Spidweb

Several of these questions are explicitly answered in the chapter on custom graphics. Of course, you can use any palette in a 256 color bitmap (as a brief inspection of custom graphics included with the game or a user-made scenairo would reveal). The bit depth thing is, however, a tpyo. You can feed the game an 8 bit or a 24 bit graphic. In the Mac version, you can also use 16 bit graphics. - Jeff Vogel

Since this is only post 12987 of the 1000000 times people will post saying, "Why doesn't the editor work?" I have to say one thing in my defense. The error dialog that comes up saying graphic 2000 is missing actually says, "Make sure the editor is in the Data folder on the Blades of Avernum folder." I tried. I swear I tried ... - Jeff Vogel

I'm uploading v1.0.2 of the Windows editor now. The only changes are adding the sound files I forgot in the source code and tweaking the text in one dialog box. Nothing exciting. - Jeff Vogel

Gah. There's something I need to tweak in the editor, so with I update it to 1.0.2 I'll add those sounds I forgot. - Jeff Vogel

Yes, Use &&. - Jeff Vogel

"Capture sounds intriguing. If you take away the party's equipment, can you give it back to them later? Fighting with sticks, rocks and kitchen knives would be an interesting twist. " It was to enable this somewhat cliched but still amusing scenario that I added the call take_item_char_item. - Jeff Vogel

"I'd got to wondering what text editor you used, since the Roses of Reckoning and Babysitting scenarios' text files look like they went through a blender when I open them up — lots of squares instead of hard returns, etc." The reason for that is that text editors can use two different characters to represent a line break: carriage return and line feed. And not all editors handle both of these well. It is stupid and annoying and inexplicable that anyone would make a text editor that can't recognize both. BBEdit is my text editor of choice, and I am pretty sure they have a cheap version (the main app is pretty expensive). I should look into this and make a link on the resources page. - Jeff Vogel

"I wonder what kind of program Jeff used to create the Avernum games (and possibly the Exile games). He must have had something a little more stream-lined, but it was probably lack-luster." I made Geneforge and Geneforge 2 (and am making Geneforge 3) with basically this editor and this system. It's not perfect, but I can't be accused of not eating my own dog food. By the way, relying on external applications is not a minus. Exactly the opposite. Scripts and graphics are best made using tools made for exactly that purpose. It would be a waste of time to make my own text and graphics editors when BBEdit and Photoshop exist and are, well, perfect. (By the way, hot tip. If you don't want to pay the full, high proce for Photoshop, get Photoshop Elements. It's a fraction of the cost and, unless you're preparing stuff for printing, just as powerful.) - Jeff Vogel

Just as a note, you might want to post these things in the Blades of Avernum Editor forum. They're much more likely to be seen by the relevant people and less likely to confuse and terrify regular players. - Jeff Vogel

Remarkable work. Very impressive. - Jeff Vogel

Just updated the editor for Windows BoA to v1.0.1. Cut/Copy/Paste were broken in v1.0. - Jeff Vogel

"Erm, speaking as an ignorant non-programmer type, shouldn't you include in the patch all of the files that were changed from the old version, including (if necessary) the corescendata files?" Not if the only thing that was fixed was one tpyo. I don't feel the added confusion was worth the benefit. You may feel differently, but you don't have to do my tech support.

This was actually fixed in Mac v1.0.1 (or maybe v1.1, not sure, but definitely Windows v1.0), though since the core data files are not replaced in the patch, the problem will remain on patched v1.0 installations.

"But I found another bug in DwtD, that was not there in v 1.0: I couldn't fulfill anymore Helm's task to find a secret entry to the castle. He does not react when I come back to tell him. Well, it's a side quest anyway." His prompt when the msision is done is mistakenly buried one or two questions down, but it's there. It'll be fixed in future versions. - Jeff

The link to the patched app will be up soon. It'll be at http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/newstuff.shtml - Jeff Vogel

Lots of big news for scenario making people. i. The Windows version should be out next week. ii. Macintosh Editor v1.1 is out, as is the beta patch for the application to v1.1. IMPORTANT - Scenarios made with the v1.1 editor will not be usable with older versions of Blades of Avernum. It's up to a new scenario version, because of all the changes. A pile of new calls are in the new version. Better string manipulation. get_energy. And all the calls that didn't work at all should work now. I also tried to tweak a lot of things that weren't working that I thought should. When you use a custom ability which takes all your action points, your turn should end. When you talk to someone and just go into shop mode, you should exit talk mode correctly. If you get the new editor and v1.1 patch and try the new calls out, please drop me a note at spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com letting me know how it goes (work or not). If there are problems, it is much better to nail them quickly, since they'll be in the Windows version too. - Jeff Vogel Spiderweb Software http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com

I get E-mails of the sort, "I spent a few hours making up an idea. Now I will let you spend hundreds of hours doing the tough, grinding, painful work of bringing it into reality," all the time. My response is always a very brief, very polite No. Idea is 1%. Implementation is 99%. Of course, in your case, you are offering to do much more than 1%. You are offering to write dialogue, for example (FAR from a trivial job). But you need to find someone who will gamble a lot of hours on you following up on that big job, without knowing you. This will not be easy. - Jeff Vogel

"Does this mean we'll have to wait until 2010 for BoG?" Maybe not that long. We'll see how I feel in 2 or 3 years. Though I'm mostly focused right now just on making Geneforge 3 good. They're tricky games to design ... lots of factions and story paths that need to be ironed out. - Jeff Vogel

"The JV still gets all the money, but he doesn't need to put in nearly the effort as for a full game. (Not that I think he should stop doing it)." In all fairness, I must point out that Blades of Avernum took more work and time than a regular game. The extra work necessary to i. implement the scripting engine and make it robust enough to stand up to a decent fraction of designer desires, and ii. make everything clear enough that it's usable, and iii. document everything, was a very long, exhausting effort. Blades took more time to do than anything I've done in years, except Geneforge (which needed a whole new engine). Don't get me wrong. I'm not whining "poor me." I love my job. But please, please don't think publicly available editors are what I write when I'm slacking. There is a darn good reason why I can only pull together the energy to make one every 5 or 6 years or so. - Jeff Vogel

My error. I forgot to change the description of that call. You can't containerize an item with a script. You can place an item in a blocked terrain type, set it as contained, and then place a container on that spot to let the party get it. - Jeff

It's because subtraction mistakenly has equal precedence with addition, and operations are done from right to left. The first thing will be fixed, but operations will continue to be right to left. - Jeff

"Hehe... as such things go, once you point it out, it practically jumps off the page at you, no? But that begs the question... how the heck did it work as expected up until the game was saved and reloaded?" It's a good question. I am not sure how the script engine will work on the boundary conditions. I think that random data was being put into some of the internal variables, and that data happened to make it work. Stranger things have happened. - Jeff

Got and processed. The crash is, indeed, the one I fixed yesterday. It happens when a call gets passed too few integers. The game will handle this error much more gracefully in the future. If you look at this line hard: if(char_ok((char_on_spot(char_loc_x(0)), (char_loc_y(0) - 5))) == 1) you will see a subtle error in the parenthesis. One call is not getting as many integers as it wants ... - Jeff

Compress the scenario, a save file I can use to repro the bug, and precise instructions for how to repro the bug, and E-mail it to spidweb@spiderwebsoftware.com. I'll take a look and see if I can fix it. - Jeff

I just fixed a bug which might have something to do with this. If a script had an error in which a call wasn't getting passed enough parameters, BoA would crash the next time a saved game was loaded. Double check to make sure your script isn't giving you any errors. I know they can be easy to miss in the scrolling text. - Jeff