Kelandon

This was what I thought, too. But see! I just proved myself wrong. Again!

I bet we do have unusually low activity now due to the unusually long time between releases right now. But I also suspect that something else is going on. Back in early '04, during a comparable lull between games, I don't think that there was as much of a lull in forum activity. At the time, we hardly discussed the games or Spiderweb at all, really, so it didn't make much difference whether Spidweb had released anything or not. These days, I think it makes a bigger difference.

As a town guard, I find it oddly comforting that whenever something goes wrong in the town, I'm not the one who has to deal with it. So my crime tolerance is such that I usually let those adventurers steal a thing or two. They're going to have to fight shades/invading monsters/rebels/who knows what soon enough. And unless it's a really big and special fight, I'm probably not going with them. I'm staying right here. And if I'm lucky, I'll be a recurring character in the next game or two. (This reminds me a little of Nobody's Heroes, the point of which is that you play as NPCs who want to be PCs.)

I pretty much gave up as soon as I got to the point where I realized that you hadn't sufficiently alpha-ed it. That wasn't me being snotty; the school year started. But I'd strongly recommend doing a little more of your own alpha testing before you do another beta call. I was finding simple problems like town boundaries not being placed right and other things you can easily see in the editor. Proper beta write-ups for problems as pervasive as I found were going to be longer than I had time for. If you clean it up a bit on your own, it'll be easier on your beta testers.

... I'm not sure if this is brilliantly incoherent or just incoherent. But it's something, all right. And that something is incoherent.

If this is Nik's 10th anniversary here, I guess we're about 6 months away from mine. Good lord. Ah, well, congratulations, Nik, on being slightly less of a newbie than I am.

Um, what? This can't possibly be true, can it?

This is also easy. You can give any creature a special script, not just specific types. Heck, if you want it to affect every creature in the game, just edit the effect into basicnpc. Alternatively, do it ASR-style, and have it based on SDFs and town entry (in the INIT_STATE). Or you could even do it one-by-one with placed rectangles. But just use set_attitude() with whatever trigger you want, really.

If I remember correctly, BoA development lagged quite a bit, and there was a long time between the release of whatever its predecessor was and it. That was accidental; BoA just took forever to make, and the lag was really bad for SW. This, on the other hand, has been (I think) basically intentional. Avadon did extremely well, and A:EftP did extremely well, and I think part of the reason for that is that Jeff spent some time marketing instead of diving into a new game right away. I think the other part of the reason for that is that he's spent a LOT of time making Avadon 2, because there's a fair bit riding on it (as the sequel to his most successful game ever). So yes, I think this is an unusually long time between releases, though not unprecedented, and not reason to worry, and not unintended.

For an NPC, it's easy. Just delete the old character and put in a new, color-shifted character in the same spot with the same characteristics. For a player, it's a little harder. I tried to replace the default character graphics (without modifying the core files) in Lord Putidus, but it only worked on Macs. Basically, you have a custom graphic with the same number as the character's graphic, and upon reload, your custom graphic gets used instead of the core graphic. It doesn't really work right.

Tentatively, I have: Administrative Law Regulation of Financial Institutions The Making of a Politician Introduction to Education Policy I'm also teaching a yearlong introductory economics course. Next semester, I finally get to take Constitutional Law and get to work in the Child Advocacy Clinic, both of which should be really exciting. Not sure what to make of this semester, really. I think it should be good, but it's hard to tell.

You can create a huge variety of custom spells in BoA that have a nice interface, or at least a passable interface. I did this in Exodus. You can also import all the Nethergate graphics. I did this (partially) in Lord Putidus. BoN would serve no purpose, because we can do Nethergate in BoA. BoG would be kind of fun, but I'd rather that Jeff do what he's good at, which is non-Blades games.

And there was the famous Dale and Krueger study to this effect (relatively simply summary here). There are limitations to what they studied — most notably, the outcome variable was "earnings," which obviously is only a small part of what you get out of college — but it is there, nonetheless. That being said, I took introductory economics at community colleges in Oakland and Berkeley. Now I teach economics (as a grad student) at an elite university. The depth of the courses is so starkly different that it's staggering. The difference probably would not be as great if I were comparing, say, UCLA and Seton Hall, but was is pretty huge between the two that I saw, anyway. This may have less to do with the professors and more to do with the students, though. I'm pretty sure that the community college students I was in class with could not have handled the economics class that I now teach, but my students can. You teach to the students in front of you, so if the students can handle a higher-level course, they get a higher-level course. This is one of the challenges that online classes face: they have to understand their student population without in-person interactions. It's possible, but it's not an easy transition from brick and mortar classes.

Wow, there were trailers for previous games? I've really been out of the loop. But yes, there's basically no way to make SW games work well in a trailer format. It ends up looking sort of silly: hey, you can point and click! And then the characters, like, move there! Plus there are items! That you can pick up!

Thanks for playing, and for your kind words! One of these days, I'll release The Magic, which has a tie-in to the unfinished trilogy, but I can't seem to find enough time even to beta test another scenario right now, so it may not be for a while.

Blades scenarios sometimes do this. I think Nobody's Heroes assumed some things about your characters' characters, so to speak. Several other scenarios do. Jeff doesn't, but the GF games attempt to respond to the choices that you make, which is at least partially requiring you to develop a kind of personality.

I realize I've been absurdly slow to get to this, but I'm now starting to test. I'll start sending reports shortly.

Of the Second Avernum Trilogy, I think that they increase in length (A4 is shortest, A6 is longest). I think that A1 and A2 were about the same size as each other, and A3 was nearly twice as long (and is also the longest game Spidweb has ever made). I'm not sure about the Geneforge series; I think they're all comparable in size, but I may be missing something. Nethergate and Avadon are both notably shorter, I think, especially Avadon. The differences are dramatic. Avadon can be finished in a long weekend of more or less continuous play. A3 took me about a month of what had to have been 8-10 hours a day. Of course, BoE is the longest of all.

Drop the difficulty down to the lowest setting. If you're still struggling, you're doing something very, very wrong. You have to play everything right to beat Avernum and GF on the highest (and maybe even second-highest) settings, but I got maybe a third to halfway through Avernum 6 without using skill points really at all (on Hard). You don't have to be a super min-maxer to get through Avernum and GF on Casual. The Dexterity exploit was an aberration among Spidweb's recent games, so I'd guess that it's toast in Avadon 2.

I take it back. If other people are already doing the legwork getting the Alint-able errors out of the scripts, I'd rather just start from whatever someone else has made. Send me a newer version and I'll get started on testing shortly.

Yes, I'm running AScript (which has Alint embedded) on 10.8.

I'm going to get into it with AScript and then send you what I produce. I may not get to it for a couple of days, though.

HAHAHAHA IT IS SPREADING! Also, I was listening to a lot of Nightwish and Within Temptation, and then I told iTunes to find me similar bands. It gave me Delain, which was founded by a former Within Temptation member and often has Nightwish's male vocalist doing guest vocals. This has made me happy the past couple of weeks.

And this project begins to go the way of many ambitious BoA projects.... I hope you get on top of stuff soon and my skepticism proves unwarranted.

I believe it plays sound 164. No sounds are hard-coded.