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Posts posted by Kelandon
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So... the bad news first. I basically stopped designing for a year because it was hard to find the time to do it. But the good news: I've resumed, and I'm making significant progress. My goal now is to design from where I was in Chapter 4 (basically, the second half) to the end of the scenario, ignoring all side quests and pretty much skipping over all combat, both of which I can fill in on a later pass.
And I'm almost to the end of Chapter 4. Today, I started to create the last three towns (as in, pressed the "Create New Town" button and placed town entrances in the outdoors) for the core plotline of Chapter 4. I have to fill in enough to keep the main plot going, and then I'm going to move into Chapter 5. Scripting Chapter 5 is going to be a fairly intense process, so who knows how long that will take -- months, I would expect. But just getting there will be significant.
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1 hour ago, BainIhrno said:
I wonder how close Kelandon is to the finish line with Homeland... I imagine if he's ready to roll with beta testing the same time that I am, both scenarios release dates could be delayed quite substantially.
It's going to be sometime next year. Probably the second half of next year.
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Huh. Jeff has never really changed the plot of a game in a remaster, has he? I mean, there have been some tweaks here and there (the ending of the Hawthorne assassination mission in Avernum 1 comes to mind), but nothing big. I'd be interested to see an Avernum 4 with semi-significant plot adjustments.
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16 hours ago, Cruiser said:
It's been a while, have you played more, or finished the game yet? If so please share your current opinion, I'm curious if it has changed at all, because I had the same problems with QW as you. I'm wondering if it's worth going back to the game for the story at least.
I played a little more, but I never got anywhere interesting, and I gave up. I'm sure there's something good here, but I just can't get myself to care long enough to slog through the stuff that I find boring to get to whatever I might be interested in. I can't stand the combat system and I dislike the graphics, so even if the plot picks up, it's hard to imagine liking this game.
FWIW, I had the same reaction to Planescape: Torment, so this isn't necessarily to say that the game is bad, just that it's not one that I want to put time into. I may come back later, the way I did with GF4. I'm less confident about coming back to Queen's Wish, though, because my issues with QW are not at all like my issues with GF4. I never came back to P:T.
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2 hours ago, Last Electorine of Haven said:
It does seem to me that a lot of the reactions to this game (whether postiive or negative) are driven by personal preference about RPG design questions that do not have one correct answer.
That's almost certainly true. All I mean to say is that, so far, I don't like this game at all. That doesn't mean it's a bad game, just that I am not enjoying it at all.
But I'm still going, just to see if anything picks up. I've played every other one of Jeff's games, and I've liked every other one of Jeff's games (most of them a lot). I'm as surprised as anyone else that I don't like this yet.
I've been going back and forth on dropping the difficulty to Normal, but I really don't think that's the problem, so I haven't done it yet.
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2 hours ago, Simulated Knave said:
You feel a mysterious curse which drove your forces out of the colony isn't a mystery?
No, not particularly, and here's why. As I understand it, the Calamity happened forever ago, and everybody just kind of accepted that something bad happened. There's like one loony sage who cares about what it was, but it's history, not a current event. Your main task doesn't even relate to that, at least not in the early game.
Compare that to, say, the barriers in Avernum 2. They just happened, they're totally screwing with everything, and your central mission is to deal with them.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I'm continuing.I made it into the Vol, but it seems like I may have done it prematurely, so I'm backing out and doing some of the quests nearer to Fort Haven first. I feel like I'm just grinding; nothing has grabbed my attention yet.
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In the vein of some of my other topics like this, here are my thoughts on Queen's Wish. I'm playing on Veteran difficulty, which is my standard for new games (though I played GF5 for the first time on Torment, which was probably a mistake).
And man, I'm not having any fun at all. Granted, it's early, but at this point I'm tentatively planning to quit and not finish. Here are some of the issues I'm having.
Combat
The "you have to complete a dungeon on one run" change is obnoxious. I always found the "jump down a hole and you're trapped and can't get out the way you came" dungeons to be the most stressful, and now every dungeon is like that. It's very easy to burn through energy, and you can't recharge it, but it's also not at all obvious how much farther you have to go, so I can't figure out how much energy to hold in reserve. Yes, you get some back after some fights, but not nearly enough to make a real difference. So I find nearly every combat annoying. I'd be tempted to just drop the difficulty down, but....
Plot
It seems like the plot kind of sucks. Most Spiderweb games start with a mystery. You've just been banished to a huge underground cave, and you don't know what's there, but it's probably hostile and wild and magical and you should go out and explore. You're shipwrecked on a island where secret, illegal magical experiments have been going on, and you have to explore to figure out what they are. You're a foot soldier in a corrupt, all-powerful, quasi-governmental agency, but things are starting to go wrong, and it's not clear why or who's behind it. You're a Roman soldier sent to a strange, magical land where bizarre things are happening and you need to figure out what or why.
Think of every great Spiderweb game, and there's some sort of mystery. Sometimes the mystery is the location (GF1, Avernum 1, to some extent GF2). Sometimes the mystery is a person (Redbeard in Avadon 1) or an event (Shanti's death in GF2, the murders and monster plagues in Avernum 3), but there's always an attention-grabbing thing that you don't know the answer to and (presumably) want to, pretty early on in the game.
There's just nothing here. I don't care about any of it and am having trouble figuring out what it is that I want to figure out. At least in Avernum 4 there were the shades, or the barriers/river journey in Avernum 2, or... give me some sense of urgency. But here it's just like: "Go clean up this mess that nobody else has bothered to do because it just isn't important or interesting enough."
Graphics
I can't stand the new graphics system. I never liked Exile graphics, and this is closer to that than the Nethergate/Avernum graphics engine or the Geneforge/Second Avernum Trilogy/Avadon graphics engine. It's too flat/low-tech. When I saw what happens when creatures die, I rolled my eyes. This looks like it was made by somebody's teenage younger brother. I get that it's Spiderweb and they skimp on graphics on purpose to stay afloat, and I've never minded before, but blech, I do not like these.
Overall
I'm not very far at all. I'm just at the point where I'm starting to enter the other regions (Vol, etc.). But I just have no desire to continue. There's nothing that is making me want to keep going. Maybe I will, because I've never skipped a Spiderweb game that wasn't a remake, but I don't know. I'm just kind of bored.
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21 hours ago, Unbound Servile said:
What does matter is that Fingolfin's changes have a rather significant effect on performance, and, that with a couple of minor changes, Jeff Vogel could improve the performance of his games without much ado. I hope Jeff realizes that this issue isn't as much out of his hands as he seems to think.
For me, this is the bottom line. Spiderweb games have been a little energy-intensive in the past, but I've never had a problem like this, and no other game that I've played is this energy-intensive. It's not the computer. It's the game.
I know that it's painful to do this because you're worried about breaking everything, but Jeff, could you take a good, solid look at the suggestions here? They seem pretty straightforward and potentially quite useful.
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9 hours ago, Fingolfin said:
So I've been tremendously enjoying Queen's wish so far, but one thing is really bugging me: While playing it, one of my laptop's CPU core is maxed out at 100% load. This causes the machine to heat up, the fan spins up, and it gets *loud*.
This is on a MacBook Pro 15" (2018, with hexacore i7 at 2.6 Ghz; 32 GB RAM; Radeon Pro Vega 16), running macOS 10.14.6 . It happens both with the Steam version, as well as the DRM free standalone version.
Anybody else having this issue?
I've been having the same issue on a similar computer (MacBook Pro 2019). I flagged it for Jeff near the end of beta and he basically just shrugged. I'd love to know how to fix it.
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I don't have that issue on Mac OS 10.14. Don't know how it is on Windows, though.
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On 3/21/2019 at 5:14 PM, Celtic Minstrel said:
For the record, if APFS is the issue and it's not (yet?) fixed, wouldn't it work to create an HFS+ partition (or even just a writable disk image) and do your BoA work on there?
I just had to upgrade (old computer died), and to my mild amazement, this appears to work. I used Disk Utility to create a writable disk image and it appears possible to edit a BoA scenario on it with the 3D Editor.
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If you play Bahssikava/Exodus/others of my scenarios, bear in mind that I'm still around and check these forums, so if you need help — Bahs is pretty challenging — you can always come here and ask.
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BoA is not completely dead — there's at least one more scenario coming, albeit slowly.
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3 hours ago, ladyonthemoon said:
The third games in each series lagged?
I mean in terms of the energy of the writing and the ideas. Avadon 1 is pretty exciting and new — lots of strange stuff happening, things to figure out. Avadon 3 is... not. It's a little perfunctory, in my opinion. I think I thought the same thing about Geneforge 3 at the time, but it's been a very long time, and it's one of the only Spiderweb games that I never re-played.
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Welcome! Leave your sanity at the door, as the traditional greeting goes. For what it's worth, I started with the original Avernum Trilogy and like that much more than the remakes too. Have fun with Geneforge and Avadon; they're also excellent, although I felt that the third game in each series lagged a little compared to the others.
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It doesn't appear that we ever created a comprehensive list for Avadon 1, but back when I was much more familiar with this, I wrote:
QuoteAlmost nothing matters in Avadon 1 until the very end of the endgame. The way you handle Gryfyn and the words you say to Redbeard right at the very end are the main things affecting the ending, in addition to whether you kill the monsters that get you medals (Beloch, Zephyrine).
In addition, the way you handle your companion PCs affects the endgame.
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Part of the reason this may be confusing is that there a bajillion books here. You can think of D&D as being a broad category that includes Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and a bunch of other things. Those are all subsets of D&D, in a way.
Dungeons and Dragons was originally published as a set of rule books back in the mid-'70s, and it was intended to describe a set of rules that could work for all sorts of fantasy roleplaying adventures that DMs could dream up. But from the beginning, DMs realized that creating their own storylines, full of NPCs and treasure and monsters and so on, was a lot of work, so by the late '70s, D&D writers supplied adventure modules like Keep on the Borderlands, which provided some storylines and concepts for DMs to work with.
By the '80s, D&D writers supplied much more elaborate fictional worlds — Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc. These were meant to be playable (i.e., there are extensions/modifications of the D&D rules that you use if you're playing a Dragonlance campaign), but they also became elaborate franchises. Dragonlance began with the Chronicles trilogy of books, but there came to be dozens of others: Legends, Tales, Heroes, Preludes, Elven Nations, Meetings, and on and on. Same with Forgotten Realms, and the others. And they're not just novels, either. There are computer games, a ton of which are set in the Forgotten Realms setting (such as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights), and other things, too. (Really bad movies, for example.)
The core D&D rulebooks got revisions from time to time as well — 2nd edition in the late '80s, 3rd edition in 2000, and so on.
So, for example, Baldur's Gate from 1999 is a computer game adaptation of the 2nd edition D&D rules that takes place in the Forgotten Realms setting. Kindred Spirits from 1991 is a 2nd edition-era novel (from the Meetings series) that takes place in the Dragonlance setting. Dragonlance Adventures from 1987 is a 1st edition-era rule book providing information for DMs who want to set their campaigns in the Dragonlance universe. And so on.
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20 hours ago, Randomizer said:
D&D started back in the 1970s (history) and Dragon Lance was written back in the 1990s.
Dragonlance actually dates to the mid-80s, originally.
You can think of D&D as essentially being the laws of physics, and the various settings (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc.) as being different worlds on which those laws play out. To be sure, there are some variations within each world, so the analogy doesn't quite hold, but it's at least a decent first approximation.
D&D may seem fresher than DL if you're comparing 5th edition D&D to the original DL novels (Chronicles, Legends), since 5th edition D&D was published about 16-18 years after the early DL trilogies. EDIT: Or if you're comparing it to the Meetings series, which dates to 1991, according to some quick Googling.
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7 hours ago, Painted Lady said:
Isn't an iPhone port a possibility with the new game, Queen's Wish? I think it was on the Kickstarter list, and believe it reached it's funding goal.
It was, and it did, so yes, Queen's Wish should come out for iPhone. The Android stretch goal was not met, but Jeff said that he'd look into it anyway. Not sure if he's landed anywhere on that by now.
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A combination of getting busier at work, focusing on some other projects for a little while, and running into a major barrier with the part of Homeland that I was designing have left me not much farther than I was two months ago, but I think I made a breakthrough today and will be able to finish off key parts of Chapter 2 now.
SpoilerI was having a heck of a time putting in the key color and side quests in Leksandria — basically, filling out the towns beyond the couple of things that are strictly necessary for progressing. After struggling for months, I realized that 1) I should base the main side quests on key Trump Administration scandals (e.g., you uncover tax evasion by someone close to the Emperor) and 2) I should make it fairly adventure game-y (dialogue + puzzles) because the whole thing takes place in friendly towns, so there's not as much room for monsters/combat. That made it click, and I think I can put in much of the rest now.
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Wait, did Slarty not finish something?
(Cheap shot, but too easy.)
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1 hour ago, Wendy said:
An attitude was unnecessary and ridiculous and I don't particularly appreciate it
I'm now even more perplexed.
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3 hours ago, Wendy said:
I suppose that is susceptible to being criticized as gender bias.
... huh?
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I finished the last couple side quests in Chapter 1, and I filled in a chunk of Chapter 2, as well as bits of Chapter 4. I'm at 70 towns, and I'm still estimating that this thing will be maybe just under 100 towns when I'm done. I've decided to shorten Chapter 5, and probably fold the Conclusion into it. So, at the moment:
Prologue: 9 towns; 100% designed and tested.
Chapter 1: 19 towns; 100% designed, mostly tested.
Chapter 2: 20 towns; 2 largely blank, 3-5 need significant filling in, roughly 70-80% designed and entirely untested.
Chapter 3: 14 towns made, ~8 more to be made; most need significant filling in.
Chapter 4: 8 towns made, ~10 more to be made; most need significant filling in.
Chapter 5: ~8-10 towns to be made.
(Note also that there are 24 outdoor sections, of which I'm presently using 18 that are almost completely designed. I may use a few more at some point.)
My sense is that I've just passed the halfway mark, more or less, but there's still a long way to go. I hope I can finish no later than the end of next year, but who knows.
Designing Chapter 4 is fun, but it's also sort of harrowing.
SpoilerI mentioned that this scenario is going to be a bit political. It engages with contemporary American politics sort of in the same way that Lord Putidus engaged with the Lucretia myth or Exodus engaged with the Moses story in the Bible. But in the same way that there was also a secondary source for Lord Putidus (the classic vampire story, e.g., Dracula) and for Exodus (Late Antiquity), there's a secondary source for Homeland: Nazi Germany. And there are supposed to be several points, especially in Chapters 3 and 4, at which you're not really sure whether what's being reflected is Trump or Hitler — and that's kind of the point. At the beginning of Chapter 3, the central villain delivers a speech that sounds a lot like a Trump speech, except it's not; it's a condensed version of a Goebbels speech.
Chapter 4 is taking on Hitler's persecution of ethnic minorities/Trump's persecution of immigrants. It's... rough.
- Ess-Eschas and IcyChains
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2

Set Terrain Memory Cell
in Blades of Avernum Editor
Posted
Yeah, tl, dr, you probably should use the flag in cells 2 and 3. Set the memory cells so that it's impassibly locked, set the flag that unlocks it in a one-shot on initially entering the town (or beginning the scenario, or whatever), and then when you want it to be locked, set the flag to zero. Haven't tested this, but it seems like it should be straightforward.