Thralni

I happily went to follow this advice - and then realized that I'm on Catalina now and the 3D editor is now 100% unsupported because Apple dropped support for 32bit apps. Blades of Avernum itself is also dead now, at least on Mac. It seems that if I want to do any further development, it would have to be on Windows.

On 5/14/2019 at 7:40 PM, Jarinex said:

Where the rivers meet also interested me as well. Does it work for the the most part (I.e no game breaking bugs)? I thought I saw there was one by the Chessrook let’s play, which kind of worried me. If not, I would love to play it. 

I assume you mean the issue where he got stuck in blackness? I have no idea why that happened... He was using exactly the version that I have on my computer, and so I wasn't able to suggest a fix... It might have to do with him using the Windows version. When I made these scenarios I was never able to play test them on Windows, as I didn't have access to Windows versions of BoA (let alone a Windows PC). Others did beta it on Windows and did not encounter this bug, so...

In summary, you may or may not encounter that bug 😛 

Frankly, looking back at WtRM, it was long and convoluted and really not very good. The sense of humor was... well, clearly that of a 15-year-old. I promise the remake will improve on it by leaps and bounds. But, it also won't be released anytime soon

I'll pitch in as well... I too hop in once every so many weeks to have a look what's going on here, and have been working on a major rework of Where the rivers meet. Given the fact that the original was mediocre at best, I promise that this new one will be more like what the original was supposed to be. But, progress is a crawl.

That's pretty much what I thought. Oh well.

Hey all,

Sorry to bring this one up again, but I was wondering if in the meantime anybody had managed to get the 3D editor working with High Sierra, or is it a lost cause?

Found them, good to know. Thanks!

Hey all,

Thanks for the useful information! Once again I'm in your debt.

Ishad: I'm guessing that's the BoA manual, not the Editor manual?

Kel: Thanks for the calculations, those are very useful, and a good guideline!

Ess: Thanks for the second opinion and validation! Seems like it agrees well with Kel's comments.

It seems a willpower of 20 should be good for my purposes.

Hi all,

I'm working on a check to determine which character has the highest willpower in the party. The manual calls this skill a 'secondary' skill derived from the primary skills. From memory, this skill becomes available when certain other skills are at a high tough level, which brings me to my question: (1) what primary skill does willpower depend on, and (2) at what level can I expect this skill to be in a level 35-40 party? I don't want the check to be impossible to pass, but I also don't want every single party to make it through.

Thanks,

Thralni

I hadn't even gotten to check out Illustrator and Photoshop yet, but the fact that APFS breaks them too is disastrous... I'm going to revert back to 10.12 for now. Can't quite wrpa my head around my stupidity - after all, APFS was THE main improvement touted by Apple in this release, and I forgot all about it. Fortunately I have my Time machine backups or I'd be royally screwed at this point.

Thanks for quoting that readme Nikki! I'd been wondering for a while what my role was in EP, as I could hardly remember having pitched in anything, and having seen the episodes, it struck me how " Nikki-esque" EP is. But the readme clarifies it all  Though really, it's probably more appropriate to call this a 1.25 developer thing...

I just updated to Mac OS High Sierra, and now every time I try to save my .bas files in the 3D editor (I think I have the newest version of it), I instead get an "error 73" and the program unloads my scenario. It doesn't crash entirely, and I can reload the scenario, but of course without any changes actually saved. So, it might has well just have crashed entirely...

Anybody seen this? Anybody any idea what to do? Effectively I can't work on my scenarios anymore now...

I'd rather not have to revert back to Mac OS Sierra, the hassle of wiping the disk and putting back a backup is something I'd rather not go through again

Edit: Tested all of the versions back to 1.1.1, they all give this error...

edit2: it just occurred to me that perhaps what broke the editor is the new file system Apple introduced in this version of the OS, since the error the editor it giving is one of saving the scenario. Anyway, for now I found a workaround in using the windows editor.

One of your 'crazier moments'? You do all this wizardry with scripted combat, and using two SDFs to store a number was something you did in one of your 'crazier moments'?  

Hi kelandon and Ess-Eschas, thanks once again for your help. This definitely makes sense, as 253 would be 1021 - (3 * 256). Thanks Ess for putting this in context, it helps me understand why things are the way they are. Though it doesn't make me any less annoyed  This will be a huge pain, as I'll have to recode some bits scattered all over the scenario...

Splitting the number up might work. I have one particular example where that would probably be a viable alternative. Sort of. I would take the number and divide by 100, then store in SDF, and won't allow numbers over 25500 to begin with. Cumbersome, but whatever, I'll spin some story... Though  for my specific purpose outlined here (character max health) I was wondering if I could do it as follows, as it might requires less SDFs:

health = 1021 // in the actual script I'd just use get_health(ME), but just to stick with he example started in my OP.

set_flag(x1,y1,health/256) // stores the number of full 256 blocks required to restore the number. I'm assuming BoA rounds down, based on prior experience.

set_flag(x2,y2,health%256) // stores the remainder

Recapitulating the number I could then do as follows:

health = 256 * get-flag(x1,y1) + get_flag(x2,y2)

That said, I haven't tested it yet. Just thinking out loud now... Really though, the best way to go about this is probably to just avoid using large numbers like these...

I reckon this is another easy question to which I once again failed to find the answer in the Docs, but I've been beating my head against the wall for probably two hours now.

I went with the assumption that maximum number that can be stored in a SDF would be around 32000, same as the max number that can be used in any script. Yet, I find myself wanting to the store the maximum HP of a creature (1021) in a SDF, and for whatever reason it keeps returning 253 instead. And when I fiddle around with it, it keeps giving different numbers from the actual HP of the creature. So confused. What's going on here? Any help would be appreciated.

my_number(), hm! Good to know. I might follow your example there. Thanks!

That's good news, and thank you for the suggestion you mentioned. It definitely sounds more simple than what i'm trying to do, but since it's already there I'll just leave it unless I find it doesn't work as well as I hoped. With regards to creatures only being 'dead' after the scripts stops running, the code that checks the group size is in the town's start state, so I'm assuming that when combat ends, or at a new turn, the code will be executed. Right...?

By your words, I presume you can, in fact, use erase_char(ME) inside a script (also outside the DEAD_STATE). But perhaps you have to follow it with end(); in order to stop running the script?

A related question to an older topic. I have been fiddling around with groups, hoping to devise a way to quickly check for certain creatures having died so as to display a message upon the death of a group of enemies. And so I used the number of creatures in a  group, and when this reaches 0, the message is triggered. And then it struck me that, when  creature dies, I'm not even sure that this "deletes" a creature from a group at all... Anybody have any idea? Is it required that i specifically delete them upon death? And can I do this from within the DEAD state in the creature script (is it even possible to use erase_char(ME)?)?

Many questions. I hope somebody can help me figure this out. Thanks in advance!

Man, I never played Canopy to the end, and now I'm kind of glad I didn't.

Honestly, this doesn't seem like it would have been the planned ending. It seems as though TM got tired of it and just wrapped it up then and there...

40 minutes ago, freezing hands and bloodless veins said:

If you have any states that call other town states, it might be worth having them call scenario states instead. Might be able to squeeze a few more out that way.

Hm, I hadn't considered that. I'll see if I can use it to my advantage somewhere, somehow. Though I think it should be fine. I realized I left open a bunch of nodes along the script, just in case I need to go back to another character and add something. I could always use those (though having to renumber all the nodes will be a tremendous pain)

1 hour ago, Ess-Eschas said:

Hello Thralni,

 

I've just had a quick check, and apparently the maximum number of dialogue nodes is 200 per script. There's a comment about it in the editor documentation, although it's hidden away amongst other details. Here's a line from the section 'How a Dialogue Node Is Structured':

 

"Each dialogue script can have up to 200 nodes, numbered 0 to 199."

 

This was something I was interested in many years ago when I was tentatively designing a small scenario. This scenario involved one town with several slightly different copies of all of the town's characters, resulting in a very large number of dialogue nodes (probably pushing 200). However, I didn't get far enough to write the full dialogue, so I haven't actually tested this limit myself yet.

Man I read over that chapter at least ten time and I still missed it. Thanks for pointing it out! I have this one town where I'm at dialog node 186, so I'm starting to push it. There also a traveling companion that reserves nodes 190-199... Oh well. I'll make it work.

Thanks for reminders too, Dinti!

Hello all,

I come to you with another rather simple question, but to which I can't seem to find the answer. Is there a limit to the amount of dialog nodes you can have in a  dialog script? And if so, what is that limit?

Thanks,

Thralni

Thanks for the prompt response, Kel!

Hey all,

Another question. I recently rediscovered the idea of groups. I'd never used them before, because I'd never really need them, I guess, but now I find myself looking for shortcuts, and certain function that may only be reliable if using groups. My question is whether groups can only be created from a script, or whether I can assign creatures to a  group also within the editor? It doesn't seem to be the case, but I thought I'd ask.

Thanks!

Hey all, thanks for the replies!

So, "%" is what I needed... I knew from the start there was a simple, one-symbol way of doing this, but I've forgotten so much of my BoA scripting days (and some of the maths involved) that I couldn't for the life of me remember.

Nikki, that code looks awesome! I'll repurpose it a little bit for use in my scenario, but otherwise it's perfect.

Kelandon, I might just re-test this, as you suggest, to make sure, though it looks like if Nik's code works fine we should have the answer

Thanks again all!

One more question. I've implemented the code, but was wondering about something. the call "tick_difference" allows to find the difference between two time points, and the manual specifies that there is an order in which you have to supply the call the two time points, namely the earliest first, and then the later one. Does that mean that, if you give, say, tick_difference(3000,1000), it will return 4000? In other words, is it going to wrap around the day? I can test this myself of course, but given my lack of time currently, if anybody has an off-hand answer, that'd be much appreciated!

Hey all,

I've been a little confused about the passage of time in BoA. Ina  thread in the forum, Ephesos posted the following schedule for the passage of time:

0 - Dawn

250 - Full Light

3750 - Dusk

4000 - Night

4250 - Twilight

4750 - Daybreak

But, then the manual says:

There are 5000 ticks in a day. The first eighth and last eighth of every 5000 tick period are nighttime.

...which suggested that ticks 625 through 4375 are day, the rest is night, which is different form what Ephesos posted

And further: