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Exile Remaster


Old Beardo

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So am I correctly understanding that you magnificent fellows are working on re-configuring BoE to run properly on newer machine and thus not require a VM to run?

 

If so, are you also doing the scenario editor? And will scenarios created on the old version be able to be converted to the new format (mostly intact) or will it be a clean slate style thing?

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This version of CBoE works fairly well on newer versions of Windows. (If you want to install it outside your user folder, such as the default Program Files directory, you will need to run the installer as an administrator. It includes the scenario editor and runs classic BoE scenarios.
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If so, are you also doing the scenario editor? And will scenarios created on the old version be able to be converted to the new format (mostly intact) or will it be a clean slate style thing?

Yes, I'm doing the scenario editor. Scenarios from the old version can be converted to the new version, and scenarios that use new features in the version Tyran linked can also be converted to the new version, with the exception of the "Display Picture" special node which is too different in the new version to easily convert.

 

You can get experimental builds here. Note that there are more Windows builds simply because the only person who expressed significant interest was a Windows user - if you're a Mac user, just ask me and I'll make a new build.

 

I'm actually planning to upload a new Windows build in a couple of hours, so if you want the latest experimental build you might want to wait a bit.

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I can, but at the moment I'm not sure how much you'd be able to play it (there are apparently two or three major bugs). Anyway, I should be able to get it up within an hour or so. (Maybe a lot sooner; I think I just did a full rebuild not too long ago.) It'll be at the same place as the Windows builds.

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Hello again CM, thanks for taking the time to make that build.

But I can't get it to run, the program quits unexpectedly.

It seems that the debugger quits the program because of an unknown required load command (EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP))

I downloaded and tried all the BOE Mac builds I could find on your site but I encounter the same problem with them as well.

I'm using Mac OSX 10.5 (Intel).

 

EDIT: I found a version of BoE that runs on my Mac (yay!). Since my OS is prehistorical, I still have Rosetta (PPC emulator) so i downloaded the PPC version of BoE.

It works perfectly.

http://spiderwebforu...lades-of-exile/

I'll try the Intel builds on my other Mac.

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I'm building on OSX 10.7, so I'm not sure if I can help much, but if you send me the crash report details I may be able to fix it. (Though if your other Mac is newer, and it works there, perhaps there's not much point in fixing it for 10.5.)

 

The Boe Carbon version works as intended on OSX 10.5 and the other builds (whereunder your latest build) work fine on my newer Mac running 10.8.

 

Anyway, I can play BoE now so thanks alot for your time.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I downloaded the editor and am beginning a new scenario. Some questions and comments:

 

1. The "place monster" feature really slows down the computer, sometimes even causes the editor to quit.

2. Can't rename outdoor sections.

3. Is there any documentation of the editor? Not sure how some of the new features actually work.

4. Any chance of finding the Exile III descriptions of items? Maybe I could make an alternate bladbase with preset items with E3 descriptions.

5. How exactly was the 'sound' file unpacked, maybe I could switch out some sounds.

 

Thanks!

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Are you using Mac or Windows? Either way, you should be aware that some things are still broken. For example, saved games seem to not work correctly at the moment. Scenarios should be relatively safe though, since I have a suite of unit tests to ensure their integrity when loading and saving them (though it's not quite complete yet).

 

1. One of my commits awhile back fixed an issue that rendered the editor unusable, but had a major hit on performance. The reason is that instead of fixing the root cause, I rewrote the relevant code paths to avoid the issue. I haven't been able to figure out how to fix it properly yet, but it's something I'd like to do. I'm guessing this is what makes it slow, though I can't be sure.

 

2. Thanks for the report - I was unaware that the Outdoor Details dialog was broken. That looks like it should be easy to fix, so I'll probably have it done in a few minutes (though it could be awhile longer before I get around to making a fixed build, since there's one or two saved game bugs I want to resolve first).

 

3. There is documentation on Sylae's site, which I believe is linked in the forum header. I'm not sure when that was last updated, but I don't think there were any major changes recent enough to be missed from it. The documentation can also be found in the repository under docs/. It's mostly up-to-date on new features.

 

4. I have E3 and am able to extract the item descriptions, though the mapping from descriptions to items may not be entirely straightforward. On a related note, ADoS has also written descriptions for all the items in the bladbase (though I'm not entirely sure I agree with his tastes in all areas).

 

5. Sounds are now in data/sounds/ in the BoE root directory, as WAV files. A scenario can (at least theoretically) substitute individual sounds by including a file with the exact same name under its internal scenario/sounds/ directory (the scenario is a gzipped tarball). I think the scenario editor even has a dialog to add custom sounds, though it probably doesn't work for replacing default ones.

 

For what it's worth, there really isn't a good reason to be running 10.5 on an Intel Mac. Every Intel Mac that can run 10.5 can also run 10.6, and many applications require 10.6.8 or later.

However, that upgrade costs money, as far as I know.
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Thanks for the reply. The Outdoor Name works sometimes, but it should definitely be looked into. My question about the sounds is how they were converted from a Sound file to individual .WAV files. If I can get a list of descriptions, I could enter them manually (albeit it would be time consuming).

 

I'm on a Mac for reference, and my computer does tend to act up sometimes when not using Blades.

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BTW, Spiderweb Software DID NOT make the Exile III item descriptions available to the Blades of Exile project; only the stuff included in the BoE package was granted to us. That's one reason I wrote alternate item descriptions. Another is that many scenarios do not take place in the Exile universe, and references to cave food and such would make no sense in them, so I made universe-independent descriptions (except for items intrinsically tied to Exile, like Vahnatai weapons). I like most of them, CM doesn't like some of them I guess, but either way they'd be easily changeable by anyone who didn't like them. Changing them to non-free content like the E3 descriptions is playing with fire.

 

If you want to have a look, I THINK this is it: http://www.almightywebsite.com/awos/boe/d/bladbase.boes

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The Outdoor Name works sometimes, but it should definitely be looked into.

That's great to hear, as it supports my testing on the matter. The issue seems to have been a problem of uninitialized variables with garbage data. If you're able to compile yourself, you can pull from master whenever you want. Otherwise I'll have another build up eventually. After I fix saved games, probably. I'll make sure to make both Windows and Mac builds from now on.

 

My question about the sounds is how they were converted from a Sound file to individual .WAV files.
For the most part, those are original sound files from the Windows version, so if they were ever directly converted from the Mac 'snd ' resources, only Jeff would know how that was done. I did write a Python script that was able to convert most of the Mac sounds to WAV, but only a few sounds were actually re-extracted with it. (Actually I extracted most of them, and the script didn't work for a few of them as I recall, but most of them didn't seem to have any reduced quality relative to the WAV version, so I didn't commit them.) The original sounds are still in the repo here, if you want to compare for yourself. You'll need a resource editor, of course. (But it's a data-fork resource file, so no need to worry about the fact that it's stored on a non-HFS+ filesystem.)

 

If I can get a list of descriptions, I could enter them manually (albeit it would be time consuming).
I'd love to use Jeff's descriptions, and I suspect ADoS would too (even though he wrote some of his own), but permission would be needed from him to do so. I do have the strings though, so I could send them to you. I'll get on that at some point.
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I do love Jeff's descriptions; Jeff is one of my favorite writers, which is why I'm trying to update and improve Bandit Busywork. Most of the scenario sucks but for the writing itself, as far as I can see, even his throwaways are gold. But even if you could get permission (and you probably couldn't because he doesn't seem to want to be bothered with this project, reacting with annoyance when we pester him, if he reacts at all) I'd still be picky. Like I said, many, if not most, E3 item descriptions are very "Exiley". I'm really not convinced it would be worth it.

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It's a problem because many, if not most, of the most popular scenarios do not actually take place in the Ermarian universe at all. I prepared as many trilogy-neutral descriptions as I could in anticipation that, should activity ever pick up again, that trend will continue. I wrote the descriptions with the actual audience of the software in mind; not the literary roots of the program, which are great but often irrelevant and sometimes important to ignore, depending on what story you're telling.

 

Furthermore, depending on how much interest there is in the software once a stable release version is finished, there may possibly be many players and designers who had never even heard about Spidweb or Exile before finding this software, interested in making scenarios, but puzzled by all these references to games they've never played. It's GNU GPL 3.0 now, remember, so it really could go anywhere.

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Even 3 of the 4 'official' scenarios Spiderweb released with the game, do not take place within Exile.* It does not make sense to have item descriptions that are written for an isolated underworld civilization, when you are in, say, a surface metropolis.

 

Technically, most of the 4th one doesn't either, although it is at least underground in caves connected to Exile.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Okay, playing BoE again, starting with Valley of Dying Things. Some gameplay observations:

 

- The "Anama Member" trait doesn't work - I've made one PC Anama, but the player isn't registering that way, whether from the Character Editor or the Create New Party.

 

- The "Go Back" button doesn't work.

 

- As already stated, "Save" doesn't always work, have to use "Save As" for now.

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- The "Anama Member" trait doesn't work - I've made one PC Anama, but the player isn't registering that way, whether from the Character Editor or the Create New Party.

I'm a bit confused - are you saying it doesn't work at all (ie, the player can learn/cast mage spells), or that it simply isn't shown?

 

- The "Go Back" button doesn't work.

I remember fixing this awhile ago, but I guess it broke again. Sigh.

 

- As already stated, "Save" doesn't always work, have to use "Save As" for now.

Wait, does this mean that "Save As" correctly saves all your data? For example, not mysteriously losing spells you learned, or auto-healing you on load, or anything like that.
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The Anama Member doesn't show, haven't tried to use mage spells. As for the Save As, not sure, but I have noticed that SDFs don't reset when loading to an earlier version. For example, in VoDT, there's a special encounter with Hydras - died the first time, reloaded the game, but didn't get a second chance to fight the Hydras. Could be a huge problem w/ more important flags.

 

Also, the new editor seemed to undo all "hide town" settings. Some towns I know are supposed to be hidden in VoDT are visible - they were not set as visible in the editor now.

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I've also noticed some scenario bugs in VoDT, given that they didn't exist before, maybe something weird is going on. The Runed Stone won't open the gates of the School of Magery - looking at the editor, a "one-time and set" node is called with the same SDF before calling the dialog box, so the SDF sets before the gate can open with the stone. Don't know if the noding changed somehow, because this wasn't an issue when playing BoE before OBoE.

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If you edit Valley of Dying things and save it, you'll need to use the "Custom Scenario" button to run the edited version. Eventually (hopefully soon) the main "Start Scenario" will reference .boes instead of .exs, but I'm not quite confident yet in the losslessness of the conversion.

 

Also, custom scenarios are read from ~/Library/Application Support/Blades of Exile/Scenarios (for Mac), not from the Scenarios folder in the game directory.

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Doesn't it mention a filename or any additional details? As long as there's a filename mentioned, you could theoretically fix it by opening the scenario with an unarchiver program. Or if it's an error in the dialog itself, it could theoretically be fixed by editing its XML definition in data/dialogs. I can't really help just from a line number, though.

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If a storage tag is being referenced by the error, that could still mean quite a few things... a storage tag is only allowed inside the editor tag (though I doubt that would be the problem), and its children have specific types - most of the values need to be an integer, but is-property should be a boolean (ie, "true" or "false", without the quotes). The chance attribute on the item tag is also an integer. I'd be kinda surprised to see BoE writing invalid data, though... and did you even edit the item placement shortcuts? Is BoE giving nothing more than just "parse error"? If there's more that's a pain to copy down, you can use the Copy button in the error dialog to copy the full text to the clipboard, and if that still doesn't help, I guess you could send the scenario.xml for me to have a look?

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I'll try to do that, can I attach files to posts/PMs?

 

Finished VoDT (cheated via debug mode) to get into the School. Other bugs:

 

- Training in a level of Dexterity costs 503 gold per level, instead of 50.

- Special nodes diseasing the party don't work.

- Opening stone doesn't work in town 11 (Student Quarters)

- Steal Food ability doesn't work.

- Sometimes monsters from other towns pour into current towns. Specifically, when leaving Administration, Zombies/Ghouls showed up when the town doesn't have them, as did Talking Spiders (with town 9 personalities).

 

Some other notes (things I fixed in VoDT)

 

- Seems like other nodes become buggy when beginning with 'One-Time and Set', maybe it worked differently before, but should be eliminated as first node.

 

- Piercing Crystals are VERY weak, for a scenario where the party can't cast "Dispel Barrier", it's almost impossible to get past a Force Barrier. Ability strength is 1, maybe should be ~7.

 

- Alien beasts set to their E3 graphic.

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This won't address any of the things you just posted, but... I have put up a new build for both Mac and Windows.

 

I'll try to do that, can I attach files to posts/PMs?

Uhh... not as far as I know? I suppose you could pastebin the file's contents (though pastebin is normally meant for partial stuff). You could also email me the file (no idea if you have my email though). (Actually, since you're a mod, maybe you have attachment priveleges? You could check the full posting page just in case.)

 

- Training in a level of Dexterity costs 503 gold per level, instead of 50.

- Special nodes diseasing the party don't work.

- Opening stone doesn't work in town 11 (Student Quarters)

- Steal Food ability doesn't work.

- Sometimes monsters from other towns pour into current towns. Specifically, when leaving Administration, Zombies/Ghouls showed up when the town doesn't have them, as did Talking Spiders (with town 9 personalities).

These all seem like relatively easy things to fix (the first is probably just a typo). I'll work on them as soon as possible. (Hopefully the won't turn out to be harder than anticipated.)

 

- Seems like other nodes become buggy when beginning with 'One-Time and Set', maybe it worked differently before, but should be eliminated as first node.

This should probably be fixed in the engine rather than in the scenario. Is it possible to get a list of particular cases you had problems with?

 

- Piercing Crystals are VERY weak, for a scenario where the party can't cast "Dispel Barrier", it's almost impossible to get past a Force Barrier. Ability strength is 1, maybe should be ~7.

 

- Alien beasts set to their E3 graphic.

Hmm, something to think about fixing in the bladbase as well, once I get around to converting it to .boes. Actually, once all the scenarios are converted to .boes, I plan to apply all bladbase fixes (and possibly ADoS's descriptions) to all four of them.
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- Training in a level of Dexterity costs 503 gold per level, instead of 50.

- Special nodes diseasing the party don't work.

- Steal Food ability doesn't work.

- Sometimes monsters from other towns pour into current towns. Specifically, when leaving Administration, Zombies/Ghouls showed up when the town doesn't have them, as did Talking Spiders (with town 9 personalities).

Already addressed these. They were about as easy as I predicted - simple minor logic errors (in fact, I'd say all but the last were probably typos).

 

I'll probably look at the opening stone / One-Shot issue(s) tomorrow.

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I do not have your email address and can't find it.

 

Anyway (one-shot errors):

 

1) Opening the school gates.

2) Gate special encounters in NE Valley.

3) Temple node in corner of outdoor 0x0

 

Two other errors I forgot:

 

1) Generic Lever node graphic is a cave wall.

2) On the "buy response, set flag" node, the "not enough gold" response never triggers even if you don't have enough. However, gold isn't taken and flag doesn't set, so merely a aesthetic error.

 

What I can think of for now.

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I wonder how many other people are still playing?

 

Anyone who's interested in seeing my thoughts on the Valley of Dying Things can read them here: http://bainscenarioa...is.blogspot.com. Know we have CSR, but would be interested in discussing the scenario itself through comments as well. Know i could just do reviews here, but thought I could organize better with a blog.

 

Of course, if I could get a Blades/Spiderweb themed background- would be good too.

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As far as I know, no-one is really playing (or at least, anyone who is hasn't said anything) other than you and possibly ADoS. If you count the original, stable game, there might be a few others (I know one or two people on the forum didn't get the upgraded BoE mainly because it wasn't stable).

 

If I ever finish any of my scenarios, I wonder if anyone will even play them. I'll probably work on them anyway though. Eventually. (I especially want to finish the two-town one that uses a lot of the new features.)

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So, it looks like the parse error you got is fairly simple to fix in the engine (quick-fix for you would be to add something like <item chance="1">1</item> in the storage tag, I think). It's a matter of save and load disagreeing on whether you can have a storage shortcut with no items. I'm wondering though, couldn't you have posted the full error message like so?

 

There was an error loading the scenario. The details of the error are given below; you may be able to decompress the scenario package' date=' fix the error, and repack it.

 

XML Parse Error: Required element item missing in element storage (file scenario.xml, line 971, column 9).

[/quote']

 

I added the Copy button specifically to make it easier for people to report error messages; does it not work for you?

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If I ever finish any of my scenarios, I wonder if anyone will even play them. I'll probably work on them anyway though. Eventually. (I especially want to finish the two-town one that uses a lot of the new features.)

 

Well, I'd start, but I tend to get fed up and quit easily when I get stuck and go replay old favourites.

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Okay, started playing A Small Rebellion - two bugs:

 

1) the 'look' feature doesn't work outdoors sometimes (true in VoDT, forgot to mention it)

2) Started out with a bunch of special items I shouldn't have - believe that special items I received in VoDT pour into ASR (by their number - so, special item #4 in VoDT means I now have item #4 in ASR).

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Thought so, guess not. Some new bugs I found playing ASR:

 

1) The 'record' features in dialog and talking never work.

 

2) Some towns are set to leave at a different (X, Y) location through the Advanced Town Details. However, this relocation causes the game to crash - noticed this in the sewers and the icy tunnels.

 

3) Arrows don't poison (when using poison)

 

4) The SDF error I mentioned earlier sometimes applies to items - when reloading a game, items were taken away, but were no longer in the scenario. (I found a crossbow in Stalker's Fortress for example, reloaded to an earlier game, and didn't have the crossbow but the bow wasn't where I found it.)

 

5) The 'Simulacrum' spell keeps monsters even if reloading before spell cast. Monsters also appear to transfer to other scenarios (doesn't reset after end of scenario.)

 

6) Spell point costs on the second page of spells are listed wrong (correct amount still taken, however).

 

7) No particular pattern for what causes the 'look' ability to break outdoors.

 

FWIW, the link you posted earlier doesn't go to the most recent version. Just downloaded it now.

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