Kelandon

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wait, did Slarty not finish something?

(Cheap shot, but too easy.)

1 hour ago, Wendy said:

An attitude was unnecessary and ridiculous and I don't particularly appreciate it

I'm now even more perplexed.

3 hours ago, Wendy said:

I suppose that is susceptible to being criticized as gender bias.

... huh?

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.

1 hour ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

Well, yeah, but I'm not talking about a batch generally, but rather including them with the open source project. I don't know if that would be any different, but it kinda feels a little shakier somehow, like it would feel more like a direct claim that the scenarios were under an equally Free license.

Distributing is distributing is distributing. Copies are copies, whether individually, batched, or batched together with something else.

Note: Still not legal advice.

55 minutes ago, The Almighty Doer of Stuff said:

The scenarios are not necessarily released under a Free license. That's why I've been hesitant to suggest sticking them with the OBoE project. There is lots of precedence for hosting scenarios on sites like TrueSite, OpenBoE.com, and others, but I'm not sure we can go so far as to package unofficial scenarios with the program or include them in the code repository.

I am no expert on copyright law, mind you, but that's how I've understood it.

I can't think of a meaningful legal difference between hosting the scenarios individually without permission and hosting them in a batch without permission, and I don't think most designers gave TrueSite (etc.) permission. Also, it would take a real asshole to file a copyright infringement suit right away — the most likely outcome is that someone would ask to be excluded, and you'd just have to comply. Or maybe a DMCA takedown notice; I did that once with someone who was hosting my scenarios without permission and being kind of obnoxious about it.

Note: Not legal advice, though I am a lawyer and I studied copyright law at one point.

I've been deliberately avoiding updating for this very reason. Until Homeland is finished, I am on 10.12.

I believe a zip of every BoE scenario ever released would be in the ballpark of 60 megabytes. Pretty manageable in this day and age.

I messaged her, and she said she would post here, but seeing that she hasn't... here's what she said:

Quote

Meh. My domain ran out and I didn’t renew this time. After trying and failing to spend some time revamping it, I was ready to let it go. If someone wants the files to take it over they can ask around at discord. They were hosted by Sylae and ... I’m not sure what [redacted] is going by now. Calls herself Wisdom on discord.

I've messaged her.

3 hours ago, wackypanda said:

Sound design met. Next stretch goal is up.

Are you maybe looking in the wrong currency? I think we're still a fair bit away from the sound design goal.

I just threw in $200. I feel like it's the least I could do after so many years, and it'd be nice to get better sounds.

We've hit the second stretch goal! Onto the third.

44 minutes ago, Formification said:

—Alorael, who just may create a new demographic poll. He has some burning questions.

Such as, "Has the number of septuagenarian Eskimos increased since 2004?"

It's probably not because your skill points are allotted wrong, because I got farther than that without using any skill points at all.

2 hours ago, Castus said:

Ok. This is weird. A while ago I could reliably reproduce it. It would happen every time. But now it's gone …

 

Strange. Maybe I can figure out what's causing it next time it happens.

Yes, that appears to be what happens with the other mysterious causes of Unhandled Exceptions: they come and go for no obvious reason. Coupled with the fact that I can't reproduce them, you can see why I haven't been able to track down some of them.

These usually come from a call affecting something that doesn't exist or is out of range. For example, if you have a creature numbered 6 and use set_character_facing(6,8), you'll get an Unhandled Exception because 8 is out of range — that parameter is only supposed to run from 0 to 7. If you don't have a creature numbered 6, and you use erase_char(6), you'll get an Unhandled Exception because you're trying to erase a character that doesn't exist.

But, for reasons I don't really understand, other things also cause Unhandled Exceptions. They occur only on Windows and I use a Mac, so I've never really had much luck tracking down the other causes.

18 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:

Kelandon, I think you missed editing the scenario title into the post just before my previous one?

Yep. Note that I'm not actually watching these videos, just editing the posts because so many people requested that they be labeled and Chessrook44 ignored those requests. So this is probably not the only time I've missed that there was a new scenario involved.

Progress is still happening, slowly. I'm up to 66 towns now, with most of the towns in the first half of Chapter 4 drawn. Most of the dialogue is still yet to be filled in, though, and a lot of the little details. Man, Chapter 4 is dark, both figuratively and literally:

I've occasionally felt the urge to go back and fill in little bits and pieces from Chapters 1 and 2, so I've done some of that, too. Those last little bits of Chapter 1 are coming together, although one part is still a bit of a blank. I'm thinking I might do a bunch of filling in around Chapters 1 and 2 and then do a bunch of testing concurrently with building out the core structure of Chapter 4. I'm think I'm getting close to halfway done.

I'm finding that when I don't have a large block of time to devote to this, it's pretty easy to do simple technical work for 20-30 minutes — setting names of characters, giving them dialogue to connect to the shops I've already made, adding little details to rooms, etc. It doesn't feel like I'm getting anything done, but it does fill out stuff that I won't have to do later, so at least it's still moving forward.

Don't know, but this sounds like a Geneforge question to me. Moved.

Also ligers are amazing! Huge and cuddly cats!