A new Mod for Jade Empire

The feature list of this release is rather small. I have more new stuff in the pipeline, but since I've gotten an astonishing number of bug reports over the last release - some of them severe - I figured it's better to postpone the new stuff, rather than the next release. So this is mainly a maintenance release.

The console no longer requires that you equip the Hummingbird Gem. You can talk to the animals at any time now.

Since vanilla Jade Empire does not feature a single animal anymore once you've left chapter three behind, I also added a bunch of new beasts to pretty much all of the later levels.

The only other new feature are improvements to the Heart of Darkness gem armor. Until now all enemies who hit you with either a martial or a weapon style lost a small amount of their Chi and Focus to you. This version of my mod also adds the contact attacks of support styles to that list. In addition it modifies the amount of Chi and Focus this armor leeches. Previously it was a fixed amount, now the amount depends on your level and your alignment. The more Closed Fist you are, the more this armor will reward you.

Bugfixes:

• The player was able to pick up wine for the Drunken Master style while playing as Black Whirlwind
• The tutorial events were intercepted too early and prevented the tutorial fight from ending. [Thanks kentek!]
• The Ironclad Mind technique was awarded after completing each and every bookset. [Thanks 7ty7!]
• The fight against Aishi the Mournful Blade would not end, if you fought her in the Black Leopard School [Thanks 7ty7!]
• Should you decide to poison the water dragon, you would have to fight your former companions. That fight would not end. [Thanks noimageavailable!]
• The fight as Sun Kin against Death's Hand would not end [Thanks Amberon!]
• The console store would collide with the inventories of other merchants [Thanks 7ty7!]
• A "copy" of the Black Whirlwind would stand with Spear-catches-leaf, while you were fighting him.
• The fight against Lucky Cho would not end, because the combatend animation collided with the dialog scene. [Thanks 7ty7!]
• If you chose the appearance of another player character after your demise, your appearance would be set to the "living" and not the "dead" appearance.
• If you did not give the right potion to Kia Min, you had to fight the pirates, she would otherwise kill, and the fight would not end [Thanks Rewels!].
• If you went to the clearing right in front of the entrance to the inn in the great forrest a few times too often, you found yourself in a random fight, that would not end. [Thanks Rewels!]
• The fight in the dream version of the school before you leave for the palace one last time would not end [Thanks Grundir!]
• The canons at the beach would fire at you during the combatend animations, when you were unable to dodge them.

The biggest addition of this version is the new cheat console. I'm not going to list all of its functions here, since it has its own page. Hopefully it will make the use of the savegame editor and other cheating tools unnecessary. Those tools do not set certain variables on which my mod relies and as a consequence may cause the game to behave quirky or even crash.

Other Changes:

• Flame Armors, Storm Armors and Stone Armors:
  • These gems now give a damage bonus and a Chi-cost reduction to their respective magic styles.
  • The stat bonuses these gems previously granted were removed again.
  • The gems have been completely redistributed to make them easier to acquire. Consult the spoiler sections, if you want to know their locations...
• There's a new technique, that reduces the Focus cost of all your weapon styles.
• I wrote a brand new system for weapon upgrades, swapped pretty much all the weapon models and changed their advancements...
• Staff:
  • The animations and stats were altered in order to turn the Staff from a defensive style into an offensive style. It's also quite good at crowd control now...
  • A third upgrade for the Staff was added: Tien's Justice.
• Spear:
  • The animations and stats were altered significantly. The Spear has become, what the Staff used to be: the perfect defensive style.
  • A new upgrade for the spear was added: the Halberd.
• A new weapon style - the Morning Stars - was added. This one has some very unique properties...
• Cobra Venom is now an upgrade instead of a technique.
• To make Death's Razor a little less cheesy, I added focus costs to the strong attack and the area attack.
• The description of the Gem of the True Initiate now shows the current specialization
• Wine and Reprieve are now available from a multitude of merchants and they all carry an infinite supply.
• Two new healing items were added: Cure and Heal. Cure is more potent than Reprieve. Heal is more potent than Cure.
• The minigame weapons no longer require button-mashing. Just hold down the mouse button and they'll fire as fast as they can.
• There is no longer a cutscene if the player declines to buy a new style. There are no animations or special effects either. It all ends quick and unceremoniously as it should.
• The regular combat end animations looked a little dull and out-of-place in the Imperial Arena. A victory in front of a huge crowd requires a bit of showing off, wouldn't you say? So I changed the animations...

Bugfixes:

• Due to a missing file, it was impossible to level the Blizzard style.
• Under certain circumstances the player character would become invisible in the Pit of Pain.
• The animations for learning Tang's Revenge finally play as they do for any other style.
• Several bugs in the dialog with the water dragon right before the finale were fixed. They caused the dialog to end prematurely and prevented the game from moving forward.
• The specialization animations collided with regular dialog under certain circumstances.
• One or two pirates in the fight against Gao's Lieutenant at the end of chapter one would occasionally spawn after the combat round.
• Non-deadly confrontations would occasionally end with your opponent "paralyzed".
• Players who had to retry the Imperial Engagement, because they lost the first time, experienced a premature end, because of a faulty counter.
• In the Arena (and only there) the stylegain animations collided with the armor animations
• The ocean effects of the mind battle shortly before the finale were broken.
• The Ogre Transformation's combat end animations collided with the gem armor end animations

There is a rather annoying bug - not only in the previous but all past versions of my mod so far: A lot of the important files for the new Transformations were missing. I did get several bug reports concerning the Transformations, but I never could make heads or tails of them. Everything worked fine on my machine. The files were there. They have been all along. They just never made their way into the download. Crap.

• fixed: Added the missing files for the new Transformations. See above.
• modified: Stone Immortal's Area Attack is now uninterruptable
• fixed: Chandler Ling's inventory was supposed to be identical to Songtao's. It is now.
• Elephant + Rhino Demon Transformations:
  • modified: The range was increased.
  • modified: The knockback of the area attack was increased.
  • modified: Damage was slightly decreased.
  • removed: The regeneration was removed
  • added: A partial resistance to Martial Arts was added.
  • added: A special weakness to weapons was added.
• Ogre Tranformation:
  • fixed: Transformation-effect at the end triggered too early.
  • added: Ogres regenerate now. The regeneration rate can be leveled.
  • removed: Switching styles while in Ogre form was disabled. It was impossible, anyway.
  • modified: Since Ogre-transformed players cannot transform back, I removed the Chi-cost
• Blizzard:
  • fixed: Harmonic Combos did not produce "unblockable" power-ups. (A file was missing.)
  • modified: Unblockable power-ups have been made more likely.
  • modified: Power-ups persist now for a while after the combat round has ended.
• Drunken Master:
  • modified: Power-ups persist now for a while after the combat round has ended.
  • fixed: The last advancement was never applied and the final effect never played.
• Resonating Crystal:
  • fixed: The power-up's floaty appeared twice.
  • fixed: I use the game's own shatter-effect now.
• fixed: Precedence and sequence of power-ups and alternative rewards have been cleaned up.
• added: When using a weapon and running out of Focus, the player will now automatically switch to Storm Dragon (if available).
• fixed: The Fox Demons in Heaven no longer block access to power-ups.
• fixed: "Death and Agony" and "Tang's Revenge" shared the same description.

There's an extremely stupid bug in the previous release. Specializations were not applied to styles you learned, while you were specialized. Not sure how I could have missed that, but I did. Now, when the time comes to undo the specialization - when you unequip the gem or switch specializations - my routines will dutifully remove the bonusses and malusses that were never applied in the first place. Depending on which it was - bonus or malus - this would leave you with an either completely overpowered or a thoroughly crippled style. If that happened to you, I recommend to "reset" the style. The only way to reset a style, is to remove it entirely and add it anew. Unfortunately there's no way to programmatically detect if a style was learned while you were specialized or not. That means this will require some doing on your part as well. I will upload a set of reset scripts this weekend. Instructions will be included. You might also be able to do this with a SaveGame Editor, but I haven't tested that.

• fixed: Specialization is now applied to new styles as well (see above.)
• fixed: The vampiric gem armor did not enhance Spirit Thief and Storm Dragon as it was supposed to do. It does now.
• fixed: The point requirements of leveling Storm Dragon's duration were wrong.
• fixed: Under certain circumstances the player would get stuck on a CF playthrough of the Black Leopard school in the Imperial City.
• fixed: After acquiring Training or Healing in chapter 5, the player's appearance would change from his/her dead appearance to the living appearance.
• fixed: The "Three times no means no" tutorial screen would show up, when it should not.
• fixed: Removing the specialist gem from your amulet did not clear the percentages in the description.
• fixed: Under certain, very rare conditions the post-combat clean-up code wouldn't run and the player would start the next combat round with most combat buttons disabled.
• modified: Divine Void was underpowered. Damage and Speed were left mostly unchanged, but its radius was increased drastically and I enhanced all the knockback effects. It's a lot more dangerous now. And a lot flashier. :)
• modified: Monkey Paw was still overpowered. It has been re-balanced - if only a bit. The damage has been reduced, but the walk speed has been increased to compensate.
• modified: The effects of gems with negative stats have been enhanced.
• modified: After a lot of hesitation I decided to enable Gore in the German version. The English version is not affected by this.
• modified: While working on the web site, I realized that a number of descriptions of styles and items were too short or too bland. They should be more interesting now.
• modified: There are level caps for specialization now. The more your level progresses, the deeper your specialization is allowed to become.
• modified: Specializations have been re-balanced. Since the base damage of magic is the lowest, the increase was made a little more drastic. The malusses were increased noticeably for all three specializations.
• modified: Zin Bu now sells the Drunken Master's wine in chapter 5.
• new: The mod now includes my pirate workshop hack. This is a fix for a bug in the original game, that seems to affect some(!) Windows 7 users. The players report to get stuck in the pirate workshop, because two opponents do not enter combat and block a doorway. The hack that I previously wrote is incompatible with my mod. I combined the two now.
• new: Internal version management: You can now load a savegame from an earlier version of this mod and everything will be upgraded to the latest version. Currently that's only relevant for specializations. The 0.1.19 specialization (if any) will be removed and the 0.1.20 specialization will be applied instead.

• removed: my attempts to fix the bugs in the Transformation styles. See here for more.
• fixed: Instead of the Dragon Fly icon the Viper icon would display over Kang's head
• new: 2 more Autosaves were moved from before the cutscene to the moment between cutscene and combat start:
  • fight against the Watcher
  • fight against the pirates after the introduction of Sky
• new: The "Jewel of the True Initiate" now provides feedback of your degree of specialization.
• fixed: There were a few bugs in my make that allowed debug-messages and unfinished code to slip into the final release. Fortunately nothing game-breaking got through, though, so you may not even have noticed this bug :)
• fixed: 2 bugs in the finale:
  • The endgame movies would not play properly.
  • When you were defeated in the finale, you wouldn't be presented with the OnDeath GUI, but instead a Jademaster save would be made and the movies would play.
• fixed: Using Dire Flame no longer cancels the visual effect of the Flame Armor(s)