Kelandon

'Sup, SMoE. As I recall, my original member number was 4045, so you may or may not remember me, but I remember your old posts. Good times. Delete that space after the en-dash and you'll have it.

It does not. Also, maybe it can't "find" the Alint executable where it expects, but if so, I assume that must have something to do with whether the program can actually access Alint's location, because after I disabled System Integrity Protection, I installed Alint in the usual place. So Alint is where it normally is now. Finally, on a hunch based on what you said, I opened up Alint's install.sh and changed the two references to "/usr/bin" to "/usr/local/bin" instead, ran the program per the usual command, and didn't get any error messages in Terminal. So I think that's all that needs to be changed in the command-line version. If I can remember to do it, I should throw the updated version on my site.

Well, I'll put it another way. Given my party builds and other choices during the games, I find that I am significantly more limited in where I can go in A:EftP than in Avernum 1 (at any comparable point) because of combats that I cannot win. (Evidently I am not alone in thinking this.) Do you see how, if this is a person's subjective experience, A:EftP would seem more linear (or whatever — less open, more constrained) than Avernum 1?

I sort of was, but I think the point remains. My claims are that a player with comparable skill in E1 and A:EftP will find that there are more places to go at more or less every point of level development (except near the end of the game) in E1 that aren't blocked either by wall, by special encounter, or (most frequently) by unbeatable combat, and that Avernum 1 is either intermediate between the two or close to E1, and that the same is true of the other games in the trilogy. I think this holds true for most, if not all, skill levels. It's pretty easy, as Lilith is showing, to explain why this would be so for a very high skill level (i.e., someone deeply familiar with the game mechanics). It's probably harder to explain why this is so for a moderate skill level (i.e., a new player), but I am saying that it is still so, and for essentially similar reasons. That has very much been my experience, at any rate, and I suspect that I am not unusual, given how often other people report much the same thing. This, I am saying, leads to a feeling of being railroaded in A:EftP, at least more so than in Exile 1 or Avernum 1. This shouldn't come as any surprise, because Jeff is trying to do this in the name of game balance.

My point was more that it happens much faster and much more broadly in earlier versions of the games than in later versions of the games. Yes, by a ways into the game, especially on Casual or Normal, you can probably go more or less anywhere in A:EftP, too, but your options for exploring without dying because of overly hard combats expand much more quickly in Avernum 1 than in A:EftP on Hard/Torment. This leads to a feeling of a more open world, even though blockages by walls and SDFs are largely (but, as Randomizer points out, not entirely) the same. EDIT: Missed that there was another page. Lilith's point, which as I understand it is that a well-designed party in Exile can take on monsters with a greater difference between the monster level and the party level than is manageable in A:EftP, is true and also applies to an ordinary party in both games. (And I think Avernum 1 is intermediate between the two.) My point, then, is that this leads to a more open feel to the earlier games, because you have more options about where you can go at any given moment: at level 1, at level 5, at level 20, or whatever. My point is more about a trend across all three versions (Exile/Avernum 1/A:EftP, etc.) and across many levels than any individual moment in any pair of games, because I'm trying to talk about the games as wholes.

Yup.

I read that blog post, and I buy it 0%. It presumes someone who thinks entirely differently about RPGs than I do. With regard to the subsequent discussion: I think that balancing the games better — and increasing the steepness of the difficulty levels — leads to a feeling of greater linearity. As I understand it, in the Exile Trilogy, if you set up your stats properly, you could go pretty much anywhere at any time, because you could fight most anything pretty immediately. In the original Avernum Trilogy, there are some limits — you should start by fighting pretty easy things early on — but the game opens up pretty quickly and you can go more or less anywhere. In the remade Avernum Trilogy, if you're playing on Hard or Torment, it's hard to go anywhere except to the next place with slightly higher-level monsters, because you'll just get squashed if you try to go out of sequence. Now, there may be several different places where you can go, but it doesn't feel as totally wide open as in the original Avernum Trilogy, because the combats just get out of hand too quickly. This relates to the minor quests that nudge you forward and the greater pointers on where to go next because it is often the case that you can only go there next, or that is one of maybe three places you can go, because the combat difficulty rises too steeply if you go anywhere else. So the experience of playing can end up being that the game pretty much tells you where to go, and if you deviate much, you die. And this has become more and more true with each remake because each remake is better balanced and the last set has steeper difficulty levels. (I remember the difficulty levels being essentially meaningless when they were first introduced in, what, Avernum 3, I think?) I think that playing on Casual would be really different, though, and the experience might be pretty different if you knew more than I do about which stats to improve and which not to. Then you could probably wander much more freely.

Here's what seems to have happened: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32590053/copying-file-under-root-got-failed-in-os-x-el-capitan-10-11 I disabled System Integrity Protection and installed Alint. I then typed the following: alint homeland.txt I got the following message: -bash: /usr/bin/alint: Bad CPU type in executable I Googled this and am now trying to fix it. EDIT: Then I downloaded the most recent version of Alint, reinstalled, and it appears to work! Ascript still hangs, but I can use command-line Alint just fine. EDIT 2: So, long story short, it appears that the problem is that OS 10.11 protects certain system directories from being written, even with root access. Alint by default installs into what has become, over time, the wrong directory. Someone who knows more about this than I do probably could fix it easily. I don't know what's wrong with Ascript, but I assume it's something related.

I upgraded to OS 10.11 a few days ago and found, to my surprise, that now Ascript hangs when I tell it to "Check with Alint." I also can't seem to install the command-line version of Alint anymore (or do anything else to get Alint to work). I couldn't swear that it has to do with the OS update, but I can't think of anything else that would have broken this. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I've probably said this before somewhere, but I thought that the problem with Avadon 1's "choice" approach was that it gave the illusion of choice while denying the actual fact of choice. You're presented with a lot of seemingly consequential decisions, and it turns out basically none of them matter. I didn't mind the lack of plot choice in Avernum, because Avernum never pretended to give me consequential plot choices. Avadon 1, on the other hand, feels like a bait-and-switch. Avadon 2 does better in this regard, but it's still not the equal of the Geneforge Series in terms of handling choices well.

If I've read the scripts right, you want to talk to Marsh in the southeast corner of town. Ishad Nha: The door is locked. You can't walk through it. It's best not to give advice unless you are familiar with the situation that the person asking for help is in, because otherwise your advice may be wrong or misleading.

My notes from ages ago say that Echoes consists of (in this order): Echoes Echoes: Assault Echoes: Black Horse Echoes: Pawns Echoes: Combat/Skirmish Bandits Bandits II: Ballad of the Red Star Corporeus I gather that at least one subsequently-released BoA scenario is part of the series too. This page lists TM's releases from Echoes: Assault on, including non-Echoes scenarios, and you may as well go in chronological order.

Lilith is being generous.

In case anyone has the same problem, it turned out that there was an update from v1.2.0 to v1.2.1 for Mac that I hadn't caught. I updated and that fixed the problem.

Welcome back to gaming, and you've chosen a good place to start! Avadon 1 is relatively short, by Spiderweb standards, but you can follow it up with five Geneforge games and five Avernum games (at the moment, until the Avernum 3 remake comes out), plus (if you feel like it) the throwback Nethergate: Resurrection, and you'll have enough to keep you busy for a LOOOONG time. Enjoy!

I am trying to run Blades of Avernum v1.2 on OS 10.10.4 (Macbook Pro Retina Mid 2012), and I am encountering a weird problem: the party does not show up on the main screen ("The Terrain" according to the manual's nomenclature). The red dots for the party show up on the automap. Every other graphic shows up on the screen. It's just the party. Everything interacts normally. The party still walks around, fights, etc. I just can't ever see the party, except on the automap. My first guess is that it has something to do with not being able to set the monitor to few enough colors, but I'm not sure why that would affect only PC graphics and nothing else. Anyone have any suggestions?

The Janus Cult disapproves of the general direction of this conversation. Both faces of the god frown on you all.

Flirt with the scout (who you meet at the beginning) at every available opportunity, and you'll leave most of your options open for paths through the game.

It's fun to respond to someone with "Nope" and then agree with them. I enjoy it too.

On a Mac, at least, right-click on the app and choose "Show Package Contents." Then go into Contents -> Resources, and you will find the relevant files. You want something prefixed "t" and then the town number and name. There are two files, one suffixed "dlg" and the other suffixed "txt," the former for dialogue and the latter for special encounters. They're just regular text files, so any text editor will open them. You should be able to find the files in a similar location on a PC, but I can't say exactly what the path looks like.

There's a weird conflict here. Yes, the junk bag is in principle for one-click selling. At the same time, nothing stops you from storing extra items that you do want to keep in there, as long as you move them out before you sell everything in the junk bag and put them back in right afterward. Personally, I don't use it that way because it's too inconvenient to do so — but is that optimal? It seems a little odd for there to be an apparently accidental feature that is inconvenient to use.

Awesome.

I strongly agree. This is very interesting. I have no idea whether I will like it or not, but it will be interesting to see what you've done, for sure.

At that point, I think you should probably follow up. It probably means it just got missed.

I think it was, though this was rare. Definitely the monsters held and used items (as in BoA); someone or other (giant chieftains?) in Avernum 3 carried invulnerability potions that, er, affected combat if they drank them.