Kelandon

Have you checked the value of the flag at that point? Is flag (16,7) actually equal to 1 when you want it to be? I don't see anything obviously problematic otherwise, if you're not getting some kind of error messages.

I've finally got around to playing Avernum 6, and I've found myself doing something really weird: I'm not using any skill points, except on Tool Use for one character and tiny amounts of Nature Lore and Arcane Lore. This started sort of as an accident. I saw that there were trainers for really basic skills, like Melee Weapons, Pole Weapons, and Mage Spells, so I decided not to spend any skill points on those until I got to those trainers. But I wasn't sure what I wanted to spend skill points on, so I ended up not using basically any at all for a while. And that while stretched into what I assume is the third of the game or so. Where I am at this point: My characters range from level 14 to level 18. Levitt just sent me into the Eastern Gallery to deal with Silvar, etc. My level 18 character has 78 skill points to spend, and, other than the character who became my lockpicker — who has a Tool Use of 12 now — everyone else is comparable. My party looks like this: Slith (no traits): dual wielding melee fighter Slith (Divinely Touched and Elite Warrior): pole fighter Nephil (Divinely Touched and Pure Spirit): priest/archer Nephil (Divinely Touched and Natural Mage): mage/archer (I intended to give the first character the same traits as the second, but by accident I didn't.) Because of the traits, I gain in some skills as I gain levels, and I've been buying skills from various trainers. I'm also playing on Hard, not Torment. But I'm kind of shocked that I've gotten this far, and I'm going to see how much farther I can make it before I am so severely underpowered that I can't do anything. I already can't do a lot of the challenge sidequests (the skribbane eaters near Almaria have been mocking me for some time, and I haven't even begun to work my way through the Honeycomb), but I can still do the main quests up to this point. I keep thinking of the comparison between this and Exile, where I think level mattered a lot less. (That's how all those BoE players were able to beat ridiculous scenarios with parties that entered at level 1.) I think that skills mattered in Exile in a way that they don't matter in Avernum, and levels matter in Avernum in a way that they didn't in Exile. I am getting stronger, albeit slowly, even though I don't spend skill points, but I don't think that I'd see the same effect at all in Exile (or even earlier Avernum games, probably). Anyway, it's an interesting experience, and I'll post updates occasionally.

I know, but the sound is short. It's not long enough to slow the game down a lot by itself. If the game is spending time loading the sound and then transitioning — in other words, filling in silence around the sound — then I could imagine it slowing down the game a lot, but it shouldn't be doing that.

We could appeal to the BoA Editor, which has seen some pretty darn impressive things done, at least on the Mac end. It is much easier to work with the current editor than it was with the original.

If it's been ten years for you, that means it's been nine years for me. What am I doing with my life?

As noted by others, A2 and A3 have the same movement, at least on a Mac, and there was no change with a white background that I can recall on a Mac. A3 dealt with damage very differently than A1 and A2 did. It's been too long for me to remember the specifics, but basically, more damage got done quickly, which basically eliminated the usefulness of casting poison/acid spells and made lower-level combat really fluky. A3 also nerfed Gymnastics, eliminated Divide Warrior, and did a few other things that I thought were for the worse. Admittedly, Gymnastics and Divine Warrior were game-breakingly good in A1/A2, so these changes may have been for the better overall, but I thought that the rest of them were a step down.

Good to hear! Keep it up!

Well, I think the A3 engine is worse than the A2 engine. It's a downgrade in combat. But it changes from one game to the next, for sure.

Jeff did swear repeatedly that he would never, ever, ever make an Exile/Avernum 4. Then Spidweb ran short of money, and he realized that he would make a lot if he made Avernum 4. So he made Avernum 4, and it pretty much saved Spidweb. I guess it was sort of obvious that he'd go back on his prior statements if Spidweb got into serious trouble, in hindsight, but it would've been a pretty bold prediction at the time to anticipate it.

What's up, SMoE.

If you're going to start with the Nethergate/old Avernum engine, you might stop over at Blades of Avernum before you get into Geneforge, or maybe before you get into Avernum 4-6. Like Blades of Exile, Blades of Avernum is a release with tons of user-made scenarios. It has maybe not quite the same volume of scenarios that Blades of Exile had, but there's probably more content in BoA than in any other Spiderweb release on your list.

You get the following answer when you ask Pirik, "Where are you originally from?" There are various small references to having been an Awakened scattered throughout that dialogue, but this is the most direct.

I wouldn't be surprised if the issue is just that the code is kind of a mess and it's hard for him to verify that we're right about what stuff does. That seems to have been an issue whenever he's open-sourced stuff before (BoE, BoA Editor).

It would be nice if the spell and skill descriptions were a little more precise. And accurate. I'd take one or the other, but both would be really great. That way, I wouldn't have to go on here to figure out what the proper builds are before starting a game. Or at least I could have a reasonable guess as to what the heck I'm doing and could just verify here. My point being, I guess, that this would reduce the problems with trying to play on higher difficulty levels casually.

I don't know. I had issues with the plot of GF5, too, not just the game mechanics, and I suspect that unless I dropped all the way to Casual, I wouldn't be able to avoid bouncing around enough that my feelings about the structure would change. I typically want to beat the games on their highest difficulty level at least once, and I knew I was going to play GF5 exactly once, so I figured I might as well get the Torment playthrough out of the way. I'm going to start Avadon 2 on Hard, probably. I'm playing Avernum 6 on Hard, too.

Prog/power metal. Right now I'm not listening to anything but have some Serenity songs off of Death & Legacy stuck in my head. I'm not that big a Serenity fan, but man, they nailed it with that album.

Did anyone else, while reading this, really want FACTS to be a Spidweb acronym like GIFTS? Because that's all I was able to think while I was reading this, and it made it really hard to concentrate on whatever it was saying. Friendly And Conversational Tarantula Spiders? No, that's not quite right. Farfetched Annoying Canny Toneless Spiders? No, that's not it either.

There are positive developments in philosophy, although I think you're right that they are different in some way. The only area of philosophy I know even a little about is political philosophy, and even though people argue over political philosophy at what seems like a really fundamental level even now, we've gone from a kind of "divine right of kings" conception to some sort of valuing of each individual over the past few hundred years. That represents progress, and it sometimes has real ramifications in life (the spread of democracy and human rights). It's not the same as a laser, I guess in part because you don't have a neat demonstration in quite the same way, and you can have democracy without, say, Locke, but you can't build a laser without inventing a laser, but, historically, there has been some interplay between progress in political philosophy and progress in political institutions. I have to say, I tried to read the rest of this topic so as not to respond solely to SoT, but I lost interest pretty quickly. What are we even talking about right now? Is it basically Thoreau and Walden — go out and live! do not read about living, but practice living! — because if so, my response is, um, there are lots of things that are fun to read about that aren't fun to do. I can read about climbing Everest, but I'm never actually going to climb Everest. I might enjoy the former, but I'll never enjoy the latter.

The poison and acid wouldn't have been as much of an issue if curing spells hadn't been nerfed also. I suppose there was pretty egregious HP bloat on Torment, although I didn't realize that was an issue at the time. I think what I didn't like — and this is totally unfair of me — is that Jeff managed to balance a game so that there was no unreasonably good path through it. There are ways to become vastly overpowered in Avernum 1/2, GF2, and Avadon, at the very least. GF5 on Torment is pretty darn balanced. I liked GF4 all the way through. It's worth finishing.

Didn't you say a while ago that one of the best things you got out of studying physics was an understanding of how easy it is to be wrong about pretty much everything? I feel as though classes in most disciplines do this. My econometrics class this semester was almost exclusively dedicated to the ways in which statistical research can be wrong. Pretty much any statistical treatment of anything is based on assumptions that we hope are true but can't really be proven. It would be easy to come out of the class saying, "We don't know anything about anything!" But I think the real lesson was to understand the assumptions that we're making when we come to conclusions and be scrupulous about considering whether those assumptions are plausible. A philosophy class might be aimed at doing the same sort of thing, albeit in a different context.

Well hey, it was Zeviz. Hi Zeviz!

I wonder if this project is finally dead. I kept predicting its demise. Rachek, signs of life?

Finished GF5 yesterday. I tried making another Rot, but it didn't really help. Instead, I drew the southern wall foes (two drakons, one eye) away from the southern wall one-by-one, so that the three friendly casters in the west could help me destroy them. Then I ran around to the east, threw the bomb, came back, and entered the final charge. The final charge was a little crazy: all of my creations died, but the last War Trall fell right as I reduced Ghaldring's health to basically 0, and my other allies managed to kill him at that point. I don't know about GF5. It was fun, I suppose, but it kept promising things that either never materialized or materialized really slowly. I mentioned drawing focus above. In plot terms, I kept expecting more clues about who the PC was prior to the memory-wipe. We got sniffs, but there was no revelation, not even serious hints, just a sense that the PC used the Geneforge or lots of canisters (probably), did some bad stuff, got really powerful, and then lost everything. I kind of assumed that we were going to find out that the PC was the PC from GF4, but it never happened. Anyway, if this weren't going to be a solvable mystery, why keep dropping the "I know who you are and might tell you someday" dialogue options? Several different NPCs say this. It set up a big reveal that didn't happen. As far as game mechanics, I'm pretty sure I played on the wrong difficulty setting. If I play GF5 again, I'll play on Hard, not Torment. You have to do some really specific things to powergame GF5, and I think I didn't quite manage them, although, um, I guess I did well enough to win on Torment. So, GF5. Fun, but not one of Spiderweb's best. To be fair, the bar is pretty high for SW, but... I don't know. Everything just slightly missed. The storyline never quite reached its potential. The game mechanics were such that combats were always just a little too much of a slog. The continual bouncing around from region to region looking for the right combats was a bit unfulfilling. Everything was almost really great but never quite got to really great, at least on the first playthrough.

I suppose that fits into the general pattern of "new things that might interest someone." People are likely to care about graphics, game mechanics, and plot, among other things.

In my first playthrough of GF1, I maxed out two Fyoras that I kept through the whole game from the beginning. I added a Drayk late in the game, but I don't remember whether I upgraded it or not. This was probably a bad way to play, and I never did the same thing again.