Kelandon

Is Erik Westra still around and working on this? We haven't seen an update in a while, and I haven't seen him around on the boards at all.

Erm, speaking as an ignorant non-programmer type, shouldn't you include in the patch all of the files that were changed from the old version, including (if necessary) the corescendata files? *goes to download a full new copy, not knowing what else might be different* EDIT: *ack* *discovers that the patch to 1.1 is all there is... the full version downloads as 1.0.1*

He still hasn't fixed that? Drakey and I both e-mailed him when v1.0.0 came out, and I can understand him ignoring me, but Drakey was a beta tester. Makes me wonder why we bother at all...

You're still on your Mac, right? Put the two new apps for v1.1 (the BoA app itself and the scenario editor) right next to the old apps, or where the old apps used to be. You shouldn't have to do anything else. Don't change the titles of any of the folders. The BoA editor goes in the Blades of Avernum Files folder.

Those aren't general enough, I believe. One is for custom terrain with special property 8 and the other is for custom terrain scripts. I'm not quite sure how one would do this. It seems simple enough, but I don't know.

*notes this down for future reference* EDIT: It does make the text rather small. Oh well.

A couple more BoA idiosyncracies: * The overload limit on calls is 8000. After 8000 calls, BoA returns an error saying that you have an infinite loop. I produced this using the code: j = 0; k = 0; while [j < 1] {print_num[k] k = k + 1; } All parentheses are replaced with brackets, because UBB doesn't like parentheses, for some reason. * BoA rounds down non-integers. For BoA, [25 / 4 == 6] is TRUE. Using %, you can get an exact value, though. * Although the character _ shows up as " in dialogs, it does NOT in text bubbles or printed strings. Thus message_dialog["The dude says, _Yo!_",""] pops a dialog that says The dude says, "Yo!" but print_str["The dude says, _Yo!_"] prints the string The dude says, _Yo!_ I think this is a bug, not just an idiosyncracy, because it means that we can't display double quotes in text bubbles or printed strings, so I e-mailed Jeff about it. I don't know if he will change this for a later version.

I am heartened. As long as Jeff keeps speaking of "future versions," we have time to find bugs and report them with the reasonable hope of getting them fixed. While I appreciate the new string manipulation calls in particular, I am dismayed not to see two powerful but relatively simple calls that are still not there: missile animation and numeric input. Missile animation could work along the same lines as the zaps: void put_missile_animation(short source_x,short source_y,short dest_x,short dest_y,short which_missile_type) All it would do is run the animation associated with firing a missile of type which_missile_type. Numeric input would work along the lines of textual input: short get_numeric_response(string top_text) Thus the player could input a number and have it saved as a variable or put into an sdf or anything else one can do with a short. If you want to know how this could possibly be useful, look at my HLPM and how clunky the intro dialogs are. There are a few others that I wish could be in there, too, but these sound possible to implement, whereas I know I'm dreaming about some of the others. Oh, and also, now that I'm mentioning it: it seems like the textual input could work with the string manipulation calls now. So instead of: void get_text_response(char top_text) it could be string get_text_response(string top_text) so that we could save these strings and check on them later, and maybe even throw the party's own words back at them. *fingers crossed*

Quote: I disagree that everything should be clear with 100% certitude. Then, happily, it's not me that you're disagreeing with. I don't think this is necessary either. I do wish that it could be developed more, but not necessarily completely. Amazingly enough, I agree with almost everything that Vent's previous post said. I still reserve a few points of disagreement, but I think they're minor enough I'm not going to enumerate them. Yeah, Creator, that scen was mine. I'd been debating whether to claim it or not -- I remember it being terrible, despite the kind comments that I've received about it -- but I've decided that I will. It'll be on my website by the end of today. (And my website will be in my sig.)

Quote: you weren't really addressing what I consider the point of this discussion. Maybe not, but I was addressing what I consider to be the point of the discussion. Quote: People keep talking about whether VoDT had plot holes or not I tried (and evidently failed) to make the point that the plot holes were inextricably linked to the success or failure of the moral of the story. I agree with Boots. This has to be a first. If I've learned anything from this thread, it's that we should encourage more people to post over on the Lyceum's CSR. I hadn't read anything that criticized ASR for its handling of morality until now, but now that I read some, I think some of these criticisms are valid. In BoE, ASR scores very high, at about the level of Brett Bixler's best scenarios.

Qalnor, calm down. If that's what you wanted, I misunderstood you. I'm not being evasive. I don't think that VoDT was supposed to contain a statement about pollution. I don't know how much clearer I can say that. However, I do think it's possible to assume there's a moral in there and try to find one. If this is the part of my opinion that you're confused about, I'll try to explain further. A few years ago, I wrote a little-known BoE scenario called NK0: Prologue. I didn't intend for it to have any kind of moral. It wasn't supposed to be a statement about anything. However, I imagine that one could poke around in it and find a moral somewhere. For example, it contains an episode in which one person in charge of a ship cheats the other person in charge of the ship. If the party helps out the captain being cheated, completely unasked, then the party gets rewarded. You could argue that the moral to that is, "Good deeds bring rewards." It completely wasn't an intentional statement, but it's there; is it a valid thing to bring up in talking about this scenario? I don't know, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and talk about it. I've said that I don't think that Jeff intended for VoDT to make a statement about pollution, but I don't think I've said that means that VoDT can't contain a statement about pollution at all. So I guess the answer to your question is: I acknowledge the ambiguity. I think that there are two equally valid different readings of VoDT, one of which is that it is a lesson on pollution and the other of which is that it is not. It's not that one is correct and the other isn't. They're both valid readings based on the scenario. I *do* think that VoDT doesn't contain a well-written and convincing statement about pollution, and for me, that's enough for the purposes of this discussion. At this point, I think the Creator's article describes one valid reading of VoDT as if it were the only valid reading, which is a bad idea, but I also think that VoDT is not the right scenario to emulate in order to create an effective scenario with a moral. I'm not on any particular "side," either favoring the Creator's article or opposing it; this isn't a war. I'm just participating in a discussion. No, VoDT didn't come off as preachy to me, but it didn't come off as reasoned or thought-provoking either. I hope that explains my point of view enough that you understand. On another note, ef, that's interesting. I think I'll take a look at that throne room again.

Quote: What exactly is your point, Kelandon? My main point was the last paragraph of that post, not the preceding ones. I don't think that Jeff attempted to use VoDT to say anything about pollution. I also think that if we assume that VoDT is a statement about pollution, it is a fairly shallow one. Therefore I think it is not the right scenario from which to draw inspiration if one wants to write a successful story with a moral attached to it. My agreement with the article goes exactly that far. You may find my ideas contradictory in places because I have changed my mind a few times in light of the evidence (which I think is a good thing to be able to do). The above paragraph states my position right now. That was not my original position. For example, Vent is clearly right that in Jeff's head, the reason for not cleaning up the waste was lack of time. He has found text (finally) that demonstrates that. EDIT: For clarity.

I have a certain fondness for the sliths. This will be explained/demonstrated when my BoA scenario comes out.

Vent, other than having copied virtually all of the text out of VoDT, I'm not sure what point you were trying to prove. EDIT: Presumably that it was, in fact, a good archeological scenario. If so, you missed my point completely. And yeah, read the Creator's last post again, because I say the same thing. EDIT 2: Now that I have a moment to explain, I will. Every snippet of archeological evidence there answers one question, but raises two more that are never answered. I had not noticed the shade saying, "The School was only given one week to close. For this reason, much virulently poisonous waste was left inside" (and I'm guessing neither had anyone else, because this would be the FIRST bit of evidence that anyone who was making the case that the waste was not cleaned up for lack of time should cite). It convinces me that this was, in fact, the reason in the designer's mind that the School wasn't closed. It still doesn't cohere with the rest of the story, but this was Jeff's reason. Palhatis had time to MAKE AN INTELLIGENT SHADE AND STICK HIM IN THE CONTROL AREA, but he didn't have time to PRESS A BUTTON. And Thuryl's point is correct: pressing the button did NOT release some unknown danger. The mages were familiar with the cleanup system, because THEY BUILT IT. And moreover, the statement, "he made sure that the controls to the waste disposal unit remained. These controls might still be activated," indicates that Palhatis specifically knew what the controls did. The whole time I was reading over those messages, when I played BoE's VoDT, BoA's VoDT, and now, too, I've been thinking, "This is all very interesting, but there is much more to this story." Palhatis's statement, "my speaking out against the evacuation and what we're leaving behind have only made me enemies," seems to indicate that Vinnia hates him and eventually murders him primarily because he wants to clean up the waste. In other words, Palhatis had time to make an entire covert setup for someone else to come along and push a couple of buttons and clean up all of the waste, but there was so little time before the school closed that cleaning up the waste would delay the closing of the school and therefore anger the Empire. This doesn't make sense. Yes, one can make up explanations that turn all of this into reasonable plot material. But a true archeological scenario would not require the player to invent explanations to fill plot holes. The story of what had happened before would become central to gameplay. Having said all of this, I still like VoDT. I don't think these points are critical to the enjoyment of the scenario. I just think it could've been better if more was done with this.

Okay, well, I'll assume Vent's post was made in good faith, then. That said, Vent, the piece of text that I quoted is the direct analog to the "about 130 years for a dated Empire order" that you found in BoE. It comes from the exact same order, but in BoA. You could at least give me enough credit to know the difference between "loose text" (of which there is very little in the BoA included scenarios) and real game text. About point 2, um, if you just dismiss what I'm saying without giving reasons, I can't really have a discussion with you. I don't really want to discuss this point, though, so it's fine by me if we just agree to disagree here. Quote: So some possibilities linked with indirect clues In my opinion, the very phrasing of this gives away the problem with it: you're listing possibilities that you came up with based on indirect clues. The central issue of pollution is the reason why people pollute. The way to have a scenario that delved into the pollution therefore would be to have extended reasons for the pollution within the scenario that are described at length. By making the reasons for the pollution be so indirect, VoDT makes its treatment of pollution superficial. Quote: My problem is that the scenario hasn't those choices, isn't wrong to not make them and then is a wrong example for this article Again I say: VoDT is not a terrible scenario for lacking in moral depth. But let's be clear here: are you saying that the scenario would not be better if Vinnia's motives were explored more thoroughly? If it truly is an archeological scenario, then let's do archeology! Lay pieces of evidence all over the deserted school, and let the player piece them all together! That would be really fun, I think. About your edited part: as usual, I have no idea what you're talking about. Or rather, I think I do, but it seems rather childish, and the fact that you're "joking" doesn't make it any better.

I'll let someone else handle this one. He's trying to provoke me again. Quote: ha bah you're just a kid!

Meh, since this conversation is still going, I will in fact read and respond to this post. I was tempted to say, "tl, dr," but I figured that would be out of line. You didn't find the date that I cited in the BoE scenario because it's not there. I cited the text document and state out of the BoA scenario (which apparently was a part of my post you didn't care to read -- I *did* cite my source). However, Jeff changed the dates between Exile and Avernum, so the comparable node in Exile gives the date that you mention. Quote: No, if there's a the 'baddie', it's Vinnia and the scenario is very clear about that. Do you ever fight Vinnia or attempt to dispose of Vinnia? No. But do you ever fight pollution or attempt to dispose of it? Yes. The term was meant in a gameplay sense, that the player spends most of the scenario trying to defeat pollution, not trying to defeat Vinnia. And heck, if anything, Vinnia and pollution are on the same side. Quote: I can't agree at least from a player point of view. I strongly enjoyed this scenario and I never wanted that Jeff give me more morale stuff about pollution. That's more agreeing with his point than disagreeing with it. You would've complained about the scenario having a Point To Make and wouldn't have enjoyed the lecture. The idea is to do it in a subtle manner. And to your archeological point of view: while it is reasonable for the scenario not to give us everything, it is not reasonable for the scenario to give us virtually nothing. A scenario that involves some moral is an argument. It cannot make its point well without making points that link together to prove some eventual thesis. If the component threads don't fit together, then it fails in its argument. If VoDT has anything to say about pollution (which I still don't really think that it does, but let's just assume), it says those things poorly because it does not make an analogy to real pollution -- and it does not do so because of the points that you claim are "merely" plot points. It doesn't have an analogy to real pollution because we have to make up the reasons that the pollution is there, perhaps with a buried hint or two that don't even particularly make sense. But again, we're overinterpreting this. VoDT is not necessarily a bad scenario because its moral is not developed. Whether VoDT is good or bad doesn't really have anything to do with it (and I rather liked the scenario, incoherent moral or not). It is just not the scenario that one would want to emulate in order to write a scenario with a well-done moral, which is what the Creator was saying in the article. BoA's ASR handles morality far better, and certain BoE scenarios do it even better than ASR.

Yeah, Thuryl said it as far as ASR is concerned. I ended up siding with the Hill Runners, but I felt pretty uncomfortable doing so. Like Thuryl, I don't think that ZKR tried to have a moral, although I'm not sure that VoDT really does either. But that's a different question, one that we haven't really discussed yet, whether VoDT attempts to moralize or not. If we assume that it does, a problem with VoDT is that the moral doesn't make sense. I think it's safer to say that VoDT tries to moralize than that ZKR does, because ZKR doesn't really have anything to do with the relationship between sliths and humans, whereas VoDT does have something to do with pollution throughout the whole story. Really, the sliths are completely unnecessary to ZKR (which is probably part of the reason that people dislike it, as the Lyceum\'s CSR will attest). If I remember the scen correctly, you don't see the sliths at any point in the scenario. Darn. I go to all this effort to write a well thought-out post, and then I read it over, and I realize that all I really want to say that is relevant to the discussion at hand is that I agree with Thuryl. Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut. EDIT: Cut out some of the rambling. EDIT 2: And really, the article didn't call VoDT terrible in its heavy-handedness. It says, "Now, VoDT is hardly the worst offender in these cases." It's not really all that excessive with the preachiness; it just probably could've been improved if the characters' motivations had been developed more thoroughly and the morality explored a bit better. Regardless of whether it's a bad scenario, I don't know that anyone would argue that the scenario wouldn't be better if it went into further depth about why the pollution wasn't cleaned up in the first place, even though all the mechanisms were there. Saying as little as, "We didn't have a power source, and one would've cost money, and we figured that the barrels would hold," would be something, at least.

God, that's mysterious. I had a piece of code that I could've sworn worked in v1.0.1 that stopped working as soon as I made the switch over to v.1.1, and it started working again as soon as I changed the species_in_party part of it. Now I can't replicate it working in the old version, though, so I must be wrong. *grumbles about the mysterious nature of BoA coding*

Some changes that I've found: I think species_in_party works differently now than it did in v1.0.1. I had some code that worked fine before, but it gave me trouble for a little bit before I figured out what was going on. Now species_in_party(1) doesn't check for humans. I don't know what it checks for, but we have to do species_in_party(0) to check for humans. I don't know if this affects Khoth's scenario, which is the only one that I know of that uses this call so far, but it was the first thing that came to mind. Also, the call print_num prints in red, "Debug Value:" before the number. I guess it does that because it is under "Debugging Procedures," but it didn't used to. To print a number by itself now, we have to append it to the string buffer, put the string buffer into a string variable, and then print that string variable. Anyone else notice other differences?

Quote: I don't much agree with you on that other thread That is why I'd rather that you not judge me by that thread. I became rather irritated over a period of several hours in a cross-thread discussion with someone who seemed to be trying to provoke me. I'd rather that you judge me by what I say in, for example, the Avernum Trilogy or Exile Trilogy forums, where I help people out by pointing them in the right direction. I can be irritable and disagreeable, but I try to be nice.

EDIT: Okay, rewrite. Qualnor, that is not what I think at all. I'm not saying (and I don't think anyone here has said) that all scenarios should have something deep and meaningful to say, even at the expense of them being fun. I'm saying (and I think the point of the Creator's article is) that IF the scenario makes the pretense of having something deep and meaningful to say -- which I'm not sure that VoDT does, but it could be interpreted that way -- then it should deal with the subject well. That, I don't think, is a controversial statement. Its application to VoDT is a bit questionable, but I think it's questionable for different reasons than anyone else has brought up so far. I don't think VoDT has anything to say about pollution. I don't think Jeff wrote it with the intent of making a statement on pollution. I think that's why the scenario treats the issue the way that it does. Thus, I don't think the Creator's points in this article apply. However, if we were to assume that the scenario was attempting to treat the issue of pollution, then we could examine what VoDT has to say about the issue. Assuming that, which I've been doing (with some reservations) all along, then VoDT treats the issue in a rather poor fashion. The most critical issue in pollution is: what are we willing to lose, environmentally speaking, in order to gain some outcome, usually with regards to business or profits of some kind? That is to say, the reasons that we pollute are of tremendous importance to the issue -- and of greater importance than any other aspect of the issue, I'd think. Now, VoDT has virtually no discussion of this. Aside from the one message to which Vent rightly referred, suggesting that the mages didn't have enough time to activate the waste removal system -- which still isn't particularly coherent with the rest of the story for the reasons that Thuryl and I gave -- VoDT does not discuss the reasons that we pollute. As Kyna rightly pointed out, if the explanation of the reason for the pollution is not in the game, or if it is so breezed over -- one hint buried in one message that was, if I remember correctly, in a drawer somewhere? -- that one need almost invent the explanation, then the game has in effect not dealt with this aspect of the issue at all. Since it does not deal with the single most critical aspect of the issue, it cannot possibly be said to have treated the issue with any sort of depth, thus violating the spirit of the Creator's article. I value scenarios for their entertainment value at least as much as, if not more so than, their artistic value -- but I don't know to what extent it is possible to separate the two in the case of a scenario that proposes to deal with a serious issue. I don't really think that VoDT attempted to deal with the issue of pollution, but if we assume that it did, then I think it dealt with the issue badly. EDIT 2: Moreover, I don't think anyone has said that the scenario is better for not dealing with the issue seriously. That would be rather absurd. Some people have tried to argue that VoDT *does* treat the issue with a certain degree of seriousness, and others have argued that it doesn't. At least, that's how I've understood the discussions.

Wow, Vent. I have no idea what you just said to Kyna (typical "clan" attitude?), but it sounded purposelessly insulting. And I just figured I'd let you know: I will no longer read nor respond to your posts, neither here nor on the Lyceum. It'll save the both of us (and everyone else) a lot of hassle.

I was wondering the same thing, but then I noticed that certain calls had this disclaimer following them: This call was added for Scenario Format Version 2, only use it with Mac version 1.1 or later or Windows version 1.0 or later. I did a search on this in Word, and I think I saw all of the new calls. Other than the string manipulation calls, it looks like there's only get energy char_give_item move_to_loc_x_y char_has_item_of_class_equip I haven't found any other changes yet.

This is really cool! It's good to see that you added some of the calls that we wanted, like get_energy and char_has_item_of_class_equip. I can't wait to start messing around with string manipulation! Windows users need wait only a tiny bit longer... EDIT: Um, btw, where is that patch for the app? I just downloaded a full new version of the editor, but there is the slight problem that a new copy of the app would be unregistered.