Harlequins mod Winter Assault Build Released

[ShinGouki]

EDIT - 12nd October

I'm pleased to announce that DoW files now has the Winter Assault build of the Harlequins mod. Or 0.2 beta as it is otherwise known.

Winter Assault Harlequins Mod (http://dawnofwar.filefront.com/file/The_Dance_Macabre;48575)

Tech tree has been totally rebuilt to deal with the large changes that Winter Assault brought. Squad leaders are back, Shadowseer model is now in also which is a big achievment. Please be aware though that the Shadowseer is still in the early stages of his animation / fx life. Allready there have been major additions to the unit. However he is still very much worth checking out in game as he is one of the most complex models to make it into DoW to date :). Just wait til you see the finished product.

You can also get the 1.4 compatible version of this mod complete with working AI.

1.4 Compatible Build (http://dawnofwar.filefront.com/file/The_Dance_Macabre;47568)

You can still get the 1.3 patch version here

Harlequins mod 0.1 for 1.3 patch (http://dawnofwar.filefront.com/file/The_Dance_Macabre;47081)

Please take the time to read the pdf I tried to make it as interesting as possible.

All feedback about the new mod should go in this thread or over at my forums Harlequins Forum (http://www.thedancemacabre.com/forum )

For those of you who have no idea who the harlequins are just go to the site

The Dance Macabre (http://www.thedancemacabre.com)

[CrossOrion]

Filefront Download not working at the moment...and the link you posted doesn't actually do anything :P

Edit. Okay, now it does, but goddamit >_<

[ShinGouki]

Yeah sorry borked the links on the first post, was meant to preview but accidentally submitted, and ended up having to edit them real quick. Guess you got in here pretty fast lol.

[CrossOrion]

Filefront still doesn't work. Arrrrrrrrrrrrg >_<

[ShinGouki]

CrossOnion check your PM.

[Grimnar42]

OK
I quickly had a look not really playing.
Wow colourful A few things though.
the installer at least on my machine the default path it wanted to install to was C:\Dawn of War this will bugger up those that dont look at things and just click next.
Correct default path C:\Program Files\THQ\Dawn of War

I noticed some of the models go into that freeze display everything mode must be an ability or something the model doesn't have animation for. A stop gap is to look for something like ability_motion_name in the lua and remove it.

Looks Pretty impressive but

[CrossOrion]

Played like a charm. Played a group of orks on standard setting, just to let me get a good feel of the new Harlequins. Slightly dissapointed on the lack of skins or textures but I'll live with that for now.

Very nice. Graphically impressive with the FX, nice flashing colors and the holosuits are damn nice. It was so shiny and flashy I didn't even notice any freeze animations :D Although I wasn't really looking that hard. On another note, death jesters and mocking birds tear apart vechicles in a pretty brutal way. Loota tanks on an individual basis won't last 4-6 seconds from three mocking birds. Not sure how imbalanced it is.

[CrossOrion]

Actually what's up with the lack of textures? The screenshots at DoWFiles seem to be showing more colorful units.

[ShinGouki]

Could other people please indicate whether the textures are showing up on the version they downloaded....

Ok your not the only person to mention the lack of new textures, which I'm mildly baffled by as this issue never came up during testing... they should all be there. The harlequin units have all been hex edited so they don't even use the old eldar textures anymore it's pretty disturbing if they somehow reverted to using the old ones. Even the buildings are hex edited....

What happens if you change your graphics settings... maybe that will prompt them to show up, or try deactivating and reactivating the mod :(.

If your not playing without all the nice new textures your missing out on a large visual part of the mod.

As for the mocking birds, they are very fragile. They are the only real thing Harlies have for taking down heavy vehicles. One blast from a predator with las cannons can pretty much take them down. Also one haywire / melta almost kills them instantly. One thing you'll notice with the Harlequins is that they actually make you use units you wouldnt' ordinarily use that often.

Space Marines for example should make heavy use of land speeders. Their speed and weapon loadout is perfect against harlequins *even the mocking bird*.

Grenade launchers on cultist squads are useful, flamers on any squad are particular useful against the choreographers.

If you allrady have 3 mocking birds thats a lot of power you just spent. I think that maybe the harlequins power income is a little high, its something I've been looking to change.

[Davius_Prime]

I am having a bit of a problem running the mod. I installed it like the read me said and put it into the right folder but my mod manager wont let me switch to it. Everytime I try to activate it the game shuts down, it does this as well for HRM. Any idea how I can get this to work?

[ShinGouki]

Hi Davius, the first thing i would check. Which patch are you running on?

This mod currently only works on patch 1.3. So if you just updated to 1.4 yesterday then you'll have to wait until i release the 1.4 build.

If you have 1.3 patch installed then i would suggest making sure that the folder

thedancemacabre is in this location

Dawn of War/thedancemacabre

also Check your Dawn of War folder for the file

"thedancemacabre.module"

If you still have trouble activating it after ensuring that all these files are in the right place and that you are in fact running the 1.3 build of Dawn of War let me know and I'll try and help you figure out whats going on by looking at your warnings.log file.

Thanks for taking the time to try out the mod :)

[CrossOrion]

Where are the texture files suppose to be located?

I peeked into C:\Program Files\THQ\Dawn of War\thedancemacabre\data\Art\ui\3d_models\texture_share and only found 2 files,

which are harli_farseer_unit.rsh and harli_farseer_unit_Default.wtp

[ShinGouki]

Thats the frontend model CrossOnion, the one that gets displayed on the main menu :)

The files you should be looking for are located in

Dawn of War\thedancemacabre\data\Art\ebps\races\eldar\texture_share

You'll notice a list of bizarely named textures *the string lengths have to be the same when editing existing texures*

eg warlock became harlock lol

This was necessary to make sure that the default eldar units didn't use our custom ones. There should be about 50+ files in there let me know of your findings

[CrossOrion]

Yep. 52 files. Not sure why they aren't showing up however...gonna c/p them to Harlequins folder and see what happens.

That didn't do anything...odd.

Edit. Got them to work! YAY! Opened the army painter and everything switched to the custom colors...dunno about textures yet though.

[OLDMAN]

Hello ShinGouki
Just to say how much I enjoyed your mod-Good use of ingame models and innovative
gameplay--really good work--I enjoyed the way you have captured the "Feel" of the
race.
As for the tex.--I had none when i first started up the mod (Even using the army
painter)I quit then started again same problem---Then I turned my computer off Altogether --Turned it back on and their they were---and have stayed eversince--
cant explain why.
But as I said an excellent mod

Thanks
Oldman

[ShinGouki]

Copying and pasting into the Harlequins folder isn't likely to do much in itself, i think it's partially a problem with how the game changes from one mod to the next. It seems to cache some of the old data for whatever reason. Something they have apparently fixed in 1.4?

It's more likely restarting the game that caused them to load up.
Anyway they are working and thats all that matters:), glad you get to play it as intended finally.

Oldman - Thanks for the kind words about the mod, Most of the work to date by me has been on coding, balancing and trying to make them seem as much like a 5th core race as possible instead of just a *full mod*. Some of the time was obviously spent on prettying things up, but most of that was spent on providing consistency and ensuring the player had all the information they needed to familiaries themselves with the race.

Grim i allready know about those issues, thanks for pointing them out though. I can actually get rid of the flag attacks pretty easily, the main reason I've left them in for now is that it keeps those hero's balanced with the other ones. It's to do with his special attacks. I know that visually it's not pleasant but i decided balance over visuals for now, seing as 0.2 won't even use those particular Eldar models. :)

In 0.2 you can hope to see the following eldar models replaced with new Custom ones.

Great Harlequin
Shadowseer
Choreographers
Mimes

Possibly Spirit Walker

:).

Any units / weapons people particularly dislike or think need changing?

[CrossOrion]

I wonder if its possile to replace Jetbike's jump ability with a rampage ability or 'rush' instead. Basically something to allow them to break through troops instead of getting bogged down by melee.

[ShinGouki]

Yeah thats possible fairly easy to code to :). How do you think this should be implemented ?

[CrossOrion]

Basically I think the feel should be the jetbikes blasting through enemy lines instead of jumping over it, causing mayhem and destruction as they run past. :P I'm not actually sure if that is more fluffy or not but its what I feel 'bikes' in general should do.

Give it stun, a slight knockdown, then once they used the ability they can turn back and start hacking up anything they miss :P Possibly a massive speed increase as well as a possible speed upgrade? something like gravtic Boosters?

[Jinxter78]

Tried to give my wave serpent the rampage ability, but it did not work. Maybe because it is a skimmer? Tell me if it works

[ShinGouki]

Jinxter is your waveserpeant 1.3 compatible i never got around to trying it. I'm doing a craftworld mod and likely moddeling a wave serpeant at some point. What type of abilities did you implement for it?

[Jinxter78]

Yes, but it is made to work with the rebirth mod. It has 50% reduced ranged damage(recieved), only upgradeable with eighter a starcannon or scatter laser, and has a throwback pulse, that sweeps enemies away from it(with a short movementstun) and gives 50% ranged damage reduction around it for infantry for 30s. Perfect for deploying Reapers or Banshees in the midst of the enemy(or rescue them from a hairy situation). It was to be used with as a anti infantry tank, while the falcon was given a proper brighlance and a missile launcher as an upgrade.

[CrossOrion]

Some thoughts.

The Solitare going up against any commander unit will kill them within a span of 2-3 seconds. I found this to be a little gem, as it can run into the middle of 3-4 defilers and engage them...then when its almost dead I can drop in 5 squads of chreos with a Great Harlequin and give them 'the last laugh'...

4 mocking birds will kill a squiggoth within 10-20 seconds of engaging.

I'm not someone to complain about balance, but seeing a squiggy drop dead like it was made out of paper kinda just drops my jaw a little :P It was tied up with a solitare and a spirit walker at the time too.

Anyways all that are just thoughts. :P What I want to ask is that if custom music will be in future releases? possibly v.02? I rather have a suitable harlequin theme (dark and creepy or gypsy type music) then all the new models, to be 75% honest :P As mentioned before I played the old Harlequin mod with the music mod in v.1.2.

[Jurand]

An other thing that will drop a squig in no time is 8 D-cannons popping it all at once... But yeah, 4 units taking a squig down that fast might be sort of hard to swallow.

[ShinGouki]

He he, I had a feeling the mocking bird would be a talking point. It is one of the harder units for me to balance. I have to deal with the fact that it's a very fragile vehicle.

It is armed with a vibro cannon which is supposed to do increased damage depending on the size of the vehicle. The reason it's hard to balance... A pred can take it down in one shot pretty much, or a marine squad with 4 missile launchers. This means for it to be even vaguely useful against certain vehicles i had to really up it's damge. This of course means that if you get 4 of these guys together they tear through heavy armour like hot knives through butter.

I'll spend more time tweaking the cannon against every armour type. I've known that this unit needs some work for a while, I didn't realise it killed squiggoth quite that fast though.

Just out of interest other than the really big vehicles what do you think of it's performance against other targets? Infantry / heavy infantry / light vehicles / buildings etc.....

Ironically through testing most of my beta testers complained that the Harlequins didn't have enough to take down tanks. Bright lances were seen as too week and mocking birds as too fragile. *Personally i think you just need to use the speed of both and they do the job quite nicely*.

Thanks for the input guys any feedback about weapons / units is really helpful in getting a general opinion on what should be changed. Whats underpowered, Whast overpowered etc...

As for the Solitaire, His primary role is as a character assassin :). He is actually pretty fragile considering he's a Relic unit. Heavy Fire will take him down very fast. But let him get to your hero and down he goes. Combining him with last laugh was a good tactic to choose :-D. Do you think he takes down the enemy hero a bit too fast? Let me know what you think.

Custom Music. Definately planned at some point. Does the music mod still work for 1.4?? I could see about just utilising that for now I guess. But yeah music is planned, however for now it's me doing it. So it's not likely to be in until a much later build. I might try and get my dad involved as well as he's a professional musician and i got him hooked on cubase in the last year or two lol.

Keep the opinions coming all useful stuff :).

[Archmagi]

For some reason I downloaded this beta and it would not work no matter what I tried. Any ideas?

Tallsinglelooking@yahoo.com Or Archmagi

[CrossOrion]

What version of DoW you running? It only works for 1.3 atm, though a 1.4 patch is on the way...with some bits missing.

[Archmagi]

Currently I am running with 1.3 patch. It is easier to work with and easier to play online with.

[ShinGouki]

The installer i made is a bit naff currently, It doesn't point to the right location. This means you have to browse to your Dawn of War folder. It was my first time using install shield and I'm not quite sure how to get it to find where your Dawn of War is installed to yet.

Make sure that it's installed the files to the right folder. If it installed correctly there should be a folder called *thedancemacabre* and a file called thedancemacabre.module in your Dawn of War folder.

If you ever had any of the old versions of the mod installed i would suugest deleting the entire "thedancemacabre" folder and try reinstalling.

Hope this helps.

[ShinGouki]

IF you still can't get it working tell me what is actually happening. Is it crashing to desktop? Just can't see it in the mod manager???

If its a crash to desktop email the warnings.log file in your Dawn of War folder so i can see whats happening.

[Tedly224]

Just giving the thread a bump and looking to find out when the 1.4 acceptable version of it might be ready. And yes, I can be patient with it as it's probably no small amount of work for your team.

[ShinGouki]

Uploading now, I'll let every one know a link once i get a response from DoW files about when they have it hosted. I'll put an update on the first post as well.

[ShinGouki]

Ok guys 1.4 compatible build is up just go to the first post of this thread for information about it and a link.

[ShinGouki]

Ok guys I just purchased Winter Assault and looked at the new files. Currently having a look through all the new features it's added.

One thing I have allready managed to do very easily is to get the Harlequins mod working with Winter Assault and all it required was changeing the *thedancemacabre.module*

I'll upload the changed file later today possibly with some other changes to make it more WA compatible :). So all you guys who have been playing WA instead of DoW should now be able to play with harlies too by tomorrow. *Maybe even tonight*

[ShinGouki]

I decided that I may as well go ahead with rebuilding the tech tree which is why i didn't upload as stated above.

Just to give you guys an idea of how the mod is doing, I know it gets a little quiet around here sometimes.

Basically I have now finished rebuilding the tech tree for WA. It is very different to the 1.4 build and is far better suited to playing against the new WA style armies. Although there are a lot of similarities to the 1.4 mod. There are an awful lot of changes going on to what the abilities and units actually do.

I have allready tested everything carefully and it all appears to be working as I planned it. I will be doing in house testing tomorrow and Friday, beta testers can expect to see a build this week as it's really only balancing that needs tweaking :).

There are a few *new* units and abilities so it's not just a case of conversion. Also you can now travel across the map using your own listening posts. This makes the Harlequins incredibly mobile. It also makes defending those listening posts a lot easier than before. Stick one or two mines nearby stick all your troops into the webway and just repsond to wherever the threat occurs.

If all goes well I'll be looking to release the Mod officially on Monday. That should give me time to update the manual and all the text for the user interface plus weed out any unexpected stuff.

[ShinGouki]

For those of you who are members of my forum you will allready know that this was released last Friday. However to everyone else Please check the first post so that you can see the link for the new biuld now finally availble at DoW files as well.

Hope you all like the new changes made to the mod to bring it in line with Winter Assault.

There will also be a patch out soon to resolve some minor changes i wanted to make and add some more cool animations / fx to the shadowseer.

For those to lazy to check the first post

Winter Assault Build (http://dawnofwar.filefront.com/file/The_Dance_Macabre;48575)

[Typhoon GX]

Wow. You guys did a great job. ;) Do the Harlequin colours bleed into the normal Eldar though?

[ShinGouki]

Nope i went to the trouble of hex editing every single eldar model and building to ensure no colour bleed occurs. Basically the only bleed you get is that if an Eldar player is playing you will get the same banner as them. Not exactly a huge problem though sometimes confusing lol.

Gradually of course all the eldar models are getting phased out of the mod. Next build will hopefully feature our own choreographers so no more banshees if I can help it. That should let me tone down the holofield fx slightly as well.

Would anyone like me to post some screenshots of the new shadowseer by the way?

[Exsus]

Not bad, aside from a few bugs. i will now make an army know as "what were we thinking?"

[CrossOrion]

Meh, No Spirit Walker in WA version :P But otherwise, good work! Haven't looked at the Shadowseer in detail though...was getting massed by AI -_-

[Exsus]

My eys a numb, to many colors. what were we thinking is to bright. still its good.

[ShinGouki]

No spirit walker? Urm build the Dark Veil Building mate :).

[fuggles]

Yes! Post screenies! One of few things I can download. I'm really looking forward to this as one of what I thought was the only people in the world to have a harlequin army. Poor, poor solitaire. *Sniff*

[ThrowN]

I'd like to see the Vibrocannon or however its called (the thing on the mocking bird after the upgrade). to shoot with a beam that hurts everything on its way, and also throws all infantry aside (like a very small, but long rampage ability)

[Deathbypeasents]

i would also like to note a bug where the LPs do not gain a weapon once upgraded.Also i see to get swarmed by my opponent those lps are too expensive!!!

[fuggles]

So, soo pretty...can't wait to see the new models (and my great harlequin not lose her head or attack with a flag). Is the Kiss going to have a low chance to kill everything upto heroes in one shot? I hope that the shadow seer will have some devastating morale aura about him\her what with that mask supposed to show your greatest fears and all.

I like the death jester but am less keen on power coming from LP's, it might grow on me but you lose a heck of a lot when you get attacked. It's cheaper but you lose a lot more when it goes and I think after a sapping attack you will be too nobbled to come back.

[CrossOrion]

2-3 LPs is enough to keep your power needs at a good high. I figure a Harlequin army can keep 2-3 LPs up at any one time with a heavy enough microing.