What this does:

Attempt to speed up Wizardry 8's battles by reducing animation time. I basically removed about half the frames from every animation (Some important NPCs were left alone), and double missile velocity. I don't know if this necessarily speeds up combat THAT much, but it does feel more responsive to me. Tell me what you think?

This is intended to be used with WizFast.exe. Link provided by one of the other posters below.

Installation:

I'm not super familiar with how W8 modding works, so this might need some adjustment.

First, back up the MONSTERS, Databases, and MISSILES folders from your Wizardry 8/Data directory if present.
Copy the Data folder into your main Wizardry 8 directory. Override everything.

That SHOULD do it. I hope?

Side effects:

Most of the NPC-generated battle sounds are disabled by this. I may or may not fix this, or do something with this. The model scripts aren't really accounting for the reduced frames, in terms of when sounds should play, so sometimes they just don't.

The animation is going to be considerably less smooth.

Some of the spell and missile launch timings will be off. I probably can't do much about this.

Potential bugs:

If this causes any crashes, try to tell me what you were fighting when it crashed. I might need to update some of the model scripts to account for the shorter animation lengths.

To Do:

I might reduce the dodge animations further. Or just eliminate them entirely.
Might increase missile velocity more, too. Not really sure how fast the numbers in Cosmic Forge actually are.

Version .5 available here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jup0feu4g2qr32o/wiz_8_speedmod.zip?dl=0

Look here:
http://www.gog.com/forum/wizardry_series/slow_moving_enemies_long_battles_fix

This fix, which has been around for a while, basically just sets the "move speed" slider to a higher value than you can normally do in-game. It accomplishes exactly your purpose, but you don't have to mess around with the animations themselves; you just make them play faster. Works like a charm.

Actually doesn't address what I'm talking about.

I'm concerned with attack animations. The movement speed fix you're talking about DOES help a lot, and what I'm working on is designed to be used with that, but...

The specific issue with the animations I'm talking about is two-fold:

1) In combat, there's a noticeable pause when the game switches from one active enemy to the next. Mix of loading data and doing AI calculations, from what I can tell? Not part of an issue with the animations THEMSELVES, but it really compounds them because the load pause doesn't start until after the current animation finishes.

2) Combat animations are rather long, and a lot of the length comes from relatively meaningless actions at the beginning and end of the attack animation.

So, for instance, the bandits you encounter a lot? The majority of the frames in that animation loop are winding up to swing and then easing back into place after the attack. The attack itself is only about a fourth of the animation itself.

Same for animations when the enemy gets hit or dodges.

So while it does make the animation in the game really smooth, it slows stuff down quite a bit.

Oh, also:

3) The move fix doesn't address projectile speed. So while monsters still move instantly, projectiles do not. REALLY noticeable when you get into combat with anything that has ranged attacks.

(My initial thought, by the way, was that W8's slow combat was the result of a high miss rate and a lot of enemies. Until I played Wizardry 7, which had a comparable miss/hit ratio and number of enemies, and while still being on the slow side, had quicker combat. Wizardry 7 has very little animation, and that's when it clicked with me).

Updated this. Download link is the same.

New version leaves all the frames in but modifies the framerate of the animations directly. Current changes:

- All attack/hit animations are generally twice as fast as in vanilla.
- Dodge animations should be about three times as fast as in vanilla.
- Projectiles move four times as fast as in vanilla.
- Some of the spells are faster. Still working on this.

This should address any crashes related to missing frames.

To install it, delete all of the .mon and .mls files from the data\MONSTERS, data\MISSILES, and data\SPELLS folders that were installed by the previous version. Then, copy over the files from the new version, overwriting anything that's already there.

DO NOT DELETE THE .SLF FILES.

Thank you so much. Encounters are actually fun now.

Thank you indeed!

It is really more of a flow now! Very useful and easy to install!

Thanks a lot for this.

I'm wondering how to apply these changes - currently am using MacOSx and it doesn't seem like the GOG wrapper situation allows for these changes, as in, I only see the .SLF file in the data folder and non of the .mon files.

Thoughts?

Also unsure how I could rune the .exe original wizfast from Wolfie back in the day. Looking to dig up this game as it is an old favorite, but currently don't have a PC

Hi Gen,

I think the .mon folders are... initially in some archive file, and the ones in the archive file get ignore if there's unarchived ones in the top level? Not really sure, no experience with the Mac version :S

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jup0feu4g2qr32o/wiz_8_speedmod.zip?dl=0

Anyway mostly updating the dropbox link.

Yes, files in the appropriate folders override the files with same name that are present in the .slf archives,
or present in an archive placed into the \patches folder.

Sir Tech probably used the .slf archives for many small files to prevent slow disk acccess on fragmented drives
and also to prevent slack space on FAT 32.

Man, I absolutely cannot believe how much of a difference this mod makes. I played for 29 hours without it, and it was driving me absolutely crazy, to the point of where I'd avoid fights because they took so incredibly long. I was contemplating quitting the game, but then I googled for it, and here I am.

Thanks a ton, amccour. Your work is HIGHLY appreciated.

Also work on Steam! Thanks a lot for this.

Just for the record:

Speed of missiles and spells, assigned in the related mls scripts which are untouched in this mod for spells,
all have been tested to work with a speed of 250, some even up tp 1k.

If the values for Missilestart and Spellstart in the monsters .mls files point to a frame out of range, the game may crash.
(it gives an appropriate error message under XP, dunno about win 7 & 10)
The frames in the .mon files were reduced far below the original in version 5,
and the mod does not contain new mls files for monsters, so there is a potential to crash.
(did not check them all in CF whether actually out of range, but e.g. acid vine and apus are affected, probably more)

That's exactly what I noticed too. This "Pause" in between the enemy move.

I made some tests to investigate that, and it looks like they are related to idle- and spice-animations. My tests were based on Kaucukovnik's combat mod, in which animations are controlled via external scripts. For example in slime_green.mls the following values could be added to accelerate the animation:

IDLE slime_idle 100
SPICE slime_spice 100

As I tested this on the 3 slimes in the monastery, the pause was definitely much shorter. The price for that however was, that the slimes were jittering all the time - even outside of combat. That's not ideal.

You can actually make it really fast. In the CosmicForge Editor you can remove all animation frames from the idle-animation except 1 frame, and then set the animation speed to like 2 fps. Then you practically have no pause in between the enemy moves. Every enemy instantly moves after the other.

The downside however is, that the character looks completely motionless during idle. Maybe not completely, as you still have the spice-animations (which are random motions of the character during idle). These spice-animations will also cause small pauses before the move. You can however remove them by deleting the according lines in the .mls script. Which is probably the best, as they can't smoothly transition to the idle-animation anymore.

When I did both of these things, the combat became really fast! You could really see the orange movement bar fly. Though the question is: would you like to play this way? With all the idle- and spice-animations gone? The game might lose part of its charm.