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Silly Question


desertfox40

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I'm going to assume it's probably too old a game, but who knows whether JV thinks so?

 

I think a bigger concern is interest - BoA didn't do astonishingly well when it was released (and actually almost ruined Spiderweb financially, if I'm remembering correctly), and it hasn't received nearly as much love as Blades of Exile has. I'd love to see the game reach a wider audience (and hopefully entice some new designers to join our ranks), but I'm not holding my breath.

 

Of course, you could always send Spiderweb an email and see what they think.

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I'd rather see BoA go open source personally.

Personally, unless we get after Jeff about this sooner, I predict the earliest we will see an open-sourced BoA is after Exile Remake Remake III: Ruined World. I imagine then he'll look at his list of games and go "oh, hey, that"

Edited by Sylae
And then he'll get on Nethergate Resurrection Resurrection
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I think Niemand had written up a possible email to send to Jeff, it might be in the 'blades chat' thread from about a year ago. I think the idea was to get the windows editor a bit further along before asking, but I guess it at least looks vaguely similar to the mac one (good enough perhaps?), and boa is only getting deader.

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I haven't tinkered with the windows editor in a few months, but I've always felt that the reason why BoA slumped in comparison to BoE was the lack of user friendliness in terms of built-in design interface. BoE came with an all-in-one design tool that even I, as a completely inexperienced teenager, could understand. BoA, while exponentially more powerful, requires more work outside of the provided editor than it does in it, and while 3rd-party tools have been phenomenally useful in making scenario design more approachable, the fact stands that without that all-in-one tool, a fair amount of could-be designers are scared away. Doesn't matter that it's just different interfaces for creating the same scripts, as BoA's approach merely cuts the GUI middleman, people are more comfortable and more ambitious if they feel guided.

 

I believe that the Steam Workshop is an excellent tool for expanding the Blades community and its influence, a centralized official hosting system that could coordinate not only scenarios, but scripts, graphics, and other presets as well, precluding the need for intimate knowledge of community and satellite resources before jumping in. Our third-party sites would still be excellent grounds for advanced users, without scaring off casual beginners.

However, I fear, given the age of the program, the necessity to change file types between operating systems, and its graphical differences from Spiderweb's current Steam offerings, that it would not be well-accepted in its current condition, even if an all-in-one editor is ever developed.

But the Workshop idea is strong.

 

Perhaps it is more prudent to pester Jeff to start a long-term project of adapting the current engine towards the goal of Blades, with a beta open long enough to give the established community a chance to adapt and port our best works, thus giving the new installation a strong repertoire when it hits the market, instead of just A Perfect Forest and Roses of Reckoning. Just saying.

This, of course, assumes that Jeff wasn't too burned by BoA to ever think of such a thing again.

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This, of course, assumes that Jeff wasn't too burned by BoA to ever think of such a thing again.

I think he said that he was. The project took far longer than expected but made very little money, if I remember correctly, and I'm pretty sure he said he was never doing anything like that again.

 

He did say that he was never doing E4/A4, and then he did, but that was because he knew he would make tons of money doing it (and he did), whereas another Blades could very well lose him money again.

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BoE had an Integrated Development Environment feel, very reassuring.

Official Spiderweb Editor was 2D, and this for a 3D game!

Then you have to remember a whole of stuff about the calls, functions. You have to look up a call and check its parameters, unless you know it off by heart.

Quite a few things that are straightforward in BoE are not so easy in BoA.

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  • 3 months later...

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