Game Speed and Framerate Separation and Other Oddities.

[Alfred The Baker 9]

Hello, in my exploration of old versions of the game for both nostalgia and trying to find some things out, ive found numerous things. Battle music in Skirmish sometimes working  , different worker behaviours, different AI behaviours and how they functino [as well as their stone cheat] GAME SPEED NOT BEING TIED TO FPS, slower game speed overall, different lighting settings and i guess shaders overall that affect insides of the buildings [and it not just being textures] and even building pricing.

One oddity i found is that if you copy gamerules.dat from 1.0 to 1.5 old AI functions will come back, they will have gong and rats as well as crime [but you cannot see if their buildings have gone bad in 1.5] and will do odd things like build stables but not use Knights, as well as them not being able to immedietly errect Stone walls, which is really fun to see AI use these things, granted it requires editing the castles since all of them had Courthouses removed, but almost all AI except Olaf use all forms of civilian buildings.

However other things are far more interesting and i have sadly not figured it out. Lighting inside of the buildings i don't know what i need to change, and i sadly cannot just copy over original files, and going trough 1 by 1 shader to see how to make the game look similar is a difficult task. Fog too i really don't know how to enable it, and its bloody annoying Firefly removed it.

Also stone structures not costing my entire stone economy is really nice, even Hunters being useful and delivering, honestly even more food than other buildings is great. Also the ability to build stockpile near ANYTHING is a very good feature that seems to have been taken out the very next patch 1.1 which is annoying.

And then there is game speed. I was honestly quite shocked when i booted up 1.0 and saw that game speed is actually not locked to framerate. You can lower the speed as low as 10 and still run a, high framerate for however Stronghold 2 engine allows. The downside is that general game speed is different, 50 is not same across the games. 90 is quite fast and its faster than the normal 50 in the game now but i do not know what the exact numbers between each other are. Either way i find it baffling that Firefly chose to do this, as i feel this works far better than what we have currently. Its hard to say when this change occured. I remember 1.4 having framerate lock, but i could only test 1.2 as i could not use the 1.3 patch and i lost my original 1.4 CD, and in true Firefly fashion you cannot access the original SH2 and Legends on Steam. But i have a feeling as the balance changes have happened in 1.3, that so did the gamespeed and framerate change happen as well. I also worry this is buried in the EXE or the DLL files unlike visuals or some mechanical things.

No idea about music tho, i once installed the game and Battle music in Kingmaker worked, but now it stopped again so i really have no clue.

Now wether i COMPLETELY think 1.0 is better played than 1.5 is different. AI is more agressive but it also sometimes struggles with armies and in general game is less stable than now. But current Steam release has oddities and i would like to somehow be able to make 1.5 have things 1.0 have.

[Asophix 45]

Hi, that is all very interesting what you have found.

As far as I know, the AI can be reinstated the civilian services, if you add these buildings to the template. Looks like gamerules.dat governs how the AI builds and maybe even what troops they use, so that's why replacing this works.

If I remember correctly, the CD version has the original release notes and changelogs in a Word document that details everything. For example, fire ballistae used to autoshoot until 1.3.1, while torture devices also didn't give honor until a point.

Are there other notable differences regarding the AI armies and castles, or are these more or less unchanged?

[Princeps Smayris 0]

Is there any community made program to see what files like gamerules.dat do? 
Somehow I need to monitor what exactly Stronghold2.exe and its other files are doing

[Asophix 45]

To my knowledge, there are no community utilities like that.

Secondly, your question is too generic. SH2 / Legends has active logic bundled in its .exe game binary and assorted .dll files. Input files (like gamerules.dat) have no active logic, they are consumed by the game during its lifetime.

From the ground up you have no other choice, but to reverse engineer the game binaries and see for yourself. Ghidra can be used to conduct analysis and restore some of the C++ code in pseudo-format, if you are tech savvy. Cheat Engine may be useful for active memory monitoring.