Spidweb

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

Some of the calls bounds check everything the designer does, and some don't. In general, though, you shouldn't be checking the terrain for non-existant spaces, modifying the inventory for non-existant characters, and so on. - Jeff

I'll see about having thrown missiles process magical ability damage properly in the next update. - Jeff

Well, actually, beta testing for Windows Blades of Avernunm has been going for 2 weeks or so, but we're about to open up our beta tester application form for a clump of new Windows testers. I'd like some experienced editor hands in on it, so if you're interested, watch the form. Bear in mind that beta testers can't be in the scenario design contest. - Jeff

"You are exiting the town and coming back to test, aren't you? I've found you definitely have to do that if you're changing the blocked/not blocked status of terrains/floors. " This could very well be the problem. The game keeps track of what spaces are blocked in an array, and it doesn't constantly recalculate it for obvious performance reasons.

That seems peculiar. Not sure why the extra height would affect it. Try commenting out the lines that add the second icon, and see if it starts to work.

This call is indeed broken. It will be unbroken for the new scenario format.

The .pdf will be updated far less often than the .doc because making .pdf files is a pain in the ass. You can't edit them like you can edit text.

This seems real close to how I wanted the glowing green gates in VoDT to work. Item. Use it. Checks for nearby terrain that crumbles/opens/changes and alters it. May take a little kludging to get it to also affect other terrain types you want to crumble (namely, checking for them one by one). I promised that the editor would be powerful, not elegant.

This is an odd one. I have never had any problem at all with items I placed in a town in the editor not being there. Try loading a save file from before you ever enter the town with the missing items, enter the town, and see if the items are there then. Preset items in a town are only ever placed the very first tiem you enter the town.

Damn it! I know I added this to the Docs, but it's not there now. Must have lost it in a crash. Added this to custom items ... "Some active abilities are spells or require targeting a foe. An item can only have one such ability. If it has more than one, only the last one will take effect."

Keep an eye on http://www.avernum.com/blades/workshop/editortechsupp.html One of the bug report thingies is about this call. - Jeff

I updated the description of this call in the docs: short party_size() - Returns the number of living, present characters in the party.

" Probably a dumb question, but can you then change dialogue nodes with this?" Sort of. Remember, you can set dialogue with the message_dialog call. That's sort of what you'll need to do. - Jeff

Just some notes about what is going in when Windows Blades is out (and a Mac update is released to match it). Please do not start incorporating these new calls yet. Wait until you're developing with the new version of the editor. I'll be adding get_energy and all calls missing from the old version. The game should correctly end a player's turn in combat when he/she uses a custom ability that drains action points. I am adding advanced string building calls. Here is the current text that will go into the docs: String Manipulation Calls These calls are designed to give the scenario designer a lot more control over the text displayed to the player. They’re a little complicated, but much more powerful. Blades of Avernum maintains a string buffer. It is a 255 character long chunk of text in memory. You can clear this buffer, append chunks of text to it, and then dump the buffer into a string variable. For example, here is a bit of code. string sample_string clear_buffer(); // empties out the string buffer. append_string("Hello, "); // puts this text into the buffer append_string("friend."); // adds this text to the end of the buffer get_buffer_text(sample_string); // the buffer is copied into string variable sample_string print_str(sample_string); // prints "Hello, friend." to the text area void append_char_name(short which_char) – Appends the name of the character which_char to the end of the string buffer. void append_number(short num) – Appends the number num to the end of the string buffer. void append_string(string source_string) – Appends the text source_string to the end of the string buffer. If the result would be longer than 255 characters, the text is truncated. void clear_buffer() – Empties the text buffer. Sets it to a blank string. void get_buffer_text(string dest_string) – Dest_string must be a string variable. Copies the text in the buffer into dest_string.