Kelandon

Okay, I'll add the "skip scene" feature. It'll delay the release of the final version of Bahssikava until, er, next weekend at the earliest and the following one at the latest, but I'll do it.

A lot of people have been having trouble with the beam puzzles in Machinery, and Windows users can't use the walkthrough effectively because the walkthrough relies on coordinates. That's why I'm going to include this.

Did you make sure that you set the town script in Town Details?

I like the special ability idea. This will be implemented for the next version of Bahs. The main code is here:

 beginstate 18;	change_custom_abil_uses(who_used_custom_abil(),2,1);		i = 0;	while (i <= 5) {		if (char_ok(i)) {			clear_buffer();			append_string("Character number ");			append_number(i);			append_string(" is located at (");			append_number(char_loc_x(i));			append_string(",");			append_number(char_loc_y(i));			append_string(")");			get_buffer_text(dlgstr);			print_str(dlgstr);			}		i = i + 1;		}break; 

Er, I hope you're playing E2, because if you're playing E1, the only package in the game doesn't have anything to do with Dharmon. The package in E1 goes from Almaria to Spire.

In E2... where did you get this package, anyway?

Funny -- I've never seen keyboard commands work when the menus are grayed out, but they do here.

Note that when you open the intro text boxes, all the menus get grayed out. You can neither copy nor paste in those boxes.

EDIT: I read this again. How on earth did you copy from inside the app?

You could even work with different it_variety numbers -- I think a spellbook with it_variety = 21 would work pretty well.

The thing is, TM was the first one to do special spells in BoA. It's all very well for us to discuss this now, after the fact, but we're Monday morning quarterbacking here.

It's not that making a scenario with that sort of story is unrealistic for in-character considerations; it's that making a scenario so huge as to do that would be next to impossible.

Stareye's suggestion seems like a good one: use an award_party_xp call on a regular basis to ramp up the speed of levels gained.

Also, after about level 100, characters become virtually invulnerable. Play around with HLPM-generated parties to see what combat mechanics become at extremely high levels. Suffice it to say that making combat interesting for a level 80 party is quite a challenge, and if half your scenario takes place at a level beyond that, you may have some serious technical struggles late in the game to keep the player involved.

What might be interesting would be to provide a pre-made singleton with a lot of disadvantages, so that he gains levels extremely rapidly, and have the scenario top out at about level 60 or so. With some supplementary award_party_xp calls, that's doable in a medium-length scenario, probably, and almost no one should make a first scenario that is more than medium-length.

Ah. Nifty.

What is this "parser" thing? (In general terms; I don't need details.)

Ah yes, walls. Placing walls in BoA still annoys me a bit. I know exactly where I want them to go, but switching between the dozens of potential walls gets annoying after a while. Not of immediate concern, but eventually, a better wall-placement system would be nice (as Khoth's BetterEditor was moving towards, I think).

Generally At the Gallows is referred to as Exile 4.

He's making a brand-new engine for A4, though, and A4 won't have custom sounds anyway because -- because it's not a scenario design system.

You need to learn some basic scripting to make a scenario. If you found the tutorial that comes with BoA too length, you may not have the patience for much of any tutorial. There are a few (I wrote an article , and there's the Cookbook ).

If you know any C, then BoA scripting should be relatively a piece of cake. Without any knowledge of any programming, I learned BoA scripting in a few months, but I think that could've been shortened to a couple of weeks if I knew anything about C first.

One of the best ways to learn is to look at examples. VoDT is a simple, basic scenario that will show you most of what you need to know to start out.

I just had an interesting discussion with someone over e-mail about Bahs, someone who really disliked the scenario and felt that I was dictating too much to the player.

I realized after a certain point that this person simply conceived of scenarios in a different way than I do, and I think SkeleTony does, as well. I've always found the objections to a pre-made party to be a bit strange, since I rather like them -- Election is one of my favorite scenarios, and so is Emulations, and NTH is not too shabby either -- but there are a substantial number of people who find needing to use a particular party to be irritating.

I also don't quite understand why designing a scenario the way that the designer likes scenarios to be is egotistical or self-absorbed in any way.

Ultimately I've found that certain people just don't like the same things as I do in scenarios -- the chitrachs? I thought the chitrachs in Bahs were a funny little distraction, and I have no idea why anyone thought they were a new and interesting challenge, but I enjoyed the N-K fight quite a bit.

I don't know. This bears more thinking about.

If you're working in a creature script, the call is enemies_nearby (which I suggest you search in the docs to read about it). If you're not, the situation could get much more complicated.

There are also 9000 flags, not just 30.

If you hate linearity, play GF, not BoA. I'll admit that having the designer control the party can be annoying if the party is induced into saying stupid things, but plot linearity can be necessary and beneficial: Bahssikava is extremeley linear, and I honestly don't think it could have been made any other way.

EDIT: Nah, never mind.

Wow, someone just asked an almost identical question over on the AT forum.

As far as I know, it is impossible to know where Bon-Ihrno is before Ghikra becomes such that you can no longer speak to him, so no, you can't ever tell him.

get_target()

It is facing south. If you mean that you want it to be facing east, then you have to find the graphic in BoA's terrain graphics file and use a paint program to flip its direction. Then insert that as a custom graphic.

This is the reason that these boards have PMs.

Alo changes his Publicly Displayed Name every day (just about) in protest of his lack of a custom title. That is, he has as many pseudonyms as there have been days since he reached "Your Postliness," which I think is on the order of... gosh, a couple hundred, at this point.