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Avernum 3 Template


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After creating the A1 Template I was curious to see whether the modular towns found in Exile 3 were used in Avernum 3. Looking at town 20 in A3, Template Town, I came to the conclusion that they do occur in A3 too.

I will be working on a new Avernum 3 Template, first I will need to sort out the item translations then work on the monsters& Currently I have a spreadsheet that can translate the floor and terrain of a town. Terrain translation array needs to be revised.

Edited by Ishad Nha
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The spreadsheet and the template will be updated daily. I managed to successfully port towns 0 and 1, the first two of the four versions of Krizsan.

Modular towns that are heavily wrecked will be restored when I find the time. Each module comes in a pair, the first member of the pair is intact, the other one is wrecked.

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I have the outdoors spreadsheet more or less functional. The dry ground terrain types, 134:136 and 159:160 in particular are causing problems. They apparently occur when the floor type is dry ground, 41:44. I am not currently sure of the exact rules for their placement,especially in the transition terrain types like 45:56.

(Here I am using the BoA translation numbers not the original A3 numbers which are usually different.)

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I am now able to port the outdoor zones at will, so far I have imported 27 of the 90.

My hunch is that the BoA toggling of G614/G616 for outdoor walls is a relic from Avernum 3. In A3 some of the terrain types are toggled according to whether the zone is surface or cave. From what I can see so far, the city walls on the surface are always terrain types 314 thru 321 while the cave city walls are types 306 thru 313.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The final 60 towns are the modular towns. They are tacked together using pre-existing modules. Town 20, Template Town is just a collection of these modules. Anyway, the A3 save file has the current town map and data record at offset 188,666. Using both the data from the save file and the data from the town.dat file the module towns can be assembled.

Now the save file has a one-size-fits-all format and module towns seem to be all medium size. This will require deleting every fourth line of map data.

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A spreadsheet for the modular towns has been devised.

There was a problem with town wandering monsters being assigned negative values for their monster type numbers, this could crash the BoA program when a party entered the relevant parts of the town concerned. This problem has been fixed in the latest edition of the template.

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  • 8 months later...
  • 6 months later...

Modular towns seem to have no height in them, they are totally flat like Exile 3 modular towns. Their town records have the standard A3 format:

General town information: 6,386 bytes

Terrain, floor, height and lighting

Text and dialog information

 

The town terrain, floor, height and lighting information is quite brief, it is recorded in a compressed format as modules and rectangles:

Start, Length, Function

6,386, 128, terrain modules [16]

6,514, 120, terrain/floor rectangles [10]

(6,634, variable, start of names and text)

 

All modules come from a totally flat town 20, hence they have no height information.

 

The list of modular towns is as follows:

120: Delan, 121: Delis, 122: Pergies, 123: Inn of Blades, 124: Silvar, 125: Colchis, 126: Farport, 127: Port Townsend, 128: Marish, 129: Bavner, 130: Hectar, 131: Kuper, 132: Fenris Port, 133: Softport, 134: Arrival Platform, 135: Kneece, 136: Name, 137: Gidrik, 138: Golddale, 139: Porter's Retreat, 140: Bolton, 141: Libras, 142: Lost Isle, 143: Storm Port, 144: Gorst, 145: Gebra, 146: Aminro, 147: Angel's Rest, 148: Lennus, 149: Squiggus, 150: Bengaro, 151: Dellston, 152: Poulsbo, 153: Appleton, 154: Malloc, 155: Isolated Inn, 156: Dorngas, 157: Calloc, 158: Wainscotting, 159: Bremerton, 160: Spineridge, 161: Mernia, 162: Greendale, 163: Tevrono, 164: Execa, 165: Vila, 166: Torria, 167: Northern Golem Spire, 168: Southern Golem Spire, 169: Eastern Golem Spire, 170: Western Golem Spire, 171: Moon, 172: Draigoth, 173: Erox, 174: Manara, 175: Ovdipur, 176: Dellskeep, 177: Wyvern Pass, 178: Name, 179: Name.

 

 

Making a decryptor spreadsheet was not too hard, the town record contains everything, except for the terrain in its expanded format. The latter can be found in the save file, when you go to the modular town concerned and save your game.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I have been able to make a spreadsheet that can decrypt the modular towns, 120 thru 179. It uses input from both the game save file and the Town.dat file. Hence, to use it you must enter the town concerned and save the game.

(You don't need to have the party wander all over Valorim: in the Outdoor.dat file the town entrance for Krizsan is found at offset 983,550. Just alter the number found there and reload the game, when you attempt to enter Krizsan you will in fact enter the town you chose in the Outdoor.dat file. Spreadsheet contains a list of the modular towns and their associated town numbers.)

Said spreadsheet is found at:

http://ishadnha.webs.com/A3ModularFileTownsDecryptor.zip

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  • 1 year later...

Modular towns have all been done, they were not so hard. Most modules come in pairs, you only need to replace the wrecked module with its normal twin. I created a copy of Town.dat and altered that. Then in A3 I entered the town and saved the game.

Four wrecked modules have no normal twins, I just used the 3D Editor for them. Another approach would be to try altering the wrecked modules in Town.dat, this is possible but tricky.

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  • 2 years later...

Avernum 3 Template has been finished off.

It broadly follows the conditions of the towns in the A3 game, with some exceptions. Various ruined towns were cleaned up by me for various reasons. This creates a pool of ready made towns that designers can place in scenarios.

Templates are no use when porting from a Blades of Exile scenario because all the work is already done. Ditto they are no use when the scenario is not set in the area of one of the first Avernum trilogy games.

 

I have not added the shops to the town dialog scripts but that could be easily done in the future.

 

Template is available at:

http://www.freewebs.com/ishadnha/A3Template.7z

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A3 is rather nice, A3 Remake should be interesting when it comes out...

 

A new version of the Template has been uploaded that fixes problem with Terrain types 155,156 occurring instead of 137,138 due to a flaw in my translation tables.

 

In the first Avernum trilogy I think the town and outdoor specials are encrypted in the game programs themselves. Town/outdoor records only show the numbers and locations of the specials, not what happens when they are triggered.

Town 84, Anim Data, the bottom three 'islands' of floor and terrain should be cave not surface. They are seen during the introduction cut scenes. I provided a corrected version in town slot 118. What the other islands do I don't know.

 

Now I am working on a list of the shops.

Edited by Ishad Nha
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  • 2 weeks later...

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