combat stats and unit info screen, redid combat UI help.
v0.64 - 12th Oct. 2010
Completed skills/abilities and effects.
v0.65 - 15th Oct. 2010
Completed artifact info. Systematically went through the file from beginning to end for polishing and checkup.
v0.7 - 16th Oct. 2010
Some general polishing. Added changes from changelog of unofficial patch 1.40h. First public beta release of PLIGHT. Hallucinating response posts due to continually rising level of sleep deprivation (response posts would be nice, but will people really be interested in a mod to a 15 year old game?). Decided to sleep.
6. Permissions and the future
You may redistribute these files, expand them, change them, and use them for your own work, as long as the endeavour remains free and non-commercial. Informing and/or crediting me is not required, but definitely appreciated.
I don't have a fixed email address associated with this project, but I'm trying to give it an official home - see section (7) for contact information.
If you asked me a question and I didn't answer for a week, assume that my answer is in your favor. The only exception for this is the question "Can I use your work for a commercial project?" (and all ways to paraphrase that), in which case my written permission is explicitly required.
Please note: While I like to think that I do reasonably well in creating stuff, I'm absolutely horrible in maintaining it, and often stop to support my work completely after a while - usually because I'm off creating something else which captures my full attention. Therefore, if you note bugs or have an idea, please mention it now, while THIS project still has my full attention.
The future planned for PLIGHT is to have a public beta now, collect feedback, ideas, and corrections (given the sheer amount of information, there must be a lot to correct), and successively work them into the project until a version 1.0 can be released. Afterwards I'll probably consider it finished and will perhaps actually try to play a game of MoM again.
7. Feedback, Questions, Contact info
The current official home for PLIGHT is the CivFanatics forum, specifically this thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=391983
New versions will be posted there, and as long as I'm supporting the project, I'll be present there, collecting feedback and answering questions.
8. Credits and Thank-Yous:
- Steve Barcia and the whole Simtex team for giving us a gem of a strategy game
- Alan Emrich, Petra Schlunk, and Tom Hughes for the excellent Prima Strategy Guide, highly recommended - 462 pages of detailed info, get it if you like Plight!
- Bryan Jacobson, Dan Simpson, and the many contributors, for the MoM user FAQ
- kyrub for the unofficial MoM 1.40 patch, and a lot of help in determining values hidden in the game's files (and correcting me if mine were different)
- The Woman Of My Dreams ™ for putting up with me being obsessed with my MoM, and spotting mistakes in my Plight
- everyone else who helped
9. Disclaimers
Master of Magic was developed by Simtex, and published in 1994 by Microprose Systems. Simtex closed operations in 1997. Microprose changed hands several times and ceased to exist in 2001. At the time of this writing, I was unable to reliably determine its current owner due to contradicting claims on various websites. The rights to Master of Magic are currently owned by Atari Inc.
All trademarks belong to their respective owners. PLIGHT is a purely non-commercial fan project that tries to enhance the players' enjoyment of the game. No infringement on any copyrights or intellectual property is intended.
Although it would come as a surprise if PLIGHT interfered in any way with the proper function of your Master of Magic game, or your computer in general, none of this can be guaranteed, and you agree to use it at your own risk.
Appendix A: Abbreviations used by PLIGHT
Appendix B: Technical Information
(Both appendices skipped here. they are present in the readme contained in the archive.)
Thanks for reading, and have fun!
-- Psyringe
I'm excited about the new Master of Magic community forming at Realms Beyond, and I'm hoping for feedback, ideas, and corrections in this thread here.
