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Kelandon

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  1. Just to be clear, your original post compared Geneforge 2: Infestation (2024) to Geneforge: Mutagen (2021). Those are completely different games, albeit with similar engines. Geneforge 2: Infestation (2024) is a remake of an earlier Geneforge 2 (2003). My understanding is that Geneforge 2: Infestation (2024) has a largely similar plot to Geneforge 2 (2003), but a substantially tweaked engine. So if you're playing Infestation and thinking it's similar to Geneforge 2, yes, it's a remake. If you're playing Infestation and thinking it's similar to Mutagen, I guess sorta? But not really.
  2. Leave it up! This is better articulated than previous iterations.
  3. Lots and lots of clues in your original post.... No shame in having irritated a lot of people almost 20 years ago. I know I did, around the same time.
  4. This is the first Queen's Wish thread that I've clicked on in what must be years. I was not disappointed.
  5. Given that early Blades community savaged the plot and pacing of E3/A3 while praising the same aspects of E2/A2, I'm not sure that your opinion that they are "blatantly incredibly similar" is universally held. More generally, to Aventari's question, from Jeff's occasional statements about his business methods, my understanding is that Spiderweb does very little (nothing?) in the way of market research. So it's entirely possible that Spiderweb knows differences in game sales and has little more than conjecture to answer why those differences exist.
  6. AAHHHHH I am very close to breaking through my Chapter 3 block. This thing wrote like absolute garbage in the first drafts, and the combat design is probably even worse, but nothing that a few rewrites during alpha testing won't fix. I have a little ways left to go—basically a town and a half of combat—and then I can go back and try to fill in little bits and pieces and some of the more important side quests before I start alpha testing. I've done enough rewrites on the ending of Chapter 3 that it reads well. It is long, and I will have to see during alpha testing whether it drags on. But the first version of it was bad, and I've managed to rewrite it to not be bad. I'll have to do the same to the rest of Chapter 3.
  7. If the game predates the use of scripts (as Nethergate probably does), then the Mac version stores the text in a way that a resource editor can access, if you can find a resource editor that still runs. Not sure how it's stored on Windows.
  8. When there's something to report, I'll post it here. For now, nothing much to say.
  9. You should be able to get pretty far even with pretty bad skill selections given how far I made it without using skill points at all. I know that's not very helpful, though.
  10. Friendly reminder that if you're talking about things that have not been released yet (or frankly even things that have recently been released), you should use spoiler tags.
  11. The introduction text is in the bas file itself. You have to use a scenario editor to access it.
  12. Each Blades of Avernum scenario has scripts that are ordinary text files. If you wanted to do a translation, you'd go into the scripts to edit or extract the text there.
  13. Kelandon

    Where to start?

    If you're playing only an hour or so at a time every now and then, and you don't want a lot of options, I'd probably recommend the Avernum series. Geneforge and (I think, didn't get very far) Queen's Wish have lots of choices that affect the way things unfold. Avadon might be confusing, frankly, because the setting has lots of factions and places and it's easy to lose track of it all. I think that at least Avadon 1 is best played as a single immersive experience—like a binge-play over a weekend. I think you could pick up Avernum for an hour at a time every few days and not lose the thread of what you're doing. Nethergate is also excellent, but I'm not sure whether it even runs on modern Macs, and like Avadon, it might be better if played more continuously.
  14. I've started tinkering again. I'm working on the Ihrghthen sequence. If I can just design some combats, I should have the main quest line for Chapter 3 more or less created and ready for testing. Loads of side quests still to create, though. We'll see how far my current momentum takes me. I did manage to register both a Mac version and a Windows version of BoA, so—for the first time—I should be able to reproduce Windows-only bugs. Another nice thing about the new setup is that I can just suspend the virtualization exactly where it is—meaning that when I come back, all the programs and files that I need are open, just where I left them. I use about five different applications to design for BoA, and some of them requiring three or four different files, so this is a significant convenience.
  15. Unfortunately, I got extremely busy and basically haven't been able to work on this for the past six months. On Tuesday, I took a major step I'd been avoiding for a while—I upgraded my operating system to something that won't run BoA or any of the scenario design tools anymore. But I did so only after setting up VMWare Fusion to run OS 10.7, which will run BoA and all of the tools. So I should still be able to work on this as soon as time clears up. I honestly don't know when that will be, but I am hoping it will be soon. I have a much clearer head about where I want to go with the rest of Chapter 3 at this point, whenever I get time to work on it. By the way, the sheer amount of emulation/virtualization on my computer at this point is overwhelming. I have BasiliskII running OS 7.5.3, SheepShaver running OS 8.6, VMWare Fusion running OS 10.7, and VirtualBox running Linux. I also dual-boot OS 12.3 and Windows 10, and I have emulators for nearly every major console from the '90s. Plus ScummVM. One update is that, over the past year, I've been learning C/C++. And now I know that the interesting thing about the special spell/ability system is not that I was using states as functions, which lots of people do in BoA. What's interesting is that, without knowing it, I was using states essentially to take the place of structs. A special spell/ability has a whole bunch of associated values—energy cost, required skill level, etc. But since a scenario script 1) doesn't have structs and 2) can't use more than 10 variables overall, I stored all the variables for each spell/ability in its own state and called that state when I needed to load that spell/ability's values—essentially loading that struct into memory. It ended up pretty complex because, owing to the limitations of BoA, I could only have one struct in memory at a time, but nonetheless it is a lot better than what I did in Exodus.
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