Aran

... I thought I was hallucinating when I saw that name pop up. Welcome back!

Well, it's certainly possible; you're just going to need the right tools, drawing skills and plenty of time. I'm pretty sure no such project exists right now.

The sprites used in Exile and the first Avernum trilogy are compatible with the respective Blades platforms, so you have vast stores of custom graphics to choose from.

The later games have more complex graphics, and use a lot more animation frames, so it'd be much more work.

(Obviously there's no way to pick a texture pack in-game. You would have to replace the existing graphics folder.)

((I'm also not sure about distribution, but as long as your pack includes no game files or non-original graphics, you should be fine.)

I dont understand why people listen to music on youtube. Here, have shitty compressed audio and windows movie maker on-screen lyrics

Probably if they don't listen to it often enough to buy it, and don't listen to enough music in general to subscribe to a streaming service. Also, even compared to piracy* Youtube is easier and less risky.

(*AndThatWouldBeWrong)

I'd consider Youtube music analogously to shareware; it's inferior to the real product, but good enough to gauge whether you want it at all.

Happy birthday then!

Or happy two-day-belated birthday; either way.

Aran and I share scarily similar tastes.

We wrote each others' code, after all.

My current absolute favorites by Two Steps From Hell is Blackheart and Winterspell.

Otherwise (not trailer music), this.

>>> This unit is pleased with your offering of $cake. It has been determined that $cake == TRUE. Oh joyous day!

to the possibility of another Blades game

Spoiler alert: No. :|

On the other hand, "probably someday" is better than any previous answer he's given regarding open-source BoA.

I don't care who narrates; I just want him to voice Redbeard.

I sort-of used them, as in instead of deleting all of them I deleted everyone but Frrrrr and made a slot three singleton. 'Create new character' gets you 60 skill points, while editing Frrrrr gets you 81.

Oh yeah, I remember that trick; some of my most interesting E3 and BoE play-throughs were third-slot singletons.

Never did figure out why Jeff did this. My best explanation is that he noticed the archer build being underpowered when using the pre-fabricated party, and decided to train him a bit more instead of revising the archery mechanics.

I suspect this balance stuff is why recent games have been increasingly insistent on pre-fab parties, fixed classes and pre-ordained skill trees. Which is a pity; I really liked being able to mix and experiment with strange builds. Playing E3 with a priest party (Anama, of course) was kind of awesome. It was also hard to part with the vast array of spells available in the Exile games. So many different status effects and fields and summons.

The age of the protagonists probably contributed to that. The Belgariad has a kid protagonist, while Sparhawk started the series as a grizzled veteran.

As far as quality and immersion goes, I also found the Sparhawk series to be more captivating. However, while I think the Malloreon was a huge improvement over the Belgariad, looking back I now like the Elenium a bit more than the Tamuli, which went a bit overboard with literal god-characters and power. They quasi-teleported all over the place (which was kind of funny, mind, because I took it to be a parody of the Traveling at the Speed of Plot trope), and in one chapter I think Aphrael summoned some kind of futuristic ship thing?

In order of preference, I think I'd go with Elenium>Tamuli>Malloreon>Belgariad.

Hawthorne shot first!

He didn't even change the color of the good and evil magical stone McGuffins.

Great idea, though the way this bundle is selling within just the first 24 hours, he could buy out a small pizzeria.

David Eddings had the Orb of Aldur, maybe a McGuffin in the stricter sense: In-universe, since it was basically some random stone a god picked up and rolled in his hand for a couple of centuries. And outside, Eddings freely admitted that the Belgariad+Malloreon are so formulaic as to be a template for fantasy series, including the choice of McGuffin. One of his forewords listed the "ingredients" as follows:

Item number three is 'The Magic Thingamajig' - The Holy Grail, the Ring of Power, the Magic Sword, the Sacred Book, or (surprise, surprise) THE JEWEL. Everybody knows where I came down on that one. The Magic Thingamajig is usually, though not always, the object of the quest.

Hello, i purchased that humble bundle and now im a bit confused about the order to play them trough. I would naturally like to start with the oldest game and play trough the whole saga. Can i use this link http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.html and start from bottom to get the right order ?

That list matches the release order pretty closely, though it groups by series. If you wanted to go strictly by release date, you'd be alternating between the Geneforge and the first Avernum trilogy a bit, but since they're entirely separate stories I don't see how that matters. Avernum 1-6 and EftP, Geneforge 1-5, and Avadon don't share a setting.

If you're going for the gradual evolution of the game engine rather than just the story, then that list is a really great idea to follow.

The top contributor list now contains "Bon-Ihrno". I think someone posted under that name here once; doesn't mean it's the same person, of course; not with canon characters.

Edit: No luck finding anyone. I now suspect I was thinking of Bain Ihrno.

The works for four bucks, on average? That is an amazing thing.

 

—Alorael, who's always fascinated by the disparity in payments by OS. It's always the same pattern.

I suspect that the mean reflects the proportion of enthusiasts more than the price most people are paying.

There are a few high-paying contributors and a ton of people paying minimum price. It seems likely that the former are particularly fond of this kind of distribution model, where Linux would be over-represented, while the low-paying ones are more representative of actual OS usage.

(It could even be some artifact caused by sampling size, where the high-paying outliers skew smaller platforms more strongly, but I don't have the statistics-fu to back that up.)

It'd be interesting to see some histograms or distributions.

The quicksave was right before hitting the gong. I have a save from before asking Shavon, but I was hoping the game would just let me leave and return before actually starting the battle, so I wouldn't lose as much time.

I was helping Shavon with his basilisks and got slaughtered - Shavon in particular died very quickly since I didn't have a way to heal him. So I reloaded and decided to return and bring along Jenell instead of Shima (going for the one-companion challenge).

However, when I came back, Shavon was gone; he wasn't in his camp anymore either. When I summoned the basilisks on my own, the game mentioned that "Shavon is dead". Is this intended - as in, if you leave the caves before the battle he loses patience, rings the gong himself and dies - or some kind of game flag glitch?

Aw. Oh well.

Edit: Wait, I guess the invites have disappeared because Steam says it's free to play now. Neat.

You are currently 25749 in the Launch Queue

Wheee!

(... why don't they just distribute their free content through a torrent?)

Edit again: Oh, the queue is limited by their game server cap, not the bandwidth.

Maybe I have it backward, but I kind of assumed that this evolution of the SW game engine (from Exile all the way through Avadon) was already driven by the attempt to widen appeal.

You can now (maybe tediously) reach the late mid-game with a mess of a character build instead of (as in E1) taking multiple attempts even beating the first few wandering encounters with a fairly good party. One of the largest steps in that direction was effectively removing death since A4, in that (excepting TPK) eliminated characters are trivial to revive, and in Avadon will actually return as soon as combat ends. In the old series, you lost your inventory and had to pay gold to get the character back. The games haven't become easier per se, but the penalty for doing badly has been repeatedly reduced.

In that sense, I think what you describe as a problem to be fixed may be the desired effect. It almost certainly gets a larger fraction of players to continue playing until mid-game, which in shareware games directly translates to sales.

Some of the design blunders become obvious very quickly though. I went into the wretch warrens with two sorceresses, and learned almost immediately that it's a bad idea to have no close combat character - particularly when there are monsters that are immune to your only basic attack.

But I suspect there are other things I haven't learned yet, and still going a lot slower because of it. Exile 3 (my first one) was preferable in that sense because if you made a bad party you got wiped almost immediately.

I'd love to, but I don't know if it'll be playable on either of my computers. It's hard enough to get the native version of TF2 to run...

Sorry to hear that. Virtual hugs if you want them.

The tour guide assured us that the whole town used to stink unrighteously. I don't know how he would have really known that for sure, but as historical reconstructions go, it sounds like a good bet.

If I remember my history lessons, that was true of all medieval towns, woad or not.