Seven Lances by FoxBat
A modification for Diablo II: Lord of Destruction 1.09+
In ages past, an ancient and powerful race, the Eternals, waged the War of the Seven Lances. In the aftermath of this war, the denizens of Hell seized the opportunity to invade the world of Sanctuary. The only hope for the mortals of Sanctuary is to discover the artifacts of the Eternals and take them up against the sinister Three.
The purpose of this modification is to create a more balanced and challenging Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, and while playable in single player, it emphasizes the dynamics of a well-built party. All skills, items, and monsters have been adjusted towards this end. Additionally, many new items, monsters, and levels have been introduced to make the experience fresh. We at the Seven Lances team hope you enjoy this new take on Diablo II.
Installation and Use
To install, simply extract all files and folders into your Diablo II directory, with the directory structure intact. Make sure you have played a game in standard Diablo II once since the OS has been reinstalled, so that the proper registry entries are available.
To play, go into the Seven Lances folder, and double-click “Play Seven Lances.vbs.” You can also create a desktop shortcut to this file. To play in windowed mode, double-click “Play 7L Windowed.vbs”
Technical Issues
1.10-1.12: The full PC install is now completely compatible with 1.09, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, and likely any future releases. This feat is accomplished by swapping enough files to make the game behave as if it were 1.09d.
Multiplayer: Seven Lances can be played in multiplayer via TCP/IP. It cannot be played on the official Battle.net servers.
Item Transfer in Single Player: You need to have a TCP/IP protocol installed on your computer, which you very likely do if it has internet access or is connected to a LAN. To use:
-Start up Seven Lances Windowed mode.
-Select other multiplayer, TCP/IP, and host a game.
-Start up Seven Lances Windowed mode again, creating a second instance of Diablo II.
-Use this window, select TCP/IP, pick a different character, and then join the game with IP 127.0.0.1.
-You should now be connected to the game you hosted earlier with Seven Lances.
-Switch between the two windows as you wish, swapping items between your characters.
-Remember if the host leaves the game, the other window in the game will also have the player kicked. The characters should save properly though.
-If you have a lot of memory, you can try running more instances and thus have multiple characters moving around.
Crash Problems: If your computer freezes while playing Seven Lances and you must reboot, this may cause problems with playing Diablo II or Seven Lances again. If you have any trouble running 7L or D2, run the Recover From Crash.vbs file in your Seven Lances directory first.
Nothing happens: if you click to start Seven Lances, see an hourglass briefly, and then nothing happens, it is likely because Diablo II cannot find your Lord of Destruction CD. Seven Lances still retains the CD-checking from 1.09, so you will not be able to take advantage of the built-in no-CD feature in 1.12. If you are trying to use D2Loader, then you need to obtain D2Loader version 1.09b11. Rename this to “7Lgame.exe” and place it in your Diablo II folder, overwriting the previous one.
“The Diablo II installation could not be found”: Try starting a single player game in normal Diablo II, but when you do so, be sure you are logged in as a user with Administrator privledges. (See the Control Panel-> Users to check on this.) Then quit out of D2, uninstall and re-install Seven Lances, and give it a try.
“Object Wscript not found” or something similar; the Seven Lances executable scripts require Windows Scripting Host in order to function. Normally this is installed standard with Windows, but some systems may not have this product installed. You can download this from Microsoft’s web site, for Windows 2000/XP or Windows 98, ME, & NT 4.0 .
.D2Accelerator: D2Accelerator is a program that can lower the detail on CPU-expensive effects to improve game performance. This is especially important in Seven Lances as many skills no longer have timers. D2Accelerator currently only supports 1.09 D2, but it will work fine with Seven Lances no matter what version of D2 you have installed. You can download D2Accelerator from sevenlances.net.
To start up D2Accelerator, select "Add a mod", type in "Seven Lances",
then navigate to the directory your put the Seven Lances MPQ, and select it. Now adjust it how you like, and click
"Apply Changes." Do NOT USE D2Accelerator's "Run Diablo II" to play, this circumvents the modified DLLs and will cause errors. Instead use the usual Seven Lances vbs files.
English Language: Seven Lances currently exists only in English. The mod will work with any national version of Diablo II; however when running Seven Lances, all text will appear in English.
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