Kelandon

If I remember correctly, Drew met Andraste. Have fun with that line, given the way the diagram is set up now. At the time (possibly still now?), Dareva was "South." Feo Takahari is "California." If "Wiz" is Wizcozski, she's "California" too. And "DC Area" should probably be called "Mid-Atlantic," because I'm not in the DC area.

Hey Randomizer — please stop posting Avadon 3 spoilers. This is not the first time, and 1) I don't like it, because I don't want your commentary coloring my impressions when I get to play the game, and 2) it's probably a violation of the NDA that you agreed to when you became a beta tester. So please stop it. It's better if you just don't say anything about Avadon 3 at all.

Sort of as Alo suggests, I kind of got the feeling that some of the continuity "errors" in the Avernum series were intentional. Erika claims that she created the light-emitting mushrooms and the food mushrooms, but I'm pretty sure someone somewhere else says that she didn't really — the impression that I got was that it was credit-claiming and ego. A lot of the other archmage inconsistencies strike me as being in a similar vein, and perhaps the dragon inconsistencies are deliberate obfuscation as suggested above. You probably can't account for everything in this fashion, but it probably gets a lot of it.

I like nearly all of these characters. Sss-Thsss was ultimately a little flat, because he doesn't really do anything or have any personality, but he is a lurking omnipresence at the beginning of A1. I don't remember Lankan at all. But Nathalie? The Wayfarer? Solberg and Cheeseball? All characters that I enjoyed. But then, my favorite character in Avadon 2 was deemed not even a character for this exercise, so I'm not sure how much I can relate to any of this.

I don't think "racist" is the right word for most of these, because "Holklandan" is a nationality, not a race. So she's culturally biased and nationalist (and a bit homesick), probably, although it seemed to me that practically everyone else was, too, so it wasn't really a distinguishing feature.

I did hide a portion of the town, yes. You move the party there via march_party() or the like, and then let the party take a step. Once the party steps on the special rectangle, move_to_new_town() can be activated. Because you can read the town number using current_town(), you can send the party to wherever you want in that town; it doesn't have to be the same coordinates in each town.

One of the original suggestions — have the item teleport the party to a specific part of town where the party can only step in one direction, and have the move_to_new_town() special there — would work. This is how I dealt with the move_to_new_town() limitation in Thanopolen Tower in Exodus, where a town change needed to be triggered by a combat death.

The Corruption is the single most memorable thing from Avadon 2 for me. I basically remember talking to the scout, Dheless, and the Corruption. The Corruption seemed like a character to me.

It's cliche to say this, but Rentar seemed flat and one-dimensional to me. I agree with others that Starrus was also a pretty big disappointment.

KPPP gets frozen due to inactivity sometimes but it's always been easy to unfreeze, and it's not frozen now.

This topic is all very mild compared to what we used to do about a decade ago, for example.

"Town size" can also be somewhat misleading at times. You may need to use a "large" size for something that's very long and narrow and therefore the same area as a "small" town, for example. (I don't know how frequently this occurs in Jeff's games, but it happens in Blades.) And a large but relatively simple or empty town is a lot less play time than a dialogue-heavy small town. So it's hard to get an objective measure of any of this. Steam times are probably the best measures we have, but without a large sample size, it's hard to say very much with any degree of certainty.

I don't understand what you mean. I thought it just allowed the federal government to track down income-generating assets more easily, so that the government could tax the income from those assets. It's not a tax on those assets in the sense of a wealth tax; it's a way of tracking down income for an income tax. So, for example, to use the same sort of mechanism for property, you would require everyone to report the income that they generate from their property. Except they already do.

Assuming you mean FATCA, not FACTA, my understanding of that law is that it just identifies assets better, but it's still in service of an income tax. Is that not correct?

There are some limits on what I can say politically in my current job, but I'm going to try to stay at a factual (rather than normative) level here. All of this is intended as a statement of what is rather than what should be and is not intended to endorse anything in particular. It's worth being aware that the current (i.e., the last bar) federal budget deficit is relatively modest by the standards of the last several decades: This is as a percentage of GDP, which is probably the best simple measure for the size of the deficit. Also, the increase in the deficit in the past few years was largely the result of the crash of 2008 (note that the deficit always increases during/after the gray parts of the graph, which are recessions or depressions). Also, the problem Greece faces with its debt is almost entirely different, because Greece doesn't control its own currency (it uses the euro) and the United States does. The United States can always avoid default by printing more money; Greece can't. As a result, the United States has never faced the extremely high interest rates on its debt that Greece faced in 2011/12, and it rarely faces high interest rates on its debt at all because of its almost total lack of risk of default. (And yes, in the right circumstances — which we are probably not currently in — printing more money can cause inflation, which is its own problem, but the point is just that the two cases are not very comparable. They have different dynamics.) Just at a mathematical level, the dynamics of the current election would have to change dramatically and quickly for that to happen (compare demographic targets to forecasts). I wouldn't hold your breath. It depends on which government you're talking about. State governments historically developed property taxes to serve as wealth taxes, because the value of a person's property was a pretty good proxy for that person's wealth. (This is becoming less and less true for the very highest echelon of wealthy people in the United States, but for most people it's still basically true.) And the Constitution doesn't restrict state government taxation much at all. Now, it's true that the Constitution has something about direct taxes in it that would affect the federal government's ability to impose a progressive property (or wealth) tax directly — frankly, I'm told the details are complicated and I've never looked them up — but I bet the federal government could encourage the states to impose wealth taxes via conditional spending (i.e., you get such and such money for this thing if you enact a law doing such and such). There are some limits on this, as the Supreme Court told us regarding the Medicaid expansion back in 2012, but it's a pretty common thing to do generally. So it probably would be possible for the federal government to "enact" progressive wealth taxes (by convincing the states do it through, basically, bribery). Now, it may not be very efficient — calculating someone's wealth (i.e., net worth) is administratively complicated, and enforcement would be pretty hard — and the states would have at least some ability to decide not to go along, but it's at least somewhat possible. And a lot of what Sanders argues should happen requires a constitutional amendment anyway, so it's not any less possible than most of the rest of his positions. When you're sufficiently rich that you can lock up a lot of money in investments and just have a little bit of your cash available for day-to-day spending, your invested money builds substantially over time (more if you can invest in the very long term). And as it builds, it can be spent on things in the future or passed on to children. So the reason for doing it is clear, regardless of what you think of the ethics of doing it. Note that doing this on a large scale requires either 1) a constitutional amendment or 2) a Supreme Court ready to overturn precedent and significant federal (and probably also state) legislation. A president can't actually do any of those things alone.

As far as iPad games from Spiderweb, my advice is not to start with Avernum 6. Start with Avernum: Escape From the Pit, which is the first game in the series. Then play Avernum 2: Crystal Souls. By the time you've finished those, it's possible that Avernum 3 will have been remade. If not, play the Avadon series in the meantime while you wait. (There will probably be three of them by then, so that will give you plenty to chew on.) Avernum 6 really ought to follow all the other Avernum games. So once you've finished the Avernum 3 remake (eventually), you should go on to Avernum 4 and Avernum 5 on your computer before you do Avernum 6.

Alint tells me that this is your problem. You need == rather than = in this line. Also, I suggest using "code" tags if you're going to post scripts; it's easier to look at.

I guess what you would probably want is to make a custom terrain script that you put on the relevant tree/stump, and put a swap_terrain() call in the terrain script's SEARCH_STATE. I notice in the docs that you could also define a te_swap_terrain in the custom objects script and use a flip_terrain(), but that doesn't seem necessary. Also, Alint will save your life regularly.

So presumably the next thing after Avadon 3 is the remake of Avernum 3. If he does his usual alternation between new games and remade old games, we'll probably get a brand-new series after that, which will alternate with Geneforge remakes.

Town scripts need to have certain states, such as the INIT_STATE (which is state 0). These states don't need to do anything; you can just have: beginstate INIT_STATE; break; But if you don't have the normal states (see docs Chapter 2.10 for details), then you get errors.

Oh. Sorry, missed the line number. Call it 501. The number is all you need, not the "g" or the .bmp.

I assume it's the capital letter. For whatever reason, Avernumscript is case-sensitive and requires all lowercase, if I remember correctly.

I don't think this is true at all. Spiderweb is doing fine. The closest Spiderweb ever came to dying was when it last released something like what you're describing (BoA). That's why Jeff probably isn't ever again going to try to create something for users to design their own scenarios. But right now, Spiderweb is reasonably financially secure (for an indie developer). I think you may have misunderstood something about Spiderweb. Jeff isn't a great programmer. Jeff is barely a programmer at all. He writes well, and he draws towns from premade graphics pretty well, and he's good at working on combat mechanics. But in terms of the actual coding, by all accounts, he's mediocre. Jeff has survived for 20+ years doing indie games (a feat accomplished by almost no one else) by being essentially cautious. I'm not sure what he has to gain when right now he's doing fine, and you're suggesting that he change directions in a manner that utilizes the weakest part of his skill set, even though the only time he's ever taken a step in the direction that you're advocating, he had a commercial failure.

I like the E3 engine (with which I'm somewhat familiar from playing BoE), and it has good writing (which I know from playing A3). And A3, at least, is incredibly fun overall, so I assume it was much the same originally. But a great storyline? The actual plot from E3 was generally pretty weak. I did feel as though the second Avernum Trilogy was relatively weak and derivative compared to more or less everything else that Spiderweb has ever made (although it got better as it went along — 5 is better than 4, and 6 is better than 5). But other than that, I don't have any real complaints about the games. I liked Geneforge (on the whole), and I liked Avadon. I can't say that I cared much for the Avernum remakes, but they were driven in part by compatibility and in part by branding (making everything look the same), so I'm not too concerned.

I've been quite explicit that Avadon was the game that brought me back to Spiderweb games. I liked it a lot.