List of Bugs

[Ishad Nha]

This is a draft list of certain bugs, listed according to the order found in the BoA Editor Help file, part 1.

 

All page numbers come from the PDF file BoA Editor Docs v12.pdf, this is done to provide a standardized page numbering system. The Word documents are hard to read so people may edit them, thus altering the numbering system.

TSE = the Windows Technical Support for the Editor.

 

Bugs in the Editor itself: I didn’t include these because some may have been corrected in the various Mac versions. Further they can be removed by re – compiling the editor.

 

Chapter 1.4: Using the Editor

Page 18, Ishad Nha: The commands in the Edit menu are not explained in the Editor Help menu. Lines 886… of the source file “Bl A Editor.c” suggest that the commands involve copying and pasting of creatures, items and terrain scripts.

 

Chapter 1.5: Editing Terrain

Page 22, Ishad Nha: It seems that a town entrance won’t work from the outdoors if the relevant square has a terrain type that is impassable to the party. Ditto, there may be problems if the town entrance rectangle is smaller than 3x3. A lot of the trouble in A Large Rebellion in the Alexandra area came from this. There may be problems, I don’t know exactly when they occur.

 

Boats generally.

Using A Large Rebellion as an example: the boat entering t3 from the east, from t10, always arrives at the east town entrance wherever that may be. It doesn’t have any connection to state 13 in t10.txt. If the move_to_new_town call doesn’t work when the party is in a boat, town entrances should be used for this case. Save the special encounters for when the party is walking along a footpath. Actually the encounter does something, it moves the party to a new town. Suddenly reversing a boat onto a special encounter can cause it to enter a town on the wrong side. The direction the boat is facing may cause this error. It seems that the boat is sent to the wrong town entrance, (and when it arrives inside a town it is always located on one of the four town entrance squares?)

 

Chapter 1.7: Editing Towns

Page 32: Set Town Boundaries - * Putting a town border right next to the edge of the town causes weird behavior: you can't exit the town, the town doesn't match the edge, etc.

Page 33, Ishad Nha: Totally Dark seems not to happen in actual practice if the “Town is on surface” box is checked.

 

Page 41:* Beam projectors malfunction wildly in close quarters, next to walls, in varying heights, etc. I have a small utility scenario to demonstrate a number of ways in which this can occur.

TSE: Beam terrains (projectors, power sources, etc.) are always drawn animated. This is because the game handles these terrain types differently. If you want to draw one of these terrains without animation, make a custom terrain graphic and copy the icon into it.

 

TSE: If a terrain type a beam can crumble and a mirror are in the same spot; the terrain will always crumble, even if the mirror would reflect it. As a workaround, use crumbling terrains that fill the whole space, or place crumbling walls so that the party can't push a mirror into their space until the wall is crumbled.

 

Chapter 2.2: Creating Custom Objects

Page 44: Corescendata and default graphic errors

* Floors 85 and 86 have fl_ed_which_icon reversed. Floor 85 should have icon 7, and floor 86 should have icon 6.

 

* The slith avatar, (creature 100), in order to match Avernum 1, should not have the graphic of a gorgon, which is what it has now. Two calls need to be added:

cr_which_sheet = 1532 and

cr_icon_adjust = 2, as Bahssikava does.

 

* In corescendata, Augmented Giant (creature 135) ought to have the line "cr_which_sheet_upper = 1618;"

* The efreet (creature 174) has cr_natural_armor defined twice, the first time as 15 and the second time as 50.

* As far as I can tell, aranea (and elder aranea), (creatures 71 and 83), default to carrying pots. I'm assuming that item 373 was aranea fangs, once upon a time.

 

* In corescendata2.txt Terrains #172 and #173 (fences) have an incorrect name. The line te_name = "Fence"; needs to be added to them.

As far as I can tell, terrains 172 and 173 (in addition to being mis-named) default to not showing up on the automap. I tried to add the line

te_draw_on_automap = 1;

but this did not seem to help. Their graphics are properly set.

* In corescendata2.txt Terrain #331 and #332 (underground hillside cave entrances) import the incorrect terrain. This causes problems with the automatic hills functionality of the editor. It will also cause the party to be drawn incorrectly when upon these terrains.

* In corescendata2.txt Terrain #367 (ruined statue) is missing the upper half. The lines te_second_icon = 1; and te_second_icon_offset_y = -55; need to be added to correct this.

 

Art graphics:

* Graphic 1654 in Blades of Avernum Art (the swarthy gal with a green shirt and brown armor) has no sword-with-shield-and-armor graphic. The graphic of her armored with sword-and-shield is missing the shield.

 

Character Graphics:

* The default rakshasa image (1607) needs realignment -- it has a black line on it.

* The default Asp graphic (1551) has its icons in the wrong order. North and west are reversed.

* The default Eyebeast graphic (1552) has its icons in the wrong order. This means that the creature will appear to be facing south when it's actually facing north in the editor, east when west, west when south, and north when east.

 

Terrain Graphics, these problems may have since been fixed

* Graphics sheet 680, icon 52, is incorrectly drawn. It needs to be flipped horizontally to be correct.

* Graphics sheet 768, icon 8, has 3 off-white pixels.

 

Chapter 2.5: Creating Custom Terrain Types

Page 53: te_can_look_at (Defaults to 0) - * Sometimes searchable terrain breaks. For certain terrain with the searchable and container attribute, they are only searchable if there is something inside the container. This means that the call te_can_look_at doesn't do a lot. Additionally, sometimes terrain becomes searchable for reasons that are obscure to me (custom hills, for instance). I can provide a scenario demonstrating this if needed.

 

Nicholas Bellerophon: I have found an issue. When importing any of the wallset terrains into a later spot, the walls no longer draw correctly on the automap in the game under certain circumstances. For example: I imported the four doors from the first wallset into spots 404, 405, 406 & 407 in order to remove their default scripts.

 

Chapter 2.6: Creating Custom Creature Types

Page 60, TSE: cr_start_item, cr_start_item_chance.

It is possible to get an error on Macintosh systems or a crash on Windows systems when you set a creature type to be able to start with multiple varieties of missile weapon (e.g. bows, thrown missiles, etc.). For example, if a creature can start with a bow or with razordisks, you can get a problem. To work around this, have any given creature type only carry one variety of missile weapon. The creature can potentially have different versions of that weapon (for example, a nephil archer can potentially have a yew or cavewood bow), but don't have a single creature type that can have a bow or a crossbow, or a bow or javelins.

TSE: Do not give a creature both a bow and a crossbow. Do not give a creature both a two-handed weapon and a shield. This can cause a crash. This crash should be fixed in future versions. However, since this can still cause crashes in older versions, it should be avoided completely.

 

Chapter 2.7 - Creating Custom Item Types

Page 58, Ishad Nha: “The spells Divine Retribution and (Ravage Life?) only affect creatures of species 0-6.” Was the spell Ravage Life not included in the final version of BoA?

 

Page 58, TSE: Characters with species "Special" are affected by Assassination and Lethal Blow. This is an error in the documentation, not a bug. However, special creatures are affected by stoning, which is a bug. This is fixed in the versions more recent than 10/8/04.

 

Page 62: it_bonus (Defaults to 0) –

* The call it_bonus may be described inaccurately. It does not provide any

protection for rings, necklaces, and bracelets, and instead of preventing the

given amount of damage, it prevents a random amount of damage up to the

given amount. (I have not verified this.)

 

Page 63: it_cursed (Defaults to 0) –

* If cursed items are placed on ground/in a container in the editor, they lose

their cursed ability.

 

Page 63, Ishad Nha: Apparently items can be used even if they are equippable, like armor and weapons. In BoA Editor Help parlance they can have active abilities. They just can’t be used while they are equipped. Weapons with such abilities can only be used in combat. Of course, when they can be used, this can only happen when they are in a PC’s backpack. If an item has both active and passive abilities: one of the two sets of abilities will be suppressed.

 

Page 64: Ishad Nha, item ability 65:

From what I can see, item ability 65: Affect Rune Reading skill, does nothing

in actual practice. Ditto when it is rephrased as item ability 43: “Affects the

statistic equal to this value, minus one”. (Rune Reading is statistic number

42.) You can increase Arcane Lore via an item ability, but this increase does

not affect Rune Reading, unlike increases to Arcane Lore coming from skill

points. I think Rune Reading is redundant, there is no need for both it and

Arcane Lore.

Page 64, TSE: Item special ability 89 does cold damage, not acid damage.

 

Page 65: * Unlike the traditional Orb of Thralni, items with it_ability_1 = 213 can give the party extra rounds of flight while the party is still in the air.

 

Chapter 2.8: Programming with Avernumscript

Page 67, TSE: Mathematical expressions without spaces between terms may cause errors. Instead of writing "x = 3+(2*i-1)", write "x = 3 + (2 * i - 1)".

Also, the precedence of the % operator is peculiar. 2 + 4 % 5 is 6, not 1. Use parenthesis for stuff you use the % operator on (for example, (2 + 4) %5).

Precedence isn't quite right with subtraction and addition. Subtraction

and addition have the same precendence and are done from right to left, so

24 - 21 + 1 will be 2 instead of 4. To get subtraction to work right, you

may want to put it in parenthesis (i.e. "(24 - 21) + 1").

 

Page 67: Dintiradan: it's been a while since I discovered this, but the maximum string limit is 254 characters, not 255 characters (at least with string literals; don't know about the buffer).

 

Excalibur: When creating dialogue you're supposed to use underscores for quotation marks, since using quotations marks will end the text. However, if you put underscores in the script for a shop description, they show up as underscores instead of quotation marks.

Ephesos: As for the quotation marks, you can just use an apostrophe... another workaround. Yay.

 

Page 68: TM, Another constant to watch out for is "shop". I don't know if this has a value or not, but if you use it as a variable, your script will crash.

TSE: Be careful not to use reserved or already used terms for variable names. For example, don't have a variable called "shop". The word shop is reserved for an action type in dialog nodes.

 

Page 69: * The constants BASE_TRAP_XP (which is 50) and NUM_CHARS (which is 120) are not documented. In fact, it'd be nice to have a list of constants somewhere like the one that Khoth posted. Also, the other reserved variable names (like the Spidweb-bug-page-listed "shop") should be listed somewhere.

 

Chapter 2.9: Creating Scenario Scripts

(Edit: this comment may be wrong.

"Ishad Nha: Currently my observation is that a scenario script cannot exceed 4,257 lines in length.")

Page 79, Ishad Nha: you can actually use around 255 states, this I know from porting Exile scenarios.

 

Edit: see comments by Niemand on November 26 and 27 in a recent post, "Picky Details"

http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=18;t=001024

 

Once again the documentation does not give the full story. It seems that the script can use hundreds or thousands of states.

 

Chapter 2.11: Creating Outdoor Scripts

Page 83, Ishad Nha: Init_state is activated well before the boundary is reached, not only that, it also appears to be erratic. It may or may not work.

 

Chapter 2.12: Creating Creature Scripts

 

* Custom scripts for joined NPCs don't do much. Everything except the DEAD_STATE is ignored. (Is this still true? Do any other states work?)

Lazarus: New bug: This one drove me nuts for two days when I was working on FB (Frostbite). It is known that joined NPC's don't run their default scripts properly, and that only their dead state is ever called. What isn't known (or at least what I didn't know) is that they don't run ANY script until they exit and reenter town. This means that if you add an NPC in town 0 with a unique dead state, he better not die while still in town 0 or nothing will happen. Suggestion: accompany any joined NPCs with a move_to_new_town() call, even if it's just re-entering the same town you're already in. Otherwise you might get burned.

 

Chapter 3.1: Porting Scenarios, the Basics

Page 101, Ishad Nha: Timers

In reality this is nowhere near as simple as Jeff describes it. I have never finally figured out what you can and cannot do but I do know that there are limitations on this. You can get timers to work alright, but sometimes they will just freeze.

 

Page 101, Ishad Nha: Custom Terrain, Items, Creatures. The method for porting is based upon a default Exile scenario that has no custom items, terrain or monsters. Create a special porting scenario if you can’t recompile the editor. For example, walls are types 5-35 and 122-169. If you have custom terrain in the second interval, terrain that is not a wall, you can go into town maps and replace it with something else, then do your porting. For example, type 137 in Shadow of the Stranger is just a blocked cave floor, unless you do something it will be ported as a part of a wall.

 

Page 101, Ishad Nha: Special Nodes Called When Creatures Die

You can just alter basicnpc.txt with this addition to the Dead_State:

if (get_memory_cell(4) >= 10)

run_town_script(get_memory_cell(4));

 

Chapter 4.1: Basics of Custom Graphics

TSE: Page 103: The documentation says that a custom graphic can have a resolution of 8 bits (with a custom palette) or 16 bits. It should say that custom graphics can have 8 bit or 24 bit color. Macintosh custom graphics can, in addition, have 16 bit color.

 

BoA Manual

Page 10: * When a statistic gets very large (perhaps over 100 or 200), the game will eventually give a message saying, "Error: File corruption caused too-high skill. Skill being reset to 0. Can correct it manually with editor." This is a problem for very high-level parties, which should naturally have Health at these levels.

Page 16: * When a regular PC is next to a spot and you look at that spot, you search the spot. If only a joined NPC (and not a regular NPC) is next to a spot, however, you don't search the spot. (It just seemed odd to me. Not sure it's a "bug" bug, though.)

Page 17, TSE: When getting items, Blades of Avernum is intentionally very liberal about what items can be taken by the party. Beams and damaging terrain (like lava) don't block getting. If you want an item to be unreachable by the party, place it inside a container.

Page 17: * Enter-combat-end-combat bug: you can get placed in totally nonsensical locations when ending combat. If you enter and then end combat immediately, you get placed one space forward. This allows you to skip special rectangles extremely easily unless specifically prevented from doing so by a designer.

 

Page 19, TSE: Floor shimmering and similar special effects will not be drawn when, in Preferences, special effects are turned off or the game speed is set to Fast.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Quote:

Page 22, Ishad Nha: It seems that a town entrance won’t work from the outdoors if the relevant square has a terrain type that is impassable to the party. Ditto, there may be problems if the town entrance rectangle is smaller than 3x3. A lot of the trouble in A Large Rebellion in the Alexandra area came from this. There may be problems, I don’t know exactly when they occur.

This is explained on page 26. It's not a bug, it's just a bad algorithm to determine which direction the party enters from. As for not working if the space is impassable, this is just common sense. You can't go through the wall, only the gate.

Quote:

Page 32: Set Town Boundaries - * Putting a town border right next to the edge of the town causes weird behavior: you can't exit the town, the town doesn't match the edge, etc.

I think the game is assuming that you would only do this if there were walls all around the edge of the town. Slightly annoying, but oh well...

Quote:

Page 41:* Beam projectors malfunction wildly in close quarters, next to walls, in varying heights, etc.

I thought I saw this somewhere in the docs, but it's certainly not on page 41...

Quote:

Page 44: Corescendata and default graphic errors

Easily fixed. Someone should probably issue the revised (fixed) corescendata as a bug fix.

Quote:

As far as I can tell, terrains 172 and 173 (in addition to being mis-named) default to not showing up on the automap. I tried to add the line
te_draw_on_automap = 1;
but this did not seem to help. Their graphics are properly set.

These are the fences, right? They probably don't show up because editor graphics are so overwhelmingly white that none of the colour pixels are picked up when they are shrunk down to map size.

Quote:

Chapter 2.5: Creating Custom Terrain Types
Page 53: te_can_look_at (Defaults to 0) - * Sometimes searchable terrain breaks. *...* I can provide a scenario demonstrating this if needed.

Sure.

Quote:

Nicholas Bellerophon: I have found an issue. When importing any of the wallset terrains into a later spot, the walls no longer draw correctly on the automap in the game under certain circumstances. For example: I imported the four doors from the first wallset into spots 404, 405, 406 & 407 in order to remove their default scripts.

This is unclear - under which circumstances do they break?

Quote:

Also, the precedence of the % operator is peculiar. 2 + 4 % 5 is 6, not 1. Use parenthesis for stuff you use the % operator on (for example, (2 + 4) %5).

This doesn't seem peculiar - it does 4%5 = 4 first, then th addition. % is division, so shouldn't it take precedence over addition?

Quote:

Page 83, Ishad Nha: Init_state is activated well before the boundary is reached, not only that, it also appears to be erratic. It may or may not work.

Is it activated when the section is pre-loaded for transition then?

[Ephesos]

te_can_look_at has always been broken, as far as we can tell. It's just that as scenarios have gotten more complex, we use more terrains and the problem gets more noticeable.

 

I think that it's just hard-coded in for some terrain slots, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

[Ishad Nha]

I am just rehashing the contents of TSE and the Editor help docs. Most of the stuff written by other people I have not checked myself. If there is no explicit credit given in my post above, the comment was originally written by Kelandon.

 

Personally I don't know when containers break, or what break means, disappear?

 

If te_can_look_at is hard coded that might explain problems in one of the scenarios with custom walls, (was it Foul Hordes?). Here we can only make a list of which terrains are hard - coded for this call. Having the list, designers may be able to work around it.

[Dikiyoba]

I think I have a partial list of terrain slots that are broken for te_can_look_at. I don't have time to try to figure the rest out, but I could post what I have if anyone wants me to.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Ishad Nha]

Certain page numbers are the best approximation that I can give. I was trying to find the most logical place in the help file to list the corrections. Page 41 is the best place to list corrections and clarifications for beam projectors. A subject like "boats" has no clear entry in the file, there are a few entries here and there.

 

Outdoor scripts, the init_state seems to fail to work more often than not.

 

It is actually Amnesia that had the problem with searchable walls, the Amnesia Readme.txt mentions the problem. If Dikiyoba or anyone else wants to publish a list then fine.

[nikki.]

Quote:

Originally written by Dikiyoba:
I think I have a partial list of terrain slots that are broken for te_can_look_at. I don't have time to try to figure the rest out, but I could post what I have if anyone wants me to.

Dikiyoba.

That'd be froody. I can take some time and fill in any blanks you have too.

[Niemand]

The tricky thing about outdoor section scripts, is that the game has 4 or more of them loaded at a time. To get the init state to run, the party has to walk 2 sections away, and then back again. I've found that the best way is to put a backup block into the script's start state; if the start state finds that the init state didn't get run to do what it was supposed to, it does it itself. That way the task will get done at worst late rather than never.

[Dikiyoba]

Okay, a while back I tested from slot 421 (the first empty slot after all the standard terrains) to slot 500, and, as far as I know, the following terrains will always act as if te_can_look_at is one:

 

Code:

425430450-451456-459469-471485-486490-495

Dikiyoba.

[Dahak]

Do icon adjusts still not work for floors and terrains in Windows? I remember posts about that, but I don't recall whether it was the engine or not.

[Lazarus.]

It's tints that don't work, and the problem still exists. Tints don't work on anything in windows.

[Nioca]

The tints work in Windows, it's just that they have a negligible affect.

[Enraged Slith]

Quote:

The tints work in Windows, it's just that they have a negligible affect.

Finally an explanation, I was wondering what the hell was wrong with my computer.

[Thralni]

Quote:

Originally written by Nioca:
The tints work in Windows, it's just that they have a negligible affect.

Is that so? It's a good thing then that I use Niemand's graphicadjuster for this kind of stuff.

[Ishad Nha]

If we are discussing the icon_adjust calls, they work well enough. But you have to hit the tab key in the 3D Editor to see what they do, because the ed_icon_adjust calls do nothing.

 

I view the effect as being best when the base graphic is colorful unlike the floor type 0 icons.

 

If an icon has no red or blue it won't be affected by an adjustment that swaps red and blue.

[Niemand]

Quote:

Is that so? It's a good thing then that I use Niemand's graphicadjuster for this kind of stuff.

I would point out that Graphic Adjuster, the Mac editor, and Mac version of the game all handle icon adjusts the consistently, but they may differ from the PC editor or the PC game.

[Lazarus.]

Quote:

Originally written by Ishad Nha:
If we are discussing the icon_adjust calls, they work well enough. But you have to hit the tab key in the 3D Editor to see what they do, because the ed_icon_adjust calls do nothing.

Color swaps do work, there's no debate there, but tints certainly do not. So 128, 256, and 512 shifts don't work for windows users.

[Enraged Slith]

Quote:

Color swaps do work, there's no debate there, but tints certainly do not. So 128, 256, and 512 shifts don't work for windows users.

Which is unbelieveably annoying when you want to turn something a redish hue that is predominantly yellow...

[Celtic Minstrel]

Well... yellow is green + blue, so you could try an invert. Or a colour swap - "xx_icon_adjust = 5;" will swap yellow with red. (Replace xx with it, fl, te, or cr as appropriate.)

[Niemand]

You can't easily plan adjusts out in your head like that; they're almost always wrong when you try them. That was what made me so frustrated that I wrote Graphic Adjuster. For instance, an adjust of 5 on the apprentice mage turns it a vivid purple.

[Celtic Minstrel]

It's still about the best one to try though.

[Enraged Slith]

Believe me, I went through like 30 different combinations and none of them worked...

[Ishad Nha]

I have edited the commentary on Chapter 2.9 of the BoA Editor Help. This reflects comments by Niemand on November 26 and 27 in a recent post, "Picky Details"

http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=18;t=001024

 

Once again the documentation does not give the full story. It seems that the script can use hundreds or thousands of states.