Mea Tulpa

I assume you have the system software set up for that keyboard (in the keyboards menu, the one with the little flag)? Does it not read keyboard input at all, or is it just the keys that are different, that don't work? Presumably the arrow keys and number pad are in the same places on your keyboard?

Ah. I imagine if you emailed and asked, they would sell you an OSX CD for substantially lower price since you already registered the game. However, that assumes that they HAVE OSX CDs already. Realmz is a different issue as the company that made it essentially shut down years ago, and no OSX version was ever produced. Regardless, I'm not sure how you can blame either developer. It's Apple's choice to repeatedly change system software and computer processors in ways that disable all older software. I should think it's fairly obvious that a physical CD is not going to update itself.

By "request new codes" he means send an email to Spiderweb asking for new codes, because the codes will reset. Spiderweb won't charge you for the new codes! Upgrading has always been free, and Spiderweb has been generous with people changing systems between Mac and PC, too.

Effects in different games as best as I can recall: EVERY GAME: - Tiny bonuses to your chance to hit or dodge attacks ALL GAMES BUT EXILE: - Small bonuses to elemental/magical resistances and in some cases armor VARIOUS GAMES (NOT EXILE): - Impact (never important) on special encounters GENEFORGE 1 AND POSSIBLY A FEW OTHER GAMES FROM THAT ERA: - Small boost to chance of enemies dropping items randomly EXILE, NETHERGATE, AVERNUM 1-3: - Chance to avoid dying completely. In Exile this approached 100%. Can you say broken? There are probably a few I've left off.

I still remember my amazement when I switched from AppleSoft BASIC to QuickBASIC. Being allowed to have variable names longer than two letters long was something I'd never dreamed of.

You could do it with scripts, Alo -- you'd just change the weight of every single item to zero.

Dintiradan, that pun was disgusting.

I think this is what I get for having been trained in Pascal, and then never going on to do much in a "real" programming language. Darn outdated AP exams!

So shorts and longs aren't interchangable in subroutine and function calls?

The Geneforge Wiki doesn't cover strategy, though. If there are specific pages on it that end up covering strategy and are worth linking to here, that's one thing, but last time I checked there weren't any. Edit: And the "forums"? Seriously? They have only a handful of posts, pretty much zero content, and don't offer anything that you can't find on this forum. Content first, link second, not the other way around!

I'm not sure what I think of the Basilisk people. They were pretty stubborn about insisting that keyboard movement was unnecessary, even though Eschalon was virtually unplayable on a mouseless laptop. On the other hand they seem to have listened to that, and to a number of other suggestions, for the sequel. I guess I'll just have to see how the game turns out.

Guys... do you have any idea how long it took just to get to the encumbrance system that we have now? In G1-3 (as well as games like A4) your weight allowance was a little higher but ALL items you carried counted towards it. The current system is leaps and bounds more convenient than that one. People made suggestions like yours every time a game came out.

The surface really doesn't fit the Avernum engine as well as the caves do. A number of people who prefer Avernum 2 to Exile 2, prefer Exile 3 to Avernum 3. That says something about the engine right there. Originally Posted By: Thuryl Lots of the old guard hated E3, and A3 is E3 but with a worse engine. Disliking A3 is a sign of good taste. Really? I know lots of the old guard disliked the changes introduced in E3, and the unsuitability of the A3 engine is obvious. But I wasn't aware that for E3 specifically, it rose to the level of hate. Maybe I just heard one too many screeds from Drakey about how much he loved E3. If you have ruled out playing any of the Exiles, my advice would be to just skip both A3 and A4. You miss practically nothing plotwise and A5 will seem fresh and vibrant, so you will have more fun with it.

I just looked at the BoE code, and you're exactly right. To-hit modifications for PCs cap blessing impact between +8 and -8 points of bless/curse. However, when a monster attacks, _no cap_ is imposed on PC blessing status. This is in the most spaghettilike of all the code sections, so it's not clear whether this is intentional or an oversight, but it indeed seems that casting Bless enough times should make it impossible for *any* enemy to hit you. Ever.

Originally Posted By: Thuryl Originally Posted By: Shifty Like the Mesh Bless really is ridiculous in Exile. A fully-powered blessing gives you +40% to hit, +40% to dodge, +8 to damage, and a flat -8 to all incoming physical damage which is the most ridiculous part. That's just the highest blessing that can be granted to you via special nodes. I'm convinced that blessing from spells goes higher than that; I've seen enemies go from hitting all the time to missing all the time. That's because hits that do zero damage register as misses, IIRC. Anyway, you can tell this is the limit on blessing from spells you cast by looking at the character screen. If your weapons are identified, it will display bonus damage and to-hit chances, including modifications from status effects like bless and curse. They cap out at +8/40%. Also, I think I remember the code confirming this when I peeked at the BoE source. Also note that if you bless yourself *and* you curse the enemies (easy with Curse All) that amounts to an 80% bonus to dodge, and a -16 modifier to incoming damage.

Bless really is ridiculous in Exile. A fully-powered blessing gives you +40% to hit, +40% to dodge, +8 to damage, and a flat -8 to all incoming physical damage which is the most ridiculous part.

Yes, and let's not even talk about Geneforge 2.

You know, part of the confusion regarding Parry, Riposte, and Quick Action is that they have been implemented differently in nearly every single game they've been in. Sigh!

Actually, we are pretty unsure how Riposte and Parry interact. Thuryl and I attempted to test this a year or two ago and got pretty inconclusive results. Riposte damage I believe is an approximate percent of the original attack's power and has nothing to do with Riposte skill.

However, in addition to the time and energy spent, you lose profit from those dozen extra beta testers, most of whom would probably have bought the game otherwise. Once you reach a certain mass of testers, adding a dozen probably won't increase the chance of catching anything new by a significant amount. And if most testers quit before they finish, giving up $300 (or whatever) to get one or two extra committed testers doesn't seem like such a hot deal.

Not just the past five games -- the past several centuries. The Empire has been methodically hunting down and slaying magical creatures and demihumans of all varieties for a long, long time.

In Exile 1 and 2, the conversation options keywords are almost always the most interesting and substantial words to appear in each dialogue passage. Typically each dialogue passage will contain either zero, 1, or 2 such keywords. You don't have to enter every noun, just the interesting ones. Also -- unlike Avernum -- there are exceedingly few scraps of dialogue that you actually have to hear to advance the game (Exile 1 has less than ten that I can think of). It's nice to hear everything, but important clues are generally made pretty easy to find. If you end up missing some random townsperson's comments on glowing fungi or how much they hate kitties, it really doesn't matter.

By "disgusting" I meant "disgustingly good"

Actually, Bohen appears in both X2 and X3, and is a she. In X2, Bohen is a warrior guarding Abra, while in X3 Bohen is an Ihrno who works with him. How she became an Ihrno is a bit of a continuity problem, because Abra states that they have been doing missions for their people together "for some years" and even makes an offhand reference to the mission they are on in X2.

Dual-wielding is disgusting in every single Exile game. The difference is that without the Ambidextrous trait, you can't really employ it without pretty high stats.