joleneth
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Posts posted by joleneth
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Thank you for the extra stats @Motardo, this is exactly what I was looking for.
1 hour ago, Personal Injury Doily said:Those items definitely don't reduce encumbrance in-game, FWIW. It seems clear that Exile used some fields for multiple purposes, and I guess that must be one of them...
I think decreasing the encumbrance is actually the easiest explanation. I opened up an Exile1 save I have, my mage a defence skill of 4 and has magic chain mail equipped for an encumbrance of 2. With the fang necklace, I manage 10/10 attempts to cast (just set him as active in combat - you don't even need to cast a spell, the check is done when the select spell dialogue comes up). Without the fang necklace, he failed 4 times out of 10. Simply increasing defence by a couple of points wouldn't work this well.
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It's great that you're looking into this. Are you decompiling the code to look at these, or using something like a hex editor? I had wondered why the Blades source had the short and long description, I wondered if it was to provide compatibility for parts of the code that hadn't been rewritten from older versions. That obviously doesn't make sense if you see it in Exile 1. If you only see some items listed twice, it's possible they're just duplicates - I know there are two lemonwood bows in Exile 1 with different bonuses, and I think there are also two yew bows with different (gold) values. This seemed to crop up for a few other items too.
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18 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:
You can just open those files with the scenario editor to read the values out. Of course, your point about them possibly changing since Exile 1 is still valid.
Ah, thanks, I should maybe have thought of that myself.
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3 hours ago, Personal Injury Doily said:
I think those item ability levels are actually visible in-game as well.
I think what you see in game (at least Exile 1) is the item level (0,1,2, respectively, for bronze, silver, gold rings of protection, and 0 for the fang necklace, although zeros show up as empty boxes), rather than the item ability strength.
2 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:I think that item data list isn't actually used by the game. It might be used by the character editor if you add items to the party, but the game loads the item list from the scenario that you're playing. There are a few hard-coded items as exceptions though (mainly the starter items that a new party gets).
Yes, it seems that way, it's a neat way of doing it. There weren't any matches for "fang necklace" or "ring of protection" in the game files, so I looked a bit further afield. Both strings also crop up in the three bundled scenarios, but it's binary data so I can't just read the values out. Of course, the stats could also have changed since Exile 1.
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Poking around the BOE code also gives some other answers, as you expect. A ring of skill has an item ability level of 2,5,8 for bronze, silver and gold, respectively. A fang necklace has an ability level of 4. The other items aren't in the list (PC editor/ITEMDATA.H in the original open source BOE).
I also looked to see if I could answer the question by @Walter (in 2006! but it's not like the game has changed since then 😅) about spell failure and encumbrance, but the behaviour seems to have changed between Exile 1 and BOE. In BOE, the encumbrance for each item can be reduced by up to 1. Also, the chances of reducing the encumbrance of an item with 1 encumbrance is higher, and is guaranteed for a sufficiently high defence skill, so you can wear as many items with 1 encumbrance as you like as long as you have a high enough defence skill. As soon as you have an item with 2 encumbrance, there is a chance of failure, and failure is guaranteed for encumbrance 3 or two items with encumbrance 2. The chance of failure depends only on your defence skill with no modifications, so this is certainly different to Exile 1, where e.g. a ring of skill can let a mage cast while wearing armour. -
Yes, sorry, the "effective" skill value used for the lookup. As you said, this contains a bunch of stuff - luck, dexterity bonus, item bonuses, and a penalty for the town/dungeon difficulty. It's interesting how different the implementation is to picking a lock, which doesn't use a lookup table at all.
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Thanks for the pointer, I downloaded the BOE source to have a look. There doesn't seem to be a bug in that version - the code applies limits to the skill value so it's never below zero or above 20. However, I can certainly believe that there used to be a bug - I notice the lookup table has 30 values in it, which would only make sense if these limits weren't applied.
I will have a look to see if I can find details about the item bonuses, but probably not today. -
On 2/21/2021 at 3:45 PM, ladyonthemoon said:
I'm sorry guys but I'm using Linux now and I don't like WINE. Anyway, I tried playing Exile with WINE and the result was not good.
Old thread, I know, but I've been playing Exile 1 under Linux without difficulty. I used Lutris to do the install, which uses a "community installer" to set up a Wine environment for each game you install. It doesn't do anything you couldn't do yourself, but saves a lot of time messing around with different Wine settings. Perhaps give it a go. You're right that it does take up some space, but from my perspective it's worth it for the amount of gameplay I get out.
I notice Geneforge 1: Mutagen also has a community installer, but I haven't tried it yet.
Cheers,John
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Thanks for the extra info. The thing I do feel I miss for Exile is a big old table of values so I can work out what's worth investing in - this was something I enjoyed a lot when playing games like Baldur's Gate. Did you pick the lookup table out of the source? On the other hand, I'm aware you don't need to be especially wise with the skill points when mid-game gold is plentiful and you can just buy a potion of knowledge.
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I used the editor to play around a bit more. A different character with a dexterity of 4 and a luck of 1 was still succeeding the majority of times with 18 traps and the nimble gloves. When I increased to 20 traps, this jumped to failing most times. Thanks for the lookup table of values - do you know if the dexterity bonus adds to the traps skill before the lookup? This would then be consistent with an overflow.
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I just tested this again, and yes - removing the gloves significantly improve my chances. I used the Bandit Lair near Fort Saffron - there's an alarm trap right at the entrance which respawns if you leave and come back. After playing around a bit, I sat down and started counting - I did sets of 10 attempts with, then 10 attempts without the gloves. Out of a total of 40 attempts without gloves, I didn't trigger the alarm once. With gloves, I triggered it 31 times out of 40.
I should add that I have a luck of 1. -
Hi everyone,
I'm currently replaying Exile 1, and it's been a lot of fun. Could anyone suggest good resource for the details of item bonuses? A fang necklace "blesses occasionally", but it also allows you to wear heavier armour without being encumbered. How does it compare to the circlet of giants, or the gauntlets of skill, or a ring of skill?
I also noticed my thief got worse at disarming traps after equipping the nimble gloves. I was reasonably high level by the time I got them - dex 16, traps 14 - so I guess the value is rolling over. I saw an old post about this for Exile 2, but there wasn't an answer. Does anyone know the details of this behaviour?Cheers,
John

Playing Exile for the first time...
in The Exile Trilogy
Posted
I haven't tried it, but you might manage to install Windows 3.1 inside DOSBox, which should come out much smaller. There are a few posts on these forums about doing it on Windows and Mac.