Kelandon

I'm not sure that we can call the Blades games Jeff's. BoA will be the community's best game so far, I think. Seriously, this scripting engine rocks. And if Jeff is actually telling the truth when he claims that he will support it better than he did BoE -- and it already looks like he is and he will -- then we'll have a really good system here. Geneforge commies. Jeez. EDIT: Just realized that I was posting on the Geneforge board. I love Geneforge! It's the best! Well, it's good, anyway.

Yes. Especially since when you approach that wall, the game tells you that the wall is there because you're not registered.

Err, that's really odd, for the both of you. This sounds like a real Tech Support issue. Have you tried e-mailing Jeff? To the best of my knowledge, all SW games try to switch to 800 by 600, but I don't really know anything. You can muck with the preferences to tell them not to take up the whole screen and not to switch resolution, which together might solve your problem -- because then you get the games in a window, rather than as a screen.

Because no one else has stepped up to the plate, I feel that I must. To vahnatai_hell_fyre: in general, AIMspeak (substituting "r" for "are," "4" for "for," and the like) is frowned upon around here. To stay remotely on topic, I liked the vahnatai of A2, but not of A3. Jeff made them too one-dimensional in A3. ("We still hate the Empire, and that is the single motivation behind all our actions.")

Yes. Many. I don't entirely know why. Jeff wanted to demonstrate using custom objects scripts so that we would have examples to work from, but other than that I don't know.

Skill potions are an Exile thing. Knowledge Brews (which varied in power -- 5 skill points in A1, 3 in A2 and A3) were the norm in Avernum. I had never seen a skill potion until I played BoE.

Specifically, "A character who joins the party must have its own script. When in combat mode, they will act according to its script. When do_attack is called, the character will look for targets and attack them. It will not, however, move too far from the party when hunting targets." Hrm. I don't like this. I'm not sure why, but it sounds bad. You may be able to get away with putting in "basicnpc" instead of leaving the character's script blank. I haven't tried it, but BoA might only object if you leave the char's script as Default. EDIT: btw, GIFTS, you're using the wrong "your." It should be "you're," as in "you are."

I can see the scenario now: Grah-Hoth and the newly evil-ified GIFTS attempt to take over Bigail... regardless, it would still be better than War on Bigail.... I could've sworn I'd posted in this topic already, but it must have been an identical one from a few months back. I'd live in Lorelei and go to the University of Valorim (kinda similar to my current life, come to think of it). Giants beware! Level 60 Kelandon with Mage Spells and Priest Spells at 20 coming through!

Yeah, lighting control would be nice. We were told that such a thing would be possible with scripting. EDIT: I'm faking numeric input with HLPM v1.0.3 (not yet released), so I withdraw that request. I'd still really like to see missile animations, though. From the old topic, set_year and approach_location would be nice, too, the former much more so than the latter.

The call run_animation_sound is fine. I'm just guessing here, but do you need a space between the semi-colon and the comments? Like, beginstate 11; // Potion of Boom Which line is it saying is the problem? EDIT: The docs' description of a procedure error is especially unhelpful. Wow. Something went wrong trying to use this function. That's why the error is there. No kidding. That's helpful.

I haven't tested this at all, but it seems like all you have to do is replace the line Code: if (run_pick_lock(get_mechanism_difficulty) == FALSE) { with Code: reset_dialog_preset_options(10);choice = run_dialog(1);if (choice == 2) {if (get_stat(char_with_highest_skill(15)),15) < get_mechanism_difficulty()) { However, that doesn't take into account lockpicks, as far as I can tell. You may have to check for that manually with a char_has_item call, since I don't see a char_has_item_with_ability call or anything approaching that.

Ah, here we go. It was a custom terrain, but a default graphic. Sheet 744, icons 5-8. EDIT: Not sure why you didn't just do what I did: open VoDT, go to town 10, and look at the terrains there. Since it has custom terrains, go to the scenario's custom objects script, find the right terrain, and check the sheet number. EDIT 2: Wait, now I get it. You didn't realize that those were custom terrains, since they had the same editor icon as stairs. Righto.

More importantly, they are 5-7-5 in JAPANESE, and Japanese syllables are much shorter than English syllables usually are. Haiku in English are often shorter than 5-7-5. I wasn't going to say anything, but since it came up....

Terrain types 74-121 are slopes of various kinds. Westra\'s Cookbook has a pretty good description of this sort of thing, under "Hills and Heights." EDIT: Not sure if this is what you meant, though.

You need to set their memory cells. For basicnpc, you need to set memory cell 3 to the node that you want the char to start with. Personality does very little.

FBM, it is also impolite to be annoying deliberately. As this appears to have been an accidental double-post, I'm guessing all but the most petty will let it slide. To were244: I'm sure you'd get a bunch of people talking if you came up with an interesting subject. There are plenty of people on these boards who have played GF, but we need a topic for discussion.

Nothing else? Really? No one has other calls that they'd like to see thrown in?

Check if you set areas to be on the surface or in caves. (This is a button in Basic Details, either Basic Town Details in the Town menu for towns or Basic Outdoor Details in the Outdoor menu.) In the caves, it is always dark as night. As for the dialogue script, it would be helpful to know what error you are getting.

It would probably be helpful to know what error you're getting. It prints in red when you first enter the town.

As Alorael said, A1 and A2 are almost completely unaffected by time, to the best of my knowledge. Aside from the instances that Alorael cited (special effects on particular days and one minor thing), time has pretty much no effect. EDIT: And for that matter, none of the major or even semi-major quests have much happen to them because of time in A3. The quests that change are very minor.

Avernumscript is not hard. I did not know one bit of programming prior to attempting it, and I can handle it just fine. Well, I mean, it does take dozens of code experiments, months of effort, and a message board or two in order to figure it out, but it's not too bad, as far as these things go. I think I'll write an article that covers some of the basics, something that covers a little bit more advanced material than the BoA docs but is not as hard to understand as just reading through the calls in the Appendices.

I think it is time to bring this back, now that Windows users have gotten a chance to see the BoA system. The final results from the old one are here . Remember, the ideal calls to suggest are easy to implement and powerful once implemented. I don't think Jeff is going to do too much more to BoA in order to increase its capabilities, so we should keep these relatively mundane. I still wish we had numeric input and missile animations. They are both simple. Numeric input is a short that requests a number from a player. You could save it as an SDF or a variable or whatever else you want to do with numbers. Missile animations would work much like the other animation calls right now, but they would send a missile animation from one spot to another. The calls would look like this, maybe: void put_missile_animation(short source_x,short source_y,short dest_x,short dest_y, short which_animation) short request_number() I also wish we had a is_beam_on_space(short loc_x, short loc_y) that would return a 1 for yes, 0 for no, in order to make controlling beam projectors and mirrors and the like easier. Then again, I'm probably just dreaming with that one. Others?

I think one of the issues is that if you spend too much time talking about the scen and not enough time making it, then it won't ever get finished. I pretty much have the first half finished right now, and I have a town-by-town and plot-point-by-plot-point outline of the rest of the scen, so I'm not too worried about finishing this thing. The only question is when, and that, I don't know. Whether I will finish any of the other scenarios that I have in my head, well, that's another question.

Also read the articles in the Scenario Workshop. Take them all with a grain of salt, but they are useful in order to get you thinking. EDIT: here , because it is rather hard to find.

Quote: I am not sure that I am going to be able to make BoA work with every text editor using every setting. You know, Jeff, all you have to do is guarantee it with a particular free text editor (say, BBEdit Lite for Mac and some other program for Windows) and then say tell everyone that if you don't use those programs, it's your own problem.