Kelandon

If I understand your code correctly, there is no need to use SDFs. The call tick_difference will keep track of the ticks anyway.

Just FYI, some people never rest. I don't, for one.

I don't remember the first offhand (someone else?), but as for the second, just keep exploring. Once you get considerably farther west, you'll find her body and then her killer. What you do then is up to you.

The disadvantage of that (or possibly advantage, depending on your intention) is that special items weigh 0. Regular items can have actual weight. In real life, enough water to last for a while in the desert would would be very heavy.

Another thought: perhaps a call that would ask the player to target a creature in sight -- exactly like using a wand that requires a target, but without the wand. This would allow custom abilities to have targets, and it would also allow for cool RP actions like pointing ones finger at someone else. Something like... short request_target() - returns the number of a visible creature of the player's choice. Cannot be used outdoors.

You could not include any food in the scenario and have the water item be of variety 4, which is food (using it_variety in your custom objects script). I think this would mean that BoA would think the water was food. I haven't tried this, though, so I don't know if it would work or what the drawbacks would be. One I can think of is that the item description might be kind of weird ("Water bottle: this is food"). But I think technically it would work. EDIT: An idea I like better is just using tick_difference to drain water every now and again, and subtract a significant amount of health if the party runs out, enough to be fatal after a short while.

For Blades scenarios, my ideas come from parts of the Avernum Trilogy that seemed to have left something out. I wrote an entire list of them in my original foray into BoE... lessee... here's one. I had an idea for a scenario because in A2 in the Tower of Eldiran in the basement somewhere, there are some captives whom you can't rescue. They say that there must be some way to get them out, but there is no way to do it in A2. So I had an idea for a scenario about rescuing the captives in the Tower of Eldiran. From there, I just think about what sort of things that would entail. What would the Tower of Eldiran look like after the Empire War? Would Empire soldiers still be there? Probably not. Would some other monsters have moved in? Probably. Which monsters were nearby that might've found the tower hospitable? There were some spiders and some giants, I think. Could they have found food there? If so, what? And of course, what is the way out? An underground tunnel, maybe? Why didn't the heroes of A2 notice it? What's in there now? How did it get there? Etc. Asking questions and forcing out details is a good way to get scenario ideas.

Probably because they're leaving the town to the north. If they can only leave the town to the north and you want them to end up on a particular spot, move their outdoor location to one space south of that spot. That is, the outdoor location is where the town (hypothetically) would be. If they leave to the north, they're going to walk a step north from that town.

It's probably objecting to state 13. You have a single equals instead of a double equals -- it should read if (get_flag(66,2) == 0) { EDIT: Also you have a floating run_dialog call. That is a SHORT, not a VOID, remember? At worst you have to say something like i = run_dialog(1); rather than what you're doing.

Changing the party's outdoor location doesn't put them outdoors. It just changes where they will end up when they walk out of town. There is no call to put them directly outdoors. You have to make them walk out of the town. You could work around this by moving them into a new town that looked the same as the first but had boundaries right next to where the characters are standing, but this might not accomplish what you want. EDIT: Also I think block_party is not a call. You probably intended block_entry.

Nice job saying exactly what I just said, Micael.

Allow me to repeat myself: WOW. YOU ADDED LINE OF SIGHT YOU ARE A GOD IF I WERE FEMALE I WOULD WANT TO HAVE YOUR CHILDREN EDIT: Oh, um, I thought of something. It would be nice if monsters showed the same rectangles around them that tell whether they're hostile or friendly or hidden or whatever as they do in 2D mode.

It's not exactly a bug; it just doesn't quite work the way that one might expect. But I don't think that's what BSR is talking about. You need to have an open space for the party to step into. Buildings are blocked spaces. Place a 3 by 3 square for a town entrance and put buildings on the corners and center only, making a picture that looks like this: X O X O X O X O X X's are spaces with buildings and O's are open grass spaces. That's the basic Avernum town entrance format (which you can vary depending on your needs).

You can get away with a lot in an INIT_STATE, though. Loading up new areas feels like it takes a while, so players will sit around for a little bit as it loads if necessary. It doesn't seem that bad if it takes somewhat long to load. START_STATEs are the ones where you have to be careful.

I killed Rentar with a quartet of spellcasters by hasting them all so that they moved sooner than she did, casting repeated Cloud of Blades on her, and then using the fourth spellcaster to Forcecage her so that she couldn't heal herself. I waited until the forcecage wore off and then repeated. Of course, this is not recommended. You have to use the control panel in the center of the battle. In order to do that, you have to have explored the fortress thoroughly and set up the beams properly.

Um, TM, from the docs, emphasis added: Quote: void set_height(short x,short y,short height) - Sets the height type at {x,y} to new_height. This call can be used outdoors.

Depending on exactly what you want to do, set_height and get_ran should be able to accomodate you. EDIT: Whew, I had a moment of doubt. Yes, set_height does work in the outdoors.

Quote: Originally written by Spidweb: Adding a new call means creating a new scenario format, which means forcing everyone who wants to try custom scenarios to upgrade, which is a pain in the ass and eats up a pile of bandwidth. Not saying it won't happen, but it's a high hurdle to overcome. Just for the record, Jeff, this is the reasoning that made BoE designers hate you. This is it, much more than anything else. As a layman, I don't quite understand what the difference is between downloading a new custom scen and downloading a patch to BoA, other than (I guess) the impact on your bandwidth, which would have a one-time spike as people download the new patch. After that, anyone new will download the new version anyway, so it's just a one-time spike and then you're done. It's NOT an inconvenience to customers and that's an absurd thing to say: how is downloading a patch more onerous than downloading a custom scenario? I do recognize that bandwidth is expensive, so I don't expect you to patch frequently, but not doing it at all is another thing entirely. And on the bright side, if you continue to patch BoA every now and again with bug fixes and even new features, BoA designers will speak glowingly of you on these boards, instead of showering you with the invective that BoE designers have over the years.

As Pygmalion is Djur's thing, Desperance (specifically this subsection more than others) is the place for all Pyg news. It is "very close" to being done -- estimates a couple weeks ago put the release date around mid-August or so. Part of the reason that it's taken so long is that Djur's computer crashed and erased everything mid-way through and also that it has a scripting engine with far (FAR) more power than BoA. But if anyone thinks it was hard to learn BoA, my guess is that it will be three times more complicated to learn Pyg -- although Djur will be around to answer questions all the time, rather than leaving it to the designers to experiment and muck around until they figure out the answers on their own. It resembles the Exile system in that it is 2-D with tiles (I think there are screenshots around there somewhere) and turn-based, but the scripting system is phenomenal. Read about items on the page I linked to and you'll get some feel for how much freedom and power designers will get. Of course, all of my information is completely unofficial. Alec and others would know far more, and Djur himself would be the one to ask for any official information.

The reason for negative reactions to a "dungeon crawl" scenario (or at least for mine) is that they so often degenerate into pointless and plotless affairs. As long as you can keep a plot to justify the monsters in the dungeon and their actions, and as long as you keep the combat interesting and fresh, they can be quite good. Ultimately, I think Exile thrives on dungeon crawls, and they are the main reason for its existence, but they need to be more than just mindlessly killing monsters.

For the item_loc_x and item_loc_y calls, I think the point is exactly what you're describing Isaac, that the item could move around. BoA would have to recognize two things: an item on the ground and an item being carried. If it's on the ground, it returns its coordinates. If it's being carried, it returns the coordinates of the character who's carrying it. If it's not in the town, it returns -1. I think this would be possible without changing the engine, although it would probably be difficult to program.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a desert is, strictly speaking, just a place with very little rainfall. Los Angeles is built in a desert. Aqueduct technology made this possible (and desalinization plants, once technology gets developed enough), so you may wish to think carefully about how much technology and water control the civilization in your scenario will have. As a more extreme example, Riyadh (in Saudi Arabia) is built in one of the least hospitable deserts on Earth. There happens to be an oasis there, but no outsiders could get there except for Arab nomads who spent all their lives in the desert, at least until planes in the early twentieth century. Actually, all around the Middle East, the land is pretty inhospitable except near the major rivers, where farmland is actually quite good (hence Mesopotamia). Rivers and oases in a desert are incredibly significant geographical features. Additionally, related to your "ice dungeons in a desert" idea, Antarctica is technically a frozen desert. There is very little rainfall (or snowfall, for that matter), but there is also very little heat, which results in the place being permanently encased in ice and snow. Depending on latitude, you may have much the same thing in some areas. And, of course, high elevations are often snowy regardless of rainfall.

If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, beams will break down those walls. Use mirrors to redirect them.

I e-mailed Jeff about this. He said yes.

I have one word for you: Pygmalion. It will have these trigger things that are so complicated I don't even understand what they are. That reminds me: it's about time for me to prod Djur again and see what the status of that thing is. *wanders off to find him*