Fort

How will Bahssikava and Canopy be addressed?

I think the caveat "Apparently" speaks for itself. Anyway, if you thought hard enough I am sure you could find some justification for killing everything in the game. I know I felt that way in Avernum. The powerful humans are always up to no good, and friendly creatures like the GIFTs can be murdered without regret because they are simply monster scum. You'd be hard pressed to find good reason for slaughtering the youth, but you could argue that the sick beggar boy was going to grow up to be a thorn in your side. My motto for genocide is to leave the neutral creatures alone. Unfortunately, that leaves only livestock at the end of the game.

It seems to me that the vampire strain has been becoming more and more powerful as each new game comes out. In E1 they could cast what, Summoning? In BoA they have fireblast and can summon themselves indefinitely. I remember quite vividly the only difficult battle I had while playing the original scenarios with my 2 PC party: the golem garden battle in Khoth's Castle. The demon golem had about 200 health left when he summoned 3 vampires. I killed the golem and then got summarily slain. But truly, I think the most fun can be had when you can successfully charm enemy Arcane Summons. I mean seriously, a single strong Control Foes spell can immediately make those 4 mutant lizards your friends.

Though that text was cleary added for atmosphere and flavor, if you want to take it literally then you must at least consider all possibilities. You want it to be that dazing people could allow you to steal things in front of them without them becoming hostile. However, you can use it to steal things and escape a fight. To me, that is why every thief should have it. It is not a way to conceal you crime, just a way to escape from its repercussions.

The selection of high level arcane summons is not bad at all, but it is the randomness of it that makes it useless. I dare say it would be overpowered if you could select to summon ice hydras against the fire golems or the elder aranea whenever you wanted. The Daemon spell back from Exile was actually pretty good in the midgame if you could afford the spell points. It never hurt to have an extra firestorm here or there combined with a resistant meatshield.

If Avatar can just get to level 70 before the next century, he should be in very good shape. Really, though, was it necessary to give Avatar all of the advantages, even the semi-useless ones?

I think you missed his point. Regarding Divine Host, I think it is unfair that in the previous Avernum games this has been the highest level priest spell, described as "awesome" in the documentation, and required a huge amount of spell points when it summons shades that are relatively useless by the time you learn the spell. It was positively ridiculous, and the Arcane Summon spell for the mages was far better at the highest level. I just never saw the reason why priests could not have had a good Divine spell before.

I think the newer dialogue system is much better than the old one, primarily because it so much more precise. There is no need to worry about a single keyword meaning several things or taking things out of context. However, I do wish there were an option in all conversations to bring up a text match box so that riddles can be a little more streamlined. The worst possible way to do riddles was of course in A3 where Jeff simply gave the answers in the options. I think the big question is whether this hint of his will really come to fruition. I mean, Nethergate has been left to fare on its own for years, so what has changed now for active focus to be brought back to it?

It is pretty clear that the whole idea behind removing waiting ever since Geneforge was to prevent players from having a guaranteed free turn against the enemy; however, now it is replaced by ending your turn and letting melee opponents run towards you. Either way, you can exploit some situations though overall it seems more or less the same. I personally would like for the enemies to be able to intelligently delay their turn so that instead of engaging in exploitation, the player could be said to be employing tactics. I do not know how you play, but I keep my left hand sprawled lackadaisically on the keyboard while I use the mouse. Neither hand ever has to leave its station. I sometimes miss being able to select targets using the keyboard, but Jeff likely did it because letters above the pseudo3D GF sprites looked bad to him.

I believe that if a secondary skill other than health is set to 0, it really is treated as 0. However, I have only seen this happen with god parties so I do not think it is a terrible problem. Personally, I think that if debug mode were expanded upon so that, for instance, one could change stats in game or enter some invincible god mode, there would not be a need for god parties for scenario testing.

If his calculations are right, then parry is a skill that does not involve diminishing returns, which is generally a good thing. Since it would be normally impossible to raise parry to 29, I am sure 18 is the practical maximum.

Do you mean the small strings of text that appear at the bottom of the world screen? I doubt there is a way to turn them off. I do not find them very obtrusive, and you need the text down there anyway because the game uses it often, like around signs and such.

The system is currently sophisticated enough to make fleeing NPCs and spies that run away to raise an alarm. Whether others can see your crime is even a part of the engine now. Really, I only want the addition of attitude groups, or at least subgroups within the generic "Friendly" group. This could be a major and worthwhile improvement. With this, a single map could seamlessly have two opposing factions whose attitudes toward the player are independent.

I am pretty sure Thralni wants to figure out how to do this numeric input script himself, though I do recommend at least looking at Kelandon's as a guide to help you along. The parenthesis problem is not necessarily on the line given; this error just means that the "(" on that line does not have a matching ")" after it. Try looking at the lines after this one.

I believe if you put a piece of trash near your piles of loot it will disappear before any of your stuff. It could act as an indicator of sorts to protect you from overloading the item limit of the town.

Well, according to this system, the daylight lasts 50% longer than in real life. The sun would set at 9:00 p.m. and rise at 3:00 a.m. I wonder if anyone else wants to have a watch in their scenario...

Well, this was surprisingly irritating but I got it to work pretty elegantly using fun, functional math. This is the basic version that will tell the time in 24 hour notation. I incorporated the leading zero for the minutes if the time is, for instance, 1:09. For a very good reason, 0:00 will not coincide with the day number changing perfectly. The difference does not accumulate, however, and the effect is essentially negligible. Code: daytick = get_current_tick() % 5000;totalminutes = 0;while (daytick > 875) { daytick = daytick - 875; totalminutes = totalminutes + 252; }totalminutes = totalminutes + (daytick * 36) / 125;clear_buffer(); append_string("The time is "); append_number(totalminutes / 60); append_string(":"); if (totalminutes % 60 < 10) append_string("0"); append_number(totalminutes % 60); append_string("."); get_buffer_text(str); EDIT: Since I figured out the mechanics of it anyway, I decided to add some small modifications to make this a complete time-telling script with all the aesthetic frills. Code: // To coordinate the changing of the days if (is_outdoor()) daytick = (get_current_tick() + 10) % 5000; else if (is_town()) daytick = (get_current_tick() + 1) % 5000; else daytick = get_current_tick() % 5000; // To take care of the value limits on the variables totalminutes = 0; while (daytick > 875) { daytick = daytick - 875; totalminutes = totalminutes + 252; totalminutes = totalminutes + (daytick * 36) / 125; // Printing the time clear_buffer(); append_string("The time is "); placeholder = totalminutes / 60; if (placeholder % 12 == 0) append_number(12); else append_number(placeholder % 12); append_string(":"); if (totalminutes % 60 < 10) append_string("0"); append_number(totalminutes % 60); if (placeholder < 12) append_string(" AM."); else append_string(" PM."); get_buffer_text(str); print_str_color(str,2);

Hmm, this peaks my curiosity. I will take a quick look at it and see if the values are truly being constantly reset to 0. I will try using some parenthesis. This should only take a few minutes... Update: I did the coding too quickly to remember a few important limitations of the engine. One, it processes equations right to left, so parenthesis are indeed necessary ( (daytick * 36) / 125 ). Two, the the engine can only handle integers up to 32767. I'll come up with a quick workaround for this, but it will not be pretty at all.

I am going to post the code that I think will accomplish your goals, but you will have to test it yourself. Although I only skimmed your code, I think that the approach is flawed, though that is probably because you are not used to an engine that truncates all decimal or float values into integers. Code: // In case you do not know, the % operator returns the remainder of the division// operation that would occur if the "%" was a "/"daytick = get_current_tick() % 5000; // Your 3.472 decimal is equal to 125/36. Dividing daytick by this yields the total// number of minutes that have elapsed since the beginning of the current day, from// which the hours and minutes can be determined.totalminutes = daytick * 36 / 125; hours = totalminutes / 60;minutes = totalminutes % 60;

Have you played Avernum 4? The game brings back area-of-effect spells and you can put items into containers now. Those features are basically back, though they are implemented differently.

The main difference is that the monsters have more health. I think they have a higher chance to hit and deal more damage, though you would have to confirm that yourself since I basically never play on anything other than Torment.

Blades of Exile if you plan to primarily stick with newer series like Avernum. E1 and E2 can be difficult to work with if you are used to E3 or Avernum style dialogue. A1 is nice, but your aching finger muscles will appreciate A2 or A3 much more because the small improvements in user-interface will save you cramps in the morning.

If you kill someone without anyone else seeing, then the town should not become hostile if this is your first crime. However, attacking certain characters will always make the town hostile and killing too many guards also has this effect. I doubt there will be anything nice in that chest.

I feel embarrassed; I have not played Avernum 4 in a while so I do not remember what new effects there are. Perhaps charming and poison apply?

For a dedicated fighter, it does not take many points into the appropriate skills in order to max out the hit percentage. You will put far many more points into these skills after this to increase damage, so a mere -30% is like nothing later in the game.