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Uh. I think this got a little off topic. Maybe you could try shoving your JPEG up the poltergeist's nose.

*yawn*. Sorry. I haven't been on for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, wait. What am I talking about? Oh yeah! Resizing. I think the resizing in the editor would be great. I am incredibly busy though, and can't help much. My programming has improved : I can now do JAVA. Wait. What about BOEJ? (I may start a forum about this)

This has gone just a little bit off topic. Considering that the last bit of page 5 was on screenshots and the top of the next page is about evil sliths makes me think that someone posted in the wrong place and nobody else cared. Well, it wasn't really the wrong place as now maybe in A6 it is possible to kill all of the sliths (except for the Gnass). Maybe kill them with giant anvils above their heads. There is a small chance that what is happening is the slith mages in R&D figured out how to summon baby sliths from air, water, and a bit of mp mixed with asp fangs and crap. If they could do that, then all they'd have to worry about is eating. And yes they do nom nom nom on hopes and dreams. At least they did until I discovered the secret of the border of the view in E1 oh so long ago. Really. I didn't know that you could shoot a fireball at far away enemies by clicking on the border of the view. I still feel a little dumb about that. That gets me to thinking, There should be a 'light beam' spell that has uber-high range and does a small amount of light damage or something. I'd be happy with that instead of the anvil. Maybe. I'm still excited!

2 things. Firstly, yes you would die. He's taken over my brain with the obscurity, obscenity, and ostupidity of the Win32 api and then I would self destruct. I already did, though. I'd just have to do it again. Second, I think some helpful moderator who happens to see this topic thing should feel free to delort this. I think there should be some sort of folder for things like this.

I'm sorry. I haven't done much related to blades of exile for a long time and only posted on this forum about 3 days ago, so I still have to catch up. does anybody know who has the latest code of boe? Because I've been trying to find it and apparently everybody else knows but me! [edit] Wow. I feel REALLY stupid. It's on the flipping front page for the blades of exile forum head. Everyone has permission to call me stupid. [edit] LOL! Chokboyoz submitted it while I was doing the previous edit!

To first reply: I didn't mean it like that! And yes, I am volunteering. I do have some programming skill.

I think that BOE should be rewritten. Start from scratch. Honestly, if BOE were written well enough in the first place BOE could have all sorts of crazy features but bugs are still being found and are being squashed and found at almost the same rate. And squashing bugs is hard! And simply increasing the max hp or max level with no odd effects took me about 15 minutes! I think that BOE should be split into a few parts and use more techniques such as classes and member functions. I think that the actual game code (not the making windows, receiving input, and doing dialogs) should be completely portable. It is almost completely NOT portable. The dialogs aren't even portable between the related executables! I'm using Ormus's Win32 Boe (from roughly March 2008) and I can't get the item editor from the scenario editor to work right on the character editor! Ideally, the only operating system specific code should be the code that is in charge of files and windows. Perhaps a file class that uses system specific code to open a file and write to it. The window class should be in charge of receiving keyboard strokes into a queue and storing mouse information. Also a dialog class that runs on a window to manage ... well... dialogs. The window should also have it's own internal bitmap to paste to the window on the paint cycle. That would really increase the speed of drawing because I've found the operating system drawing commands to be rather slow compared to hard-coded and specifically specialized drawing functions. Fonts are monochrome bitmaps drawn to first then partitioned. Everyone who thinks I'm crazy/stupid/idiotic/brilliant? please speak up.

Because some people prefer the game that way. I personally think that the limited summons is better because not all monsters are going to have that spell and the ones that do will be constantly trying to either blast them all or out-summon you or it will die in seconds. I mean turns. Either ways, if there are infinite summons the best way to use that would be to have a mage and a priest and a summoner. The summoner would summon constantly. The priest would bless and the mage would haste. With a strong-type summon and lots of energy potions in a few turns you have an army capable of killing almost any enemy except for certain rare monsters that cannot be killed the normal way, or the ones that have a 'kill all summons' spell. There might be at most 10 different such enemies. Maybe a geneforge-esque setup would do, such as you don't get your mp back? Or a new idea, and that is that having summons forces you to control them, forcing you to use ap to control them. Perhaps the higher your level is the more shared ap you and your summons use. That would make sense as that would mean a level 2 could manage 2 while a level 10 maybe 6 and a level 50 uses 10. A logarithmic scale. Except for the level 1 which only gets 1. That should be practical. The exact formula I used to come up with that is- maxsummons=logab(level/2,5)*4+2;

I suppose. If/when Avernum is open sourced (see May Avernum 6 update, page 5 I think) the max should be a 32-bit just to be cool. After all, doing 2000000000+ damage obviously isn't over-doing it. There could be another penalty for dual wielding that I haven't seen anybody mention. What if dual wielding took extra ap? It does take a bit longer to swing two weapons. Even if it's a simultaneous swing, like the popular but really stupid 'scissors' cut attack thing which you merely have to duck and stab to parry, you still unbalance yourself greatly. The effect of dual wielding should be very small for daggers/knives/other very small and light-weight weapons because they can be moved so quickly. Maybe the weight value for the item can be factored. It's an already existing system.

Originally Posted By: Niemand ...and as I understand it, Jeff has also written a new graphics layer in the newer games which can use OpenGL and DirectX, rather than Quickdraw and whatever it is BoA uses on Windows. Most likely WinGDI. Either that or a custom graphics engine that merely blits a preset bitmap to the screen, which really speeds up the drawing, especially with GDI+. I also hope it will be GPL'd. The GPLing of BOE was wonderful. It really caught me back on to Spiderweb Software. If BOA is opened, I hope it will be intelligible and not use too much directx or opengl because those don't work so well on my compiler for some reason (Dev-C++).

What makes you so sure it's 2^15-1 (32767)? That would imply a 16-bit variable. I suppose it's possible. Are you sure it isn't a 32-bit? Does anyone even know what language it's written in? That would be significant. Because if it is C++ (a language I'm familiar with), there would be a conflict between notational convenience and memory consumption. Either an 'int', 32 bits in which case the maximum is either 2^31-1=2147483647 or a program-set limit. Or a 'short int', 16 bits which produces the 32767. That is if the integers are signed. If they're unsigned, they're 2^32-1=4294967295 and 2^16-1=65355 respectively. For those who don't know much about the details of computers or programming, look it up on the internet or on wikipedia how integers are traditionally handled. Either ways, unless you have the source code, because damages of 473 have been seen it will be almost impossible to prove the true limit. Only a record maximum. The health may be a 16 bit integer since nobody really needs more than 60000 health, or even 1000 health. Unless you fail.

I'm very excited. It sounds so great I might get off my bum and actually buy it instead of just sticking to the demo! Not that the other ones weren't good. I just rarely buy games. And has anybody else noticed that there are multiple pages of discussion on armor and shields? That should be it's own topic, probably. To 'Mario', It's an rpg. Yes, it is Avernum. Nevertheless, that's also like asking why you buy the kill spell in E1. It's an rpg. The kill spell once your mage was at least level 15 did 70's even to sliths. Also, X wouldn't have to worry. The other mages (unless I missed the tower exploding or caving in because I haven't played even the demo for A5) would avenge him. My sister tried to kill a regular town with a good party (everyone at least 12) and was swarmed. With mages it's even worse. You'd need everyone to be absurdly high level or something to pull that off. To 'Rent-an-Ihrno'. Also, I think it was, sadly, a joke. I have had an itch to drop anvils on heads since I played E1 so so so long ago. To a much much earlier reply, hopefully The Man will sell Avernum before he dies. He might leave it to someone in his will. Or open it with a sourceforge project. Oh, wonderful GNU Avernum! How I wish for you! Seriously. I think after Avernum 6 He should make a sourceforge project. I have an odd feeling that that wouldn't work out so well. Could anyone explain why?

Bigger Inventory screen? In av4, when you had your inventory open, you could see all of the buttons on the right side of the screen, but you couldn't click them . So, why are they still visible if you can't click them?