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Kelandon

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Everything posted by Kelandon

  1. Man, who knew he cared so much about dental hygiene?
  2. Given that one of the other active topics in General right now is about recommendations for RPGs that are similar to Spidweb games, you're fine mentioning the names of other games here.
  3. I skipped ahead and am now about to write the scene with the biggest twist in the whole scenario. Now that I've designed the sequence leading up to it, which runs across two separate towns and has taken me several hours in itself, I'm at the point where the scene begins. And, somehow, I'm nervous.
  4. I think the general issue was that it's much, much harder to make a BoA scenario with the editor tools that existed at the time of the 2004 release than it was to make a BoE scenario with the editor tools as of BoE's release. Also, there came to be more general tools for making games over time — BoE was more novel in the late '90s/early 00's than BoA was in the mid '00s/late '00s, much less now. At this point, if I were learning a new game-making system, there are a ton of engines that I could learn that are much more powerful than anything that Spiderweb would release.
  5. I didn't interpret you to mean that, either. I thought that you meant that the difference between Avernum/Geneforge/Avadon is like the difference between Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale — which it's not. BG and IWD (at least IWD 1) have a lot more in common with each other than the Spidweb series have in common with each other. (I think Slarty's description of "huge" overlap is overstated, but, eh, differences in opinion I guess.)
  6. It's very much not like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale — those both use Dungeons and Dragons rules, take place in the Forgotten Realms setting, etc. Avernum, Avadon, and Geneforge have similar graphics and user interfaces (including similar dialogue systems) but are otherwise almost entirely different. They have different rules/game mechanics (other than generally having turn-based combat), different settings and characters, etc.
  7. I went through and labeled the rest of the scenarios. It's possible I missed a scenario here or there, but they should generally be labeled now.
  8. The option to sell to him was never "hidden." It was always there. You just forgot about it.
  9. This is not what happened. In Episode 379, at about 27:50, you sold things to the innkeeper when you first talked to him. You just forgot about that later.
  10. That's correct. Spell descriptions are in the BoA Manual.
  11. There is no call to check the difficulty level that the player has set. One could create difficulty levels with a flag — I've considered doing that in the Bahssikava rewrite (basically, insert an "Easy" mode that would tone down nearly all the combat) — but it wouldn't track the hardcoded difficulty levels. It had not occurred to me to create difficulty levels in Homeland, though. I'm sort of inclined against it because it would be a mess to try to balance.
  12. Just FYI for everyone, I went back and labeled the first episode for most of the scenarios. I made through about 80% of the posts (to Threnody), but once we started getting into a lot of little short scenarios, I got tired of it and stopped for the time being. I may go back and label the rest at some point.
  13. This is driving me nuts, but I can't find the post now where the main workaround was revealed. It was before Al posted that in August 2003, although, if I remember correctly, not long before. There was another workaround earlier, too.
  14. It's not documented, but Magery also adds to Willpower at a 1:1 ratio. The actual formula is Willpower = Int/2 + Mag/2 + Pri/2 + Magery. By the time you hit level 35, I'd expect your primary spellcasters to have raised their primary skill (Mage Spells, Priest Spells) to 17 to access all the available spells and to have raised Int to at least 10 or so. From 17/2 (which BoA rounds down to 8) and 10/2, that'd be a sum of 13. You definitely have access to Magery at that point, and there's a pretty good chance that the party has added some to it — it's cheaper than both Int and Mage Spells/Priest Spells, just for adding spellcasting power. My standard level 35 party has a Magery of 8, which totals a Willpower of 21. A dual-classed spellcaster (i.e., a character that loads up on both Mage Spells and Priest Spells) could have Int of 8, Mag of 17, and Pri of 17 at level 35, which totals a Willpower of 20. So I'd say a reasonably high Willpower at level 35 is about 20 or 21.
  15. If I remember correctly, AtG was released before the 100-town bug workaround was discovered.
  16. I'm kind of terrified that there's something like this in BoA, too — whether it's exactly the same 100-town bug or just some other damned thing that applies only to huge scenarios — and no one has encountered it yet because no one has made a scenario this large. I guess we'll find out.
  17. Still filling in parts of Chapters 1-3. I'd say Chapter 1 is about 90% done. I kind of have no idea what to do with the last 10% — there are elements that I know I want to be present, but I just don't know what to do with them right now. So it may be a while before that part is 100% done. Chapter 2 is a lot more incomplete — I want to take an entire day (maybe tomorrow) to fill in a lot of combat, which will bring it a lot closer. I now have a high-level conceptual picture of what should happen in every part of Chapter 3 (including the second part, which was a bit of a blank before), but there's a lot of detail work involved in implementing it. To give an example of one of the things that makes this all take forever: Chapter 2 has a huge city that turns out to have too much dialogue for one town. So I spent a chunk of today creating a new town for the insides of several buildings. This requires copying over the interiors, copying over the dialogue, changing the dialogue node and state numbers, creating special rectangles that move from one town to the next, editing the creature numbers in special states... etc. If I had known from the beginning that I was going to need to do this, I could've saved some time, but I didn't. I'm at 56 towns now, many fairly incomplete. Exodus had 57 accessible towns, so it's getting close to Exodus's size. But there are at least 11 towns remaining in Chapters 2 and 3, and probably 15-20 in each of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. So I'm starting to think that this thing will be above 100 towns when it's done.
  18. Oh, huh, I think I remember that now. Is this effect of the INN action documented somewhere? I can't find it in the docs.
  19. Yeah, TM's scenarios are pretty incoherent. Fun, once you get past that. But incoherent.
  20. I — and at least a couple others who weighed in when this question came up in the Let's Play thread — would suggest chronological order. Many, many scenarios are related in some way to scenarios that came before them, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not. EDIT: Also, lol at the comment on a TM scenario: "I'm beginning to think that this author is insane."
  21. Chessrook44 has been rather evasive when it comes to debugging questions, but I was able to verify that deduct_ap() doesn't work on his version of BoA but does on everyone else's. I'm not surprised that something else is screwed up. I tried to track down what is broken in MoC, but I wasn't immediately able to figure it out. I see sleeping in the inn. I see the START_STATE in the scenario script, which tracks the day and time of day. But is sleeping in the inn supposed to move time forward?
  22. Ah, there we go. Divine Restoration removes all negative effects, according to the documentation. It occurs to me that I've never actually verified which ones these are — most are obvious, but you never know with BoA.
  23. I didn't think this was right, so I tested it. Curing does not clear the Webbed status. As far as I can tell, nothing but defending in combat or waiting outside of combat reduces Webbed levels.
  24. Glad you're excited! But unless it's going to take you over a year to finish that process, Homeland probably won't be ready by then. I'm still only about a third of the way done.
  25. Mixed work on Chapters 1-3 over the past few weeks. Chapter 1 is basically done, save part of one side quest, a little dialogue, and some testing. I'm filling in some side quests in Chapter 2 as I create the main quest line in Chapter 3, which makes progress sort of slow. (Also, work has picked up, which also makes progress a bit slow.) But it's coming along. Chapter 3 has three major quests with several subparts, and the first major quest is about halfway designed. The high-level conceptual work is largely done; now it's just a lot of implementation of the plan that I now have in my head. The second major quest is still a bit of a blank. I have a general sense of what's supposed to happen, but I have to figure out how exactly to get from Point A to Point B. Once I get to that point, I'm going to have to stop and think things through again — how exactly will this piece work out? But once that's done, the third major quest is going to be fun. This is one of the key moments in the scenario, one of the moments that I've been building to since... gosh, since Bahssikava.
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