Kelandon

I think one can see the best and worst of Jeff's scenario design technique in his comments. I agree with TM that Blades is not mostly about beating up monsters but mostly about telling/reading/RPing a story. Quote: It is better to have lots of fun and action in an irrational setting than a scrupulously designed and plotted storyline that is on the dull side. Erm, but this kind of misses the point. The point is that the fun and action (particularly in BoA even more than in BoE, but in both) can be from the dialogs and the animations as well as the combat. One need not tear through a dungeon of Haakai with a Flaming Runed Black Halberd of Death to be having fun. As I said on the Lyceum, I would've loved to see a longer cut scene in ASR on Zaskiva, because explosions and madness and people fighting and running all over the place are quite fun as animation, and they certainly pump up the tension in a way that a combat between a level one party and a vampire (or any other challenging combat) does not. One should not misread me, though: this exact combat is used to good effect in TM's scenario (w00t we have a fifth BoA scenario w0000t!), but it is not the *only* way of adding tension. And many kinds of tension are good. I think the goal is balance, but the bottom line is plot.

Quote: Does anyone else find the organization weird? Yes. Things that I think should be in the appendices are in the regular docs and vice-versa. Also it has taken quite a bit of getting used to the format just so that I can find calls, which I still often fail at doing. I do searches, but I don't always know what the call is, so I have to search by topic ("Hmm, is it in dialog, or advanced dialog, or cut scens, or..."), which is really difficult. I am trying to learn by baby steps, one call at a time. I agree that a numeric input would be great.

From Walker White's post: short get_energy(short which_char)

I am going to go WEEP in my corner now for having thought that I was breaking new ground with my sad little script that makes a character walk away once you've set an SDF. Seriously, wow. I am *very* happy that we as a community have people like this.

Wooooooaaaaah... the COLORS... seriously, adjusting the slith chief's icon by 162 gives an interesting result. Thanks TM for the suggestion and Boots for the clarification! Still, I would love anyone who would make a cool-looking priestly type graphic for me, slith with ankh, maybe. Or a ghostly slith. Or a slith child. Or a slith elder. Or just about anything slithy that strikes your fancy.

I noticed in ZKR that Crotho in Morog's Labs walks into the death beams and gets damaged. If you wait around long enough, he kills himself. He uses the default script, basicnpc, so this would happen with any NPC near beams that can be walked through. I suspect this is bad. Of course, we could just make those spaces blocked to NPC's, but I would think that we could make some addition to basicnpc that would prevent this. I haven't looked at how to do it yet, but I wanted to bring it up, mainly because changing basicnpc is akin to writing a new version of the editor. Can/should we alter basicnpc so that this doesn't happen? Or should we just work around this? (I actually don't have an opinion, yet. Just wanted to have some discussion.)

Not answering from my own knowledge -- it's been a while since I played Nethergate, hmm, maybe I should play it again -- but from Stughalf's post: "the disguising cloaks in one of the side rooms near the platform." So far as I know, there are only two side rooms, in the southwest and the southeast (not counting the ones in the north). From Schrodinger and Zeviz's Nethergate page (at the top of the Nethergate topic), the cloaks are in the southeast room. Walk near the wall so that you don't get seen. EDIT: and come to think of it, I was somewhat frustrated with the Romans' ending -- it made me feel as though my actions hadn't made any difference -- but I would've been more unhappy with any other ending that I can think of.

Quote: You could use the icon shift What does this mean? How does one do this?

While I can hardly call myself an advanced scenario designer... I use Word to keep track of SDFs. I also use Word to edit scripts (but the default TextEdit to read them), and I use Photoshop and ResEdit to work with custom graphics. Just for kicks, my SDF flag notes are in this format: 0 0 1 party has eaten the pie 2 party has eaten two pies 3 party has eaten three pies 0 1 1 party has entered Big Room 0 2 1 party has seen Big Monster 2 party has killed Big Monster 0 3 250 party has seen message in front of creepy altar

I really like this idea. I haven't played with it at all; I have little in the way of custom floors I want to deal with right now, but once you add a few more features, this will be a great program. Obviously it will not replace writing scripts directly, but it will make it easier to do basic things and serve as a good intro for new designers.

I need sliths. Anything. Slith priests particularly, maybe with necklaces with ankhs, maybe with robes, other clothing, maybe with frill things on their heads like the chiefs, anything. And spectral sliths, slith mages, slith children, slith elderly. Anything that anyone can make that is of a slithy nature, I will be able to use. Even color edits would be appreciated. E-mail them to the account on my profile. Thanks in advance!

Was there any reason given for the call being turned down? Seems like such a simple thing to implement, code-wise....

Not sure what good it would do, but I thought it might be constructive/fun to mention all the calls that we wish that BoA had that it doesn't have. I personally want a force_start_year call to set the year (for historical or futuristic scenarios). It would be the companion of force_start_day, which does exist. There's also a thread going about item descriptions, something like an it_description call. Any more thoughts?

Reading the docs straight through is hard if you don't have any BoE or other programming experience. My suggestion is to read a piece of the docs and then open up the editor and play around with it for a bit, and then read more of the docs, and then play with the editor, and just keep alternating between them. It takes a lot of time, but you won't get quite as frustrated. Oh, and use the editor to look at VoDT. Jeff has pretty good commentaries on what's going on in the scripts there, so you can sort of see how it all fits together.

Jeez, how might one pull *that* off, astronomically speaking? One quarter of the day cycle is nighttime? I would think that would only be possible if the planet weren't even remotely spherical. Uh oh...

The problem may be with assumption c). We don't know how long days are, because this varies considerably from planet to planet. I did a different set of calculations based on the signs in A3, posted here , near the bottom of that page, and came to the conclusion that Valorim is about the size of India and therefore that days on the planet of Avernum are roughly nine Earth days in length. My evidence is certainly not definitive, though... I think it's clear that Jeff didn't intend to be consistent in terms of space and time -- didn't one of those signs say, "Please don't hold us to this"? -- but it's fun to try and work with what he gave us

Does anyone else think this is kind of wacky? In order to set the response options for dialogues using add_dialog_choice, we refer to numbers 0-2, but in the number we get back from run_dialog we get 1-3. That is, if we say add_dialog_choice(0,"Yes") and the player chooses it, then run_dialog gives us back 1. Likewise, for add_dialog_choice(1,"No"), we'd get back 2, and for the third, it's 2 and 3. I didn't actually believe this was how it worked until I looked at ASR's t2 town script, state 13. Should this be changed for the next version of BoA?

Quote: Or did Jeff cook these up just for this scenario? Yes, kind of. These are custom graphics (sheets 540 and 541 in stealth.cmg). They aren't available in the same way as the graphics in the appendices, but you can copy them and use them as custom graphics, crediting Jeff.

Soon, as people start working on and completing scenarios, more scripts will be available on SW's site (specifically, here ), and you can just edit some Memory Cells to get your desired effect. So you don't have to be a coder to make scenarios. Just understanding how to use Memory Cells is a bit complicated in itself, but it's not nearly as bad as trying to write the scripts directly. I highly recommend trying it; collaborations are hard. And for the time being, while no scripts are up on the site, you can use Jeff's scripts that come with the game.

Is anyone else experiencing UNBELIEVABLE lag in BoA? It's making it hard for me to move around... and the animations (hitting things, things dying) are taking forever. Anything that can be done about this? EDIT: nm, I just quit and restarted. Now I have no other applications running and it seems to be fine.

No, it's offical: I hate the Exile engine. That's okay. I think the Nethergate/Avernum engine is outstanding.

I'm trying to play VoDT, and the monsters in the dungeons keep coming back to life. I kill a bunch of monsters, go back to town, heal up and spend my gold, come back, and voila! Same monsters that I already killed are now attacking me. Now, maybe I'm just a stupid Avernum user, but when I kill monsters, I expect them to STAY DEAD. Is this not true of the Exile series? Is something going wrong? Do people know what I'm talking about? If it matters, I'm running Mac OS 10.2.

In any case, it is the same link as at the top of the Nethergate forum. Either of them (to Schrodinger and Zeviz or to TM) will do, as both sites have the same Sylak items list.

From the link at the top of the page of this forum... Sylak Items ...

Yes, Drakefyre, I am well aware that there are other clans of vahnatai. Quote: they can't have found the vahnatai, or at least Rentar-Ihrno's vahnatai (emphasis added) by which I meant our familiar clan.