Kelandon

Yeah, Mac BoA is a lot less buggy than Windows BoA, and I use a Mac, so I probably can't replicate any of these bugs.

I have a guess about Of Good And Evil. Open up t0NorthernOu and find this portion (early on in the script):

beginstate INIT_STATE;
// This state called whenever this town is entered.

	turn_off_training(1);


//Names
		
	set_name(7,"Roland");
	set_name(9,"Katherine");
	set_name(10,"Mackie");
	set_name(13,"Charla");
	set_name(15,"Nicias the Other");


//Dialog Pics
	set_char_dialogue_pic(7,1954,0);
	set_char_dialogue_pic(9,522,0);
	set_char_dialogue_pic(15,517,0);

if (get_flag(27,1) == 0)
{
		set_terrain(20,12,137);
		set_terrain(20,18,137);
}

	if (get_flag(8,9) < 1)
		erase_char(15);

	if (get_flag(80,0) != 52)
		erase_char(9);

	if (town_status(ME) < 3)
		set_state_continue(19);
break;

My guess is that the problem is near the end of that chunk, at town_status(ME). I think that should be changed to town_status(0).

Let me know if that works.

4 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

I DID see all the lightning strikes when I played, but I can see they didn't appear in the video, either on YouTube or the raw copy I have.  Most likely, this was a rendering or recording error on my end... perhaps due to how it was captured.

Well, that's reassuring. I was worried that BoA was going all crazy now.

That's weird... the jagged zaps in the Stone Circle are mostly not appearing on your computer. There's no problem with the code... I just place a jagged zap and then run it. And some of them are appearing, and all the sounds are playing — just not all of them appear. How odd.

And no, not all four characters are intended to mages as such. They are all capable of using "the magic" (the special ability) but not necessarily magic (Mage Spells). Those are not intended to be the same thing.

7 minutes ago, Dintiradan said:

Not only is that also the way I play CRPGs, but it's the way that we've all been trained to play CRPGs. If you advance the main quest line, you risk losing access to side quests (for a SW example, think moving from one chapter to the next in Avernum 2). So if you're a completionist who wants to see every aspect of a scenario, you paradoxically have to ignore the advice the scenario is giving you.

I'm aware of the phenomenon generally, but Chessrook44's avoidance behaviors are not limited to advancing the main quest line or even to anything that could plausibly work in the way that you're describing. Also, there are other things that one would have to do that Chessrook44 doesn't do if one wanted to see every aspect of a scenario.

Which makes it all sort of weird, really. But, as I've said throughout, play the way you want. I just have to clean up a couple of things.

5 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

It's more a tendency to do everything that ISN'T the main quest before I actually continue the main quest. 

Call it what you want, but when you're told to go somewhere, you go everywhere other than the place you're told to go.

Also, it's not that Luck is some superpowered skill that you should always raise. The point that I was making is that a high-level party benefits a lot from some amount of Luck (because of its life-saving chance) and that Luck raises immunities as much as Resistance does (so it's better when it's cheaper).

That being said, Luck is almost never bad to have. I did actually boost Luck a good deal at some point during The Magic. But that advice was pretty specific to where you were in Exodus at the time.

8 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

It's more or less for me been dependent on a mix of how I hear other people say it and which I think sounds better.  Charisma I've always heard with the hard K sound, and the soft Ch sound seems wrong to me.  Archmage rolls off the tongue more easily and sounds better with the hard K.  Archbishop can go either way, though the soft CH sounds better.  But that's all me.

That's sort of beside the point. Both "charisma" and "archbishop" have been in English long enough that there's a standard (I would say "correct," but Slarty might take issue with that) pronunciation. "Charisma" has a K sound. "Archbishop" has a CH sound. That's pretty clear.

"Archmage," on the other hand apparently was made up by fantasy authors a few decades ago. That's new enough, and nonstandard enough, that it's not ordinarily found in dictionaries (and so doesn't have a standard pronunciation listed). It's based on prefixing arch- to words to indicate "principal" or "chief," which apparently dates back almost to the Middle Ages. I tried to find something that said that it's always with a CH sound when used that way — i.e., a nonstandard word invented with this prefix, as opposed to a standard word like "archangel" — but no dictionary that I could find clearly said so. (Rather bizarrely, I did find that it's always with a K sound when it's a suffix — e.g., monarch. Same root.)

However, dictionary.com suggests that the arch- with a K sound (e.g., archangel) is a variant of archi- before a vowel, and archi- is always with a K sound (e.g., architect). So I think it's unambiguous that arch- before a consonant is pronounced with a CH, not a K ("archbishop," "archmage"); it would be archi- before a consonant if it were a K sound. Before a vowel is more ambiguous ("archenemy" vs. "archangel"), though I still think that the rule is CH and the exception is K.

Also, your tendency to do things as out of order as you possibly can is demonstrating bugs that I've otherwise never seen or heard of. Even The Magic, which was a late scenario of mine and therefore generally better tested than the others, appears to have an SDF set wrong. Things to fix for a later upload, I suppose.

I'd always pronounced "archmage" like "archbishop" rather than like "archangel" (i.e., ch, not k), and now I Google and see that this is a raging internet debate. I had always taken the former to be the rule and the latter to be the exception, and someone with a lot of time on their hands checked every word with this prefix and seems to agree with me. The case is even more convincing once you separate out borrowings with different roots (whether from the same original Greek word, e.g., archipelago, where the root is archi-, not arch-, although both are from Greek arkhi-, or from a different one, e.g., archaeology, where the root is archae- from Greek arkhai-). But apparently there are people on either side of this one.

Huh. The more you know.

7 hours ago, Tarsus said:

Wasn't it going to aimed at level 1 parties? Are you still going for that?

 

It's all very exciting. Speaking just for myself though, I'm hoping you won't bring in too much stuff you introduced in the Magic.

I mean, one of the major plot points of The Magic is that the Bahs/Exodus party dies in a raid by a barbarian army that destroys Danatha. That's still true — that's essentially the beginning of Homeland. (How do you get into Khitaloss Province after the lord of Danatha decides to block you? Well, Danatha is annihilated in a barbarian raid. Convenient. Almost too convenient....) So yes, Homeland is designed for a new, level 1 party, and they're not the same people as the Bahs/Exodus party.

As far as other stuff from The Magic, Homeland will very much be the style of Bahs/Exodus and not The Magic. The Magic was intended to be a kind of coda that takes place after Homeland, resolving a few points never addressed in Homeland. As a coda, it wasn't really intended to feel like Bahs/Exodus at all. It's a lot more sad and personal but a lot less dark and epic. Homeland will be... um... pretty dark and epic.

But the plot points introduced in The Magic will remain. The basic premise of The Magic (as Sophia/Ethass explains) is that everyone who dies in Homeland appears on the island, and we do find out minor details about each of those characters' fates. That will all be consistent with what happens in Homeland.

6 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

And so we begin the next scenario, Nobody's Heroes!  And right from the start it's got a bit of a... less serious bent.

Lol! Yes, Nobody's Heroes is... a bit of a different scenario.

I will definitely let people know as I get to the point where it's playable, though that is a long way off yet. 

Given the recent level of activity in the BoA forums, I thought now might be a good time to announce that I am in the early stages of designing Homeland, the follow-up to Bahssikava and Exodus!

I've actually been working on Homeland on and off for about seven years now, but each time I started working on it again, I hit a wall. The original version of the scenario that I was creating just didn't work. The outdoors was all wrong. The writing style was all wrong. The relationship between the major characters of Exodus (Kass, etc.) and the party was all wrong. Nothing fit, and nothing worked. I'd try to design for a few hours a few days in a row, and I'd maybe draw a single town, or write a little dialogue, or something. It just didn't flow, and nothing I did could make it work. So I'd give up for a few months and then come back, and I'd have the same problems again.

So, a few weeks ago, I junked everything that I had made so far and started afresh. I redrew the outdoors. I restructured the plot. I changed more or less everything — although it turns out that I probably will be able to keep a few of the towns that I had previously made (thank god, because that was a lot of work that I tossed out).

And the good news is that everything is proceeding well now! Instead of hitting a wall every time I sit down to design, I am having no trouble at all writing the story that I wanted to write. It's a massive scenario, probably more or less the size of Exodus, so unfortunately even with good, steady progress, I don't think there will be even a beta until another year or two from now at the earliest, and there are many life events coming up that could derail my work, but I do intend to finish this. At the moment, I think I will, although it won't be until 2018 or 2019 at the earliest.

I think I'd like to post updates every now and again here, mostly because it helps keep me motivated. Those updates will contain very minor spoilers — nothing big, just little aspects about the structure and general topics of the scenario — and at first I'll hide spoiler-y things in spoiler tags, but I will stop doing that after a few posts, so be warned. Also, a bunch of hints about what will happen in Homeland were dropped in Exodus, and even more in The Magic, so things that have already been revealed I figure are fair game to talk about even outside of spoiler tags.

Fanfic of my fanfic! Love it!

It's been ages since I've gone back into my slith language notes, but what you have here is sufficiently convincing that I don't see anything off about it on first glance.

And the ending! Glad you enjoyed the story, and I'm looking forward to something rather different with Nobody's Heroes. And some kind of resolution, if not a truly satisfying one, in The Magic.

I'm not sure where you got your information from, but I released three other BoA scenarios, not just two. Lord Putidus was also mine. It's not even tangentially connected to the others, unlike The Magic (which is really the fourth scenario in the Slith Homeland series) or Nobody's Heroes (which isn't really in the same series but at least has Machrone, so it's tangentially connected). But I did release it about a month after Bahssikava.

Based on reading the scripts, I think you have to go through a handful of outdoor special encounters to find her. Wander around the outdoors near the Grotto, paying particular attention to unusual rocks, trees, or bandits. There are several steps and I haven't worked out exactly which ones you have to do in which order, but it looks relatively simple if you just wander around that part of the outdoors a bit.

5 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

This is true, and I am not the type to go THAT deeply into the numbers and stats.

Neither am I, ordinarily. I mean, I laid all that out in detail just to prove a point, but probably the analysis I would do is:

Hmm, the damage looks higher for this two-handed weapon — probably higher by a lot, because the dice are greater (d12 vs. d10), the bonus is higher (14 vs. 11), and the two-handed weapon adds to all my weapon skills and adds 4 levels of damage. I lose some resistances, but I gain skills, so I probably get the resistances back again, more or less. I also lose some specific skills, but I gain all skills, and just about in the same quantity, so that's probably a wash also. I lose a little bit of protection, but at this level, a shield doing 1-15 + 20 isn't really helping me much, so I don't really care. And then I lose one of the two +1 APs. Do I care about a large increase in damage more than I care about a second +1 AP? Probably. So I take the two-handed weapon.

Could one make a different judgment given the same choices? Sure. But really, it doesn't take much to make decisions that are reasonably well thought out, and the reasons you gave were not well thought out.

In relation to the most recent episode, the time limit in the second level of Nathaganth's Castle was not nearly as strict as you made it out to be; you could've gone into the side doors. You just couldn't exit combat mode and wander around for a while, which eats up an incredible number of turns. Also, I'm a little surprised that you made no effort at all to deal with the Archwizard or the paralyzer; it seemed contrary to your usual completionist ways. Oh well.

On to the ending!

"Interesting" is one way to describe depending almost entirely on a bug exploit. I think the more common word is "cheap," though.

I'm also confused as to what point you thought you were making in that shield rant. I mean, everyone who's ever played any RPG knows that shields provide additional protection from damage and bonuses to your abilities. That still doesn't answer the question as to whether a one-handed weapon plus sword is better than a two-handed weapon, though. To know which is better, you would have to work out the exact tradeoffs involved — how much more damage would I do with the two-handed weapon? Exactly how much protection would I lose, and what bonuses would I be trading? This involves doing some math and then thinking through how encounters typically go. (And yes, under certain conditions, a one-handed weapon plus a shield would be better than a two-handed weapon. Under other conditions, the two-handed weapon would be better.)

It's okay to not do the calculations to figure out which is better. If you prefer to play by instinct and intuition, that's great! Have fun! Enjoy! But when you haven't done that, condescendingly lecturing the people who have done the calculations and have worked through all this stuff is... maybe not the best move.

Gory details in the spoiler tags.

And you can enter any of the four Spiderweb scenarios? (Not just Valley of the Dying Things?)

I'm on Mac, so just to verify, the four Spiderweb scenarios are in the same folder as you're putting the custom scenarios?

What happens if you remove Diplomacy With the Dead from the BoA Scenarios folder and put exactly one custom scenario in the BoA Scenarios folder?

12 minutes ago, Chessrook44 said:

"Tactics" is the idea in my head.  When moving like that, everyone can only move or take one action at a time.  When in combat, they can move further or attack more often at once.  In my eyes, moving out of combat can be advantageous to survival sometimes.

"Tactics" were irrelevant; there were no enemies near you or even attempting to attack you. The only consequence of moving outside of combat mode was that there was substantial lag, which you audibly complained about.

Whyyyyyyy would you not enter combat mode in the midst of a huge battle? The lag alone is excruciatingly annoying.

I thought I did put respawns in the battle. Maybe I did in the beta and deleted them later... or maybe I never did. Hmm.

1 hour ago, Chessrook44 said:

As for "Area Descriptions", Kelandon, I'm assuming you're referring to the minimap, which I try to keep open at all times.  Please correct me if I'm wrong or misunderstanding what you mean by "The Left Side Of the Screen".

No, the area descriptions are the text a little above the automap. For example, in the video you just posted, the initial area description is "Gateway Cave." 

In relation to the most recent episode:

Yes, I mentioned earlier that Exodus is also littered with references to antiquity (as well as references to the Old Testament).

And Machrone is taking care of the baby while Phaedra is gone. Don't worry.

And you missed Thakta, the chief supervising the farmers! So much for Destruction L3. Oh well.

One other thing that just came to mind — I don't think I've ever seen you pay attention to area descriptions, but that's a fairly significant part of the humor in Nobody's Heroes. Take a look at the left side of the screen sometimes when you play the scenario.

10 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

Surprisingly, there was nothing that indicated it did, and at no point in our conversations with the Goddess or our interactions with the other Vahnatai remains did it suggest that the two were ever connected.  I admit though, I did check what the answer offscreen was if you ask about it, and it honestly felt so tangental.  You have the Goddess of the Vahnatai here, answering questions about why she disappeared, who she is, the deal with the Prophet.... and you can ask about the Vahnatai, something completely unrelated to the expedition, seemingly unrelated to the Goddess, and unrelated to Slith history outside of LONG before the Kalthanad?  I just didn't see why it had to be asked, and expected if I did people would look at me oddly and wonder why I was asking.

As ChowGuy points out, this is pretty far off-base. There are repeated hints in the Lava Ocean that the Goddess had something to do with the vahnatai:

• There is a note in the lower level of the Lava Lizard Cave, in language older than the Khalthanad, that says, "That you shelter and protect us, we pray, O gods of the afterlife and the beyond realms, and keep us safe from the clutches of Nghathlaghzhanth and Hathnazriakh, who contend for our souls always."

• There is the note in Dalaghant's lab that says, "Thus I sing of the dark goddess Hathnazriakh and her mortal battles against good vahnatai." The narrative adds, "This is by far the oldest form of the ancient slith language you have ever seen. This Hathnazriakh must have been a mortal enemy of the vahnatai and sliths since time immemorial."

• After the Breeding Pit, when you speak to Dalaghant for the last time, if you ask him why he has to kill you, he says, "Because that is what my lady Hathnazriakh would want, and she is queen here. You have crossed me, and for that, my master Nathaganth would want you dead, and you have slain berekhs, creatures dear to my lady." Dalaghant is a holdover from over a thousand years ago, before the Empire of Khalthas. He has nothing to do with sliths; he is a vahnatai-era relic. (And, for that matter, you know that he has something to do with things going wrong for the vahnatai, based on the notes in the Lava Lizard Cave.) And his gods are Hathnazriakh and Nathaganth.

And the relevance to the immediate conversation is that the Goddess is explaining her history. She talks about Khalthas, her relationship with Nathaganth, her interactions with Ethass and Legare, the major things she's done over her lifetime — and now you finally have the chance to ask her about the one other mystery that you keep getting told has an answer "elsewhere" (e.g., the first level of the Lava Lizard Cave). She is an immortal goddess; at a minimum, she was around when the vahnatai were around, and she at least could know the answer to this thing that you keep coming across and not being able to figure out.

The crystal pillars and the Goddess's past actions and inner motivations are not exactly unrelated to the expedition, either, as I hope is relatively clear from all the hints that keep being dropped. Those things don't get resolved in Exodus, but....

EDIT: But more to the point, when there's a major mystery in a game and you have a chance to find out the answer, why would you not? That's just weird.

Something funny has happened to Pithoss's graphic in one of the more recent versions. Apparently I re-ordered the custom objects script, which put Pithoss out of order, which screwed up his graphic. Easily fixed -- when we get to the end, I'll upload the final version cleaning up a bunch of this stuff.

LOL at not asking about the vahnatai and the crystal pillars! It has EVERYTHING to do with it! Oh well.

You said you weren't sure why the last barbarian in the Barbarian Fort lost so much health all at once, but that's the power of Lethal Blow; Fawkes hit for 1231 damage that turn.

The Shield of Testament, as you've undoubtedly figured out by now, is for a specific purpose later in the game. Oh well.

Huh. I thought I had it set that you couldn't learn a spell from a caster unless you had seen the spell once. Something to fix for a later update, I suppose.

You're so dramatically over-leveled at this point that, together with the bug exploits, the game balance is all out of whack. Alas.

9 hours ago, Chessrook44 said:

I DID consider doing the scenarios in creator order, I admit, but Chronological won't work as well as I have NO idea when scenarios were made

Oh, if that's the only obstacle, I can pass along release dates. Let me know if you want them; I have all of them for the first few years of BoA and it wouldn't take much to work out at least release months (if not exact dates) for the later years.