Kelandon

Quote: Originally written by Ishad Nha: Yes, Kel, I have tried it on a few scenarios, the process is quite straightforward, that is why I know it only takes a few seconds. Misleading, I said. Running the importer takes a few seconds. Porting a scenario takes much, much longer. But if you feel like porting a bunch of scenarios, by all means, do it. There's no one stopping you.

Quote: Originally written by Micawber.: Is it possible that the to-hit % is misleading for a similar reason to the armor %? Probably.

Quote: Originally written by Student of Trinity: But we do notice 'Hey, that's three times in ten rounds!' Three times in ten rounds would not have raised my eyebrows, but ten times in ten rounds started to. When I was consistently getting hit more times than not, I started to wonder. I should point out that I'm not a fool. I am aware of the human element in observing probability. I took this into account when I realized that the displayed to-hit probabilities were not accurate.

I'm not totally sure. I think part of the problem that I've had with it is that I've been looking at to-hit percentages, which are just not accurate. Monsters that have %5 chances to hit me hit me a heck of a lot more often than one time in twenty. I don't know about drops, though. I should check that in BoA, where it's really easy to conduct a simple experiment: make a monster with a 5% chance to drop something, place about forty of them in a town, and then kill all of them and check how many actually dropped that item.

We do know from experience that the random number generator does not, in fact, generate random numbers, though, unless Spidweb has changed it since the last few games.

Well, no. He is right to point out that this event was unusual, and it is not statistically immoral to calculate the odds of it happening again, which ought to be negligible if Spiderweb games actually used legitimate random number generation. And if something happens that ought to have an almost zero chance of happening again, it is reasonable to call that event unlikely. Still, if you find that thahd droppings are ridiculous, you might want to check what they ate.

Quote: Originally written by Ishad Nha: It is magical; choose the Import option and a few seconds later an entire scenario appears all at once! Have you actually tried it? If you had, you would know that this is an entirely misleading statement. Quote: Originally written by Lenar Labs: Kel, how long did it take you to port 9 Variations on Point B? I think it took me a day. Possibly a few. But that scenario has almost nothing in it, so my experience with that is not at all representative of what people would face in porting real, decent scenarios. And it was annoying as hell — the way that BoE and BoA deal with space in towns is totally different, so you have to place most of the specials (and many of the walls) over again. And, of course, you have to re-make all of the custom graphics and re-write much of the code. In fact, you basically have to re-write the scenario from the ground up. No, porting BoE scenarios is not a quick and easy way to make more BoA scenarios. There is no quick and easy way to make more BoA scenarios, except perhaps making small, manageable scenarios.

Quote: Originally written by Alchemy: I hope you get around to this sooner rather than later, if only because I'm itching to see how in the flying blue hell you intend to make a scenario for level-120 parties. Well, my first idea was monster plagues of level-edited demons and undead.

For some reason, the idea that Valorim was considered settled with the defeat of the Ratbane clan. Aha: "You find an interesting book: The Early History of Valorim, Vol. 1, by Zaft. When the Empire turned its mighty eye to the continent of Valorim, it was settled only by fierce, mindless nephilim and similar monsters. The tale of the Empire's taming of this savage continent is a long and exciting one! The first settlement in Valorim was Blackcrag Fortress, a mighty fortress at the north end. The early building of this fort, which provided a safe place for settlers and a supply depot, was the key to the destruction of the nephilim tribes. From this stronghold, settlers were able to establish the Keep of Tinraya, the largest and mightiest city in Valorim. The Keep's mighty walls and limited access makes it the Empire city safest from attack. From the Keep, lightning raids by Empire Dervishes were able to devastate the mighty Ratbane clan of nephilim. This cleared the way to the founding of Gale and Lorelei. The tale of the taming of the southern half of the continent will follow in Volume 2, coming soon." This tell us nothing about when it happened, though. But we know that Valorim already had a fair number of cities for a while before it was considered "settled."

I'm pretty sure that there's no one who fits the two criteria: 1) moderates a board on SW, and 2) has the technical skills and time to work with large amounts of Jeff's code. It's hard enough to find anyone who meets just 2), without mentioning 1).

Both. Aimee was in the east, and Aydin was in the west. But Aimee didn't have a tower, I think, and she may have been mentioned in a later Avernum and therefore is accounted for.

From the needle/ferrets, I can only assume.

Yeah, Jeff and his wife do most of it. While we don't know for a fact that Jeff's vacation includes his wife, I'd be surprised if not. Linda may still be around, holding the fort and murdering kittens.

My next project is updating the HLPM, which should happen maybe sometime next week, whenever I have a free day to work on it. After that, I'd like to spend some time re-writing the docs. I'd also like to make a short scenario, sort of like LP after Bahs, something that takes only a couple of weekends. I have a few ideas what this short scenario could be about, but I'm not sure which idea I'm going to go with at this point. And eventually, someday, I intend to make the third part of the Slith Homeland trilogy.

Quote: Originally written by Duskwolf: How about the river blockage to the west of the Mass Teleporter, in the Northern Waters? That looks like a prime candidate for a bit of opening up. How about it? That's what everyone else in this thread has said, too. There are eight locations in Avernum 1 that have rivers leading off the map: Two north from the Northern Islands: North from Lost Bahssikava: North from Fort Draco: East from Fort Avernum: South from Almaria: South from Patrick's Tower: West from Erika's Tower: Of those, we definitely visited Northern Avernum (by what was Lost Bahssikava), Fort Draco, Fort Avernum, Almaria, and Patrick's Tower in A4. That leaves the two north from the Northern Islands and the one west of Erika's Tower. I'm not sure that there's any reason to prefer one or the other here.

KernelKnowledge would be the one to ask about how the bas file works. He did the most work on trying to muck with it. The issue of a specification did come up once before (in a very unfortunate way), when people more knowledgeable about these subjects than I talked about it.

Quote: Originally written by Arch-Mage Solberg: About the new route... is it 1. In the Northern Waters going north to new caves? 2. On the river near Erika's Tower going west? 3. On the river near Almaria going south? 4. On the river near Silvar and Fort Avernum going east? "visited in early games but not Avernum 4" rules out 3 and 4, I believe, although I could be wrong about that. My money is on 1, myself, but only because the basis of the would-be Northern Kingdom series was going to be that very location.

Quote: Originally written by Dintiradan: So... basically what everyone wants is a BoA IDE. Yeah, basically. If we combined a most of the utilities already present and added a couple new features to each of them, we'd basically have what we need.

No, no, because of the summon special spells in Canopy, like Baldev. Oh, never mind.

Quote: Originally written by pinski_88: So that line alone made the rest of the script fail? Any script error makes the whole script fail.

(insert Canopy special spells jokes here)

I had pretty high hopes for the Remake project, but it seems to have been a phenomenal flop. I wish I could learn to code and just implement a few simple changes myself, but I'm not sure that's at all possible. You know what would be neat? An added feature in the BoA editor that, when you place a special encounter rectangle, after you specify the number of the state that it should call, pulls up a pre-formatted text-editing box that can be saved directly to the town script as the appropriately numbered state. This couldn't be too hard, and it would partly demystify the scripting process. And there's a reason why my links page has five links to pages inside Spiderweb; it's not easy to find what you need for BoA on Spiderweb through the Spiderweb site.

Quote: Originally written by Spidweb: I have plans to release the code of Blades of Exile before too long. You were saving the best news for last, weren't you? This is awesome! Finally! Quote: Reducing its price to $15 has helped sales, and I am still generating new people to play your scenarios. Yes, this seems like a good thing. I understand if you wait a while yet before releasing the code. SoT's point, though, is a reasonable one: if Nethergate v2.0 and A5 sell like crazy (and I'd bet on the latter, although I'm not totally sure about the former), you might just at that point be able to give BoA away. Quote: About the Unhandled Exceptions. I would bet money the situation here is caused by using calls to affect characters/items/whatever that are out of range. (Like setting the level of character -3, or character 220.) Whenever I looked at a scenario with this sort of crash, the problem was accessing something out of range. Yes, kinda. The problem is that referencing things that are out of range is common to an enormous number of different calls in an enormous number of different situations, sometimes only obscurely. (The clear_town bug comes to mind.) Saying that UEs come when you access things that are out of range is like saying that standard script errors occur when your script has typos: it's true, but it's hard from that alone to tell what the problem is. Quote: If I have to patch Blades of Avernum to make it work on Vista, I'll also try to tighten the script error checking up a bit. This would be much appreciated. And as for Stareye's points: at some point in the not-too-distant future (shortly after the contest, perhaps), I'd like to sit down and see what we, as a community, can do to make the BoA editor easier to learn and use. This is, in a large part, on us.

This, sadly, makes a lot of sense. I think 4 is probably a good thing; between BoA and BoE, we have enough scenario editing capability to satisfy us, I think. And as for 3, well, I at least understand. I'm not happy about it, but I do understand. Most of the bugs would be difficult to fix or (as in the case of the corescendata and default graphic problems) can be easily fixed by the community itself. On the other hand, the Unhandled Exceptions are pretty dire: just about every scenario ever made by a Mac-using designer has caused UEs on Windows computers, and they're damn near impossible for designers to track down. I'm not sure that they could be termed "bugs that only affect designers." But we'll make do. Never let it be said that the BoA community is less resilient than the BoE community was, persisting even in the face of mystifying and frustrating bugs. On a slightly different subject, I've long suspected that BoA didn't sell very well, but I didn't realize that it sold just that poorly. I bet that quite a lot more people bought BoE back in the day, which is much more responsible for the huge variety of scenarios for BoE than anything inherent in the community or whatever. And knowing that A4 was what you had to do to stay in business makes it make a lot more sense to me. I'm glad that you're getting to be out of financial danger now, anyway, and, as I said in the other thread, I look forward to A5.

Towards the end of beta testing, I mentioned that I was glad that Rentar was gone, because she had been a problem in Blades scenarios (people bringing her back to have her final revenge, but the scenarios really sucked). Jeff had this to say: "In canon, she is dead. DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD. In Avernum 5, people will talk about how seriously, seriously dead she is."