Azalea

That did occur to me, but I thought it must not be that since I had to restart it anyway every time I made a change. But I did then turn off the computer and try again later, so potentially it was that that fixed it. I'll have to try that the next time I can't for the life of me figure out why something's not working. And thanks! 😁 It's good to have a little piece of my childhood back!

I'm now thinking the most likely explanation is that it was working all along and I simply confused myself with my own bad wording (and probably convinced myself that it wasn't going to work because it's such an important node in my scenario). I've worked out that the problem couldn't have been with either of the Set Flag specials because they haven't changed since it seemed not to be working. I could potentially have put the same flag twice on the Stuff Done Compare node, but with the two flags being right in front of me, I doubt it. It also doesn't look like I connected the nodes incorrectly. It doesn't appear to be anything I was doing in-game either. So although I'm sure I remember it saying each time that the Jump To special was being called, I think my brain may have interpreted 'second flag lower special' as 'second special'. I certainly did have to think about what I meant by that at some point when I read it. In any case, it's a more plausible explanation than my somehow managing to mess up the simple act of writing 10 numbers. I also realise that probably no one cares about any of this! 😂

Well, with that in mind, I tried it again. It's now suddenly working. I tried various things to reproduce the problem and still have no idea what in the name of sanity I did wrong the first time. There wasn't a lot to get wrong, and if I checked it once I checked it a thousand times. I guess I must have fixed whatever the problem was when I put the specials back to their original setup after using them in the interim to test Increment Flag, since that node is pretty much the basis for my entire scenario. Oh well, I suppose it will have to remain a rather annoying mystery.

I'm working on quite a complex scenario with branching paths depending on decisions the player makes, so I tested the Stuff Done Compare node to see which special is called if the two values are equal, since the one it implies it should be isn't what it says in the documentation. It turned out the Jump To is called. Satisfied, I left it at that, but left those test specials where they are for the time being. Then it occurred to me that I'd better check the node actually works. That's when I discovered that no matter which flag I changed, the Jump To special was still called even if it should definitely have been the other one. That says to me that either Stuff Done Compare doesn't work or that Set Flag doesn't work if the player just walks over it. However, I also tried it with One Time Do Nothing and it still didn't work. I'm not sure what I can be doing wrong here. This series of test specials is located right at the beginning of the scenario, so it's not that I've messed it up by doing something else. So, is Stuff Done Compare known not to work? I'm using my copy of BoE from a disc.

This. I've dabbled in coding enough to have a fair idea what's going on in that snippet of code from VoDT, but I haven't done enough of it to be able to read it without a great deal of effort. Interpreting the language is much harder work than just learning which information I need to put where in an interface that does that for me.

Awesome, I'm glad I could contribute something useful.

Well, you have just answered my prayers! There is indeed a section for this in Advanced Town Details. I don't recall ever using that before, yet I'm sure I got this to work in the umpteen scenarios I never finished as a child. Oh well, I remember that menu having seen it just now. Honestly, it would be really handy if specials had a 'Called By' section so you don't have to trawl through all your specials, or even towns, looking for the number, like I was doing with VoDT. This has made my day, especially as I didn't think I'd get a reply, certainly not so soon. Edit: I tell a lie, it's coming back to me. I think I did used to know that existed, probably because at some point I read the entire scenario editor instructions from start to finish before I even let myself begin a scenario. However, it's been years since then. Years of thinking my BoE days were over.

So I have no idea how active this forum is, but since posts have been made this year and there seems to still be a small community of people who still play BoE, I guess I'll put this here. I've started designing a scenario (mainly for fun, but if there are people out there who would play it, then that's a bonus) and I'm having an issue with Stairway encounters which is baffling me. I've essentially got two towns that are linked by a forced stairway which I've dropped on a portcullis. That works fine. However, I wanted a dialogue box to come up when the party enters the second town for the first time, like you get in Sweetgrove in VoDT. No matter what I try, it won't appear unless the special is on a space the party walks onto (when just having it in the town specials list didn't work, I tried having it so that the stairway deposits the party onto the space containing the special, but it wouldn't activate until I walked off and on again). I could live with having the party walk to it in this case, but there might be a point later on in the scenario when I really need the special to be triggered just by entering the town. Now, here's the thing - I looked to see how it's done in VoDT and ASR (it's probably done in ZKR too, but I don't remember), and it seems to be this: using VoDT as an example, when the party enters Sweetgrove, the game checks to see whether the party has activated the quickfire machine yet, in which case they'll have been sent to Sweetgrove via a forced stairway. If they have, they get a few dialogue boxes, then a reward, and then the scenario ends. If they haven't activated the quickfire, the game checks to see whether the party has visited Sweetgrove before. If they have, nothing happens, if they haven't, a dialogue box comes up. All this happens just by the special nodes existing in Sweetgrove's list. Zaskiva has much the same thing, only it checks to see if you've inadvertently killed Lord Volpe, and if you have, you die. I made a tiny scenario containing three towns, representing Fort Talrus, Sweetgrove and wherever it is in the school that the quickfire machine is located (Major Waste Repository?) I copied the above as simply as I could, putting a special in the third town which changed flag 0,0 and then sent the party to the second town via a forced stairway. The second town was supposed to check the value of 0,0 and display a dialogue box accordingly. Did it happen? Nope. I like to think I understand specials fairly well and I can't see anything vital I'm not doing, so unless someone can enlighten me I'm guessing it's a bug. Why it only affects my scenario and not the official BoE ones though (I've played through the beginning of VoDT and the Sweetgrove message comes up), I have no idea.