Kelandon

I do think this is kind of sad, though: several months ago, I made a scenario to demonstrate bugs that I had discovered in BoA. I tested it with v1.1 (or possibly v1.0, don't remember) of BoA, and everything checked out: all things malfunctioned just as I described in the in-game pop-up menus and in the in-script commentary. I sent this scenario to Jeff with a list of bugs. He then released v1.1.1 some time after that. I tested this scenario recently with v1.1.1, and everything still malfunctions just as before.

I admit that the bugs that I found were minor, but I followed all possible proper procedure, and he ignored them on the subsequent patch.

I also find it a bit annoying that he didn't tell us which bugs he thought he fixed for v1.1.1 that we reported from v1.1.0. Now we have to go back and check everything.

Not directly, but you could just pretend. Have different dialogue options be labled "(to X)" and "(to Y)," where X and Y are the names of the characters that you want to be a part of the conversation.

Plots are the easy part, and giving a general plot doesn't help much anyway, because someone who doesn't write well can still get bogged down in the details.

Anyway, the way to make a good boss battle is via scripts. Make the creature do something unexpected. Give it special spells. Give it a particular targeting AI that makes it harder. Match it up with some other creature that has a complementing ability. Anything like that will make your boss battle more difficult, and if done well, more interesting.

Also, the way to develop tension is to have a vivid and interesting plot that connects directly to the battle.

In Town Details, there are choices for lighting, and if you set the lighting to Gets Dark 10x Faster or Totally Dark, the light will go away quickly or completely as soon as it is made. But if you want this to be a one-time effect at one point in the dungeon, I don't know if you can do this, short of using a move_to_new_town to send the party to an identical dungeon with a different light value.

You can't do it in the demo. It happens much, much later in the game, after you... reach the Keep of Tinraya? Something like that.

Basically, the barrier to stop you goes down. There's no trick to it. You just finish quests elsewhere and then you can walk through. But it's pretty late in the game, far after the demo.

You're carrying a bar of uranium. Drop it.

In the Designers\' FAQ , third question.

Just to say that it's not likely that you'd get taken up on this, but more power to you if you do.

Talk to Eldin in Dharmon. Then talk to Bertaud in Mertis.

Go Berserk is a special ability. Riposte is a special skill. You can make custom special abilities that call scenario scripts, but not custom special skills.

What about outdoors, though?

Any and all maps that you could make would be good.

In the same way that George Washington was the father of the United States. Oppenheimer was one of the major head scientists involved in the creation of the atom bomb.

Look at the BoA Appendices under the heading, "Splitting Up the Party Calls." The call split_off_one_char will split off one character, although I'm not sure how well it works for the length of an entire scenario.

My source, the Oxford English Dictionary, likewise has appropriate definitions for all of those but "channeller," which evidently has not yet been used often enough in the context of magic to convince the makers of the OED that it carries that definition.

Note that most of the good original fantasy writers were classicists, one way or another. Tolkien, before the Hobbit and LotR, was an expert on old Norse and Germanic mythology, including Beowulf and the like. Do not discount the influence of genuine classics in the development of fantasy.

The suffix -trix is a Latin suffix. It is always feminine. The arch- prefix is the part that makes it mean "greatest."

The suffix -trix is much like the English suffix -tress, which is similarly always feminine.

I think the idea of the word "incantrix," which is not actually proper English, is to start with the word "enchanter," archaize to the original form "incantator" (which is the person who does the action of the verb "incantare," which is "to consecrate with charms"), and then feminize to incantrix.

We're hoping he'll add this feature. Right now it's not available.

Solodric, that is reason that we should worry, not reason that we shouldn't.

What isn't clicking?

An easy trap to fall into is to think that Geneforge will play like all of Spiderweb's previous games. At least to me, the four Exile games, Nethergate, and the four Avernum games all feel fairly similar in terms of style: you're wandering around and killing things using magic and weapons in order to defeat bad things until you can finally kill the ultimate big bad guy. There is very little suspense or mystery, and the combat systems, as much as they differ from each other, all sort of involve the same kind of things. It's entirely possible to play GF without ever blessing or hasting anything, which would be difficult and probably foolish in any of the other series.

It's a different game. Don't expect it to be Avernum.

Modifying the source code of BoA and releasing it as a new program is certainly not encouraged by Spiderweb, and it is of questionable legality. Spiderweb does not want you to do this.

There are many ways to fake world-specific skills, but you can't actually code them in directly. You can make a non-magical medieval world, but you have to do it indirectly: set the party's magical skills to zero, and don't include any magical monsters, and put something in the scenario script to check if they've trained their magical skills and reverse whatever they might've done.

Jeff said, when making BoA, "My goal is to enable the designer to make fascinating and complex adventures in the Avernum system and world." It may be useful to you to read his statement of intent in response to requested features from the community.

There was some discussion of a similar thing here .

You can't modify the Dread Curse. One way to do special skills is purely through SDFs, which is how I do an Ancient Slith Language skill in Bahssikava, but if you absolutely must have it show up on the characters' sheets, do it via Special Items.

And yes, the editor is being given more capabilities, but not those kinds. The application has the engine itself, so there's not too much that we can do to the game's engine, and SW is definitely not going to give us that much more in the way of engine changes. Special skills (which have been brought up before, numerous times) and extra races (same) are not going to be added.

To be clear: it's not just that the editor has to be changed; it's that the BoA app itself would need to be changed, and the BoA app isn't not open-source. We, the community, are creating a new editor as we speak, but it can't have new races, because that simply isn't possible with tweaking the app itself.

It was a dark and stormy night, Alo, and Stareye had had a few too many drinks...

In all seriousness, even in the AT I do vastly more work with walkthroughs than I do with the games themselves, at least in terms of providing hints, and I do actually have registered copies of those games. I can still read a walkthough for the ET despite not having registered, and there's where I get almost all of my information anyway.

It's at the very bottom of the menu, "Free Extras."